Patricia Cornwell - Point of Origin

'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.

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.

So he had robbed others of what he did not have. He had destroyed as he had been destroyed, the point of origin his own miserable lot in life, his own wretched self. I did not feel sorry for him. Nor did I think that he and Carrie were still here in this city, or even anywhere around. She had gotten what she'd wanted, at least for now. The trap I had set had caught only me. She had wanted me to find Benton, and I had.

The final word, I felt sure, would be what she eventually did to me, and at the moment, I was too beaten up to care. I felt dead. I found silence in sitting on an old, worn marble bench in the riotous tangle of Joyce's overgrown backyard. Hostas, begonias, and fig bushes fought with pampas grass for the sun, and I found Lucy at the edge of intermittent shadows cast by live oak trees, where red and yellow hibiscus were loud and wild.

'Lucy, let's go home.'

I sat next to my niece on cold, hard stone I associated with cemeteries.

'I hope he was dead before they did that to him,' she said one more time.

I did not want to think about it.

'I just hope he didn't suffer.'

'She wants us to worry about things like that,' I said as anger peeked through my haze of disbelief. 'She's taken enough from us, don't you think? Let's not give her any more, Lucy.'

She had no answer for me.

'ATF and the police will handle it from here,' I went on, holding her hand. 'Let's go home, and we'll move on from there.'

'How?'

'I'm not sure I know.' I was as truthful as I could be.

We got up together and went around to the front of the house, where McGovern was talking to an agent out by her car. She looked at both of us, and compassion softened her eyes.

'If you'll take us back to the helicopter,' Lucy said with a steadiness she did not feel, 'I'll take it on in to Richmond and Border Patrol can pick it up. If that's all right, I mean.'

'I'm not sure you should be flying right now.' McGovern suddenly was Lucy's supervisor again.

'Trust me, I'm fine,' Lucy replied, and her voice got harder. 'Besides, who else is going to fly it? And you can't leave it here on a soccer field.'

McGovern hesitated, her eyes on Lucy. She unlocked the Explorer.

'Okay,' she said. 'Climb in.'

'I'll file a flight plan,' Lucy said as she sat in front. 'So you can check on where we are, if that will make you feel better.'

'It will,' McGovern said, starting the engine.

McGovern got on the radio and called one of the agents inside the house.

'Put Marino on,' she said.

After a brief wait, Marino's voice came over the air.

'Go ahead,' he said.

'Party's taking off. You going along?'