Point of Origin

by Patricia Cornwell

  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 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?”

  “I’ll stick to the ground,” his answer came back. “Gonna help out here first.”

  “Got it. We appreciate it.”

  “Tell them to fly safe,” Marino said.

  A campus police officer on bicycle patrol was standing sentry at the helicopter when we got there, and tennis was going strong on the courts next door, balls clopping, while several young men practiced soccer near a goal. The sky was bright blue, trees barely stirring, as if nothing bad had happened here. Lucy went through a thorough preflight check while McGovern and I waited in the car.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked her.

  “Bombard the news with pictures of them and any other info that might cause someone out there to recognize them,” she answered. “They’ve got to eat. They’ve got to sleep. And he’s got to have Avgas. He can’t fly forever without it.”

  “It doesn’t make sense that it hasn’t been spotted before, refueling, landing, flying, what all.”

  “Looks like he had plenty of his own Avgas right there in his garage. Not to mention there are so many small airfields where he could land and gas up,” she said. “All over. And he doesn’t have to contact the tower in uncontrolled airspace, and Schweizers aren’t exactly rare. Not to mention”—she looked at me—“it has been spotted. We saw it ourselves, and so did the farrier and the director of Kirby. We just didn’t know what we were looking at.”

  “I suppose.”

  My mood was getting heavier by the moment. I did not want to go home. I did not want to go anywhere. It was as if the weather had turned gray, and I was cold and alone and could escape none of it. My mind churned with questions and answers, and deductions and screams. Whenever it went still, I saw him. I saw him in smoldering debris. I saw his face beneath heavy plastic.

  “. . . Kay?”

  I realized McGovern was talking to me.

  “I want to know how you’re doing. Really.” Her eyes were fastened to me.

  I took a deep, shaky breath, and my voice sounded cracked when I said, “I’m going to make it, Teun. Beyond that, I don’t know how I’m doing. I’m not even sure what I’m doing. But I know what I’ve done. I’ve ruined everything. Carrie played me like a hand of cards, and Benton’s dead. She and Newton Joyce are still out there, ready to do something bad again. Or maybe they already have. Nothing I’ve done has made a goddamn d
ifference, Teun.”

  Tears filled my eyes as I watched a blurry Lucy checking to make sure the fuel cap was tight. Then she began untying the main rotor blades. McGovern handed me a Kleenex. She gently squeezed my arm.

  “You were brilliant, Kay. For one thing, had you not found out what you did, we wouldn’t have had a thing to list on the warrant. We couldn’t have even gotten one, and then where would we be? Yes, we haven’t caught them yet, but at least we know who. And we will find them.”

  “We found what they wanted us to,” I told her.

  Lucy had finished her inspection and looked my way.

  “I guess I’d better go,” I said to McGovern. “Thank you.”

  I took her hand and squeezed it.

  “Take care of Lucy,” I said.

  “I think she does a pretty good job of taking care of herself.”

  I got out and turned around once to wave goodbye. I opened the copilot’s door and climbed up in the seat, then fastened my harness. Lucy slipped her checklist out of a pocket on the door, and went down it, zeroing in on switches and circuit breakers, and making sure the collective was down, the throttle off. My heart would not beat normally, and my breathing was shallow.

  We took off and nosed around into the wind. McGovern watched us climb, a hand shielding her eyes. Lucy handed me a sectional chart and said I was to help navigate. She lifted into a hover and contacted Air Traffic Control.

  “Wilmington tower, this is helicopter two-one-niner Sierra Bravo.”

  “Go ahead, helicopter two-one-niner, Wilmington Tower.”

  “Requesting clearance from university athletic field, direct to your location for ISO Aero. Over.”

  “Contact tower when entering pattern. Cleared from present position, on course, stay with me and report down and secure at ISO.”

  “Two Sierra Bravo, wilco.”

  Then Lucy transmitted to me, “We’ll be following a three-three-zero heading. So your job after we gas up will be keeping the gyro consistent with the compass and helping out with the map.”

  She climbed to five hundred feet and the tower contacted us again.

  “Helicopter two Sierra Bravo,” the voice came over the air. “Traffic is unidentified and at your six o’clock, three hundred feet, closing.”

  “Two Sierra Bravo is looking, no joy.”

  “Unidentified aircraft two miles southeast of airport, identify yourself,” the tower transmitted to all who could hear.

  We were answered by nothing.

  “Unidentified aircraft in Wilmington airspace, identify yourself,” the tower repeated.

  Silence followed.

  Lucy saw the aircraft first, directly behind us and below horizon, meaning its altitude was lower than ours.

  “Wilmington tower,” she said over the air. “Helicopter two Sierra Bravo. Have low-flying aircraft in sight. Will maintain separation.

  “Something’s not right,” Lucy commented to me, turning around in her seat to look behind us again.

  24

  IT WAS A dark speck at first, flying after us, directly in our path and gaining on us. As it got closer it became white. Then it turned into a Schweizer with sunlight glinting off the bubble. My heart jumped as I was seized by fear.

  “Lucy!” I exclaimed.

  “I’ve got it in sight,” she said, instantly angry. “Fuck. I don’t believe this.”

  She pulled up on the collective and we began a steep climb. The Schweizer maintained the same altitude, moving faster than we were for as we gained altitude, our speed dropped to seventy knots. Lucy pushed the cyclic forward as the Schweizer gained on us, swerving in closer on our starboard side, where Lucy was sitting. Lucy keyed the mike.

  “Tower. Unidentified aircraft making aggressive moves,” she said. “Will be making evasive maneuvers. Contact local police authorities, suspect in unidentified aircraft known armed and dangerous fugitive. Will avoid built-up areas, will take evasive actions towards water.”

  “Roger helicopter. Am contacting local authorities.”

  Then the tower switched to over-the-guard frequency.

  “Attention any aircraft, this is Wilmington tower on-guard, aircraft traffic area is now closed to incoming traffic. Any ground traffic halt movement. Repeat, aircraft traffic area is now closed to incoming traffic. Any ground traffic halt movement. All aircraft this frequency, immediately switch to Wilmington approach control on Victor 135.75 or Uniform 343.9. I say again, all aircraft this frequency immediately switch to Wilmington approach control on Victor 135.75 or Uniform 343.9. Helicopter two Sierra Bravo, remain this frequency.”

  “Roger, two Sierra Bravo,” Lucy returned.

  I knew why she was heading toward the ocean. If we went down, she didn’t want it to be in a populated area where others might get hurt or killed. I also was certain that Carrie had predicted Lucy would do exactly this, because Lucy was good. She would always put others first. She turned to the east, the Schweizer following our every move but maintaining the same distance behind us of maybe a hundred yards, as if confident that it didn’t need to be in a hurry. That’s when I realized that Carrie had probably been watching us all along.

  “It can’t go over ninety knots,” Lucy said to me, and our tension was rising like heat.

  “She saw us come in straight to the field earlier today,” I said. “She knows we haven’t refueled.”

  We flew at an angle over the beach and followed it briefly over bright splashes of color that were swimmers and sunbathers. They stopped what they were doing and stared straight up at two helicopters speeding over them and out to sea. Half a mile over the ocean, Lucy began to slow down.

  “We can’t keep this up,” she told me, and it seemed a pronouncement of doom. “We lose our engine, we’ll never make it back, and we’re low on fuel.”

  The gauge read less than twenty gallons. Lucy pushed us into a sharp one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. The Schweizer was maybe fifty feet below us and head on. The sun made it impossible to see who was inside, but I knew. I had not a single doubt, and when it was no more than five hundred feet from us and coming up on Lucy’s side, I felt several rapid-fire jolts, like quick slaps, and we suddenly swerved. Lucy grabbed her pistol from her shoulder holster.

  “They’re shooting at us!” she exclaimed to me.

  I thought of the submachine gun, the Calico missing from Sparkes’s collection.

  Lucy fought to open her door. She jettisoned it and it tumbled through the air, sailing down and away. She slowed our speed.

  “They’re firing!” Lucy got back on the air. “Returning fire! Keep all traffic away from Wrightsville Beach area!”

  “Roger! Do you request further assistance?”

  “Dispatch land emergency crews, Wrightsville Beach! Expect casualty situation!”

  As the Schweizer flew directly under us, I saw muzzle flashes and the tip of a barrel barely protruding from the copilot’s window. I felt more quick jolts.

  “I think they hit the skids,” Lucy almost screamed, and she was trying to position her pistol out her open door and fly at the same time, her shooting hand bandaged.

  I instantly dug inside my pocketbook, dismayed to realize my .38 was still inside my briefcase, which remained safe inside the baggage compartment. Then Lucy handed me her pistol and reached behind her head for the AR-15 assault rifle. The Schweizer swooped around, to pursue us inland, knowing we were cornered because we would not risk the safety of people on the ground.

  “We’ve got to go back over the water!” Lucy said. “Can’t shoot at them here. Kick your door open. Get it off the hinges and dump it!”

  I somehow managed, the door ripping away as rushing air blasted me and the ground suddenly seemed closer. Lucy made another turn, and the Schweizer turned, too, as the needle on the fuel gauge slipped lower. This went on for what seemed forever, the Schweizer chasing us out to sea, and our trying to return to land so we could get down. It could not shoot up without hitting the rotor blades.

&nbs
p; Then at an altitude of eleven hundred feet, when we were over water at a hundred knots, the fuselage got hit. Both of us felt the kicks right behind us, as close as the left rear passenger door.

  “I’m turning right now,” Lucy said to me. “Can you keep us straight at this altitude?”

  I was terrified. We were going to die.

  “I’ll try,” I said, taking the controls.

  We were heading straight toward the Schweizer. It couldn’t have been more than fifty feet from us, and maybe a hundred feet below when Lucy pulled back the bolt, chambering a round.

  “Shove the cyclic down! Now!” she yelled at me as she pushed the barrel of the rifle out her open door.

  We were going down a thousand feet per minute, and I was certain we would fly right into the Schweizer. I tried to veer out of its path, but Lucy would have none of it.

  “Straight at it!” she yelled.

  I could not hear the gunfire as we flew directly over the Schweizer, so close I thought we would be devoured by its blades. She fired more, and I saw flashes, and then Lucy had the cyclic and was ramming it into a hard left, cutting it away from the Schweizer as it exploded into a ball of flames that rolled us almost over on our side. Lucy had the controls as I went into a crash position.

  Then as suddenly as the violent shock waves had hit, they were gone, and I caught a glimpse of flaming debris showering into the Atlantic Ocean. We were steady and making a wide turn. I stared at my niece in stunned disbelief.

  “Fuck you,” she coldly said as fire and broken fuselage rained into sparkling water.

  She got on the air, as calm as I had ever seen her.

  “Tower,” she said. “Fugitive aircraft has exploded. Debris two miles off Wrightsville Beach. Negative survivors seen. Circling for signs of life.”

  “Roger. Do you need assistance?” came the rattled response.

  “A little late. But negative. Am returning to your location for immediate refuel.”

  “Uh. Roger.” The omnipotent tower was stuttering. “Proceed direct. Local authorities will meet you at ISO.”