The Face of Death

  I smile at her. “I guess you did.” I bite my lower lip. “Sarah, what he said to you, about you being a murderer…you know that’s not true, right?”

  She begins to shiver. The shivers turn into shakes, full-body trembles, her eyes wide, her face pale, her lips white and pressed flat together.

  “Barry, get the nurse!” I say, alarmed.

  “N-n-no!” Sarah says.

  I look at her. She shakes her head as an underscore and crosses her arms over her chest, hugging herself and rocking back and forth. I watch, poised to hit the call button. A half-minute goes by and the shaking subsides back to shivers, the shivers die away. Color comes back into Sarah’s face.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, feeling stupid for asking. It’s an impotent question.

  She moves a lock of hair away from her forehead.

  “It happens sometimes,” she says in a voice that’s surprisingly clear. “Bubbles up out of nowhere, like a seizure.” Her head snaps around, her eyes meeting mine, and I’m startled by the clarity and strength I see in them. “I’m almost done, do you understand? This is it. Either you find him and stop him or I’m going to take away the thing he wants the most.”

  “What’s that?”

  He gaze is steady but haunted. Firm yet lost. “Me. More than anything, he wants me. So if you can’t catch him, I’m going to take me away for good. Do you hear me?”

  She turns back to the window, back to the sun, and I could argue with her, I could protest, but I realize she’s gone away from us for now.

  “Yes,” I reply, my voice soft. “I do hear you.”

  “So what’d you think about all that?” Barry asks.

  We’re back outside, in the parking lot. He’s smoking and I’m wishing that I could do the same.

  “I think that was a horrible, horrible story.”

  “Got that right,” he mutters. “If she’s telling the truth.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’ve heard some crazy tales in my time. Seen a lot of lying. This didn’t feel like that.”

  “I agree.”

  “What did you think about the suicide threat?”

  “It’s real.”

  That’s all I say, all I need to say. I can tell Barry agrees with me.

  “What about our guy?”

  “I’m still fuzzy on this perp. Revenge is the motive to a near one hundred percent certainty. And it’s everything to him. He was willing to give up personally mutilating the bodies so that he could force Sarah to do it. Hurting her was more important, more fulfilling, than cutting them open himself.”

  “But not killing them,” Barry observes.

  “Except when it came to the boy. Again, making her do it, his observation of her pain, was enough. But murder, per her, gives him an erection. Playing with the blood…that’s ritual, that’s sexual. Watching her do it seems too cerebral.” I rub my face with my hands, try to shake myself into a semblance of normality. “Sorry, I’m not being helpful.”

  “Hey, we’ve worked a few of these together. This is how it goes for you.”

  He’s right, this is how it goes. Observe, observe, observe, think, correlate, feel, and do it all again until the killer’s outline goes from fuzzy to focused. It’s chaotic and jumbled and contradictory, but this is how it goes.

  “Can you get a sketch artist over here?” I ask. “The tattoo will be distinctive, unique.”

  “I’ll make it happen.”

  “I’ll reach Callie and see what occurred at the Vargas scene. I’ll make sure she calls you and fills you in too. Barring a big forensic break, I think the most productive path is going to be digging into everyone’s past, with special attention to Vargas. That’s where the answer lies. Based on the vengeance motive, and the way he treats the bodies of the children, I’m interested in the human-trafficking angle.”

  “That’s one for you then.”

  “Why?”

  “Apparently, the trafficking beef was federal all the way. FBI, in fact.”

  “Here?”

  “Californi-yay. But I’ll start rooting around in the Kingsleys’ lives. Sarah’s too. I’ll check out her parents, see if they really were murdered. Oh yeah, and I’ll follow up with the medical examiner. Damn, I’m busy.”

  “I’ll make sure Callie gets you a copy of the diary.”

  We both stand there, thinking. Making sure we’ve covered all the bases.

  “Guess that’s it then,” Barry says. “I’ll be in touch soon.”

  “That apartment was a disgusting pigsty, honey-love.”

  “I know. What did you find?”

  “Let’s see, where to begin? Method of death was the same as the Kingsley family. Throats were cut, blood drained into the tub in the bathroom. Mr. Vargas was disemboweled. No hesitation cuts on him, however.”

  I tell her about Sarah.

  “He made her cut them open?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence. “Well, that would explain it then. Moving on. The young lady wasn’t mutilated—as you saw. We don’t have an ID on her yet, but she was young. My guess would be somewhere between thirteen and fifteen. We found a tattoo of a cross, with Cyrillic writing underneath it that translates to ‘Give thanks to God, for God is love.’”

  “Seems odd that an American girl would have Cyrillic writing tattooed on her. She’s either Russian or local Russian. Which makes sense.”

  The Russian mob has become a huge player in human trafficking, including underage sex workers.

  “The scarring on her feet is very similar to what we saw on the footprints recovered at the Kingsleys’, except these are fewer in number by far. They also seem relatively fresh. The ME estimated, based on color and fading, that they’re about six months old.”

  “Odd coincidence, don’t you think? Both her and the perp having the same kind of scarring?”

  “No, because I don’t believe it’s a coincidence. All the prints we recovered matched the two victims. We have a ton of hair and fibers. We also have a lot of semen stains, but they’re all old and dry. You know, flaky.”

  “Thank you for that visual.”

  “I’ve only given the computer a cursory once-over, but I did see e-mail and various documents on it, as well as lots and lots of porn. Lots of porn. I’m having the computer brought back to the office, where I’ll be going through it. Did I mention lots of porn? Mr. Vargas wasn’t a nice man.”

  “Did the perp play with their blood?”

  “If you mean, did he enjoy another round of finger painting, then no.”

  He gave up the mutilation of the Kingsleys to Sarah. Maybe the blood-painting was a substitute. A kind of consolation prize.

  “What about the diary?”

  “I’m off to the office, I’ll print it out there.”

  “Call me when you have.”

  I reach James on his cell phone.

  “What do you want?” he answers.

  This kind of greeting doesn’t surprise me anymore. This is James, the fourth and final member of my team. He’s oil to everyone else’s water, a saw blade against the grain. He’s irritating, unlikable, and infuriating. We call him Damien when he’s not around, after the character in The Omen, the son of Satan.

  James is on my team because he’s brilliant. His intellect is blinding. A high school graduate at fifteen, perfect SAT scores, he had a PhD in criminology by the time he was twenty, and joined the FBI at twenty-one, the goal he’d been striving toward since he was twelve.

  James had an older sister, Rosa. Rosa died when James was twelve, at the hands of a serial killer wielding a blowtorch and a smile. James helped his mother bury Rosa, and he decided at her grave what he was going to spend the rest of his life doing.

  I don’t know what else drives James besides the job. I don’t know anything about his personal life, or if he really has one. I have never met his mother. I have never known him to go out to the movies. He’s always turned the radio off when I’ve been a passenger in his car, pref
erring silence to song.

  He’s beyond careless when it comes to the emotions of others. He can flip between scalding hostility, or a thoughtlessness that embodies the ultimate in “I don’t need to know how you feel, and in the final analysis, I really—truly—don’t care.”

  He’s brilliant, though. An undeniable brilliance, blinding as an arc light. He has another ability as well, one that he shares with me, that binds us together, however unwillingly. He can peer into the mind of a killer and not blink. He can gaze at evil full in the face and then pick up a magnifying glass to get a closer look.

  In those times, he is invaluable, a companion, and we flow together like boats and water, rivers and rain.

  “We have a case,” I say.

  I brief him on everything.

  “What does this have to do with my Sunday?” he asks.

  “Callie will have the diary couriered to you today.”

  “And?”

  “And,” I say, exasperated, “I want you to read it. I’m going to do the same. Once we’re done, I want to compare notes.”

  A long pause, followed by a longer sigh, very put-upon. “Fine.”

  He hangs up without saying another word. I stare at the phone for a moment and then I shake my head, wondering why I’m surprised.

  16

  “HOW’S THINGS, SWEETHEART?” I ASK BONNIE.

  I had realized, in the parking lot, that everyone was in motion, everything necessary was being done. Which meant I could go be Mom for a little while. This was a skill you had to learn in law enforcement: how to make the time. The cases you are responsible for are important. Literally matters of life and death. You still have to get home for dinner sometimes.

  We’re in Alan and Elaina’s living room. Alan’s off running errands. I’d briefed him on the case in general, but have no duty for him at the moment. Elaina is bustling about in the kitchen, getting us something to drink. Bonnie and I are on the couch, staring at each other for no particular reason.

  She smiles and nods. Good, she’s saying.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  She points at me.

  “How am I doing?”

  She nods.

  “I’m fine.”

  She frowns at me. Stop lying.

  I grin. “I should be allowed to have some secrets, babe. Parents aren’t supposed to tell their kids everything.”

  She shrugs. A simple motion with specific meaning: Well, we’re different.

  Bonnie’s body is ten years old, but that’s where it ends. I feel more often like I’m living with a teenager than with a young girl. I used to ascribe this to what she’s experienced, the things she’s gone through. I know better now.

  Bonnie is gifted. Her gift doesn’t lie in child-genius, but in her ability to focus, to observe, to understand. When she sets her mind to something, she sticks with it to conclusion, examining things in a deep, layered sense.

  I had raised concern about her schooling a few months back. She’d made me understand that I shouldn’t worry. That she’d go back to school and that she’d catch up. She’d taken my hand and had led me into the family room. Matt and I had created quite a little library in there. We believed in reading, in the power of books. We had planned to pass this love and lesson on to Alexa. We’d paid a contractor to install wall-to-wall built-in bookshelves, and we never got rid of any book we read.

  Matt and I would spend an hour or so together each month choosing specific volumes to add. Shakespeare. Mark Twain. Nietzsche. Plato. If we thought it had something of value to communicate, we bought it and put it on a shelf.

  It was part collection, part working library. None of it was vanity. That was our rule: Never buy a book to gain the approval of others.

  Matt and I weren’t poor, but we weren’t rich, either. We weren’t going to leave behind a huge material estate. We had hoped to will Alexa the usual things: a house that was paid off, memories of being loved by her parents, maybe some money in the bank. We also wanted to leave her something that would be uniquely us. Something only her parents would leave her, an inheritance of the heart. This library as a legacy, a small sampling of the collected works of man. The dream of this was something Matt and I shared, something we could do, rich or not.

  Alexa was just starting to get interested in this room before she died. I haven’t added anything to it since. I’ve had dreams of waking up to find it aflame, the books screaming as they burn.

  Bonnie had pulled me into this forgotten (avoided) place. She’d pulled out a book and had handed it to me. How to Sketch, by some unknown but obviously talented author. She’d pointed at herself. It had taken me a moment to understand what she was saying.

  “You read this?”

  She had smiled and nodded, pleased that I understood. She’d grabbed another, Basics of Watercolor. And another, Art and Landscapes.

  “All of these?” I’d asked.

  She’d nodded.

  Bonnie had pointed at herself, had mimed being thoughtful, then had indicated the library with a sweep of her hand.

  I had stared at her, considering. It came to me. “You’re saying, when you want to know about something you come in here and read a book about it?”

  Head nod, big smile.

  I have the ability to read and to learn, and the drive to do both, she had been telling me. Isn’t that enough?

  I wasn’t sure it was enough. There were the three R’s, after all. Well, okay, she had “reading” down, but hey, there were still the other two. And of course, there was the socialization aspect of things, peers and boys and just saying no. The complex dance of learning to share the world with others.

  All of this had whirled through my mind. The fact that Bonnie had read books about art and painting and now painted on a regular basis—and painted well—had mollified me to a point, quieting some of my fears and allowing me to rationalize shelving the problem for another day.

  “Okay, sweetheart,” I had said. “For now, okay.”

  Her spiritual precociousness was evident in other ways; not just in her paintings, but in her ability to listen with complete attention and tremendous patience, in her over-mature ability to go right to the heart of emotional matters.

  She was a child in many ways, it was true, but in some ways she was far more perceptive than I was.

  I sigh. “Today I went and saw a girl named Sarah.”

  I tell her an abridged version of Sarah’s story. I don’t tell her about Sarah being forced to have sex with Michael, or the graphic details of the Kingsleys’ deaths. I do tell her the important things; that Sarah is an orphan, that she feels chased by someone she calls The Stranger, that she is a young woman who’s reached the zenith of despair and now sits ready to tumble downward, free-fall, into darkness, forever.

  Bonnie listens with interest and thoughtful intensity. When I finish, she looks off, deeply contemplative. She turns back to me, points at herself, then at me, and nods. It takes a moment for our telepathic shorthand to kick in.

  “She’s like us, that’s what you’re saying.”

  She nods, hesitates, then indicates herself with emphasis.

  “More like you,” I reply, getting it.

  A nod.

  I stare at her.

  “You mean because she saw the people she cared for getting murdered, sweetheart? The way you saw your mom get killed?”

  She nods, then shakes her head. Yes, she’s saying, but not just that. She bites her lower lip, thinking. She looks up at me, indicates herself, and pushes me away.

  Now it’s my turn to bite my lip. I stare at her—and suddenly I understand.

  “She’s like you would be without me.”

  She nods, her face sad.

  “Alone.”

  A nod.

  Communicating with Bonnie is like reading pictographic writing. Not everything is literal. Symbology plays a part. She’s not saying that she and Sarah are one and the same. Sarah is a young girl who has lost everything and everyone she loves a
nd—here is where the semblance ends—who is now alone in the world. Bonnie is saying, She is what I could be if there was no Smoky, if my life was just foster homes and memories of my mom dying.

  I swallow. “Yeah, honey. That’s a pretty good description.”

  Bonnie has her scars. She’s mute. She still has nightmares sometimes, nightmares that make her scream in her sleep.

  But she’s not alone.

  She’s got me, and I’ve got her, and that makes all the difference in the world.

  I could see Sarah with more depth now: Sarah screamed in the night, but there was no one there to hold her when she woke up. There hadn’t been for a very long time.

  A life like that might make you surround yourself with the color black, I mused. Why not? Everything was darkness, best to make sure you remember that fact, best not to let yourself indulge in the fantasy of hope.

  A clink of glasses distracts me from my own musings. Elaina has returned with our drinks.

  “Orange juice for the two of you, water for me,” she says, smiling and sitting down.

  “Thanks,” I say, and Bonnie nods, and we sip our OJ.

  “I heard what you were telling Bonnie,” Elaina says after a moment. “About the girl, Sarah. Terrible thing.”

  “She’s in bad shape.”

  “What’s going to happen to her now?”

  “I guess once she’s released from the hospital, she’ll go into protective custody. After that, it depends. She’s sixteen. She’ll either go into a group home or foster care until she’s an adult or she’s emancipated.”

  “Will you do me a favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will you talk to me about this? Before she gets released from the hospital?”

  I puzzle over this request for a moment, but only a moment. It’s Elaina, after all. Her purposes are pretty easy to divine. Particularly when combined with her earlier revelation to me about being an orphan. “Elaina, it would not be a good idea for you to take this girl on. In spite of the obvious—that there’s a psycho out there who seems to have a fixation on her—she’s messed up. She’s hurt, that’s true, but she has a serious hard side to her. I don’t know anything about her background, whether or not she does drugs or steals or…anything.”