Point of Origin

22

LUCY AND I lifted off from Ward's Island in a hot wind and low barometric pressure that made the Bell JetRanger sluggish. We followed the East River and continued to fly through the Class B airspace of La Guardia, where we landed long enough to refuel and buy cheese crackers and sodas from vending machines, and for me to call the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. This time I was connected to the director of student counseling. I took that as a good sign.

'I understand your need to protect yourself,' I said to her from behind the shut door of a pay phone booth inside Signatures terminal. 'But please reconsider. Two more people have been murdered since Claire Rawley was.'

There was a long silence.

Then Dr Chris Booth said, 'Can you come in person?'

'I was planning to,' I told her.

'All right then.'

I called Teun McGovern next to tell her what was going on.

'I think Carrie escaped from Kirby in the same white Schweizer we saw flying over Kenneth Sparkes's farm when we were working the scene,' I said.

'Does she fly?' McGovern's confused voice came back.

'No, no. I can't imagine that.'

'Oh.'

'Whoever she's with,' I said. 'That's the pilot. Whoever helped her escape and is doing all this. The first two cases were warm-ups. Baltimore and Venice Beach. We might never have known about them, Teun. I believe Carrie waited to drag us in. She waited until Warrenton.'

'Then you're thinking Sparkes was the intended target,' she stated thoughtfully.

'To get our attention. To make sure we came. Yes,' I said.

'Then Claire Rawley figures in how?'

'That's what I'm going to Wilmington to find out, Teun. I believe she's somehow the key to all of this. She's the connection to him. Whoever he is. And I also believe that Carrie knows I will think this, and that she's expecting me.'

'You think she's there.'

'Oh yes. I'm betting on it. She expected Benton to come to Philadelphia, and he did. She expects Lucy and me to come to Wilmington. She knows how we think, how we work, at least as much about us as we know about her.'

'You're saying that you're her next hits.'

The thought was cold water in my stomach.

'Intended ones.'

'Not a chance we can take, Kay. We'll be there when you land. The university must have a playing field. We'll get that arranged very discreetly. Whenever you land to refuel or whatever, page me and we'll keep up with each other.'

'You can't let her know you're there,' I said. 'That will ruin it.'

'Trust me. She won't,' McGovern said.

We flew out of La Guardia with seventy-five gallons of fuel and an unbearably long flight to look forward to. Three hours in a helicopter was always more than enough for me. The weight of the headsets and the noise and vibration gave me a hot spot on the top of my head and seemed to rattle me loose at the joints. To endure this beyond four hours generally resulted in a serious headache. We were lucky with a generous tail wind, and although our airspeed showed one hundred and ten knots, the GPS showed our ground speed was actually one hundred and twenty.

Lucy made me take the controls again, and I was smoother as I learned not to overcontrol and fight. When thermals and winds shook us like an angry mother, I gave myself up to them. Trying to outmaneuver gusts and updrafts only made matters worse, and this was hard for me. I liked to make things better. I learned to watch for birds, and now and then I spotted a plane at the same time Lucy did.

Hours became monotonous and blurred as we snuggled up to the coastline, over the Delaware River and on to the Eastern Shore. We refueled near Salisbury, Maryland, where I used the bathroom and drank a Coke, then continued into North Carolina, where hog farms slaughtered the topography with long aluminum sheds and waste treatment lagoons the color of blood. We entered the airspace of Wilmington at almost two o'clock. My nerves began to scream as I imagined what might await us.

'Let's go down to six hundred feet,' Lucy said. 'And lower the speed.'

'You want me to do it.' I wanted to make sure.

'Your ship.'

It wasn't pretty, but I managed.

'My guess is, the university's not going to be on the water, and is probably a bunch of brick buildings.'

'Thank you, Sherlock.'

Everywhere I looked I saw water, condominium complexes, and water treatment and other plants. The ocean was to the east, sparkling and ruffled, oblivious to dark, bruised clouds gathering on the horizon. A storm was on its way and did not seem to be in a hurry but threatened to be bad.

'Lord, I don't want to get grounded here,' I said over my mike as sure enough, a cluster of Georgian brick buildings came into view.

'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.'

'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.