The Face of Death

  She’d since graduated from watercolors to oils and acrylics. She spent a day each week painting, intense, her concentration almost furious. I had watched her without her knowing it, and I’d been struck by her total immersion. I could tell that the world disappeared when she painted. Her focus narrowed to the canvas in front of her, the shouting in her mind, the motion of her hand. She generally painted without stopping, a continuous dead run.

  Maybe it was the act that was therapeutic. Perhaps the paintings were secondary. Maybe it was just the doing that was important.

  Whatever the truth, the paintings were good. Bonnie was no Rembrandt, but she had talent. Her work had a vitality, a boldness that suffused each painting with agelessness.

  “You want to turn Alexa’s room into a studio?”

  Bonnie has been painting in the library, and it’s beginning to over-flow with paper and canvas and mess.

  She nods, happy but cautious. She reaches over to me, takes my hand, gives me a look of concern. Again, understanding, that flash and flood.

  “But only if it’s okay with me, huh?”

  Her smile is soft. I give her one in return, touch her cheek.

  “I think it’s a great idea.”

  She lets the caution drop away from her smile. The shine of it starts to work its way into my darker recesses.

  She indicates the TV and gives me an inquisitive look. She’s been watching the cartoon channel.

  Want to watch with me? she’s asking.

  That sounds about right.

  “You bet.”

  I open up my arms so she can snuggle into me, and we watch together, and I try to let her sunshine banish all that internal rain.

  Be the cactus, I think. We got sun. To hell with the sand.

  47

  IT’S MORNING AND I’M TRYING TO CALM SARAH DOWN.

  She’d met Elaina, and a new look of horror and terror had crossed her face. She’d started to back away, toward the door.

  “No,” she says, her eyes wide, shining with unspent tears. “No way. Not here.”

  I understand what’s happening. She’s recognized the goodness of Elaina, understood it in a flash, and she sees Desiree and her mother and deaths yet to come.

  “Sarah. Honey. Look at me,” I say, my voice soothing.

  She continues to stare at Elaina.

  “No way. Not her. I can’t be responsible for that.”

  Elaina steps forward, brushing me aside. The look on her face is a mix of compassion and pain. Her voice, when she speaks, is gentle, so gentle.

  “Sarah. I want you here. Are you listening to me? I know the risks, and I want you here.”

  Sarah continues to stare at Elaina, no longer speaking, but shaking her head, back and forth, back and forth.

  Elaina points at her own baldness.

  “See that? That was cancer. I beat cancer. And you know what else? Six months ago a man came and he grabbed me and Bonnie and he meant to kill us. We beat him too.” She indicates the group that’s here, me, Alan, Bonnie, herself. “We beat him together.”

  “No,” Sarah moans.

  Now it is Bonnie who strides forward. She looks up at me, she points to herself. I frown at her, puzzled, trying to understand. She points at herself again, and then points at Sarah. Everyone watches, transfixed. It takes me a moment, and then I get it.

  “You want me to tell her about you?”

  A nod.

  “You sure?”

  A nod.

  I face Sarah. “Bonnie’s mother, Annie, was my best friend. A man—the same one who later tried to kill Elaina and Bonnie—killed Annie, right in front of Bonnie. Then he tied Bonnie to her mother’s dead body. She was like that for three days. Until I found her.”

  Sarah’s stare is now reserved for Bonnie.

  “And you know where he is now?” Alan says. “He’s dead. We’re still here. We’ve all been through stuff, Sarah. You don’t have to worry about us—let us worry about us. Let us worry about you. This is my home, and I want you here too.”

  I can sense her not so much faltering as yearning. Bonnie is the one who bridges the gulf. She walks over to Sarah and takes her hand. The moment hangs and we wait it out.

  Sarah’s shoulders sag.

  Sarah doesn’t speak. She just nods. I am reminded of Bonnie, and as I think it, my foster-daughter catches my eye and gives me a sad smile.

  “Let’s not forget me,” Kirby says, unable to remain silent any longer. “I’m here, and I’m loaded for bear. Giant, mutant bear.” She grins, showing all those white teeth and lets those leopard eyes flicker. “If the cuckoo-bird shows up here, he’s cuckoo for sure.”

  There’s no freshly ground coffee this morning, but at least it’s stopped raining.

  Everyone is here in the outer office again, facing me. No one looks as fresh as they did yesterday. Not even Callie. She’s immaculate, as always, but her eyes are red-rimmed with exhaustion.

  Assistant Director Jones comes through the door, his own cup of coffee in his hands. He doesn’t apologize for holding us up, and none of us expect him to. He’s the boss. Being late is his prerogative.

  “Go ahead,” he says.

  “Right,” I say. “Let’s start with you, Alan.”

  I knew that Alan had come back over late last night to dig through the Langstroms’ lives.

  “First things first, Grandpa Langstrom. Well, he was Linda’s father, so he was actually Grandpa Walker. Tobias Walker.”

  “Hold it,” AD Jones says, putting down his cup of coffee. “Did you really just say Tobias Walker?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Everyone turns to look at him. His face is grim.

  “I gave you that list this morning, Agent Thorne. The police and agents who were assigned to the trafficking task force. Take a look.”

  Callie scans the page in front of her. Stops.

  “Tobias Walker was on the LAPD side of the task force.”

  The sensation I feel running through me is overwhelming. Unreality mixed with electric excitement.

  “Another name you’ll recognize,” she says. “Dave Nicholson.”

  “Nicholson?” AD Jones asks, frowning. “LAPD, big guy. Good cop. What about him?”

  I give him the abridged version of yesterday’s events. His shock is acute.

  “Suicide?! And his daughter was taken hostage?” He goes to grab his coffee, thinks better of it, runs a hand through his hair. I can’t tell if he’s dismayed or enraged. Probably both.

  An idea is coming toward me, running to me, big enough to blacken my mental horizon. A rising sun of realization.

  “What if…?”

  Everyone looks at me, questioning. Everyone, I notice, but James. He’s staring off, transfixed.

  Seeing the same thing?

  Maybe. Probably.

  “Just listen,” I say. I can hear the excitement in my own voice. “We have a task force that failed, probably due to internal corruption. We have a motive of revenge. We have some key messages. The one to Cathy Jones, along with her gold shield: Symbols are only symbols. The one to Nicholson: It’s the man behind the symbol, not the symbol, that’s important. Combine that with what we know—what does it tell us?”

  None of them are fast enough for James. He’s there, he’s caught up with me. Boats and water, rivers and rain.

  “He’s referencing the corruption. Just because someone wears a badge, it doesn’t mean they’re not a bad guy. Symbols are just symbols.”

  Understanding lights up Alan’s eyes. “Right, right. We missed the boat. Revenge was the motive. But it wasn’t the traffickers he wanted to punish the most. That’s why Vargas got off easy. He wanted the task-force members. Whoever it was that sold out that safe house and those kids.”

  Silence. Everyone taking this in, everyone nodding at different times. The ring of truth.

  “Sir,” I ask AD Jones, “what do you remember about Tobias Walker?”

  The Assistant D
irector rubs his face. “Rumors, that’s what I remember. He was even more of a dinosaur than Haliburton. Nasty guy. Racist. Carried a blackjack, that kind of thing. Really liked his phone books and rubber hoses. He was the one they looked at the hardest after the attack on the safe house.”

  “Why?”

  “He’d been investigated for suspected graft three times prior by LAPD Internal Affairs. Beat it every time, but the rumors persisted, including a rumor that he was in the pockets of organized crime. Nothing anyone could ever prove. He died of lung cancer in 1983.”

  “Obviously, our perp is convinced that they were more than just rumors,” James notes.

  “Who else?” I say. “What happened to Haliburton, sir?”

  The Assistant Director’s face goes ashen. “In the past, I would have said he killed himself and his wife, but under the circumstances…”

  “Do you know the details?”

  “It happened in 1998. He’d been retired for quite a while. He was in his late sixties, kept himself busy doing whatever it is you do when you’re retired. Probably continued dabbling with his poetry.”

  “Poetry?” I interrupt.

  “It was the thing that made Haliburton human. His contradiction. He was a very conservative guy. Fire-and-brimstone churchgoer, didn’t trust anyone with hair past their ears, bought all his suits at Sears. That kind of thing. He was harsh and he was judgmental. Never cracked a joke. But he wrote poetry. And he didn’t mind sharing it. Some of it was pretty good.”

  I tell him about The Stranger’s tale of an amateur poet and his wife.

  “Oh man,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. “This just keeps getting better and better. Haliburton shot his wife and then shot himself. At least that’s what we always thought.”

  “What about a ‘student of philosophy’? Is there anyone on either of the task forces that might fit that description?”

  “It doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “Any other untimely deaths?”

  “There were three of us here. Haliburton, myself, and Jacob Stern. Stern retired to Israel in…sometime in the late eighties. He was another old-timer. I never heard anything about him after that. The LAPD had Walker, Nicholson, and a guy from Vice by the name of Roberto Gonzalez. We know about Walker and Nicholson—but I don’t have any information on Gonzalez. He was a young cop, bilingual. From what I remember, he was decent enough.”

  “We’re going to have to follow up on him and Stern,” I say.

  “The big question now,” Alan observes, “is the same question as before, but we’ve just narrowed the playing field: Who is The Stranger, and why does he have such a hard-on for the task-force members?”

  “I have another,” Callie says. She glances at AD Jones. “No offense, sir, but why did you get to live?”

  “I think the fact that you’re an Assistant Director is the answer,” James says. “I don’t know that it made him cross you off his list, but it might make him save you for last. Killing an AD—that would draw a lot of attention. He might not be ready for that much scrutiny.”

  “Comforting,” AD Jones replies.

  “Back to Alan’s question,” I say. “Logic dictates he’d be a child who was victimized by the trafficking ring. He can’t be a relative.”

  “Why?” Alan asks, and then answers his own question. “Because of the scarring on the feet.”

  “Correct.”

  I consider this. “Callie, did you find anything going through the Langstrom house that might be helpful?”

  “I spent a very long day and night there with Gene. We found lots of dust, but nothing forensically probative. The antidepressants Linda Langstrom had weren’t prescribed by the family physician, but by a physician located on the other side of town.”

  “She went out of her way to hide them,” I note.

  “Yes. But she never took any of them.”

  I frown. “Does that mean anything to anyone?”

  No one replies.

  “James? News about the boy’s computer?”

  “No.”

  I think, trying to come up with some magic. Nothing.

  “Our most potent avenue of inquiry, then, is the trust.” I relate my conversation with Ellen. “We need that subpoena. Today.”

  “Cathy Jones can do that for you,” AD Jones says. “She should be able to testify that the Langstroms were probably murdered by a third party. That’s a priority.” He tosses his cup in the trash can and heads toward the door. “Keep me apprised.” He stops, looks back. “Oh and, Smoky? Catch this guy, will you? I prefer to stay breathing.”

  “You heard the man,” I say. “Callie and Alan, that goes to you guys. James, I want you to find out what, if anything, has happened to the two other names on that list. Stern and Gonzalez.”

  Everyone gets into motion, hunters with the scent.

  48

  “ROBERTO GONZALEZ WAS MURDERED IN HIS HOME IN 1997,” James intones. “He was tortured, castrated, and his genitals were placed in his mouth.”

  “Sounds like the description he gave of the ‘student of philosophy,’” I murmur. “What else?”

  “Stern appears to be alive and well. I alerted the Crisis Management Unit, they’re going to get in touch with the Israeli authorities and put him under guard.”

  “I agree with your theory about AD Jones—but why Stern? Why’d he get to live?”

  James shrugs. “It could be purely geographic. Too far away, so get to him last.”

  “Maybe.” I chew on my lower lip. “You know,” I say, “there’s another avenue we haven’t even looked at.”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘Mr. You Know Who.’ The guy Vargas mentioned in his video clip. I’m assuming he’s supposed to be the man-in-charge. Wouldn’t he be a prime target for The Stranger?”

  “We should leave that alone for now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a question that may never get answered. They didn’t find him in 1979 with a task force. Why should we think that we’ll find him today?”

  “For one thing, we’re not corrupt.”

  He shakes his head. “That’s beside the point. Yes, I think he was tipped off back then, and yes, I believe someone protected him, or at least his interests. But I don’t think it was a big conspiracy, not at the law-enforcement level. It’s hard enough to corrupt a cop, no matter what the public at large thinks. It’s even harder to get a cop, or an agent, to get into bed with a child trafficker. No. This was the work of one person on that task force, two at the most.”

  “Walker?”

  “He’s the likely suspect. The thing that bothers me, though, is the fact that the whole network just seemed to disappear. It’s as if it rolled itself up overnight. No more kids with scars on their feet. That bothers me.”

  “Why? The bad guys were being cautious.”

  “No. Cautious is what they were already doing. Having someone on the inside. Cautious would be finding a new pipeline and a new market. Closing shop altogether? Criminals get smarter, they don’t just give up on their business.”

  “That’s not our concern. For all we know, they never stopped. Maybe they just got smarter, or moved their business elsewhere. Hell, sexual tourism has been growing for years—maybe they set up shop in their home country and got rid of the risk altogether.”

  James shrugs, but I know this doesn’t satisfy him. He’s a puzzle-solver. He doesn’t like unanswered questions, whether they’re relevant to our investigation or not.

  “He’s not a sibling, you know,” James says.

  The Stranger, he means.

  “I know. It’s all too personal for that. He experienced something bad, he didn’t just observe it happening to a relative.”

  “Something still bothers me about the diary, as well,” he says.

  I study him. “Any insight?”

  “Not yet.”

  My cell rings.

  “We have a written statement from Cathy Jones,” Callie tells m
e. “We’re on our way back.”

  “Great work, Callie.”

  She sniffs. “Did you expect any less?”

  I smile. “Bring it to me and then we’re going to shoot it straight to Ellen.”

  “We’ll see you in twenty minutes.”

  A rush of adrenaline shoots through me, strong and sudden. It leaves me feeling energized and a little bit shaky, as though everything is outlined in a bright nimbus of light.

  Here it is, I realize.

  “We’re going to be getting our subpoena,” I tell James.

  “Remember what we talked about.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  I know what James is saying. Examine every conclusion. We’re still walking on the path he laid for us.

  49

  EVERYONE IS GOING. ALAN, CALLIE, JAMES, ME. WE HAVE THE subpoena and we’re on our way to see Gibbs.

  There’s an excitement, a kind of electricity in the air. We’ve been forced, to a great degree, to sit back and suck it up. The whole story, mile after mile of it, a horror show. We’ve watched Sarah and others suffer in our mind’s eye.

  Now we could be an hour away from finding out who he is. It doesn’t matter, at this moment, that he’s led us here. We want to see his face.

  We exit the elevator into the lobby and I see Tommy standing at reception, a phone in his hand. He sees me and waves.

  “Give me a sec,” I tell the others.

  “Hurry up,” James retorts.

  “Hey,” Tommy says as I approach. “I wanted to make sure you got hooked up with Kirby. Find out if that worked.”

  I grin at him. “She’s interesting for sure. I—”