The Face of Death

  AD Jones shakes his head in frustration. “Dammit.” He points a finger at me. “Find something, Smoky. Enough is enough. End this.”

  He turns and gets back into his car, leaving me nonplussed by his outburst. A moment later, it heads toward the gate and the growing throng of reporters.

  “Well,” Callie says to Brady, “I suppose you and I will have to continue this later. There will be a later?”

  He tips an imaginary hat.

  “That’s affirmative.”

  He saunters off. Callie ogles his backside as he goes.

  “Ah, lust.” She sighs. She turns toward the house, winks at me. Callie is doing what Callie does: trying to lift the inexorable grimness of things, like the boom box and sunlight in my bedroom a lifetime ago. “Are you ready to go to work, Gene?”

  They go off together. I watch her reach into her pocket, pop a Vicodin.

  I empathize right now. I want nothing more than a single shot of tequila.

  Just one.

  I wait. It’s making me crazy.

  Everything I can do is done. Gibbs is under surveillance. Cabrera is in custody. Theresa and Jessica are in a hospital, being examined. Bonnie, Elaina, and Sarah are safe. Alan is on the phone with Elaina, delivering the news about Theresa so that Elaina can pass it on to Sarah. Callie and Gene are inside, trying to balance speed with thoroughness. Thoroughness is winning.

  All I can do now is wait.

  Alan walks over to me. “Elaina’s going to let Sarah know. At least we can give her that.”

  “What do you think, Alan? Even when we catch Juan, is there a happy ending? Or does he get what he wanted all along?”

  I’m not sure why I ask him these questions. Maybe because he’s my friend. Maybe because of all the people on my team, Alan is the one I feel I can look up to, subordinate or not.

  He’s quiet for a long moment. “I think when we catch him, we’re doing our job. We’re keeping him from doing more damage. We’re giving Sarah a chance. That’s all. It may not be the best answer, but it’s all we’ve got.” He looks at me, gives me a kind smile. “It’s all we’re responsible for, Smoky. You want to know if Sarah’s already dead inside, if he’s murdered her spirit. The truth is, I don’t know. The bigger truth is, Sarah doesn’t know. The final truth is, we’re giving her the chance to find out. And that’s not everything, and it might not be enough, but it’s not nothing, either.”

  “And him? What about Juan?”

  Alan’s face becomes sober. “He’s a perp now. His days as a victim are long gone.”

  I think about what he’s said, and it comforts me and then doesn’t, comforts me and then doesn’t. My spirit tosses and turns, trying to sleep on a bed that’s only soft in certain places. This is not a new feeling, and I let it wash over me.

  Justice for the dead. It’s not nothing. It’s far from nothing. But it’s not resurrection, either. The dead stay dead even after their killers are captured. The truth of this, the sadness of it, makes the job neither pointless nor fulfilling.

  Acceptance and disquiet. Acceptance and disquiet. Two waves that roll me gently, one following the other inside my heart forever.

  I wait.

  During my waiting, Tommy calls. I feel guilty and elated, two new waves. Guilty that I had not called him to check on him. Elated at the sound of his voice, at the truth that he is alive.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “I’m okay. No major damage to the muscle. Cracked my clavicle, which hurts like hell, but I won’t end up on disability. I’m fine.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

  “I’m not. You’re doing your job. There’ll be times I’ll get caught up too. Nature of the beast. If we start keeping score, we’ll be over before we begin.”

  His words warm me inside. “Where are you now?”

  “Home. I wanted to call you before I took my pain pills. They can make me a little goofy.”

  “Really? Maybe I’ll have to come over and take advantage of you while you’re all loopy.”

  “Nurse Smoky giving me a sponge bath? I’ll have to get blown up more often.”

  The pressure inside causes me to react with a giggle. I clap a hand over my mouth, mortified.

  “Anyway,” Tommy says. “Get back to it. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Bye,” I say, and hang up.

  Alan glances over at me. “Did you just giggle?”

  I frown. “Of course not. I don’t giggle.”

  “Ah.”

  We wait.

  Callie and Gene are done with half of the home. They have a set of elimination prints taken from Cabrera that they’re using for comparisons as they go. So far, nothing.

  It’s 3:00 A.M. The reporters and their helicopters are gone, maneuvered away by a skillful AD Jones. He’d made himself the source of information and they’d followed him like a herd of hungry vampires. I imagine that the story we want told has now been splashed across television screens and Web sites, and will show up in the newspaper headlines of tomorrow. Cabrera found. Suspect dead. Case closed.

  We wait.

  My phone rings at 4:30 A.M.

  “It’s Kirby.”

  The simple fact that her voice is serious and no wisecracks follow starts the alarm bells ringing.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Sarah’s gone.”

  60

  I’M ALMOST SHOUTING AT KIRBY. IT’S ANGER DRIVEN BY FEAR.

  “What do you mean she’s gone? You were supposed to be guarding her.”

  Kirby’s voice is calm without being defensive. “I know. I was worried about people on the outside trying to get in, not her trying to get out. She wasn’t snatched, Smoky. She left. I went to the bathroom. She walked out the door. She left a note, said, There’s something I have to do.”

  I pull the phone away from my ear. “Son of a bitch!” I yell into the sky. Alan’s been inside the house. He comes running out.

  “Do you know where she might be going?” Kirby asks.

  I stop, poleaxed.

  Do I?

  The voice in my head replies, accusing.

  Of course you do. If you’d been listening, you would have been ready for this. But you were too busy with yourself, weren’t you?

  The truth I’m trying to reveal to myself appears.

  Sarah, memorizing him. The way he talks. Saying she’d never forget his voice.

  Sarah, taking a phone call from Gibbs the other day, supposedly to “verify” she was fine with us going into the home.

  I grip my temples with one hand. My head is spinning and my heart is racing.

  He talked to her recently, the day he killed the Kingsleys. Then, he talked to her on the phone, in the hospital, as Gibbs. She knew the moment she heard his voice. He probably wanted her to know.

  “I think I do,” I tell Kirby. “Stay with Bonnie and Elaina. I’ll be in touch.”

  I hang up before she can reply.

  She knew, and once she knew that Theresa was safe, she went off to do the one thing she wanted more than anything else in the world.

  She went to kill him.

  The endless cycle.

  “What is it?” Alan asks.

  I see the fear in his eyes. I can’t blame him. The last time we were near the end of a case and I got a phone call that made me react this way, Elaina was in danger.

  “Elaina and Bonnie are fine. Sarah’s on the run.”

  I see him thinking, his mind racing, watch as understanding hits home.

  “Gibbs. She’s going to kill Gibbs.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  The fear doesn’t leave his eyes. It’s not Elaina, it’s not Bonnie, it’s not me. It’s not Callie or even James.

  But it is Sarah.

  I hear James’s voice in my head: Every Victim.

  “If we let her kill him, she’ll never make it back,” he murmurs.

  I unfreeze at this, snapping into motion.

  “Get ahold of surveillance. Alert them
, get the address. If they spot her, they’re to detain her. Otherwise, they’re to watch and wait for us to get there. I’m going to let Callie know we’re going.”

  I head for the house at a run. I find Callie in one of the bedrooms.

  I tell her what’s happening. Again, I see that fear. The same fear in her eyes that I’d seen in Alan’s. It’s odd to see on Callie, unsettling. No one’s gotten away from Sarah’s story without a scar to show for it.

  “Go,” she says, grim. “I’ll handle things here.”

  61

  AS IT TURNS OUT, GIBBS—JUAN—DOESN’T LIVE THAT FAR AWAY,

  in LA terms. In this early time of the morning, without traffic to slow us down, we should arrive at his house in the San Fernando Valley within twenty minutes.

  On the way there, my phone rings again.

  “Is this Smoky Barrett?” a deep voice asks.

  “Who’s this?”

  “My name is Lenz. I’m one of the agents assigned to watch Gibbs. We got a problem.”

  My heart beats even faster, if that’s possible. “What?”

  “My partner and I were doing our thing, keeping an eye on the house. Pretty quiet detail. About five minutes ago someone took a shot at us. Well, at the car. Plugged holes through the trunk and one of the passenger windows. We dive down in our seats, pull our weapons, when we come back, we see a teenage girl beating feet to the front door.”

  “Dammit!” I say. “Did she enter the home?”

  His voice is miserable. “Yeah. Three minutes ago or less.”

  “I’ll be there shortly. Stay alert but stay back.”

  It’s a small home. Humble. A two-story built in older, some would say better, times. It has a small, treeless, unfenced front yard. The driveway leads from the street to a detached single car-garage. The street is quiet. The sun is breaking somewhere on the horizon; we can see its glow climbing over the rooftops.

  An agent I don’t recognize is waiting. He comes to us as we get out.

  “Lenz,” he says. He’s fortyish, a little homely. He has the skinny look and sallow skin of a smoker. “Really sorry about this.”

  “You stay here,” I tell him. “Keep your partner watching the back. We’re going up to the front door.”

  “You got it.”

  They get moving. Alan and I do the same. We haven’t drawn our weapons, but our hands rest on them. When we get to the front porch, I hear Sarah. She’s screaming.

  “You deserve to die! I’m going to kill you! Do you hear me!”

  A voice responds. It’s too low for me to make out the words.

  “Ready?” I ask Alan.

  “Ready,” he says, my friend that I secretly look up to. No questions asked.

  We’re at the tipping point. I can hear it in Sarah’s voice. There is no time for finesse, only time for action.

  We move to the front door. I check the knob. It opens under my hand, and I throw the door wide. I enter first, gun drawn. Alan follows.

  “Sarah?” I call. “Are you here?”

  “Go away! Go away go away go away!”

  It’s coming from the kitchen, toward the rear of the house. It’s not far; I reach the doorway in a few quick strides. I look into the kitchen and stop.

  It’s small. Old-fashioned and efficient. The dining table sits away from the stove, clean but battered, with four old chairs around it. Stark. Functional.

  Juan is sitting in one of the chairs, smiling. Sarah is standing, facing him, about four feet from him. She has a gun pointed at his head. It looks like a thirty-eight revolver. It’s an obscenity in her small hands. Something that doesn’t belong.

  I almost don’t recognize Gibbs. He’s missing his beard and moustache.

  They were fake, dummy.

  He turns, sees me, smiles.

  Eyes aren’t blue, either. They’re brown. He was wearing contacts.

  “Hello, Agent Barrett.” His voice is humble, but his eyes are bright. He’s dropped the pretense, let the madness inside him shine. “Are you the good side of what I’ve become?”

  “Shut up!” Sarah screams. The gun trembles in her hands.

  I glance back at Alan, shake my head. Telling him to wait. I lower my gun without putting it away.

  Sarah had begun to unravel earlier. Now she’s come undone. Looking at her face, I understand, finally, what it was that Juan as The Stranger had been striving for.

  Her face was the face of an angel, its wings shorn, as it fell away from the sight of God. The absence of hope as a totality.

  A Ruined Life.

  I look at Juan and see that he’s sucking down the horror of it, and that this, for him, has become a kind of ecstasy. He told himself once that it was all about justice, and maybe, at one time, it was. But he had changed, in the worst and most fundamental way, until it was only about one thing: The Joy of Suffering.

  He’d set out to punish evil men, and in doing so, had become an evil man.

  “This is not the ending I had planned,” he says, ignoring me now, “but God’s will is all, and I see, I see, what he is doing here, in his infinite wisdom, praise be to Him. He set me on the path, to make you over in my own image, and that can only be completed, I see, I see, by my death at your hands, praise be to Him. You will kill me in the name of vengeance, you will kill me because you think that it is right, but, I see, I see, that you will only be killing me because you want to, praise be to Him.” He pauses, angling his head down. “You will not kill me to save Theresa. She has been released, she is unharmed. You will be killing me because you yearn to spill my blood, a need so sharp and huge and terrible that it burns your skin like a bright blue flame. And where does that need come from, where does that flame come from?” He nods and smiles with his mouth open. “It is the flame of God, Little Pain. Don’t you see? I was an angel of vengeance, sent by the Creator to destroy the men who hide behind symbols, the demons that caper through the world in pressed suits, proclaiming their goodness while eating the souls of the innocent. I was sent by God to cut a wide swath, a bloody swath, a swath that drowns both victim and oppressor, the innocent and the guilty. What are the deaths of some who shouldn’t die in the name of the greater good? I was sacrificed so that I could be made into the Lord’s weapon. And I have sacrificed you, I see, I see, so that you can become me and take my place, praise be to Him.” He leans forward, closes his eyes, his face blissful. “I am ready to meet God. Hail Mary, full of Grace.”

  I enter the kitchen, ignoring Juan, watching Sarah. I move toward her, not stopping, coming up next to her. She doesn’t react. She can’t tear her eyes away from Juan’s face.

  She sees, I realize. Like I see. Like James sees. Like that poor FBI agent who’d blown her head off. Sarah sees Juan, and understands.

  Her agony is his orgasm. But the reasons behind it are all tragedy and madness.

  I can feel her need coming off her, a burning. Her finger trembles on the trigger, and she stands, poised in the moment. She wants him dead, but she’s afraid. Afraid it won’t be enough. That it won’t last long enough. That it’ll be over too fast, and that none of it will fill the hole.

  And she’s right. She could kill him for an eternity, and in the end, she’d only lose herself.

  What do I say to her? I’m going to get one chance. Maybe two.

  Juan continues to pray, fervent, certain, proud.

  Insane. He’d started out organized, but Dr. Child had been right. The lunacy had been there, waiting and latent, like a virus.

  I drown out his voice with my own thoughts, my eyes fixed on Sarah’s angel face.

  Falling, but not yet fallen.

  Theresa, Buster, Desiree. Loved and loved by. Goodness and smiles and…gone. Where was the key? What would pull her away from the edge she was about to tumble into?

  It comes to me softly, feathers, not thunder. A ghost-kiss.

  I lean forward and put my lips to her ear. I whisper to her and I put the force of my own self into my voice, my own pain survived. We?
??re both wingless angels, scarred inside and out, bleeding from wounds that fight not to heal. The decision is not about goodness or evil, about happiness or sadness, about hope or despair. The decision is the simplest of all: the decision to live or to die. To gamble that as life continues, suffering will abate, and something better will eventually abide.

  I put Matt and Alexa into my voice, and hope that they will carry my words into her heart.

  “Your mother is watching you from the clouds, baby. Forever and always, and she doesn’t want this. The only place she lives is inside of you, Sarah. That’s the last part of her. If you kill him, she dies for good.” I straighten up, move away. “That’s all I’m going to say, honey. It’s your choice now. You choose.”

  Juan narrows his eyes at me. He examines Sarah. Smiles like a snake lapping up milk mixed with sugar.

  “You’ve already chosen, Little Pain. Do you need my help? Do you need me to remind you, to fan the flame inside so that you can do His will?” He licks his lips. “Your mother? I touched her body after she died. I touched her private places. I touched her inside.”

  Sarah freezes. I freeze too. I wait for her to kill him. A dark part of me, the place where I keep my own killer’s eyes, forgets my purpose and wants her to kill him. Instead, she begins to shake.

  It starts as a small quivering, like the tremors that precede an earthquake. It moves from her hands to her arms to her shoulders. Down her chest, to her legs, a terrible shaking, till it almost seems like she should fly apart, and then—she freezes.

  Her head goes back and she howls.

  It’s awful.

  It’s the sound of a mother who woke up and realized that she rolled over on her baby in her sleep, suffocating him. It drills into my heart.

  As she howls, I see Juan, and I get to witness his exaltation. Watch him quiver, see him shake, watch as his upper body pitches forward, as his fists clench and his hands curl. Hear his groan. Long, low, full of slithering things and the rolling, stinking, sticky dead. It harmonizes with the sound of Sarah through discordance, demonic. Juan’s fall is complete. He’s no better now than the men who made him this way.