But I already had. I had seen the empty face, the misshapen mouth and nose that had no bridge. I had seen the orange-tinted flesh sparkling with ice. The date on the freezer bag was June 17, the location Philadelphia, and that had penetrated at the same time I was looking, and then it was too late, or maybe I would have looked anyway, because I had to know.

“They’ve been here,” I said.

I struggled to get up and got light-headed again.

“They came here long enough to leave that. So we’d find it,” I said.

“Goddamn son of a bitch!” Marino screamed. “GOD-DAMN-MOTHER-FUCKING-SON-OF-A-BITCH!”

He roughly wiped his eyes on his fist as he continued to pace like a madman. Lucy was coming down the steps. She was pale, her eyes glassy. My niece seemed dazed.

“McGovern to Correll,” she said into her portable radio.

“Correll,” the voice came back.

“You guys get on over here.”

“Ten-four.”

“I’m calling our forensic guys,” said Detective Scroggins.

He was stunned, too, but not the same way we were. For him, this wasn’t personal. He had never heard of Benton Wesley. Scroggins was carefully going through the bags in the freezer, his lips moving as he counted.

“Holy God,” he said in amazement. “There’s twenty-seven of these things.”

“Dates and locations,” I said, mustering my reserved strength to walk over to him.

We looked together.

“London, 1981. Liverpool, 1983. Dublin, 1984, and one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven. Eleven, total, from Ireland, through 1987. It looks like he really started getting into it,” Scroggins said, and he was getting excited, the way people do when they are on the verge of hysteria.

I was looking on with him, and the location of Joyce’s kills began in Northern Ireland, with Belfast, and continued into the Republic with nine murders in Dublin, and neighborhoods such as Ballboden, Santry, and Howth, and also a murder in Galway. Then Joyce had begun his predation in the United States, mainly out west, in remote areas of Utah, Nevada, Montana, and Washington, and once in Natches, Mississippi, and this explained a lot to me, especially when I remembered what Carrie had said in her letter to me. She had made an odd reference to sawed bone.

“The torsos,” I said as the truth ran through me like lightning. “The unsolved dismemberments in Ireland. And then he was quiet for eight years because he killed out west and the bodies were never found, or else never centrally reported. So we didn’t know about them. He never stopped, and then he came to Virginia, where his presence definitely got my attention and drove me to despair.”