Point of Origin (43 page)

'You said he was in and out a lot,' Marino said. 'Maybe he had other residences?'

'I don't know anything more about him, really,' she replied.

Within an hour, the Wilmington Police Department had a warrant to search Newton Joyce's property in the historic district, several blocks from the water. His white frame house was one story with a broken-pitch gable roof that covered the porch in front at the end of a quiet street of other tired nineteenth-century homes with porches and piazzas.

Huge magnolias darkly shadowed his yard with only patches of wan sunlight seeping through, and the air was fitful with insects. By now, McGovern had caught up with us, and we waited on the slumping back porch as a detective used a tactical baton to break out a pane of glass from the door. Then he reached his hand inside and freed the lock.

Marino, McGovern, and a Detective Scroggins went first with pistols close to their bodies and pointed to shoot. I was close behind, unarmed and unnerved by the creepiness of this place Joyce called home. We entered a small sitting area that had been modified to accommodate patients. There was a rather ghastly old red velvet Victorian couch, a marble-topped end table centered by a milkglass lamp, and a coffee table scattered with magazines that were many months old. Through a doorway was his office, and it was even stranger.

Yellowed knotty pine walls were almost completely covered with framed photographs of what I assumed were models and actors in various publicity poses. Quite literally, there were hundreds of them, and I assumed Joyce had taken them himself. I could not imagine a patient pouring out his problems in the midst of so many beautiful bodies and faces. On Joyce's desk were a Rolodex, date book, paperwork, and a telephone. While Scroggins began playing messages from the answering machine, I looked around some more.

On bookcases were worn-out cloth and leather volumes of classics that were too dusty to have been opened in many years. There was a cracked brown leather couch, presumably for his patients, and next to it a small table bearing a single water glass. It was almost empty and smeared around the rim with pale peach lipstick. Directly across from the couch was an intricately carved, high-back mahogany armchair that brought to mind a throne. I heard Marino and McGovern checking other rooms while voices drifted out of Joyce's answering machine. All of the messages had been left after the evening of June fifth, or the day before Claire's death. Patients had called about their appointments. A travel agent had left word about two tickets to Paris.

'What'd you say that fire starter thing looks like?' Detective Scroggins asked as he opened another desk drawer.

'A thin bar of silvery metal,' I answered him. 'You'll know it when you see it.'

'Nothing like that in here. But the guy sure is into rubber bands. Must be thousands of them. Looks like he was making these weird little balls.'

He held up a perfectly shaped sphere made completely of rubber bands.

'Now how the hell do you think he did that?' Scroggins was amazed. 'You think he started with just one and then kept winding others all around like golf ball innards?'

I didn't know.

'What kind of mind is that, huh?' Scroggins went on. 'You think he was sitting here doing that while he was talking with his patients?'

'At this point,' I replied, 'not much would surprise me.'

'What a whacko. So far I've found thirteen, fourteen . . . uh, nineteen balls.'

He was pulling them out and setting them on top of the desk, and then Marino called me from the back of the house.

'Doc, think you'd better come here.'

I followed the sounds of him and McGovern through a small kitchen with old appliances that were layered in the civilizations of former meals. Dishes were piled in cold scummy water in the sink, and the garbage can was overflowing, the stench awful. Newton Joyce was more slovenly than Marino, and I would not have thought that possible, nor did it square with the orderliness of Joyce's rubber band balls or what I believed were his crimes. But despite criminalist texts and Hollywood renditions, people were not a science and they were not consistent. A prime example was what Marino and McGovern had discovered in the garage.

It was connected to the kitchen by a door that had been made inaccessible by a padlock that Marino had handily removed with bolt cutters that McGovern had fetched from her Explorer. On the other side was a work area with no door leading outside, for it had been closed in with cinder block. Walls were painted white, and against one were fifty-gallon drums of aviation gasoline. There was a stainless steel Sub-Zero freezer and its door, ominously, was padlocked. The concrete floor was very clean, and in a corner were five aluminum camera cases and Styrofoam ice chests of varying sizes. Central was a large plyboard table covered with felt and here were arranged the instruments of Joyce's crimes.

Half a dozen knives were lined in a perfect row, with precisely the same spacing between each. All were in their leather cases, and in a small redwood wooden box were sharpening stones.

'I'll be damned,' Marino said, pointing out the knives to me. 'Let me tell you what these are, Doc. The bone-handled ones are R. W. Loveless skinner knives, made by Beretta. For collectors, numbered, and costing around six hundred bucks a pop.'

He stared at them with lust but did not touch.

'The blued steel babies are Chris Reeves, at least four hundred a pop, and the butts of the handles unscrew if you want to store matches in them,' he went on.

I heard a distant door shut, and then Scroggins appeared with Lucy. The detective was as awed by the knives as Marino was, and then the two of them and McGovern resumed opening drawers of tool chests, and prying open two cabinets that held other chilling signs that we had found our killer. In a plastic Speedo bag were eight silicone swim caps, all of them hot pink. Each was zipped inside a plastic pouch with price stickers that said Joyce had paid sixteen dollars apiece for them. As for fire starters, there were four of them in a Wal-Mart bag.

Joyce also had a modular desk in his concrete cave, and we left it to Lucy to access whatever she could. She sat in a folding chair and began working the keyboard while Marino took the bolt cutters to the freezer, which, eerily, was precisely the same model I had at home.

'This is too easy,' Lucy said. 'He's downloaded his e-mail onto a disk. No password or anything. Stuff he sent and received. About eighteen months' worth. We got a username of FMKIRBY. From Kirby, I presume. Now I wonder who that pen pal might be,' she added sarcastically.

I moved closer and looked over her shoulder as she scrolled through notes that Carrie had sent to Newton Joyce, whose username horrifically was skinner, and those he had sent to her. On May tenth he wrote:

Found her. A connection to die for. How does a major media tycoon sound? Am I good?

And the next day, Carrie had written back:

Yes, GOOD. I want them. Then fly me out of here, bird man. You can show me later. I want to look in their empty eyes and see.

'My God,' I muttered. 'She wanted him to kill in Virginia, and do so in a way that would insure my participation.'

Lucy scrolled some more, and her tapping of the down arrow was impatient and angry.

'So he happens upon Claire Rawley at a photo shoot, and she turns out to be the bait. The perfect lure because of her past relationship to Sparkes,' I went on. 'Joyce and Claire go to his farm, but he's out of town. Sparkes is spared. Joyce murders and mutilates her, and burns the place.' I paused, reading more old mail. 'And now here we are.'

'Here we are because she wants us here,' Lucy said. 'We were supposed to find all this.'

She tapped the key hard.

'Don't you get it?' she asked.

She turned around and looked at me.

'She reeled us in, here, so we would see all this,' she said.

Bolt cutters suddenly snapped loudly through steel, and the freezer door sucked open.

'Jesus fucking Christ,' Marino shouted. 'Fuck!' he cried.

ON THE TOP wire shelf were two bald mannikin heads, one male, one female, with blank faces smeared black with frozen blood. They had been m used as forms for the faces Joyce had stolen, each one laid over the mannikin's face, then frozen hard to give his trophies shape. Joyce had shrouded his mask-like horrors in triple layers of plastic freezer bags that were labeled like evidence, with case numbers, locations, and dates.

The most recent was the one on top, and I robotically picked it up as my heart began to pound so hard that for an instant, the world went black. I began to shake and was aware of nothing else until I came to in McGovern's arms. She was helping me into the chair where Lucy had been seated at the desk.

'Someone bring her some water,' McGovern was saying. 'It's all right, Kay. It's all right.'

I focused on the freezer with its wide-open door and stacks of plastic bags hinting of flesh and blood. Marino was pacing the garage, running his fingers through his thinning strands of hair. His face was the hue of a stroke about to happen, and Lucy was gone.

'Where's Lucy?' I asked with a dry mouth.

'She's gone to get a first aid kit,' McGovern answered in a gentle voice. 'Just be quiet, try to relax, and we're going to get you out of here. You don't need to be seeing all this.'

But I already had. I had seen the empty face, the misshapen mouth and nose that had no bridge. I had seen the orange-tinted flesh sparkling with ice. The date on the freezer bag was June 17, the location Philadelphia, and that had penetrated at the same time I was looking, and then it was too late, or maybe I would have looked anyway, because I had to know.

'They've been here,' I said.

I struggled to get up and got light-headed again.

'They came here long enough to leave that. So we'd find it,' I said.

'Goddamn son of a bitch!' Marino screamed. 'GODDAMN-MOTHER-FUCKING-SON-OF-A-BITCH!'

He roughly wiped his eyes on his fist as he continued to pace like a madman. Lucy was coming down the steps. She was pale, her eyes glassy. My niece seemed dazed.

'McGovern to Correll,' she said into her portable radio.

'Correll,' the voice came back.

'You guys get on over here.'

'Ten-four.'

'I'm calling our forensic guys,' said Detective Scroggins.

He was stunned, too, but not the same way we were. For him, this wasn't personal. He had never heard of Benton Wesley. Scroggins was carefully going through the bags in the freezer, his lips moving as he counted.

'Holy God,' he said in amazement. 'There's twenty-seven of these things.'

'Dates and locations,' I said, mustering my reserved strength to walk over to him.

We looked together.

'London, 1981. Liverpool, 1983. Dublin, 1984, and one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven. Eleven, total, from Ireland, through 1987. It looks like he really started getting into it,' Scroggins said, and he was getting excited, the way people do when they are on the verge of hysteria.

I was looking on with him, and the location of Joyce's kills began in Northern Ireland in Belfast, then continued into the Republic in Galway, followed by nine murders in Dublin in neighborhoods such as Malahide, Santry and Howth. Then Joyce had begun his predation in the United States, mainly out west, in remote areas of Utah, Nevada, Montana, and Washington, and once in Natches, Mississippi, and this explained a lot to me, especially when I remembered what Carrie had said in her letter to me. She had made an odd reference to sawed bone.

'The torsos,' I said as the truth ran through me like lightning. 'The unsolved dismemberments in Ireland. And then he was quiet for eight years because he killed out west and the bodies were never found, or else never centrally reported. So we didn't know about them. He never stopped, and then he came to Virginia, where his presence definitely got my attention and drove me to despair.'

It was 1995 when two torsos had turned up, the first near Virginia Beach, the next in Norfolk. The following year there were two more, this time in the western part of the state, one in Lynchburg, the other in Blacksburg, very close to the campus of the Virginia Tech. In 1997, Joyce seemed to have gotten silent, and this was when I suspected Carrie had allied herself with him.

The publicity about the dismemberments had become overwhelming, with only two of the limbless, headless bodies identified by X-rays matching the premortem films of missing people, both of them male college students. They had been my cases, and I had made a tremendous amount of noise about them, and the FBI had been brought in.

I now realized that Joyce's primary purpose was not only to foil identification, but more importantly, to hide his mutilation of the bodies. He did not want us to know he was stealing his victims' beauty, in effect, stealing who they were by taking his knife to their faces and adding them to his frigid collection. Perhaps he feared that additional dismemberments might make the hunt for him too big, so he had switched his modus operandi to fire, and perhaps it was Carrie who had suggested this. I could only assume that somehow the two of them had connected on the Internet.

'I don't get it,' Marino was saying.