Point of Origin

'What store?'

'The patient privilege programs allow them to earn credits or money for the store. Snacks, mostly. They get one delivery a week, and they have to use their own money.'

'Where did Carrie get money?'

Blaustein would not say.

'What day did her deliveries come?'

'Depends. Usually early in the week, Monday, Tuesday, late in the afternoon, usually.'

'She escaped late in the afternoon, on a Tuesday,' I said.

'That's correct.' Her eyes got harder.

'And what about the deliveryperson?' I then asked. 'Has anybody bothered to see if he or she might have had anything to do with this?'

'The deliveryperson was a he,' Blaustein said with no emotion. 'No one has been able to locate him. He was a substitute for the usual person, who apparently was out sick.'

'A substitute? Right. Carrie was interested in more than potato chips!' My voice rose. 'Let me guess. The delivery people wear uniforms and drive a van. Carrie puts on a uniform and walks right out with her deliveryman. Gets in the van and is out of here.'

'Speculation. We don't know how she got out.'

'Oh, I think you do, Ms Blaustein. And I'm wondering if you didn't help Carrie with money, too, since she was so special to you.'

She got to her feet and pointed her finger at me again.

'If you're accusing me of helping her escape…'

'You helped her in one way or another,' I cut her off.

I fought back tears as I thought of Carrie free on the streets, as I thought about Benton.

'You monster,' I said, and my eyes were hot on hers. 'I'd like you to spend just one day with the victims. Just one goddamn day, putting your hands in their blood and touching their wounds. The innocent people the Carries of the world butcher for sport. I think there would be some people who would not be too happy to know about Carrie, her privileges, and unaccounted source of income,' I said. 'Others besides me.'

We were interrupted by a knock on her door, and Dr Ensor walked in.

'I thought I might take you on your tour,' she said to me. 'Susan seems busy. Are you finished up here?' she asked the legal aid attorney.

'Quite.'

'Very good,' she said with a chilly smile.

I knew then that the director was perfectly clear on how much Susan Blaustein had abused power, trust, and common decency. In the end, Blaustein had manipulated the hospital as much as Carrie had.

'Thank you,' I said to the director.

I left, turning my back on Carrie's defender.

May you rot in hell, I thought.

I followed Dr Ensor again, this time to a large stainless steel elevator that opened onto barren beige hallways closed off with heavy red doors that required codes for entry. Everything was monitored by closed circuit TV. Apparently Carrie had enjoyed working in the pet program, which entailed daily visits to the eleventh floor, where animals were kept in cages inside a small room with a view of razor wire.

The menagerie was dimly lit and moist with the musky smells of animals and wood chips, and the skittering of claws. There were parakeets, guinea pigs, and a Russian dwarf hamster. On a table was a box of rich soil thick with tender shoots.

'We grow our own birdseed here,' Dr Ensor explained. 'The patients are encouraged to raise and sell it. Of course, we're not talking mass production here. There's barely enough for our own birds, and as you can see by what's in some of the cages and on the floor, the patients tend to be fond of feeding their pets cheese puffs and potato chips.'

'Carrie was up here every day?' I asked.

'So I've been told, now that I've been looking into everything she did while she was here.' She paused, looking around the cages as small animals with pink noses twitched and scratched.

'Obviously I didn't know everything at the time. For example, coincidentally, during the six months Carrie supervised the pet program, we had an unusual number of fatalities and inexplicable escapes. A parakeet here, a hamster there. Patients would come in and find their wards dead in their cages, or a cage door open and a bird nowhere to be found.'

She walked back out into the hallway, her lips firmly pressed.

'It's too bad you weren't here on those occasions,' she said wryly. 'Perhaps you could have told me what they were dying from. Or who.'

There was another door down the hall, and this one opened onto a small, dimly lit room where there was one relatively modern computer and printer on a plain wooden table. I also noted a phone jack in the wall. A sense of foreshadowing darkened my thoughts even before Dr Ensor spoke.

'This was perhaps where Carrie spent most of her free time,' she said. 'As you no doubt know, she has an extensive background in computers. She was extremely good about encouraging other patients to learn, and the PC was her idea. She suggested we find donors of used equipment, and we now have one computer and printer on each floor.'

I walked over to the terminal and sat down in front of it. Hitting a key, I turned off the screen saver and looked at icons that told me what programs were available.

'When patients worked in here,' I said, 'were they supervised?'

'No. They were shown in and the door was shut and locked. An hour later, they were shown back to their ward.' She grew thoughtful. 'I'd be the first to admit that I was impressed with how many of the patients have started learning word processing, and in some instances, spread sheets.'

I went into America Online and was prompted for a username and password. The director watched what I was doing.

'They absolutely had no access to the Internet,' she said.

'How do we know that?'

'The computers aren't hooked up to it.'

'But they do have modems,' I said. 'Or at least this one does. It's simply not connecting because there's no telephone line plugged into the telephone jack.'

I pointed to the tiny receptacle in the wall, then turned around to face her.

'Any chance a telephone line might have disappeared from somewhere?' I asked. 'Perhaps from one of the offices? Susan Blaustein's office, for example?'

The director glanced away, her face angry and distressed as she began to see what I was getting at.

'God,' she muttered.

'Of course, she may have gotten that from the outside. Perhaps from whoever delivered her snacks from the store?'

'I don't know.'

'The point is, there's a lot we don't know, Dr Ensor. We don't know, for example, what the hell Carrie was really doing when she was in here. She could have been in and out of chat rooms, putting feelers out in personals, finding pen pals. I'm sure you've kept up with the news enough to know how many crimes are committed on the Internet? Pedophilia, rape, homicide, child pornography.'

'That's why this was closely supervised,' she said. 'Or supposed to have been.'

'Carrie could have planned her escape this way. And you say she started working with the computer how long ago?'

'About a year. After a long run of ideal behavior.'

'Ideal behavior,' I repeated.

I thought of the cases in Baltimore, Venice Beach, and more recently in Warrenton. I wondered if it were possible that Carrie might have met up with her accomplice through e-mail, through a Web site or a chat room. Could it be that she committed computer crimes during her incarceration? Might she have been working behind the scenes, advising and encouraging a psychopath who stole human faces? Then she escaped, and from that point on her crimes were in person.

'Is there anyone who's been discharged from Kirby in the past year who was an arsonist, especially someone with a history of homicide? Anyone Carrie might have come to know? Perhaps someone in one of her classes?' I asked, just to be sure.

Dr Ensor turned off the overhead light and we returned to the hall.

'No one comes to mind,' she said. 'Not of the sort you're talking about. I will add that a peace officer was always present.'