The Face of Death

  “Why did Mr. Bad Man call you?”

  I consider this.

  “It could have been planned, I suppose, but I don’t think so. I think he was there.”

  “Come again?”

  “I think he was there. Watching. He saw us arrive and he recognized me.”

  It’s a staple of profiling and criminal investigation that perpetrators will return to the scene of a crime. The reasons are myriad. To find out how the investigation is going. To relive the experience. To feel powerful.

  “I think he always planned to tell us about the second crime scene. He decided to hang around, see what happened, and call it in. It just happened to be us.”

  “So he recognized you.”

  “Unfortunately.” I sigh.

  “Barry’s signaling to exit.”

  Barry knows the area we’re going to, an apartment complex.

  “Not a total shit hole, but not a great place either,” he’d said. “I caught a suicide there about four years ago.”

  I follow and we turn right onto Sepulveda Boulevard. Things become busier here than on the freeway. It’s Saturday night, and people have places to go, things to do, the hamster wheel of life.

  “I wonder if this scene will be fresher than the last one,” she says. “Do you think he’s going on a tear? Making a night of it?”

  “I really don’t know, Callie. This guy is puzzling. He guts a family, but he leaves the boy alone and Sarah gets to live. He paints the room with their blood, but he plans well enough to drug them. On the one hand he seems psychotic and disorganized, on the other he’s purposeful and controlled. It’s weird.”

  She nods in agreement. “Swimming in the pool was impulsive.”

  Killers are human, and humans are complex. But over the years, we’ve learned that there are patterns to look for. All serial killers are driven by the compulsion to kill. The how and why of it can be worlds apart.

  Organized killers, the Ted Bundys of the world, tend to follow a plan. They are the icemen, the ones with clarity. They’re careful and cold-blooded until the moment of the act itself. They don’t necessarily have a need to depersonalize their victims, and they can be consummate actors, blending in with the rest of us, their sickness undetectable.

  Disorganized killers are different. They are the Jeffrey Dahmers, the Son of Sams. They have difficulty assimilating with others. They often trouble their neighbors or coworkers with odd behavior. It’s hard for them to control their compulsions and they thus find it difficult to stick to any long-term plan. In the methodology of the disorganized killer you find victims of opportunity and over-the-top mutilations. This is the realm of on-site cannibalism, of women with their breasts or genitals ripped away.

  Of a husband and a wife, gutted like deer.

  Full-blown disembowelment represents a frenzy. It would be very unusual for a killer in that state to be able to make the choice to keep Sarah alive. And yet he did.

  “He seems to have a plan,” Callie says. “Perhaps things aren’t as they seem.”

  “What Sarah said would seem to indicate that she was his intended victim. So why so much violence to the others? Things don’t add up.”

  “They will.”

  Callie is right. They will, they always do. Serial killers may not always get caught, but they are never—ever—original, not when you get down to the basics of what makes them tick. They might be cleverer than we’re used to, or more horrifying, but in the end, they are all driven by compulsion. A pattern is inevitable. This is an absolute and they can’t escape it, no matter how sane or smart they are.

  “I know. So what’s up with the pain and the pain pills?” I ask, blurting it out before really thinking about it.

  Callie glances at me, eyebrow raised. “There’s an abrupt change of subject.” I make a right turn, following Barry. “The doctors think it’s a result of some minor nerve damage. They say it could heal, but they’re not as hopeful as they had been. It’s been almost six months, after all.”

  “How bad is the pain?”

  “It has sharp moments. That’s not the real problem. It’s the constancy of it. Low-key pain that never goes away is worse, in my humble opinion, than occasional agony.”

  “And the Vicodin helps?”

  I see her smile in profile. “Smoky, we’re friends for many reasons. One of them is that we only speak the truth to each other. Ask what you really want to ask.”

  I sigh. “You’re right. I’m worried about the addiction end of things, obviously. Worried for you.”

  “Understandable. So here’s the truth: Addiction is inevitable. I imagine if I stopped taking them now, it would be difficult. In another three months, it’ll probably be worse. The truth is, if this never resolves, I’ll be on some form of pain medication forever, which will mean the end of my career. So, Smoky my friend, you’re right to be worried, and you’re not alone in worrying. I give you permission to ask me about it once a month, and I promise to be honest about where things stand so you can make the right decisions. Beyond that, I don’t want to discuss it, agreed?”

  “Jesus, Callie. Are you doing everything the docs are telling you to?”

  “Of course I am.” She sounds tired. “Physical therapy is the main thing. I want to lick this, Smoky. I have five things in my life: my job, my friends, my daughter, my grandson, and my frequent, very satisfying sexual encounters. I’m fairly happy with that. Losing this job?” She shakes her head. “That would leave a rather large hole. And that’s about as much ‘me talk’ as I can stand for now.”

  I stare at her, sigh. “Fair enough.”

  I let it go, but file it under “urgent.” Just another thing that’ll never be far from my mind. I should report her and put her on desk duty, but I won’t and she knows it. Callie is as ruthless with herself as she is with the truth of evidence. If she feels she’s become a liability, I won’t have to sideline her. She’ll do it herself.

  Of course, if I go to Quantico, the professional end of it won’t be my problem….

  Barry turns left onto another one of those quieter, residential streets. I follow him for a block, we turn left at a stop sign, and make an immediate right into an apartment parking lot.

  “I see what he means about this place,” Callie remarks, looking through the windshield.

  This is an old apartment complex of a type raised in the seventies, a two-story built around a courtyard with perhaps forty units. It’s trimmed in brown wood, and the stucco over the concrete is dirty and cracking. The pavement in the parking lot is cracked, and there are no paint-lines to delineate the boundaries of the parking spaces. Two large blue trash Dumpsters are pushed up against the building. Both are close to overflowing.

  We get out of the car and meet Barry.

  “Nice, huh?” he says, indicating things.

  “I’ve seen worse,” I reply, “but I wouldn’t want to live here.”

  “Yeah, well, the courtyard used to be okay. What’s the apartment number?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Second floor. Let’s go.”

  Barry’s right; the courtyard is okay. Not great, but better than the exterior. It has a centerpiece of trees and grass, well kept up. All of the apartment doors face into the courtyard, two floors of them, forming one big square. You can hear the city here, but there’s a degree of insulation. It was meant to be an oasis of privacy, but it was designed on too small and too cloistered a scale. It feels like a trap now, or a cage. Wagons circled against the coming, inevitable siege of the city.

  “Apartment twenty is on the upper left corner,” Barry says.

  “Take the lead,” I reply.

  We un-holster our weapons and make our way up the stairs. I can see lights on in most windows. Everyone keeps their drapes drawn here; there’s no other way to achieve any privacy. We reach the top of the stairs. The door to apartment twenty is two doors to our right.

  Barry hugs the wall as he makes his way to the door, moving fast. We follow. He reaches
out with his free hand and knocks, loud. Cop-knocking.

  “LAPD. Open the door please.”

  Silence.

  Silence, in fact, all the way around. TVs had been on, radios had been playing. Now everything has gone quiet. I can sense the other residents, listening. Circling those wagons.

  Barry knocks again, louder.

  “Open up, please. This is the Los Angeles Police Department. If you don’t open the door, we’ll be forced to enter the premises.”

  We wait.

  Again, no response.

  “Phone call gives us probable cause.” He shrugs. “Let’s see if the door is unlocked. If not, we’ll have to dig up the manager.”

  “Go ahead,” I tell him.

  He reaches over and tries the knob. It turns in his hand. He looks back at us.

  “Ready?”

  We nod.

  He flings the door wide with a single motion, moving to the right of it as he does so. His gun comes up in a two-handed grip. I fill the space on the left and do the same.

  We’re looking into a living room butted up next to a kitchen. The carpet is a medium weave, old and dirty, an unattractive brown. A black leather sofa sits against a wall in the small space, facing a cheap entertainment center housing a thirty-inch television. The TV is on, the volume down. An infomercial for some kind of business opportunity murmurs.

  “Hello?” Barry calls.

  No reply.

  A cheap and battered wooden coffee table sits in front of the leather couch. I see various adult magazines spread across it, and what appears to be a jar of Vaseline. An ashtray, overflowing with butts, sits to the right.

  “Smells like feet and ass in here,” Barry mutters.

  He moves into the apartment, gun still at the ready. I follow. Callie comes in behind me. We see nothing in the kitchen as we approach it other than a ceramic-lined sink full of dirty dishes. An old-fashioned split-level refrigerator hums.

  “Bedrooms are in the back,” Barry says.

  It’s a very short walk through a very small hallway to get to the bedrooms. We pass a single bathroom on the right. I see white tile, a white tub. It’s small and dirty and smells of urine. Nothing to speak of on the counter around the sink. The mirror is specked and unclean.

  The bedrooms are situated next to each other. The door to the one on the right is open and I see what appears to be some kind of a home office. There’s a computer on an old metal desk, a nineteen-inch flat screen monitor, and a bunch of shelves made from cinder blocks and one-by-six boards. The shelves are almost empty, filled with a few paperback books and adult videotapes. A bong sits on the top of one, a quarter-full of murky pot-water.

  It occurs to me that this is a sad, strange place. The only things of value I’ve seen have been the couch, the television, and the computer system. Everything else is cheap and salvaged and timeworn, with a layered hint of seedy degradation.

  “I’m smelling something now,” Barry murmurs, nodding toward the door to the other bedroom, which is closed.

  I move closer and there it is: that cloying tang, pennies in my mouth.

  “I’m going to open it,” Barry says.

  “Go ahead,” I reply, gripping my weapon. My heart hammers away. Barry and Callie look as tense as I feel. I probably look as tense as I feel.

  He grips the knob, hesitates for a moment and throws it wide. He raises his weapon in a single motion.

  The smell of blood rushes out to greet us, along with the odors of sweat, feces, and urine. I see the promised words, on the wall above the bed:

  THIS PLACE = JUSTICE

  They seem proud and bold, almost joyous to me.

  Below the words, something that used to be a man. Next to the man lies a girl, her skin an unnatural alabaster.

  We all lower our weapons. The threat was here, but it has come and gone.

  This bedroom continues the apartment’s motif, small and sad. Dirty clothes lie on a floor in the corner. The bed is a double, consisting of just a mattress on a box spring on a metal frame. No headboard or baseboard. No chest of drawers.

  On the bed is a naked man with his insides torn out. He’s Hispanic. He’s a small man; I put him at approximately five foot seven inches, and he’s skinny—too skinny. He’s probably the smoker. His dark hair is flecked with gray and I’m guessing his age to be somewhere between fifty and fifty-five.

  The girl is Caucasian, and looks to be in her early to mid-teens. She has a pretty enough face, with dirty-blond hair. Small, pert breasts. Freckles on her shoulders. Her pubic area has been shaved. Other than the slash across her throat, she’s uninjured. I note that her eyes, like those of Laurel Kingsley, are closed. She doesn’t look like she’d be related to the man, and I wonder about her presence here, in this sad place with this older man and his coffee table decorations of girlie mags and Vaseline.

  I wonder about something else, a more subtle similarity between this scene and the Kingsleys’: The fact that he left both the children intact, while all the adults have been disemboweled.

  He kills the kids but he doesn’t mutilate them. Why?

  “This area is too small,” Callie says. “I don’t recommend entering the room prior to CSU.”

  “Roger that,” Barry says, holstering his gun. “Definitely the same guy, Smoky, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  The man’s face is frozen in a shout, or maybe a scream. The girl’s face is calm, passive, which I find a lot creepier and a little more depressing.

  “Well, Smoky, I’m officially overburdened now, and I’m officially requesting assistance.”

  I force myself to turn away from the dead girl’s too-bland features. “You know what that means,” I say to Callie.

  She sighs, a puff of the cheeks. “I’ll wake up Gene and we’ll get going on this.”

  Gene Sykes is the head of the LA FBI’s Crime Lab. He and Callie have worked together in the past. They’ll work together now to handle this scene, and I know they’ll find anything that’s there to find.

  “Wait,” I say as a thought comes to me. “What timeline do you see between this and the Kingsley murders?”

  “Based on the state of the corpses, I would guess this scene is approximately a day old,” she says.

  “So he killed here first, and then went right to doing the Kingsleys. Strange.”

  “How’s that?” Barry asks.

  “Ritual serial homicide follows a cycle. Murder is the peak of the cycle. Depression follows the act. We’re not talking about feeling a little down, we’re talking deep, debilitating depression. And yet our perp killed here, woke up the next day, and murdered the Kingsleys. It’s not impossible, but it’s unusual.”

  “Everything about this sucks,” Barry observes.

  As Callie contacts Gene, I get a call from Alan.

  “I’m done here. Everything go okay?” he asks.

  “That depends on your definition of ‘okay.’” I fill him in on the second scene.

  “He did us the big favor.”

  “The big favor” is our way of saying that the perpetrator gave us a second scene without us having to think about it first. Many times, the first scene we get simply doesn’t provide enough evidence to lead us to a perp. In those cases, all we can do is wait for him to strike again, and hope he’s more careless the second time around. Or the third. Or the fourth. It’s disheartening and guilt-creating. “The big favor” is sarcastic—and yet it’s not. He’s provided us with a second scene and we don’t have to feel guilty about it because it happened before it was our responsibility. Everything from this point forward is on us.

  “Yep. What did you find out?”

  “Nothing. No one noted anything unusual. No strange vehicles, no strange people. But this is one of those neighborhoods. Middle of the middle.”

  Alan is referring to a study he forwarded to me recently. It was an application of sociology to criminal investigation. It made a note of how changes in technology and perception
of rising crime, coupled with economic factors, conspired to make our jobs harder.

  Neighborhoods used to tend toward community. People as a rule knew their neighbors. The result, in terms of non-forensic investigation, was a more observant witness pool and an environment where the outsider stuck out as such.

  Time marched on, things changed. Women went to work. The access to information about crime and criminals expanded as the reach of television grew. People began to realize that a neighbor could be a child molester, the high school quarterback could be a date rapist, and in general they began to circle the wagons.

  These days, the study found, most middle-class neighborhoods—the “middle of the middle”—lack that old sense of community. The vast majority of residents know the names of the neighbors on either side, but that’s it.

  Poorer neighborhoods, in contrast, tend to be more tight-knit. Wealthy neighborhoods tend to be more security conscious and watchful. The study concluded that the best place for a criminal to work was in the “middle of the middle,” where every home was an island, and that in those neighborhoods, forensics were more likely to solve a crime than witnesses.

  “Even so,” Alan continues, “there was a birthday party just three houses down. Lots of kids and parents around.”

  “Which tells us he doesn’t stick out.” I consider this. “He might have worn a uniform.”

  “I don’t think so. I asked, no one remembered seeing anyone from the gas, electric, or phone companies. On a weekend, that wouldn’t have been the smartest move anyway.”

  “It would stand out more than it would blend in.”

  “Right.”

  “He’s so damn bold, Alan. During the day, when everyone would be home. Why?”

  “You think it means something.”

  “I know it. You don’t take a risk like that without a reason. He likes messages and he was sending one by coming for them when he did.”

  “What?”

  I sigh. “I don’t know yet.”

  “You’ll figure it out. What’s the game plan?”

  “Barry asked for our help, so we’re on it—but go ahead and go home. We’ll pick this up again tomorrow.”