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.
23
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.
He had calmed a little and had brought himself to sift through Joyce's packages.
'How did he get all of these here?' he asked. 'All the way from England and Ireland? From Venice Beach and Salt Lake City?'
'Dry ice,' I said simply, looking at the metal camera cases and Styrofoam ice chests. 'He could have packed them well and put them through baggage without anyone ever knowing.'
Further searching of Joyce's house produced other incriminating evidence, all within plain view, for the warrant had listed magnesium fire starters, knives, and body parts, and that gave police license to rummage through drawers and even tear out walls, if they so chose. While a local medical examiner removed the contents of the freezer to transport it to the morgue, cabinets were gone through and a safe drilled open. Inside were foreign money and thousands of photographs of hundreds of people who had been granted the good fortune not to have turned up dead.
There also were photographs of Joyce, we presumed, sitting in the pilot's seat of his white Schweizer or leaning against it with his arms crossed at his chest. I stared at his image and tried to take it in. He was a short, slight man with brown hair, and might have been handsome had he not been terribly scarred by acne.