“What about a photograph of Carrie? Is there a way for me to see what she looks like? Or what she used to look like?” Donoghue asks.

Lucy reaches across the table and retrieves the phone. She types on it for a moment, hands it back to Donoghue.

“When she supposedly was killed in the chopper crash this was the photo on file, her mug shot from when she’d been arrested the year before and locked up in Kirby on Wards Island. Wikipedia, by the way. This photo’s on Wikipedia. Carrie Grethen has her own Wikipedia page.”

“Why?” I ask. “Why would she have a Wikipedia page now, and when did it happen?”

“Recently,” Lucy answers. “You can look at the history and see the first version of her page was posted six weeks ago. Since then the same person appears to be revising it, and I have no doubt it’s her. Carrie. I’m sure she’s the one who posted her old mug shot and the aerial photo of Kirby Psychiatric Center.”

“Which as you know is on an island in the East River. She’s the only patient in history to escape from the maximum security forensic unit for the criminally insane,” Janet tells Donoghue. “Somehow she’d managed to hook up on the outside with the psycho we mentioned earlier, Newton Joyce. Turned out he was a serial killer who liked to cut off his victims’ faces to remember them by, and had a big stash in his freezer. He was a pilot, had his own helicopter and landed it on Wards Island and flew off with Carrie. The rest of his story didn’t end so well, at least not for him.”

“She had herself airlifted out by a serial killer? How could she manage something like that?” Donoghue is impressed.

“The question is always how she does things,” Lucy says. “And there’s always a long and involved story. Carrie is extremely smart and resourceful. She’s patient. She knows she’ll get what she wants if she takes her time and doesn’t give in to impulses, to cravings and rages.”

“So this is what she used to look like.” Donoghue moves the phone closer to both of us.

Chapter 25

CHAPTER 25

THE FACE IS YOUNG AND STRONGLY PRETTY, BUT IT was always the eyes that gave her away. They remind me of pinwheels. They seem to spin as her aberrant thoughts surge behind them, fueling the evil entity that inhabits her soul.

Carrie Grethen is a cancer. I realize that’s an overused pathological metaphor but it’s the truth in her case. There’s no healthy tissue left, just the malignancy that has consumed her life and completely taken over her psyche. I barely view her as human, and in a way she’s not because she’s missing the major traits that qualify her to be a member of the same race as the rest of us.