Free Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell

Quantico, Virginia. Benton Wesley was the legendary unit chief who wore conservative suits and a large gold ring.
    It was believed that from reports and nightmarish photographs, he could divine some clue that investigators missed, as if there was a magic prize to be rooted out during sessions inside the dank, windowless space where the only sounds were grim voices, papers sliding across the conference room table, and distant muffled shots from the indoor firing range. Benton’s world for most of his FBI career was J. Edgar Hoover’s former bomb shelter, an airless bunker belowground where pipes from the Academy’s upper-level toilets sometimes leaked on worn carpet or ran in stinking trickles down cinder-block walls.
    Benton is fifty and has reached the bitter belief that psychological profiling isn’t psychological in the least, but is nothing more than forms and assumptions based on decades-old data. Profiling is propaganda and marketing. It is hype. It is just one more sales pitch that helps rake in federal dollars as FBI lobbyists stalk Capitol Hill. The very word profiling makes Wesley grit his teeth, and he can’t abide the way what he used to do is misunderstood, abused, has become a hackneyed Hollywood device drawn from worn-out and faulty behavioral science, anecdotes and deductive assumptions. Modern profiling is not inductive. It is as specious and misleading as physiognomy and anthropometry—or the dangerous and ridiculous beliefs from centuries past that murderers looked like cavemen and could be unequivocally identified by the circumference of their heads or the length of their arms. Profiling is fool’s gold, and for Benton to come around to that conviction is akin to a priest deciding there is no God.
    No matter what anybody says, no matter what statistics and epidemiological studies suggest and intellectual gurus pontificate, the only constant anymore is change. Human beings today commit more murders, rapes, pedophilia, kidnapings, hate crimes, acts of terrorism and just plain dishonest, dishonorable, self-serving sins against all forms of life than the free world has ever seen. Benton obsesses about it a lot. He has plenty of time to do so. Max thinks Benton, whose name he does not know, is a wacko intellectual snob, probably a professor at Harvard or MIT, and a humorless one at that. Max does not catch the occasional irony or dry-ice wit that Benton was known for when he was known, and he is known by virtually no one anymore.
    Max no longer speaks a word to him, just takes his money and makes a big production of counting Benton’s change before shoving it and a slice of cheese pizza or a soda or a bag of Cracker Jacks to the “Scheiße Arsch.”
    He talks about Benton every chance he gets.
    â€œThe other day he buy a pretzel,” Max told Nosmo King, thedelivery man whose mystical-sounding name is the mundane result of his mother seeing No Smoking divided into No Smo king when double doors parted as she was being rolled into the delivery room to give birth to him.
    â€œHe eats his pretzel there”—Max stabbed his cigarette toward a canopy of old oaks—“and schtared up like some schzombie at that schtuck kite”—pointing the cigarette again and nodding at the tattered red kite high in the branches of an oak tree—“like it some schientific phenomenal or a schymbol from God. Maybe a UFO!”
    Nosmo King was stacking cases of Fiji bottled water inside the Café Esplanade kiosk and paused, shielding his eyes from the sun as he followed the line of Max’s cigarette up to the wrecked kite.
    â€œI remember how that used to piss me off as a kid,” Nosmo King recalled. “Get yourself a brand new kite and five minutes later it’s hung up in power lines or a fucking tree. That sure is life. One minute things are moving along good, the next, the wind blows your ass to ruination.”
    Dark preoccupations and shadows