“Carrie could have planned her escape this way. And you say she started working with the computer how long ago?”

“About a year. After a long run of ideal behavior.”

“Ideal behavior,” I repeated.

I thought of the cases in Baltimore, Venice Beach, and more recently in Warrenton. I wondered if it were possible that Carrie might have met up with her accomplice through e-mail, through a Web site or a chat room. Could it be that she committed computer crimes during her incarceration? Might she have been working behind the scenes, advising and encouraging a psychopath who stole human faces? Then she escaped, and from that point on her crimes were in person.

“Is there anyone who’s been discharged from Kirby in the past year who was an arsonist, especially someone with a history of homicide? Anyone Carrie might have come to know? Perhaps someone in one of her classes?” I asked, just to be sure.

Dr. Ensor turned off the overhead light and we returned to the hall.

“No one comes to mind,” she said. “Not of the sort you’re talking about. I will add that a peace officer was always present.”

“And male and female patients did not mix during recreational times.”

“No. Never. Men and women are completely segregated.”

Although I did not know for a fact that Carrie had a male accomplice, I suspected it, and I recalled what Benton had written in his notes at the end, about a white male between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-five. Peace officers, who were simply guards not wearing guns, might have insured that order was maintained in the classrooms, but I doubted seriously they would have had any idea that Carrie was making contact on the Internet. We boarded the elevator again, this time getting off on the third floor.

“The women’s ward,” Dr. Ensor explained. “We have twenty-six female patients at the moment, out of one hundred and seventy patients overall. That’s the visitors’ room.”

She pointed through glass at a spacious open area with comfortable chairs and televisions. No one was in there now.

“Did she ever have visitors?” I asked as we kept walking.

“Not from the outside, not once. Inspiring more sympathy for her, I suppose.” She smiled bitterly. “The women actually stay in there.”

She pointed out another area, this one arranged with single beds.

“She slept over there by the window,” Dr. Ensor said.

I retrieved Carrie’s letter from my pocketbook and read it again, stopping at the fifth paragraph:

LUCY-BOO on TV. Fly through window. Come with we

Under covers. Come til dawn. Laugh and sing.

Same ole song.

LUCY LUCY LUCY and we!