Point of Origin (42 page)

'I don't know about this.' Lucy was looking around. 'If she's here. Where, Aunt Kay?'

'Wherever she thinks we are.' I sounded so sure.

Lucy took over.

'I've got the controls,' she said. 'I don't know if I hope you're right or not.'

'You hope it,' I answered her. 'In fact, you hope it so much it scares me, Lucy.'

'I'm not the one who brought us here.'

Carrie had tried to ruin Lucy. Carrie had murdered Benton.

'I know who brought us here,' I said. 'It was her.'

The university was close below us, and we found the athletic field where McGovern was waiting. Men and women were playing soccer, but there was a clearing near the tennis courts, and this was where Lucy was to land. She circled the area twice, once high, once low, and neither of us spotted any obstructions, except for an odd tree here and there. Several cars were on the sidelines, and as we settled to the grass, I noted that one of them was a dark blue Explorer with a driver inside. Then I realized that the intramural soccer game was coached by Teun McGovern in P. E. gym shorts and shirt. She had a whistle around her neck, and her teams were co-ed and very fit.

I looked around as if Carrie were observing all this, but skies were empty, and nothing offered even the scent of her. The instant we were on the ground and in flight idle, the Explorer drove across the grass and stopped a safe distance from our blades. It was driven by an unfamiliar woman, and I was stunned to see Marino in the passenger's seat.

'I don't believe it,' I said to Lucy.

'How the hell did he get here?' She was amazed, too.

Marino stared at us through the windshield as we waited out our two minutes and shut down. He didn't smile and wasn't the least bit friendly when I climbed into the back of the car while Lucy tied down the main rotor blades. McGovern and her soccer players went on with their staged game, paying no attention to us at all. But I noticed the gym bags beneath benches on the sidelines, and I had no doubt what was inside them. It was as if we were expecting an approaching army, an ambush by enemy troops, and I could not help but wonder if Carrie had made a mockery of us once again.

'I wasn't expecting to see you,' I commented to Marino.

'You think it's possible US Airways could fly somewhere without dumping your ass out in Charlotte first?' he complained. 'Took me as long to get here as it probably did you.

'I'm Ginny Correll.' Our driver turned around and shook my hand.

She was at least forty, a very attractive blond dressed primly in a pale green suit, and had I not known the truth, I might have assumed she was on the university's faculty. But there was a scanner and a two-way radio inside the car, and I caught a flicker of the pistol in the shoulder holster beneath her jacket. She waited until Lucy was inside the Explorer, and then began turning around in the grass as the soccer game went on.

'Here's what's going on,' Correll began to explain. 'We didn't know whether the suspect or suspects might be waiting for you, following you, whatever, so we prepared for that.'

'I can see that you did,' I said.

'They'll be heading off the field in about two minutes, and the important point is we got guys all over the place. Some dressed as students, others hanging out in town, checking out the hotels and bars, things like that. Where we're heading now is the student counseling center, where the assistant director's going to meet us. She was Claire Rawley's counselor and has all her records.'

'Right,' I said.

'Just so you know, Doc,' Marino said, 'we got a campus police officer who thinks he may have spotted Carrie yesterday in the student union.'

'The Hawk's Nest, to be specific,' Correll said. 'That's the cafeteria.'

'Short dyed red hair, weird eyes. She was buying a sandwich, and he noticed her because she stared holes in him when she walked past his table, and then when we started passing her photo around, he said it might have been her. Can't swear to it, though.'

'It would be like her to stare at a cop,' Lucy said. 'Jerking people around is her favorite sport.'

'I'll also add that it's not unusual for college kids to look like the homeless,' I said.

'We're checking pawn shops around here to see if anybody fitting Carrie's description might have bought a gun, and we're also checking for stolen cars in the area,' Marino said. 'Assuming if she and her sidekick stole cars in New York or Philadelphia, they aren't going to show up here with those plates.'

The campus was an immaculate collection of modified Georgian buildings tucked amid palms, magnolias, crepe myrtles, and lobolly and long-leaf pines. Gardenias were in bloom and when we got out of the car, their perfume clung to the humid, hot air and went to my head.

I loved the scents of the South, and for a moment, it did not seem possible that anything bad could happen here. It was summer session, and the campus was not heavily populated. Parking lots were half full, with many of the bike racks empty. Some of the cars driving on College Road had surfboards strapped to their roofs.

The counseling center was on the second floor of Westside Hall, and the waiting area for students with health problems was mauve and blue and full of light. Thousand-piece puzzles of rural scenes were in various stages of completion on coffee tables, offering a welcome distraction for those who had appointments. A receptionist was expecting us and showed us down a corridor, past observation and group rooms, and spaces for GRE testing. Dr Chris Booth was energetic with kind, wise eyes, a woman approaching sixty, I guessed, and one who loved the sun. She was weathered in a way that gave her character, her skin deeply tanned and lined, her short hair white, and her body slight but vital.

She was a psychologist with a corner office that overlooked the fine arts building and lush live oak trees. I had always been fascinated by the personality behind offices. Where she worked was soothing and unprovocative but shrewd in its arrangement of chairs that suited very different personalities. There was a papasan chair for the patient who wanted to curl up on deep cushions and be open for help, and a cane-back rocker and a stiff love seat. The color scheme was gentle green, with paintings of sailboats on the walls, and elephant ear in terracotta pots.

'Good afternoon,' Dr Booth said to us with a smile as she invited us in. 'I'm very glad to see you.'

'And I'm very glad to see you,' I replied.

I helped myself to the rocking chair, while Ginny perched on the love seat. Marino looked around with self-conscious eyes and eased his way into the papasan, doing what he could not to be swallowed by it. Dr Booth sat in her office chair, her back to her perfectly clean desk that had nothing on it but a can of Diet Pepsi. Lucy stood by the door.

'I've been hoping that someone would come see me,' Dr Booth began, as if she had called this meeting. 'But I honestly didn't know who to contact or even if I should.'

She gave each of us her bright gray eyes.

'Claire was very special -- and I know that's what everyone says about the dead,' she said.

'Not everyone,' Marino cynically retorted.

Dr Booth smiled sadly. 'I'm just saying that I have counseled many students here over the years, and Claire deeply touched my heart and I had high hopes for her. I was devastated by news of her death.'

She paused, staring out of the window.

'I saw her last about two weeks prior to her death, and I've tried to think of anything I could that might hold an answer as to what might have happened.'

'When you say you saw her,' I said, 'do you mean in here? For a session?'

She nodded. 'We met for an hour.'

Lucy was getting increasingly restless.

'Before you get into that,' I said, 'could you give us as much of her background as possible?'

'Absolutely. And by the way, I have dates and times for her appointments, if you need all that. I'd been seeing her on and off for three years.'

'Off and on?' Marino asked as he sat forward in the deep seat and starting sliding back into its deep cushions again.

'Claire was paying her own way through school. She worked as a waitress at the Blockade Runner at Wrightsville Beach. She'd do nothing but work and save, then pay for a term, then drop out again to earn more money. I didn't see her when she wasn't in school, and this is where a lot of her difficulties began, it's my belief.'

'I'm going to let you guys handle this,' Lucy said abruptly. 'I want to make sure someone's staying with the helicopter.'

Lucy went out and shut the door behind her, and I felt a wave of fear. I didn't know that Lucy wouldn't hit the streets alone to look for Carrie. Marino briefly met my eyes, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing. Our agent escort, Ginny, was stiff on the love seat, appropriately unobtrusive, offering nothing but her attention.

'About a year ago,' Dr Booth went on, 'Claire met Kenneth Sparkes, and I know I'm not telling you something you're not already aware of. She was a competitive surfer and he had a beach house in Wrightsville. The long and short of it is they got involved in a brief, extremely intense affair, which he cut off.'

'This was while she was enrolled in school,' I said.

'Yes. Second term. They broke up in the summer, and she didn't return to the university until the following winter. She didn't come in to see me until that February when her English professor noticed that she was constantly falling asleep in class and smelled of alcohol. Concerned, he went to the dean, and she was put on probation, with the stipulation that she had to come back to see me. This was all related to Sparkes, I'm afraid. Claire was adopted, the situation a very unhappy one. She left home when she was sixteen, came to Wrightsville, and did any kind of work she could to survive.'

'Where are her parents now?' Marino asked.

'Her birth parents? We don't know who they are.'

'No. The ones who adopted her.'

'Chicago. They have had no contact with her since she left home. But they do know she's dead. I have spoken to them.'

'Dr Booth,' I said, 'do you have any idea why Claire would have gone to Sparkes's house in Warrenton?'

'She was completely incapable of dealing with rejection. I can only speculate she went there to see him, in hopes she might resolve something. I do know she stopped calling him last spring, because he finally changed to another unlisted phone number. Her only possible contact was to just show up, my guess is.'

'In an old Mercedes that belonged to a psychotherapist named Newton Joyce?' Marino asked, adjusting his position again.

Dr Booth was startled. 'Now I didn't know that,' she said. 'She was driving Newton's car?'

'You know him?'

'Not personally, but certainly I know his reputation. Claire started going to him because she felt she needed a male perspective. This was within the past two months. He certainly wouldn't have been my choice.'

'Why?' Marino asked.

Dr Booth gathered her thoughts, her face tight with anger.

'This is all very messy,' she said finally. 'Which might begin to explain my reluctance to talk about Claire when you first began to call. Newton is a spoiled rich boy who has never had to work but decided to go into psychotherapy. A power trip for him, I suppose.'

'He seems to have vanished in thin air,' Marino said.

'Nothing out of the ordinary about that,' she replied shortly. 'He's in and out as he pleases, sometimes for months or even years at a time. I've been here at the university for thirty-some years now, and I remember him as a boy. Could charm the birds out of the trees and talk people into anything, but he's all about himself. And I was most concerned when Claire began to see him. Let's just say that no one would ever accuse Newton of being ethical. He makes his own rules. But he's never been caught.'

'At what?' I asked. 'Caught at what?'

'Controlling patients in a way that is most inappropriate.'

'Having sexual relations with them?' I asked.

'I've never heard proof of that. It was more of a mind thing, a dominance thing, and it was very apparent that he completely dominated Claire. She was utterly dependent on him just like that.' She snapped her fingers. 'After their very first session. She would come in here and spend the entire time talking about him, obsessing. That's what's so odd about her going to see Sparkes. I truly thought she was over him and besotted with Newton. I honestly think she would have done anything Newton told her to do.'

'Possible he might have suggested she go see Sparkes? For therapeutic reasons, such as closure?' I said.

Dr Booth smiled ironically.

'He may have suggested she go see him, but I doubt it was to help her,' she replied. 'I'm sorry to say that if going there was Newton's idea, then it most likely was manipulative.'

'I sure would like to know how the two of them got hooked up,' Marino said, scooting forward in the papasan chair. 'I'm guessing that someone referred her to him.'

'Oh no,' she replied. 'They met on a photo shoot.'

'What do you mean?' I said as my blood stopped in my veins.

'He's quite enamored with all things Hollywood and has finagled his way into working with production crews for movies and photo shoots. You know Screen Gems studio is right here in town, and Claire's minor was film studies. It was her dream to be an actress. Heaven knows, she was beautiful enough. Based on what she told me, she was doing a modeling job at the beach, for some surfing magazine, I think. And he was part of the production crew, the photographer, in this instance. Apparently he is accomplished in that.'