‘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.
His skin was pitted down his neck and into the open shirt he wore, and I could only imagine his shame as an adolescent, and the mockery and derisive laughter of his peers. I had known young men like him as I was growing up, those disfigured by birth or disease and unable to enjoy the entitlement of youthfulness or being the object of love.