'Chicago. They have had no contact with her since she left home. But they do know she's dead. I have spoken to them.'

'Dr Booth,' I said, 'do you have any idea why Claire would have gone to Sparkes's house in Warrenton?'

'She was completely incapable of dealing with rejection. I can only speculate she went there to see him, in hopes she might resolve something. I do know she stopped calling him last spring, because he finally changed to another unlisted phone number. Her only possible contact was to just show up, my guess is.'

'In an old Mercedes that belonged to a psychotherapist named Newton Joyce?' Marino asked, adjusting his position again.

Dr Booth was startled. 'Now I didn't know that,' she said. 'She was driving Newton's car?'

'You know him?'

'Not personally, but certainly I know his reputation. Claire started going to him because she felt she needed a male perspective. This was within the past two months. He certainly wouldn't have been my choice.'

'Why?' Marino asked.

Dr Booth gathered her thoughts, her face tight with anger.

'This is all very messy,' she said finally. 'Which might begin to explain my reluctance to talk about Claire when you first began to call. Newton is a spoiled rich boy who has never had to work but decided to go into psychotherapy. A power trip for him, I suppose.'

'He seems to have vanished in thin air,' Marino said.

'Nothing out of the ordinary about that,' she replied shortly. 'He's in and out as he pleases, sometimes for months or even years at a time. I've been here at the university for thirty-some years now, and I remember him as a boy. Could charm the birds out of the trees and talk people into anything, but he's all about himself. And I was most concerned when Claire began to see him. Let's just say that no one would ever accuse Newton of being ethical. He makes his own rules. But he's never been caught.'

'At what?' I asked. 'Caught at what?'

'Controlling patients in a way that is most inappropriate.'

'Having sexual relations with them?' I asked.

'I've never heard proof of that. It was more of a mind thing, a dominance thing, and it was very apparent that he completely dominated Claire. She was utterly dependent on him just like that.' She snapped her fingers. 'After their very first session. She would come in here and spend the entire time talking about him, obsessing. That's what's so odd about her going to see Sparkes. I truly thought she was over him and besotted with Newton. I honestly think she would have done anything Newton told her to do.'

'Possible he might have suggested she go see Sparkes? For therapeutic reasons, such as closure?' I said.

Dr Booth smiled ironically.

'He may have suggested she go see him, but I doubt it was to help her,' she replied. 'I'm sorry to say that if going there was Newton's idea, then it most likely was manipulative.'

'I sure would like to know how the two of them got hooked up,' Marino said, scooting forward in the papasan chair. 'I'm guessing that someone referred her to him.'

'Oh no,' she replied. 'They met on a photo shoot.'

'What do you mean?' I said as my blood stopped in my veins.

'He's quite enamored with all things Hollywood and has finagled his way into working with production crews for movies and photo shoots. You know Screen Gems studio is right here in town, and Claire's minor was film studies. It was her dream to be an actress. Heaven knows, she was beautiful enough. Based on what she told me, she was doing a modeling job at the beach, for some surfing magazine, I think. And he was part of the production crew, the photographer, in this instance. Apparently he is accomplished in that.'

'You said he was in and out a lot,' Marino said. 'Maybe he had other residences?'

'I don't know anything more about him, really,' she replied.

Within an hour, the Wilmington Police Department had a warrant to search Newton Joyce's property in the historic district, several blocks from the water. His white frame house was one story with a broken-pitch gable roof that covered the porch in front at the end of a quiet street of other tired nineteenth-century homes with porches and piazzas.

Huge magnolias darkly shadowed his yard with only patches of wan sunlight seeping through, and the air was fitful with insects. By now, McGovern had caught up with us, and we waited on the slumping back porch as a detective used a tactical baton to break out a pane of glass from the door. Then he reached his hand inside and freed the lock.

Marino, McGovern, and a Detective Scroggins went first with pistols close to their bodies and pointed to shoot. I was close behind, unarmed and unnerved by the creepiness of this place Joyce called home. We entered a small sitting area that had been modified to accommodate patients. There was a rather ghastly old red velvet Victorian couch, a marble-topped end table centered by a milkglass lamp, and a coffee table scattered with magazines that were many months old. Through a doorway was his office, and it was even stranger.

Yellowed knotty pine walls were almost completely covered with framed photographs of what I assumed were models and actors in various publicity poses. Quite literally, there were hundreds of them, and I assumed Joyce had taken them himself. I could not imagine a patient pouring out his problems in the midst of so many beautiful bodies and faces. On Joyce's desk were a Rolodex, date book, paperwork, and a telephone. While Scroggins began playing messages from the answering machine, I looked around some more.

On bookcases were worn-out cloth and leather volumes of classics that were too dusty to have been opened in many years. There was a cracked brown leather couch, presumably for his patients, and next to it a small table bearing a single water glass. It was almost empty and smeared around the rim with pale peach lipstick. Directly across from the couch was an intricately carved, high-back mahogany armchair that brought to mind a throne. I heard Marino and McGovern checking other rooms while voices drifted out of Joyce's answering machine. All of the messages had been left after the evening of June fifth, or the day before Claire's death. Patients had called about their appointments. A travel agent had left word about two tickets to Paris.

'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.