“Don’t you understand?” I yelled at her. “The nicks to bone at the temple, at the jaw. Like a scalping, only worse! He doesn’t build fires to disguise homicide! He burns everything because he doesn’t want us to know what he’s done to them! He steals their beauty, everything beautiful about them, by removing their faces.”

Lucy’s lips were parted in shock.

Then she stuttered, “But Carrie? Now she’s doing that?”

“Oh no,” I said. “Not entirely.”

I was pacing and wringing my hands.

“It’s like Gault,” I said. “She likes to watch. Maybe she helps. Maybe she fucked things up with Kellie Shephard, or maybe Kellie simply resisted her because Carrie was a woman. Then there was a fight, the slashing and stabbing until Carrie’s partner intervened and finally cut Kellie’s throat, which is where the magnesium shavings were found. From his knife, not Carrie’s. He’s the torch, the fire builder, not Carrie. And he didn’t take Kellie’s face because it had been cut, ruined, during the struggle.”

“You don’t think they did that to, to. . .?” Lucy started to say, her fists clenched in her lap.

“To Benton?” I raised my voice more. “Do I think they took his face, too?”

I kicked the paneled wall and leaned against it. Inside I went still and my mind felt dark and dead.

“Carrie knew he could imagine everything she might do to him,” I said in a slow, low voice. “She would have enjoyed every minute of it as he sat there, shackled. As she taunted him with the knife. Yes. I think they did that to him, too. In fact, I know it.”

The last thought was almost impossible to complete.

“I just hope he was already dead,” I said.

“He would have been, Aunt Kay.”

Lucy was crying, too, as she came to me and wrapped her arms around my neck.

“They wouldn’t have taken the chance that someone might hear him scream,” she said.

Within the hour, I passed on news of the latest developments to Teun McGovern, and she agreed that it was critical for us to find out who Carrie’s partner was, if possible, and how she might have met him. McGovern was more angered than she would show when I explained what I suspected and knew. Kirby might be our only hope, and she concurred that in my professional position, I had a better chance of making that visit successfully than did she. She was law enforcement. I was a physician.