Page 24

Clive Benson lived in a middle-income apartment in a modest building near downtown but was removed from the trendier and ritzier neighborhoods. That wasn't to say the neighborhood was rundown. It was just nondescript. Ordinary. Unremarkable. The perfect place for a serial killer to hide.

Faith knocked on the door and was somewhat surprised when Clive answered almost immediately, the stout, balding Clive looked nervously between the three agents and said, “Can I help you?”

“We certainly hope so,” Faith replied.

Clive stared at her for a moment. “Wait. You’re that FBI agent who’s been on TV a lot lately. You’re the one who caught that serial killer.”

“I’ve caught quite a few serial killers,” Faith replied, maintaining eye contact. “And yes. I’m the one from the TV."

Clive paled. “What’s this about? I don’t know anything about that guy.”

“This isn’t about that guy,” Faith assured him. We caught him already. This is about the guy who’s poisoned four different people in restaurants over the past two weeks.”

Clive paled a shade further. “What? Well, I don’t know anything about that either.”

“We think you do,” Michael said. “And we’d love to know everything you know. Would you mind coming out and talking to us?”

Clive licked his lips and looked between the three of them again. “I don’t know if I should.”

“Why not? If you’re not the killer, then there’s no reason not to talk to us.”

“I… I always read that you’re supposed to ask for a lawyer no matter what.”

“Why do you need a lawyer?” Faith asked. “We’re not charging you with anything. We just want to talk.”

“Um… I really don’t know anything. Sorry, guys.”

He moved to close the door, and Michael stopped him. He shivered but tried to screw up his courage. You… you don’t have a warrant. You can’t talk to me right now.”

Faith stepped closer and made a gamble. “We don’t have a warrant yet, but I’ll bet if we tell a judge what we think you’ve been doing at those restaurants, that judge will be more than willing to provide us with one. Then we will talk, lawyer or no lawyer, and it will be a far less pleasant conversation than this one.”

Clive swallowed, and once more, his eyes shifted between the three agents. This time, they rested on Turk. Turk bared his teeth and growled softly, and Clive sighed. “All right. I guess… this is about the murders, right? Nothing else?”

Now that was an interesting question. “No, nothing else,” Faith replied.

“Okay. In that case, sure, come on in.”

He led them inside, and Faith noted that the interior of the apartment was far more lavish than the outside. The flooring appeared to be of granite tile rather than the vinyl laminate of the rest of the building. The sofa was real leather, and an expensive massage chair sat in front of a seventy-five-inch TV with a sound system that looked almost as expensive as the TV. The dining set was of polished mahogany and all of the kitchen appliances were of the latest smart-home designs.

“Nice place you got,” Michael observed.

“Th-thank you,” Clive said. “Don’t tell the building about the flooring. I had to pretend I owned the place to get them to install the wiring for the heating.” He blanched. “I… I didn’t mean that. I mean—”

“We don’t care about the unauthorized improvements,” Faith reassured him. “We’re not building inspectors.”

Clive nodded too fast. His jowls flapped a little with the movement, a reaction both comical and disgusting. “Right Of course. I just… well, anyway, would you guys like a drink? I have champagne, scotch, wine. Oh, you probably can’t drink on the job, huh?”

“It’s generally frowned upon,” Faith confirmed.

Clive laughed nervously. “Yeah, I’ll bet. I’ll drink something if you don’t mind.”

“Be my guest. It’s your house.”

He poured himself a shot of scotch. Faith noted the brand on the bottle. It was a nice brand, but ordinarily not too expensive. That particular bottle, however, was thirty years old. That took it from nice but not too pricey to the sort of stuff high rollers drank at six figure tables in Vegas.

“You’re living the high life here, aren’t you?” Faith noted.

Clive downed the whiskey in one gulp and said defensively, “It’s not a crime to enjoy life, is it?”

“To enjoy life? No. To take life? Yes.”

Clive swallowed and poured himself another shot. Faith noticed his hands were trembling. “Well, I didn’t take anyone’s life, so I really don’t know what you guys want me to tell you.”

“How about we start with what you were doing at those restaurants hours before Eleanor Crestwood, Harold Grimes, Lila Vance and Samuel Klein died of poisoning?”

“I was doing my job. I’m the health inspector.”

“Kind of odd that you would have just happened to be at those restaurants the same days those victims were murdered.”

“No it isn’t. The restaurant employees were all there too. So were plenty of diners.”

“Yes, but none of them were at all four places the same day as all four of the victims. That, Mr. Benson, is only you.”

"So? I usually do my work earlier in the day, so I'm not caught in the dinner rush."

"That makes sense. So, I reviewed the logs from the Health department on our way over here. Isn't it crazy that you happened to be inspecting all four restaurants almost exactly four hours before our victims were killed each time? We have you visiting Cucina Toscana at five o’clock. Then Eleanor Crestwood dies at nine o’clock. We have you visiting Sushi Amaterasu at four o’clock. Then Harold Grimes dies just after eight. Next is Lila Vance. You inspected Café Toulouse at two o’clock. She’s dead right at six. Finally, you visit the Prime Cut Steakhouse at three-thirty, almost exactly four hours before Samuel Klein kicks the bucket.”

Clive looked ashen. “I didn’t know that.”

“We think you do,” Faith countered. “I really don’t believe in coincidence, Mr. Benson. Once or twice, sure, I can believe it. But all four times? That’s really stretching my imagination.”

Clive sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “Look, I… I really don’t know what you want me to say.”

“The truth would be nice,” Michael said drily.

“I don’t know! I mean…” he lifted his hands and let them drop. “I know this looks bad, but…”

“It looks very bad, Clive,” Faith said. “Can I call you Clive?”

He chuckled anxiously. “Does it matter?”

“Not really. See, we have all four victims poisoned by a unique sodium channel blocker. Do you know what a sodium channel blocker is, Clive?”

“No.”

“Me either, to be honest. But I know it’s poison, and I know it killed all four of those people. I also know that poison sometimes takes a while to work. Sometimes it hits you right away, and sometimes it takes a few hours or even a few days. See, this is where the timing starts to look a lot less coincidental and a lot more convenient. Maybe this poison takes four hours to work.

“But I wasn’t there when they were… I mean, we weren’t at the restaurants at the same time.”

“So maybe you poisoned something else. Maybe you found the food set aside for their table and slipped it in there.”

“But how would I know they were coming to the restaurant? And how would I know where they were going to be seated?”

Faith controlled her reaction. That was the problem. They didn’t have answers to those questions. All they had was the suspicious timing of Clive’s visits. That wasn’t nearly enough to charge him with the crime. They needed him to reveal something now, something that would give them enough to take action. At the very least, they needed something that could justify continuing to pursue Clive as a person of interest.

But they had none of that going in, so they had to rely on intimidation. It was a crappy way to work, and Faith hated that they had become so desperate. But they were desperate, and as the saying went, that called for a desperate measure.

“Those are all great questions, Clive,” Faith said coldly. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t! That’s my point!”

Michael sighed and crossed his arms. “It just looks really bad, Clive. Four restaurants. Four hours. Four victims. It’s far too pretty a package for us not to wonder what it means.”

“Or for a jury to think about what it means,” Faith added.

“Well, I can’t help you,” Clive insisted. He was sweating profusely now. “What do you want me to say? If I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what happened. You can look through all the chemicals the restaurant uses and compare them to what you found in the bodies. A lot of the cleaning chemicals are poisonous, and I sample a lot of them as part of my job. I don’t put them in dishes or food, but if enough of them got inside the food, then that might have done it.”

That was actually worth following up on. “Thanks for the hint,” Faith replied. “We will look into that. In the meantime, I still want to hear an explanation from you.”

Clive sighed and poured himself a third shot. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Shitty luck? I did my job, and apparently, I did it at the right time to look like a murderer."

He downed the third shot, and Michael commented, “Damn. They must pay health inspectors a lot for you to chug a hundred fifty dollars of scotch like it’s water.”

Clive flinched and nearly dropped his shot glass. “I… I… I… well, there’s no reason I can’t. It’s my money.”

Faith noticed his reaction and followed up on Michael’s point. “That’s true,” she said. “It’s a lot of your money. Who’s paying you that money?”

He swallowed. “The city.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so. Come on, Clive. Talk. How do you make enough money to afford all of this? How do you make enough money to have your flooring replaced with the stuff pop stars have in their ten thousand square foot mansions?”

“I’m good with my money.”

“That would mean you live more frugally, Clive. Not more lavishly. Try again. Or do I need to verify your salary with the Health Department and start doing some math.”

“I get kickbacks, okay?”

Faith blinked in surprise. She looked at Michael and saw the same shock on his face. Even Turk looked stunned.

Clive sighed and poured himself another shot. He drank this one just as fast as the other three, but whether it was the confession or the alcohol, he was far calmer when he said, “I get kickbacks from the restaurants. The fine dining places, you know, it’s not enough just to pass. They have people looking at them who demand perfection. The Michelin guide notices a single line item marked wrong on an inspection, and it’s a death knell. Sometimes there are simple things that can get a restaurant shut down, but it’s really hard to get a passing grade. Fruit flies is a big one. If I see two fruit flies in a restaurant, I have to fail them that point, and it’s a big point. Basically an entire letter grade. But it’s a bitch and a half to keep those things out of some businesses. If you’re an ice cream shop or a café in a strip mall and you have high traffic, so your doors are opening and closing all day, it’s next to impossible to keep your place so clean that there’s never at least a couple of flies hanging around. Some of these places can’t afford the labor to spend four hours every night cleaning. So, they kick me a few thousand a year instead. It’s still cheaper than four hours a night of cleaning. I sign off on the report, they can keep costs down, everyone’s happy.”

“Except the diners, right?”

“Oh, those places are still cleaner than most people’s kitchens. They’ll be fine. Fruit flies don’t even do anything.”

“Okay,” Faith said. “So you’re a dirty inspector who takes kickbacks. That still doesn’t explain the timing. How are your kickbacks four hours apart from each victim each time?”

He shrugged dejectedly. “I don’t know. Shitty luck is all I can think of. Maybe karma. Maybe God really does exist, and he’s pissed at me for taking bribes, so he sent you guys over here to punish me for it. I don’t know, I really don’t.”

Faith shared a look with Michael. Clive hadn’t given them anything that could clear him, but he hadn’t given them anything they could use to connect him to the murders either.

They had enough to arrest him, though. If they found anything that suggested he was a murderer as well as a corrupt inspector, they could come back around to him.

“All right,” Faith said. “You’re under arrest for taking kickbacks. You’ll probably catch a charge for the flooring too. If I were you, I would use what’s left of those kickbacks you received to hire a very good lawyer.”

“What? But I didn’t kill anyone!”

Faith sighed. “Yeah, I’m starting to believe you about that. But you still failed in your obligation to the people of Philadelphia.”

“This is bullshit!”

Turk growled, and he calmed down.

Michael cuffed him and called the police to come pick him up. Faith headed outside, Turk at her heels.

She should have known better. She did know better.

But she followed this lead anyway because she was desperate and she was grasping at any straw to save herself from the mess she was in.

She sighed and ran her hands through her hair. Their killer was out there planning his next victim, and they were shaking down a dirty health inspector. What a joke.

Maybe the Boss was right. Maybe it was time for her to leave fieldwork behind. She’d gotten West. She’d done what she set out to do. Maybe it was time to leave this behind for others who weren’t so exhausted.

Maybe she just didn’t have what it takes anymore. Maybe the scars Trammell, West and the numerous other serial killers she’d fought had left behind were too much for her to overcome.

Maybe the world would be better off without Special Agent Faith Bold trying and failing to protect them from the monsters that lurked in the darkness.