On bookcases were worn-out cloth and leather volumes of classics that were too dusty to have been opened in many years. There was a cracked brown leather couch, presumably for his patients, and next to it a small table bearing a single water glass. It was almost empty and smeared around the rim with pale peach lipstick. Directly across from the couch was an intricately carved, high-back mahogany armchair that brought to mind a throne. I heard Marino and McGovern checking other rooms while voices drifted out of Joyce’s answering machine. All of the messages had been left after the evening of June fifth, or the day before Claire’s death. Patients had called about their appointments. A travel agent had left word about two tickets to Paris.

“What’d you say that fire starter thing looks like?” Detective Scroggins asked as he opened another desk drawer.

“A thin bar of silvery metal,” I answered him. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

“Nothing like that in here. But the guy sure is into rubber bands. Must be thousands of them. Looks like he was making these weird little balls.”

He held up a perfectly shaped sphere made completely of rubber bands.

“Now how the hell do you think he did that?” Scroggins was amazed. “You think he started with just one and then kept winding others all around like golf ball innards?”

I didn’t know.

“What kind of mind is that, huh?” Scroggins went on. “You think he was sitting here doing that while he was talking with his patients?”

“At this point,” I replied, “not much would surprise me.”

“What a whacko. So far I’ve found thirteen, fourteen . . . uh, nineteen balls.”

He was pulling them out and setting them on top of the desk, and then Marino called me from the back of the house.

“Doc, think you’d better come here.”

I followed the sounds of him and McGovern through a small kitchen with old appliances that were layered in the civilizations of former meals. Dishes were piled in cold scummy water in the sink, and the garbage can was overflowing, the stench awful. Newton Joyce was more slovenly than Marino, and I would not have thought that possible, nor did it square with the orderliness of Joyce’s rubber band balls or what I believed were his crimes. But despite criminalist texts and Hollywood renditions, people were not a science and they were not consistent. A prime example was what Marino and McGovern had discovered in the garage.