The Face of Death

  “She said her parents were murdered. When she was six.”

  “That’s great. I love a happy ending.” He sighs. “How do you want to handle interviewing her?”

  “Strictly straight and narrow. This girl…” I shake my head. “If she feels like we’re not being honest with her, or we’re not taking her seriously—she’ll stop trusting us. And I don’t think she trusts us much anyway.”

  “Fair enough.” He takes a final drag on his cigarette before flicking it into the parking lot. “I’ll follow your lead.”

  Sarah has a private room in the children’s wing of the hospital. Barry has a guard posted outside the door. Young Thompson again. Tired looking but still excited.

  “Any visitors?” Barry asks him.

  “No, sir. No one.”

  “Sign us in.”

  It’s nice enough, as hospital rooms go, which as far as I’m concerned is like saying that it’s the best one available at the Bates Motel. The walls have been painted a warm beige, and the floor is some kind of faux-wood. Better than white linoleum and institution-green, I admit to myself. There’s a large window, and the drapes are pulled open, allowing the sunlight to pour in.

  Sarah’s in a bed near the window. She turns her head to see us as we enter.

  “Aw, geez,” I hear Barry say under his breath.

  She looks small and pale and tired. Barry is appalled. This is another reason I like him. He’s not jaded.

  I walk up to the side of her bed. She doesn’t smile, but I’m happy to see less deadness in her eyes.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “Tired.”

  I indicate Barry with a nod of my head. “This is Barry Franklin. He’s the homicide detective in charge of your case. He’s a friend of mine, and I asked him to take on your case because I trust him.”

  Sarah looks at Barry. “Hi,” she says, disinterested. She turns back to me. “I get it.” She sighs, her voice resigned and bleak. “You’re not going to help me.”

  I blink, surprised.

  “Whoa, honey. The local police are always involved. It’s how things work. That doesn’t mean I’m not a part of it.”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “Nope.”

  She stares at me for a few seconds, eyes narrowed and suspicious, gauging the truth of what I’m saying. “Okay,” she says, reluctant. “I believe you.”

  “Good,” I reply.

  Her face changes. Hope, mixed with desperation. “Did you get my diary?”

  I choose my words carefully. “I couldn’t take the original diary. We have rules about how we handle things at a crime scene. But”—I raise my voice as I see her face begin to fall—“I had a photograph taken of every single page in it. Someone is going to be printing those photographs out for me today, and I’ll be able to read them. Just as if they were the pages from your real diary.”

  “Today?”

  “I promise.”

  Sarah gives me another long, suspicious stare.

  There’s no trust in this girl, I think. No trust at all.

  What had it taken to make her this way? Did I want to know?

  “Sarah,” I say, keeping my voice even and gentle, “we need to ask you some questions. About what happened in your house yesterday. Are you ready to do that?”

  The gaze she gives me is filled with too much experience, a kind of empty indifference I’ve seen before in victims. It’s easier to be indifferent than it is to care.

  “I guess.” Her voice is flat.

  “Do you mind if Barry is here while we talk? I’ll ask all the questions. He’ll just sit away from us and listen.”

  She waves a hand. “I don’t care.”

  I pull up a chair next to her bed. Barry sits down in a chair near the door. More of our easy dance. He’ll be able to hear everything, but he’ll remain unobtrusive. It won’t be hard for Sarah to forget that he’s even there.

  There’s an intimacy to victim recollection. It’s personal. A sharing of secrets. Barry knows this, and he knows that Sarah is going to be most comfortable sharing those secrets with me.

  She’s turned her head back to the window. Away from me, toward the sun. Her hands are folded. I see black nail polish on every nail.

  Let’s get this row on the shoad, inner-me says.

  “Sarah, do you know who did this?” The key question. “Do you know who it was that killed the Kingsleys?”

  She continues staring out the window. “Not in the way you mean. I don’t know his name, or what he looks like. But he’s been in my life before.”

  “When he killed your parents.”

  She nods.

  “You said you were six when that happened.”

  “June 6,” she says. “On my birthday. Happy birthday to me.”

  I swallow, stumbling inside for a moment at this revelation.

  “Where did that happen?”

  “Malibu.”

  I glance at Barry. He nods, makes a quiet notation in his notepad. We’ll be able to track down all the details of this earlier murder, if it happened.

  “Do you remember what occurred back then? When you were six?”

  “I remember all of it.”

  I wait, hoping she’ll elaborate. She doesn’t.

  “How do you know the man who killed the Kingsleys yesterday is the same man who killed your parents ten years ago?”

  She turns to look at me, a faint expression of resignation and muted anger on her face. “That’s a stupid question.”

  I regard her for a moment. “Well, then…what’s a good question?”

  “Why is he the same man?”

  I blink. She’s right. That’s the most incisive question of all.

  “Do you know why?”

  She nods.

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  “I’ll tell you a little. The rest you’ll have to read about.”

  “Okay.”

  “He…” She struggles with something. Maybe to find the right words. “He said to me once, ‘I’m making you over in my own image.’ He didn’t explain what that meant. But that’s what he said. He said he looked at me and my life the way an artist looks at clay, and that I was his sculpture. He even had a name for the sculpture, a title.”

  “What was it?”

  She closes her eyes. “A Ruined Life.”

  The scritch-scratch of Barry’s pen pauses. I gaze at Sarah, trying to digest what she’s just said.

  Organized, I think to myself. Organized but driven by something specific and obsessive. Revenge is the motive, and destroying her is a piece of it. A big piece.

  She continues talking. Her voice is a little bit faint and faraway. “He does things to change my life. To make me sad, to make me hate, to keep me alone. To change me.”

  “Has he ever told you why?”

  “He said, when it all started: ‘Even though it’s not your fault, your pain is still my justice.’ I didn’t get it then. I don’t get it now.” She looks at me, searching, inquisitive. “Do you?”

  “Not specifically. We think this is about some kind of revenge for him.”

  “For what?”

  “We don’t know yet. You said he does things to change your life. To change you. What kind of things?”

  A long, long pause. I can’t tell what’s moving through her eyes. I only know that it’s sorrowful and huge and that it’s not new to her.

  “It’s about me,” she says, her voice small and quiet. “He kills anyone who is good to me or could be good to me. He kills the things I love and that love me back.”

  “And no one’s caught on to this before?”

  She goes from calm tones to a low roar in an instant, startling me. Those blue eyes are blazing. “It’s all in my diary! Just read it. How many times do I have to tell you? God! God! God!”

  She turns away, back to the sun once more, trembling and twitching and overflowing with rage. I can feel her pulling away, going inside herself.

  “
I’m sorry,” I say, soothing. “And I promise, I will read it. Every page. What I need to know now is what happened yesterday. In the house. Anything you can remember.”

  Another long pause. She’s not angry anymore. She looks tired, right down to her molecules.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Start at the beginning. Before he came to the house. What were you doing?”

  “It was mid-morning. About ten o’clock. I was putting my nightgown on.”

  “Putting it on? Why?”

  She smiles, and that old hag Sarah keeps inside herself is back in full force, chuckling and ugly.

  “Michael told me to.”

  I frown. “Why did Michael tell you to?”

  She cocks her head at me.

  “Why, so he could fuck me, of course.”

  15

  “YOU AND MICHAEL WERE HAVING SEX?”

  I’m proud of myself. I’ve managed to keep my voice steady and judgment-free at this revelation.

  “No, no, no. Sex is something that happens between two people that are equal. I was fucking Michael. So he wouldn’t lie to Dean and Laurel and make them send me away.”

  “He was forcing you?”

  “Not physically. But he was blackmailing me.”

  “With what? What had you done?”

  She shoots me a look of incredulity. “Done? I hadn’t done anything. But that wouldn’t have mattered. Michael was the perfect son. Straight As, track team captain. Never did anything wrong.” The bitterness in her voice is like acid. “Who was I? Just some stray they’d taken in. He said if I didn’t have sex with him, he’d plant pot in my room. Dean and Laurel were nice people, and they were good to me—but they didn’t have much tolerance for anything…unusual. They would have sent me away. I figured I could hold out for another two years, till I was eighteen, and then I’d be a legal adult and I could leave.”

  “So you…had sex with him when he asked you to.”

  “A girl’s gotta eat.” Her voice drips with sarcasm, and a hint of self-loathing that makes my heart ache. “He just wanted me to blow him and he liked fucking me.” She looks down at her hands. They tremble in counterpoint to the hard face she’s showing me. “Hey, I haven’t been a virgin for a long time. What’s the big deal?”

  “The Kingsleys didn’t suspect?”

  Sarah rolls her eyes. “Please. I told you, they were good to me—but they really liked thinking that everything in their life was perfect.” She hesitates. “Besides…they were good to me. I didn’t want them to know about Michael. It would have hurt them. They deserved better.”

  “So, you were putting your nightgown on. What happened then?”

  “He showed up at my bedroom door.”

  “Michael?”

  “No, The Stranger. He just appeared there. No warning. He was wearing panty hose over his face, like he has in the past.” She chews her bottom lip for a moment, caught up in a memory. “He had a knife in his hand. He was happy, smiling, relaxed. He said hello, acting all jolly and normal, and then…he said he had a gift for me.” She pauses. “He told me: ‘Once upon a time, a man deserved to die. He was an amateur poet, this man, a gifted one. He made pretty words, but he was darkness inside. One day I came to the man, I came to him and I put a gun to his wife’s head and I told him to write her a poem. I told him it would be the last thing she’d ever hear before I blew her brains out. He did what I said and I killed them, praise be to God. Once they were dead, I pulled their insides out, so the world would see their darkness.’”

  The message, I think. He disembowels them so that we will see who they really are.

  I note the religious bent as well. Fanaticism in serial killers is nearly always a sign of insanity.

  But not in this case. His faith wasn’t sparked by his desire for revenge. It’s something he grew up with.

  “Did he give you this poem?” I ask. “Was that the gift?”

  “A copy, yeah. He said he retyped it for me. I put it in the pocket of my nightgown after he made me read it.” She nods toward the table next to her hospital bed. “It’s in the drawer. Go ahead. He was right, it’s pretty good, when you consider the circumstances.”

  I reach over and open the drawer. Inside is a folded square of nondescript letter-sized white paper. I unfold it and read:

  IT IS YOU

  When I breathe

  It is you

  When my heart beats

  It is you

  When my blood flows

  It is you

  When the sun rises

  When the stars shine

  It is you

  It is you.

  I’m a barely casual reader of poetry, unqualified to judge what I’ve just read. I only know that I like its simplicity, and I wonder about the moment in which it was written.

  “It’s true, you know,” Sarah says.

  I look up. “What’s true?”

  “If he says it happened that way…then it happened that way.” She closes her eyes. “The Stranger told me that the ink on the original is smudged because the poet cried while he was writing it. It also has his wife’s blood on it. ‘Beautiful pinpoint drops,’ he said, ‘because the blood misted from her head when I shot her.’”

  “Go on,” I say. “What happened next?”

  She looks off, her voice faint.

  “He asked me how I liked the poem. He seemed genuinely interested. I didn’t answer. He didn’t seem to mind. ‘It’s good to see you again,’ he said. ‘Your pain is more beautiful than ever.’”

  “Sarah, how accurate is your memory of the way he talks and what he says? Don’t be offended.”

  “I have a gift for voices and what people say. It’s not a photographic memory or anything. I can’t remember it exactly, not word for word, not like that. But I’m pretty good. And I really concentrate on him when he’s speaking. The way he talks. The things he does.”

  “That’s good, it will help,” I encourage her. “How tall is he?”

  “A little over six feet.”

  “Is he black or white?”

  “White and clean shaven.”

  “Is he a big man? By that, I mean, is he fat or skinny? Muscular or weak?”

  “He’s not fat, but he’s not thin. He’s very strong. He has a perfect body. Perfect. Not a flaw on it. He must work out like crazy. He’s well built without being all pumped up.”

  I hear Barry’s pen scratch away.

  “Go on,” I say. “What happened next?”

  “‘I’m almost done sculpting you, Sarah,’ he said. ‘Ten long years, full of ups and downs and twists and turns and sorrow. I’ve watched you bend and break. It’s interesting, isn’t it? How many times a human being can shatter and still keep moving forward? You’re not the same little girl you were when we began this journey, are you? I can see the cracks, the places where you had to glue yourself back together.’” Sarah shifts in the bed, restless. “This isn’t exact, okay? It’s not word for word, but basically it’s what he said and how he sounded.”

  “You’re doing fine,” I assure her.

  She continues. “He had a bag with him. He opened it and pulled out a small video camera and pointed it at me.”

  “He’s done that before, hasn’t he?” I ask.

  She nods. “Yes. He says he’s documenting my ruin. That it’s important, that without it there’s no justice.”

  Killers collect trophies. The video is his.

  “What did he do next?”

  “He focused on my face, and he said: ‘I want you to think of your mother.’” She turns to me. “Want to see what he saw?”

  Before I can tell her no, I really don’t, her eyes change and I forget to breathe.

  They fill up with a grief and yearning as vivid as a sunrise. I see hope unfulfilled, a fundamental loss of heart.

  She turns away. I can breathe again.

  But how can she?

  “What then?” I push out, a little shaky.

  “He jus
t sat for a little bit, watching me through the camera lens. Then he started to talk to me. ‘Do you know what one of the most exciting parts of this is for me, Sarah? The things I can’t control. Take this place, for instance. A family that is kind to you without being truly warm. A son who shows the world a perfect face, but blackmails you so you’ll suck his cock. It’s amazing. On the one hand, all chance. I didn’t make this home. On the other hand, you are only here because of me. Did you ever think of that while Michael’s cock was in your mouth? That you were there, looking up into his eyes, because of the things I’ve done?’”

  Sarah gives me a sardonic smile. “The answer is yes. I did think about The Stranger, some of those times.” I note that her hand is still trembling.

  “Go on,” I encourage her.

  How’d he know Michael was abusing her? A mental note I keep to myself, for now. I don’t want to break her rhythm.

  “He got nasty, then.” She stares off, remembering. “He said: ‘Do you know what Michael made you, Sarah, the moment you got down on your knees in exchange for his silence? He made you a whore.’”

  Sarah’s hands fly up to her face, startling me. She covers her eyes and her shoulders tremble.

  “Are you okay?” I ask her in a soft voice.

  She heaves out a single deep breath, almost a sob. A moment passes and she drops her hands back into her lap.

  “I’m fine,” she says, toneless.

  She continues putting a voice to the man she calls The Stranger.

  “‘Chance, but not really,’ he said. ‘All I had to do was place you on the road, as God willed me to. I knew I could count on human nature to make your journey hard, as long as I was there to remove the kind ones. The ones that care are always a minority, Little Pain. A raindrop in a storm.’” She looks at me. “He’s right. He may have stacked the deck and given my life a push, but the people that did bad things to me?” She rubs her arms as though she’s cold. “He didn’t make them do those things. They did them on their own.”

  I want to comfort her, to tell her that not everyone is bad, that there are good people in the world. I’ve learned to stifle this instinct. Victims don’t want sympathetic words. They want me to turn back time, to make it not have happened.