* * *
DETECTIVE WADE BENBOW was waiting for us by the emergency entrance. He took off his short-brim Stetson when he saw Mr. Lowry. “How do you do, Mr. Jude? I’d like to talk to Aaron in my vehicle if you don’t mind. We won’t be long.”
“That’s fine,” Mr. Lowry said.
I sat down in the passenger seat of the unmarked car and left the door partly open. Benbow got behind the wheel. “Close the door,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
His eyes roved over my face. “You took quite a licking.”
“I’ve been through worse.”
“Where was that?”
“Who cares?” I said.
“Are you pressing charges?”
“No, sir.”
He was wearing a gray sport coat and a snap-button purple shirt and a wide leather belt and dark slacks that had flecks of grass on the cuffs. An open package of Lucky Strikes rested on the dashboard. He picked it up and shook a cigarette loose. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
He tossed the package back on the dash. “Good for you. I’m trying to quit. Want to tell me why you’re not pressing charges?”
“I don’t trust y’all or anything you do.”
“How did you arrive at this great assessment of our system?”
“I was in a lockdown unit fifteen feet from where a man was electrocuted. I could hear him weeping. The electricity made a warm smell, like someone ironing clothes.”
Benbow’s eyes were empty. My words seemed to have no influence on him. He took a manila folder from the pouch on the door and opened it on the steering wheel. “I have six photographs I want you to see. Give me any thoughts that cross your mind.”
The detective’s photos were eight-by-ten, black-and-white, the grotesqueness of the images probably accentuated by a Graflex with a flash attachment. But under the best of circumstances, the dead are not cooperative when a camera disrupts their sleep, particularly when their remains have been exhumed in rain-soaked woods or pulled from a drainpipe or a wall or inside a freezer, the light in their eyes sealed with frost.
Detective Wade Benbow’s phot
os were no exception. All of them showed the bodies of women or teenage girls, each with a rictus grin or matted hair or fingernails like knife points, or clothes that would have to be peeled from the skin with tweezers, or eyes that had eight-balled.
“Why are you showing me these photos?” I said.
“I’ve got a hang-up. I don’t like men who kill women and young girls.”
“Where’d these murders happen?”
“Within two hundred miles of here, in both Colorado and New Mexico. Over a period of about three years.”
“How’d they die?”
“If I tell you, you’ll wish I hadn’t.”
“I don’t understand why you’re singling me out.”
He leaned across the seat and removed an envelope from the glove box and took a color photo of a little girl from the envelope. She was smiling and had braces and bright yellow hair. A grape sno-cone was clutched in her hand; her cheeks were red and looked heated, as though she had just come from play.
“Who is she?” I said.