Eventually, flames were suffocated, and she took off the lid to see what was left. My heart thudded as I noted papery white ash and areas of spared silicone that were still visibly pink. The swimming cap had not turned gooey or become a liquid at all. It simply had disintegrated until either cooling temperatures or an absence of oxygen or perhaps even a dousing with water had thwarted the process. The end result of our experiment was completely consistent with what I had recovered from Claire Rawley’s long blond hair.

The image of her body in the bathtub, a pink swimming cap on her head, was ghastly, and its implication was almost more than I could comprehend. When the bathroom had gone to flashover, the shower door had caved in. Sections of glass and the sides of the tub had protected the body as flames shot up from the point of origin, engaging the ceiling. The temperature in the tub had never climbed above one thousand degrees, and a small telltale part of the silicone swimming cap had been preserved for the simple freakish reason that the shower door was old and made of a single thick sheet of solid glass.

As I drove home, rush hour traffic hemmed me in and seemed more aggressive the greater my hurry. Several times I almost reached for the phone, desperate to call Benton and tell him what I had discovered. Then I saw water and debris in the back corner of a burned-out grocery store in Philadelphia. I saw what was left of a stainless steel watch I had given to him for Christmas. I saw what was left of him. I imagined the wire that had confined his ankles, and handcuffs that had been locked with a key. I now knew what had happened and why. Benton had been killed like the others, but this time it was for spite, for revenge, to satisfy Carrie’s diabolical lust to make him her trophy.

Tears blinded me as I pulled into my driveway. I ran, primitive sounds welling up in me as I slammed the front door behind me. Lucy emerged from the kitchen. She was dressed in khaki range pants and a black T-shirt, and holding a bottle of salad dressing.

“Aunt Kay!” she exclaimed, hurrying to me. “What is it, Aunt Kay? Where’s Marino? My God, is he all right?”

“It’s not Marino,” I chokily said.

She slipped an arm around me and helped me to the couch in my great room.

“Benton,” I said. “Like the others,” I moaned. “Like Claire Rawley. A swimcap to keep her hair out of the way. The bathtub. Like surgery.”

“What?” Lucy was dazed.

“They wanted her face!”

I sprang up from the couch.