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Hope had expected another sort of police experience, a more critical investigation--at least, a more suspicious cop, and certainly a man very different from Arden Bensenhaver. She was so grateful, for one thing, that Bensenhaver was an old man, clearly in his sixties--like an uncle to her, or even more sexually remote: a grandfather. She said she felt better, that she was all right; when she straightened up and stood away from him, she saw she had smeared his shirt collar and his cheek with blood, but Bensenhaver hadn't noticed or didn't care.
"Okay, show me," Bensenhaver said to the deputy, but again he smiled gently at Hope. The deputy led him to the open cab.
"Oh, my God," the driver of the stuck car was saying. "Dear Jesus, look at this, and what's that? Christ, look, I think that's his liver. Isn't that what a liver looks like?" The pilot gawked in mute wonder and Bensenhaver caught both men by their coat shoulders and steered them roughly away. They started toward the rear of the truck, where Hope was composing herself, but Bensenhaver hissed at them, "Stay away from Mrs. Standish. Stay away from the truck. Go radio our position," he told the pilot. "They'll need an ambulance or something here. We'll take Mrs. Standish with us."
"They'll need a plastic bag for him," said the deputy, pointing to Oren Rath. "He's all over the place."
"I can see with my own eyes," said Arden Bensenhaver. He looked inside the cab and whistled admiringly.
The deputy started to ask, "Was he doing it when..."
"That's right," said Bensenhaver. He put his hand into a horrible mess by the accelerator pedal, but he didn't seem to mind. He was reaching for the knife on the floor of the passenger's side. He picked it up in his handkerchief; he looked it over carefully, wrapped it in the handkerchief, and put it in his pocket.
"Look," the deputy whispered, conspiratorially. "Did you ever hear of a rapist wearing a rubber?"
"It's not common," Bensenhaver said. "But it's not unknown."
"It's weird to me," said the deputy. He looked amazed as Bensenhaver pinched the prophylactic tight, just below its bulge; Bensenhaver snapped the rubber off and held it, without spilling a drop, up to the light. The sack was as large as a tennis ball. It hadn't leaked. It was full of blood.
Bensenhaver looked satisfied; he tied a knot in the condom, the way you'd knot a balloon, and he flung it so far into the bean field that it was out of sight.
"I don't want someone suggesting that it might not have been a rape
," Bensenhaver said softly to the deputy. "Got it?"
He didn't wait for the deputy to answer; Bensenhaver went to the back of the truck to be with Mrs. Standish.
"How old was he--that boy?" Hope asked Bensenhaver.
"Old enough," Bensenhaver told her. "About twenty-five or twenty-six," he added. He did not want anything to diminish her survival--particularly, in her own eyes. He waved to the pilot, who was to help Mrs. Standish aboard. Then he went to clear things with the deputy. "You stay here with the body and the bad driver," he told him.
"I'm not a bad driver," the driver whined. "Christ, if you'd seen that lady there--in the road..."
"And keep anyone away from the truck," Bensenhaver said.
On the road was the shirt belonging to Mrs. Standish's husband; Bensenhaver picked it up and trotted to the helicopter in his funny, overweight way of running. The two men watched Bensenhaver climb aboard the helicopter and rise away from them. The weak spring sun seemed to leave with the copter and they were suddenly cold and didn't know where to go. Not in the truck, certainly, and sitting in the driver's car meant crossing that field of muck. They went to the pickup, lowered the tailgate, and sat on it.
"Will he call a tow truck for my car?" the driver asked.
"He'll probably forget," the deputy said. He was thinking about Bensenhaver; he admired him, but he feared him, and he also thought that Bensenhaver was not to be totally trusted. There were questions of orthodoxy, if that's what it was, which the deputy had never considered. Mainly, the deputy just had too many things to think about at one time.
The driver paced back and forth in the pickup, which irritated the deputy because it jounced him on the tailgate. The driver avoided the foul, bunched blanket crammed in the corner next to the cab; he cleared a see-through spot on the dusted and caked rear window so that he could, occasionally, squint inside the cab at the rigid and disemboweled body of Oren Rath. All the blood was dry now, and through the mottled rear window the body looked to the driver to be similar, in color and in gloss, to an eggplant. He went and sat down on the tailgate beside the deputy, who got up, walked back in the truck, and peered in the window at the gashed corpse.
"You know what?" the driver said. "Even though she was all messed up, you could tell what a really good-looking woman she was."
"Yes, you could," the deputy agreed. The driver now paced around in the back of the truck with him, so the deputy went to the tailgate and sat down.
"Don't get sore," the driver said.
"I'm not sore," the deputy said.
"I don't mean that I can sympathize with anyone who'd want to rape her, you know," the driver said.
"I know what you don't mean," said the deputy.
The deputy knew he was over his head in these matters, but the simple-mindedness of the driver forced the deputy to adopt what he imagined was Bensenhaver's attitude of contempt for him.
"You see a lot of this, huh?" the driver asked. "You know: rape and murder."
