CRIMINALLY INSANE, DEEMED MENTALLY unfit to stand trial, Carrie was warehoused on Wards Island in the middle of the East River, and it was a catastrophic mistake.

I don’t know why it surprised anyone when she escaped. Benton had predicted as much, and he said that the miscreant who airlifted her to freedom, Newton Joyce, wasn’t the first or last Clyde to her Bonnie. As a child, Joyce was horrifically disfigured in a fire. After his death, police searched his house and found a freezer full of his victims’ faces. Carrie had encouraged him to keep the souvenirs. They probably were her idea.

I’m sure there were other partners after him, who knows how many before she exploited and had her fill of Troy Rosado. Carrie has a pattern of partnering with people she’s convinced she can control, usually fatally flawed males like Troy, like Joyce, and before them Temple Gault, who Carrie worshipped and couldn’t dominate.

A rare breed of glorious monster, Gault was a self-indulgent flamboyant Caligula, only he also was disciplined and supremely competent. Slight and limber, he was lithe and as lethal as a razor-tipped whip. He could strike as fast as a cobra, slicing open a throat or kickboxing the person to death, and he had a fetish for biting. As I walk through the heavy hot air I see his light blond hair, his blue eyes wide and staring like Andy Warhol’s.

I’ve hardly thought about Temple Gault in years, and it’s as if he’s suddenly all around me. For an uncanny instant I feel his evil presence in the stagnant night, and I’m grateful he and Newton Joyce are gone for good. Dead. Unfortunately Carrie isn’t, and I envision her dyed black hair and baseball cap, her unnaturally pale skin that she obsessively protects from ultraviolet light and toxins. This was what she looked like about a year ago, at any rate, and we have no idea about her appearance now. It could be anything.

But I would know those eyes, eerily blue like cobalt radiation, as if the decay of her very core emits a sapphire glow that darkens with her worsening moods, deepening to an angry purple like a damselfish when it turns aggressive. Carrie once was physically exquisite, born with exceptionally beautiful attributes and a stellar intellect. Her splendor was part of her curse.

The rest of it was her deranged religious freak of a mother who was pathologically jealous with a plethora of personality disorders and delusional ideations. Carrie had no siblings that would survive. After her birth, her mother miscarried twice. The brother born on the third try died soon after the father went to prison, and I remember looking up the autopsy records and lab reports when I was the chief in Virginia.