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.