‘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.