It was connected to the kitchen by a door that had been made inaccessible by a padlock that Marino had handily removed with bolt cutters that McGovern had fetched from her Explorer. On the other side was a work area with no door leading outside, for it had been closed in with cinder block. Walls were painted white, and against one were fifty-gallon drums of aviation gasoline. There was a stainless steel Sub-Zero freezer and its door, ominously, was padlocked. The concrete floor was very clean, and in a corner were five aluminum camera cases and Styrofoam ice chests of varying sizes. Central was a large plyboard table covered with felt and here were arranged the instruments of Joyce’s crimes.

Half a dozen knives were lined in a perfect row, with precisely the same spacing between each. All were in their leather cases, and in a small redwood box were sharpening stones.

“I’ll be damned,” Marino said, pointing out the knives to me. “Let me tell you what these are, Doc. The bone-handled ones are R. W. Loveless skinner knives, made by Beretta. For collectors, numbered, and costing around six hundred bucks a pop.”

He stared at them with lust but did not touch.

“The blue steel babies are Chris Reeves, at least four hundred a pop, and the butts of the handles unscrew if you want to store matches in them,” he went on.

I heard a distant door shut, and then Scroggins appeared with Lucy. The detective was as awed by the knives as Marino was, and then the two of them and McGovern resumed opening drawers of tool chests, and prying open two cabinets that held other chilling signs that we had found our killer. In a plastic Speedo bag were eight silicone swim caps, all of them hot pink. Each was zipped inside a plastic pouch with price stickers that said Joyce had paid sixteen dollars apiece for them. As for fire starters, there were four of them in a Wal-Mart bag.

Joyce also had a modular desk in his concrete cave, and we left it to Lucy to access whatever she could. She sat in a folding chair and began working the keyboard while Marino took the bolt cutters to the freezer, which, eerily, was precisely the same model I had at home.

“This is too easy,” Lucy said. “He’s downloaded his e-mail onto a disk. No password or anything. Stuff he sent and received. About eighteen months’ worth. We got a username of FMKIRBY. From Kirby, I presume. Now I wonder who that pen pal might be,” she sarcastically added.

I moved closer and looked over her shoulder as she scrolled through notes that Carrie had sent to Newton Joyce, whose username horrifically was skinner, and those he had sent to her. On May tenth he wrote:

Found her. A connection to die for. How does a major media tycoon sound? Am I good?