Point of Origin

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.