The Face of Death

  “Worse how?”

  “He beat her head with a pipe. Various injuries resulted, but the most severe was permanent damage to her optic nerves. She’s legally blind, Smoky.”

  I’m silent, taking this in. Failing to some degree.

  “But that’s not all.”

  “What else?”

  “The attacker whipped her. On the bottoms of her feet. Bad enough to leave scars.”

  “What?!” I almost shout, I’m so surprised.

  “No kidding. I had the same reaction. So that’s bad, but—”

  “I already know what’s weird—that he let her live.”

  “Exactly. He’s killed everyone else we know about so far, except for Sarah. Why not Jones?”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “That’s why I’m calling. I got an address on her, but I’m in the middle here…”

  “Give it to me. Callie and I will go see—” I stumble over the word see for a moment. “We’ll go talk to her.”

  33

  CATHY JONES LIVES IN A CONDO IN TARZANA, HER NEIGHBORHOOD yet another example of a suburb tucked away amidst the urban sprawl of greater Los Angeles. It’s a nice enough building, kept up, but perhaps a little worn around the edges.

  The rain has stopped for now, but the sky is gray and the clouds still look angry. Callie and I spent almost an hour navigating our way here. LA hates the rain and it shows; we’d passed two accidents on the freeway.

  We’d called ahead, but had gotten only her voice mail.

  “Ready?” I ask Callie, as we stand in front of the door.

  “No. But knock anyway.”

  I do.

  A moment passes. I hear the sound of footsteps on a hardwood floor, and then a voice, clear but uncertain.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Cathy Jones?” I ask.

  A pause. Then a dry reply:

  “No, I’m Cathy Jones.”

  Callie looks at me with an eyebrow raised.

  “Ms. Jones, this is Special Agent Smoky Barrett, of the FBI. I’m here with another agent, Callie Thorne. We’d like to speak with you.”

  The silence is heavy.

  “About what?”

  I could reply, “Your attack.” I decide to take a different approach.

  “Sarah Langstrom.”

  “What’s happened?”

  I hear raw alarm in the question, mixed with perhaps a hint of resignation.

  “Can we come in, Ms. Jones?”

  Another pause, followed by a sigh.

  “I guess you’ll have to. I don’t go outside anymore.”

  I hear the sound of a dead bolt being turned, and the door opens.

  Cathy is wearing a pair of sunglasses. I see small scars at her hairline and temples. She’s a short woman, slender but compact. Athletic. She’s wearing slacks and a sleeveless blouse; I can see the wiry muscle in her arms.

  “Come in,” she says.

  We enter. The condo is dark.

  “Feel free to turn on some lights. I don’t need them. Obviously. So make sure you turn them off before you leave.”

  She leads us into the living room, sure-footed. The interior of the condo is newer than the outside facade. The carpet is a muted beige, the walls an off-white. The furniture is clean and tasteful.

  “You have a very nice home,” I offer.

  She sits down in an easy chair, indicating the couch to us with a sweep of her hand.

  “I hired a decorator six months ago.”

  We sit.

  “Ms. Jones—”

  “Cathy.”

  “Cathy,” I correct. “We’re here because of Sarah Langstrom.”

  “You said that already. Cut to the chase or hit the road.”

  “Blind and disagreeable,” Callie says.

  I shoot a furious look at Callie, aghast. I should have known better; Callie is the undisputed master of incisive ice-breaking. She’d assessed Cathy Jones and had understood sooner than I had: Cathy wanted to be treated like a normal person more than anything else. She knew she was being an ass; she wanted to see if we were going to coddle her or call her on it.

  Cathy grins at Callie. “Sorry. I get tired of being treated like a cripple, even when it’s a little bit true. I found that pissing people offtends to even the playing field the fastest.” The smile disappears. “Tell me, please. About Sarah.”

  I relate the story of the Kingsleys, of Sarah’s diary. I talk about The Stranger, and recount our analysis of him. She sits and listens, her ears turned toward my voice.

  When I finish, she sits back. Her head turns toward the window in the kitchen. I wonder if this is an unconscious mannerism, something she did when she still had her sight.

  “So he’s finally shown his face,” she murmurs. “So to speak.”

  “It appears that way,” Callie replies.

  “Well, that’s a first,” Cathy says, shaking her head. “He never did when I was around. Not with the Langstroms, not later with the others. Not even with me.”

  I frown. “I don’t understand. He did this to you—how do you figure he wasn’t revealing himself?”

  Cathy’s smile is humorless and bitter. “Because he made sure that I’d keep my mouth shut. That’s the same as staying hidden, isn’t it?”

  “How did he do that?”

  “The way he does everything. He uses the things you care for. For me, it was Sarah. He said, quote, ‘to take my lumps and keep my mouth shut’ or he’d do to Sarah what he was going to do to me.” She grimaces, a haunted mix of anger and fear and remembered pain. “Then he did what he did. I knew I could never let him do that to her. So I kept my mouth shut. That and…” She pauses, miserable.

  “What?” I prod.

  “It’s one of the reasons you’re here, right? You want to know why he kept me alive. Why he didn’t kill me. Well, that’s one of the reasons I kept my mouth shut. Because I lived. Because I was afraid. Not for her. For me. He told me if I didn’t do what he said, he’d come back for me.” Her lips tremble as she says this.

  “I understand, Cathy. Truly, I do.”

  Cathy nods. Her mouth twists and she puts her head in her hands. Her shoulders tremble some, though not much, and not for long. It’s a quiet cry, a summer thunderstorm, there and then gone.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, raising her head. “I don’t know why I bother. I can’t actually cry anymore. My tear ducts were damaged along with everything else.”

  “Tears aren’t the important part,” I say, the phrase seeming lame even as it comes out of my mouth.

  Who are you, Dr. Phil?

  She fixes her sightless gaze on me. I can’t see her eyes through the black lenses of the sunglasses, but I can feel them. “I know you,” she says. “About you, I mean. You’re the one who lost her family. Who got raped and got her face cut up.”

  “That’s me.”

  Even blind, the gaze is piercing.

  “There is a reason.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That he didn’t kill me. There is a reason. But let’s get to that last. Tell me what else you want to know.”

  I want to press her, but discard the idea. We need to know everything. Impatience with the sequences of it all would just be counterproductive.

  We cover the Langstrom murders, as per what we read in Sarah’s diary.

  “Very accurate,” she confirms. “I’m surprised she remembers so many details. But I guess she’s had a lot of time to think about it.”

  “So that we’re clear,” I say. “You were one of the responding officers? You were there, you saw the bodies and Sarah?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Sarah’s diary, she says that no one believed that her parents had been forced to do what they did. Is that true?”

  “It was true then, it’s still true now. Go and pull the case file. You’re going to find that it’s never been ruled as anything other than a murder-suicide, case closed.”

  I’m skeptical. “Come on. You?
??re saying there was nothing there, forensically?”

  Cathy holds up a finger. “No. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that no one took a hard, close look because he’d set up the scene so well. You get a sense, sometimes, when a scene has been staged. You know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right. Well, you didn’t get that sense here. You had a suicide note, held down by a glass of water with Mrs. Langstrom’s fingerprints and saliva on it. You had her fingerprints on the gun, as well as blowback of both gunshot residue and blood consistent with what you’d expect from a suicide. You had her fingerprints around her husband’s neck. Her fingerprints on the hacksaw used to decapitate the dog. She was taking antidepressants on the sly. What would you have thought?”

  I sigh. “Point taken.”

  Hearing the story from the lips of another professional puts it into a different light for me. I see it as Cathy saw it, as the homicide detectives would have seen it, without the benefit of a Kingsley crime scene or Sarah’s diary.

  “You hinted that there was something there to find,” Callie murmurs.

  “Two things. Small, but there. The autopsy report on Mrs. Langstrom noted some bruising around both her wrists. It wasn’t considered probative because we weren’t looking for anything. But if you do have a reason to look…”

  “Then you think about handcuffs and Sarah’s story,” I say. “You think about Mrs. Langstrom getting angry and yanking on those padded cuffs as hard as she could and bruising up her wrists.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was the other thing?”

  “In the accepted scenario she shot the dog and she shot herself. No one reported hearing gunshots, and we’re not talking about a twenty-two popgun. Which makes you start thinking about a silencer, even though no silencer was on the gun at the scene.”

  “What made you start looking?” Callie asks.

  Cathy is quiet for a moment, thinking.

  “It was Sarah. It took a while, but as time went on, and I got to know her, I began to wonder. She’s an honest girl. And the story was so damn dark for a girl her age. People kept dying or getting hurt around her. Once you give in to the possibility, you start seeing clues everywhere.” She leans forward. “His real brilliance has always been in his subtlety, his understanding of how we think, and in his choice of victim. He doesn’t overdo his staging, so it looks natural. He leads us to a conclusion, but not with so many bread crumbs that we’d get suspicious. He knows we’re trained to reverse-engineer in the direction of simplicity rather than complexity. And he chose a victim in Sarah with no relatives, so there’s no one that’s going to hang around and demand that we take a closer look, no one that’s going to worry at it.”

  “But there was, wasn’t there?” I say in a quiet voice. “There was you.”

  Cathy does that looking-toward-the-window thing again. “That’s right.”

  “Is that why he did this to you?”

  Cathy swallows. “Maybe that was part of it, but I don’t think it was the big reason. Doing what he did to me was useful to him.” She seems to be breathing a little faster.

  “Is there anything about what he did to you—about what happened to you—that would be helpful?” I ask, prodding. “I know it’s difficult.”

  She turns to me. “This guy is—or has been—a ghost. I think anything that puts a face on him is going to help, don’t you?”

  I don’t reply; it’s a rhetorical question.

  Cathy sighs, a ragged sigh. Her hands tremble and the quickened breathing continues.

  “Funny. I’ve been wanting to tell the real story for almost two years. Now that I can, I feel like I want to jump out of my skin.”

  I take a gamble. I reach over and grab one of her hands. It’s clammy with sweat and it shakes. She doesn’t pull it away.

  “I used to pass out,” I tell her. “After it happened. For no reason at all.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t pass it around,” I say, smiling, “but yes. Really.”

  “Truth, honey-love,” Callie says, her voice soft.

  Cathy pulls her hand away from mine. I take this as a struggle for strength on her part.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve been taking pills for anxiety since it happened, until about two weeks ago. I decided I wanted to wean myself off them. They turned me into a zombie, and it’s time to get strong again. I still think I made the right decision, but”—she waggles her hand—“it makes things harder, sometimes.”

  “Do you have coffee?” Callie chirps.

  Cathy frowns. “Sorry?”

  “Coffee. Caffeine. Nectar of the gods. If we’re going to sit and listen to something horrible, I think coffee is sensible and recommended.”

  Cathy gives her a faint, grateful smile.

  “That’s a great idea.”

  The normality of a cup of coffee seems to calm Cathy. She holds on to the cup as she speaks, stopping to take a sip when things get too rough.

  “I’d been poking around in the case files for years, trying to find something that would convince a senior detective to take another look. You have to understand, while I was considered a decent cop, I was still just a uniform. It’s a whole different social strata, the plain-clothes and the unies. The guys in Homicide are driven by statistics. Solve rates, murder rates per capita, all that stuff. If you want them to add an unsolved to the pile—particularly if it means taking it out of the solved column—you’d better have something compelling. I didn’t.”

  “The wrist-bruising wasn’t enough?” I ask.

  “No. And let’s be honest, I don’t know if it would be enough for me, if the situations were reversed. The bruising was noted, but per the ME’s notes, it could have come from any number of things. Her husband grabbing her wrists too hard, for one. Remember, she’s supposed to have strangled him.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, I’d been chasing this for a few years, on my own time, and getting nowhere.” She pauses, looking uncomfortable and ashamed. “To be honest, I wasn’t always pushing on it the way I should have. Sometimes, I doubted the whole scenario. I’d lie in bed at night, thinking, and I’d decide I didn’t believe her, that she was just a messed-up kid who’d cooked up a story to explain the otherwise senseless deaths of her parents. I’d generally come back to my senses, but…” She shrugs. “I could have done more. I always knew that, in the back of my mind. Life just kept moving forward. I can’t really explain it.” She sighs. “In the meantime, I did my job and got my promotions. And then, I went for detective.” She smiles at the memory. She’s probably unaware that she’s doing it. “Passed the test with flying colors. It was cool. A big deal. Even my dad would have approved.”

  I note the use of the past tense regarding her father, but I don’t press her on it.

  “I wanted Homicide, but I was assigned to Vice.” She shrugs. “I was a woman, and not bad looking, but I was tough. They needed someone to play hooker. I was disappointed at first, but then I started to enjoy it. I was good at it. I had a knack.”

  More of that unconscious smiling. Her face is animated.

  “I kept in touch with Sarah. She was getting harder and colder every year. I think I was the only thing keeping her in touch with herself, in a way. I was the only person who’d known her the whole time that really cared.” She turns her sightless eyes to the kitchen window, contemplative. “I think that’s why he came after me when he did. Not because I’d become a detective. Not because I was poking around. Because he knew I cared. He knew he could count on me to pass on his message if I thought it might help Sarah.”

  “What message?” Callie asks.

  “I’ll get to that. The other thing…I think it was time to take me away from her.” She turns her head to me. “You understand?”

  “I think so. You’re talking about his overall plan for Sarah.”

  “Yes. I was the last one left who knew who Sarah was, inside. The last person she coul
d be sure of. I don’t know why he let it go on as long as he did. Maybe to give her hope.”

  “So he could snatch it away,” I say.

  She nods. “Yep.”

  “Tell us about that day.” Callie’s voice is soothing, a gentle push.

  Cathy’s hand grips the coffee cup in a reflexive motion, a brief spasm of emotion.

  “It was just like any other day. That’s the thing, I think, that throws me the most. Nothing special had happened on the job, or personally. The date wasn’t significant, and the weather was as usual as it comes. The only difference between that day and another is that he decided it was the day.” She sips from her cup. “I’d finished up a late shift. It was past midnight when I got home. Dark. Quiet. I was tired. I let myself in and went straight for the shower. I always did that. It was symbolic for me—do a dirty job, come home and shower it off, you know.”

  “Sure,” I reply.

  “I got undressed, I took my shower. I put on a bathrobe and grabbed a book I was reading—something trivial and silly but entertaining—and then I poured myself a cup of coffee and took a seat right here.” She pats the arm of the easy chair with one hand. “Different chair, same location. I remember putting my coffee cup down on the table”—she goes through the motion, caught up in the memory—“and the next thing I knew, there was a rope around my neck, pulling me back, so fast, so strong. I tried to think, to do something, to get my hands up between the rope and my neck, but he was too fast. Too strong.”

  “We call that a blitz attack,” Callie says, her voice kind. “In the case of a strong attacker, it’s successful most of the time. There probably wasn’t much you could have done.”

  “I tell myself that too. I usually believe it.” She sips from her cup. It’s her lip that trembles, this time. “He knew what he was doing. He yanked back and up”—she grabs her own throat, demonstrating—“and I was out within seconds.” She shakes her head. “Seconds. Can you believe that? He could have killed me right then. I would never have woken up. I’d have died. But…” Her voice trails off. “But I did wake up. Over and over. He had the rope twisted around me, John Wayne Gacy–style. He’d tighten it up, cut off the blood to my brain, I’d go out. He’d loosen it and I’d come around. Then he’d tighten it up again. I woke up once and my bathrobe was gone. I was naked. I woke up again, and my hands were cuffed behind my back, my mouth was gagged. It was like drowning over and over again, and waking up in a new part of the nightmare every time. The thing that was worst of all, for some reason, was that he didn’t speak.”