The Face of Death

  “He shot the wife. Without warning. He was jabbering away and then he just stopped talking mid-sentence, pointed the gun at her, and…blew her…away.” He shakes his head. “You could have heard a pin drop in the command van. Suffice to say, it forced our hand.”

  “If he could shoot the wife without preamble…”

  Dawes nods. “Then he could do the same with the baby. Our sniper already had a shot lined up, and he got the green light and he took it. It was righteously accurate, dead in the forehead, no fuss, no muss. Perfect.” He sighs. “Problem is, Dad dropped the baby girl and she landed on her head and died. That sniper shot himself a week later.” His look is more piercing this time. “So, like I said, it could have turned out a lot worse here, Agent Barrett.”

  “Call me Smoky.”

  He smiles. “All right, I will. Do you believe in God, Smoky?”

  The question startles me. I give him my most honest answer.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah. Me neither.”

  He shakes my hand, gives me a sad smile and a slight nod, and he’s gone. His story remains behind, echoing inside me, a tale of impossible choices.

  Thanks for sharing, Dawes.

  I sit down on the curb in front of the house and try to gather myself. Callie and Alan are both on their cell phones. Callie finishes and comes over, plopping down next to me.

  “Good news, honey-love. I called Barry Franklin, and he agreed, after much grumbling, to ask for this case. He’ll be here shortly.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Homicides, with some exceptions, are not federal crimes. I’m not allowed to walk into a jurisdiction and take over a murder just because I feel like it. Everything we do involves and requires liaison with the locals to be on the up-and-up. Like most agents (and local cops) I prefer to engineer my “liaison relationships.” This is where Barry comes in. Barry is a homicide detective for the LAPD, one of the elite few to reach the rank of Detective First Grade. If he wants a case, it’s his.

  I met him on the very first case I had as a unit head in Los Angeles. A crazy young man was torching homeless people and taking their feet for trophies. Barry had asked the Bureau to help with a profile. Neither of us had cared about politics or credit. We just wanted to catch the bad guy and we did.

  The pragmatic end of things: He’s an excellent investigator, he won’t deny me access to the crime scene, and if I ask him nicely, he’ll utter the magic words, request for assistance. Those words open the door to full and unfettered involvement on our part. Until then, we are legally no more than observers.

  “How are you doing, honey-love?” Callie asks.

  I rub my face with my hands. “I’m supposed to be on vacation, Callie. The whole thing in there…” I shake my head. “It was surreal. And fucked up. The day started out great. Now I feel crappy and…yuck. Too many messy cases in a row.”

  People think every murder is a bad one, and while they’re technically right, horror comes in degrees. The gutting of an entire family is a jolt.

  “You need a dog,” she says.

  “I need a good laugh,” I reply, forlorn.

  “Just one?”

  I give her a wry smile. “Nope. I need something on a trend. A series of good laughs. I need to wake up and smile, and then I need to do it again the next day, and again the day after that. Then I can have a shitty day, and it won’t feel so bad.”

  “True,” she muses. “‘Into every life a little rain,’ and all that—but you’ve taken it to a new level.” She pats my hand. “Get a dog.”

  I laugh, as she’d intended.

  Quantico, Quantico, a voice sings inside my head. No Sarahs, no up close and personal, no clangy-jitters there.

  Alan heads toward us, still talking on his cell phone. When he gets to us, he holds the phone away from his ear. “Elaina wants to know the outlook on tonight. As far as Bonnie goes.”

  I think it through. I need Barry to arrive. I need him to get his Crime Scene Unit onto processing the house. I need to go through the home and soak in the scene.

  It isn’t officially ours yet, but I’m not willing to just walk away.

  I sigh.

  “It’s going to be a late one. Can you ask her if she minds taking Bonnie for the night?”

  “No problem.”

  “Tell Elaina I’ll be in touch tomorrow.”

  He puts the phone to his ear and walks away, delivering the news.

  “What about me?” Callie asks.

  I give her a tired grin. “You get to work on your vacation, just like me. We’re going to meet Barry, check things out…” I shrug. “And then we’ll see. Maybe it will be back to vacation-time, maybe not.”

  She sighs, an overdramatic, long-suffering sigh. “Slave driver,” she mutters. “I want a raise.”

  “I want world peace,” I reply. “Disappointment abounds. Get used to it.”

  “Bonnie’s covered,” Alan says as he returns. “So what’s the plan of action here?”

  Time to take command.

  This is my primary function, above all others. I run a group, really, of luminaries. Everyone has an area they shine in. Callie is a star when it comes to forensics. Alan is a legend in the interrogation room, and he’s the best there is when it comes to beating feet and canvassing an area. He’s tireless and he misses nothing. You don’t get people like that to follow you because they like you. They have to respect you. It requires just a touch of arrogance. You have to be willing to acknowledge your own strengths, to be a star in your own area and know it.

  Where I excel is in the understanding of those we hunt. In seeing a scene, not just looking at it. Anyone can walk through a murder site and observe a body. All the skill is in the reverse-engineering. Why that body? Why here? What does that say about the killer? Some are skilled at it. Some are very skilled. I’m gifted, and just arrogant enough to acknowledge it.

  My personal talent in my chosen field is my ability to understand the darkness that makes up the men I hunt.

  Lots of people think they understand the mind of serial killers. They read their true-crime books, perhaps they steel themselves and give a series of gory crime photos an unblinking eye. They talk about predators, the psychosexuality of it all, and they feel enlightened.

  All of that is fine, there’s nothing wrong with it—but they miss the boat by a mile.

  I tried to explain this once in a lecture. Quantico was doing their version of career day, and various guest speakers were giving command performances to rooms full of bright young trainees. My turn came and I stared out at them, at their youth and hope, and tried to explain what I was talking about.

  I told them about a famous case in New Mexico. A man and his girlfriend had spent years hunting and capturing women. They would bring the abductees into a specially equipped room, filled with restraints and instruments of torture. They’d spend days and weeks raping and torturing their victims. They videotaped most of what they did. One of their favorite implements was a cattle prod.

  “There is video, I’d said, “where you can see smoke pouring out of a young woman’s vagina because they used a cattle prod to penetrate her.”

  Just this, this tiny bit of information, far from the worst available, silences the room and turns some of those young faces white.

  “One of our agents, a woman, had the job of making a series of detailed drawings of all the whips and chains and saws and sex toys and other perversities that this couple had used on the women they’d brought into that room. She did her job. She spent four days doing it. I’ve seen the drawings and they were good. They were used in court, actually. Her superior praised her and told her to take a few days off. To go home, see her family, clear her head.” I had paused, letting my eyes roam over all those young faces. “She went home and spent the day with her husband and her little girl. That night, while they were asleep, she crept downstairs, got her service pistol out of the gun safe, and shot herself in the head.”

  There had
been a few gasps. There had been a lot of silence.

  I had shrugged. “It would be easy to take that strong young woman and classify her and not think anything more about it. We could call her weak, or say that she must have already been depressed, or decide that something else was going on in her life that no one knew about. And you’re welcome to do that. All I can tell you is that she’d been an agent for eight years. She’d had a spotless record and had no history of mental illness.” I’d shaken my head. “I think she looked too much, went out too far, and got lost. Like a boat on the ocean with the shore nowhere in sight. I think this agent found herself floating on that boat and couldn’t figure out a way to get back.” I had leaned forward on the podium. “And that’s what I do, what my team does: We look. We look and we don’t turn away, and we hope that we can deal with that.”

  The administrator running the program hadn’t been all that happy with my talk. I hadn’t cared. It was the truth.

  I wasn’t mystified by the act of that female agent. It wasn’t the seeing that was the problem, not really. The problem was the un-seeing and the stop seeing. You had to be able to go home and turn off the images that wanted to giggle through your mind, all sly feet and whispers. This agent hadn’t been able to do that. She’d put a bullet in her head so she could. I empathized.

  I guess that’s what I was trying to tell those fresh-scrubbed faces: This isn’t fun. It’s not titillating, or challenging, or a roller-coaster scare.

  It’s something that must be done.

  It’s my gift, or my curse, to understand the desires of serial killers. To know why they feel the way they do. To feel them feeling it, just a little, or just a lot. It’s something that happens inside me, something based in part on training and observation, based in greater part on a willingness to become intimate with them. They sing to themselves, a song only they can hear, and you have to listen the way they listen if you want to hear the tune. The tune’s important; it dictates the dance.

  The most important component is thus the most unnatural act: I don’t turn away. I lean in for a closer look. I sniff them to catch their scent. I touch them with the tip of my tongue to catch their flavor. It has helped me capture a number of evil men. It’s also given me nightmares and moments where I wondered at my own hungers: Were they mine? Or had I just understood too much?

  “Barry is coming,” I tell Alan. “It’s his scene. It may not become ours, but let’s proceed as if it’s going to be. Callie, I want you to walk the scene with me. I need your forensic eyes. Alan, I want you to re-canvass the neighborhood. Barry won’t have a problem with that. Let’s find out what the neighbors know.”

  “You got it,” he replies, pulling out a small notepad from his inside jacket pocket. “Ned and I will dig in.”

  Alan has always called his notepad “Ned.” He told me his original mentor said the notepad was a detective’s best friend, and that a friend should have a name. He’d demanded that Alan come up with one, and thus Ned was born. The mentor was long gone, the name was forever. I think it’s a form of superstition, Alan’s version of a baseball player’s lucky socks.

  Callie squints at a black Buick that has just been let past the cordon lines. “Is that Barry?” she asks.

  I stand up, and recognize Barry’s heavy, bespectacled face through the windshield. I feel a kind of relief run through me. Now I could do something.

  “I’d give you a hard time about the date you pulled me away from,” Barry says as we approach, “but you look like you’re having a shitty night yourself.”

  Barry is in his early forties. He’s heavy without being fat, he’s bald, he wears glasses, and he has one of the more homely faces I’ve seen—the kind of homely that becomes cute in the right light. In spite of these handicaps, he’s always dating pretty, younger women. Alan calls it the “Barry phenomenon.” Supreme confidence, without being arrogant. He’s funny, smart, and larger than life. Alan thinks a lot of women find that combination of self-assurance and a big heart irresistible.

  I think that’s just a part of it. There’s a hint of unyielding strength in Barry that rolls through all that amiability like thunder in the distance. He’s seen it all, he knows that evil is a real thing. Barry is a hunter of men, and at some level, right or wrong, that’s always going to be sexy in an animal-scent kind of way.

  I know his grumbling is all for show; we’ve lost track of who really owes a favor to whom, and in truth, neither of us really cares.

  “Anyway,” he says, pulling out a notepad, his own Ned, ready now to get down to business. “What have you got for me?”

  “Ritual slaughter. Evisceration. An ocean of blood. The usual,” I say.

  I fill him in on what I know. It isn’t much, but it begins the back-and-forth rapport that works so well for us. We’ll walk the scene and talk as we go, bouncing observations off each other, honing our conclusions. It might seem aimless to an observer, but it’s method, not madness.

  “Three dead?” he asks.

  “Three that I saw, and I’m pretty sure that’s it. Patrol cleared the house, and they didn’t mention any other bodies.”

  He nods, tapping his pen on the notepad. “You’re sure the girl didn’t do it?”

  “No way,” I say, emphatic. “She didn’t have enough blood on her. You’ll see what I mean when we go inside. It’s…messy. I’m also fairly certain that one of them was killed downstairs and then carried into the bedroom. Carried, not dragged. She doesn’t have the strength for that.”

  He looks toward the house, thinking. He shrugs. “Doesn’t really play for me, anyway,” he says. “The girl doing it. What you described sounds like advanced killing. Not to say that sixteen-year-olds aren’t doing some bad things these days, but…” He shrugs again.

  “I sent Alan off to interview the neighbors. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “Nope. He’s the man when it comes to that stuff.”

  “So when can we go in?” I ask.

  I’m anxious now, reenergized. I want to start looking at this killer.

  He glances at his watch. “I expect the Crime Scene Unit here any minute—another favor you owe me. Then we can slip on our paper booties and get to work.”

  I start outside the house. Barry and Callie wait, patient, listening.

  I examine the front of the home. I look up and down the street, at the homes on either side. I try to imagine what it would have been like in the daytime.

  “This is a family neighborhood,” I say. “Crowded. Active. It was Saturday, so people would have been at home. Coming here, today, was a bold move. He’s either overconfident or very competent. Not likely a first-timer. I’m guessing he’s killed before.”

  I walk forward, moving up the walkway and toward the front door. I imagine him, moving up this same path. He could have been doing it while I was shopping with Bonnie, or perhaps while I was clearing out Matt’s master-bedroom closet. Life and death, side by side, each one unaware of the other.

  I pause before walking through the front door. I try to imagine him here. Was he excited? Was he calm? Was he insane? I come up blank. I don’t know enough about him yet.

  I enter the home. Barry and Callie follow.

  The house still smells like murder. Worse now, as time has passed, and the odors have begun to deepen.

  We move to the family room. I stare down at the blood-soaked carpet. The CSU photographer is busy taking pictures of it all.

  “That’s a hell of a lot of blood,” Barry observes.

  “He cut their throats,” I say. “Ear to ear.”

  “That’d do it.” He looks around. “Like you said. No blood trails.”

  “Right. But all of this tells us things about him.”

  “Such as?” Barry asks.

  “He likes what he does. Using a blade is personal. It’s an act of anger, sure, but on another level, it’s an act of joy. The way you kill a lover. The only thing more intimate is using your bare hands. It can also be the way you kill a stra
nger that you love. A sign of respect, a thank-you for the death they’re giving you.” I indicate the bloody room with a sweep of my hand. “Bloodletting can be intimate or impersonal. Blood is life. You cut the stranger you love so you can be close to the blood when it starts flowing. Blood is also a path to death. You drain pigs of blood pretty much the same way. Which way did he see them? As pigs, or lovers? Were they nothing, or everything?”

  “Which do you think?”

  “Don’t know yet. The point is, however he viewed them, there wasn’t any doubt. You don’t kill with a knife if you’re conflicted. It’s an act of certainty. A gun gives you distance, but a knife? A knife has to be used up close. A knife is also evidence that the manner of death is as important to him as the death itself.”

  “How’s that?”

  I shrug. “A gun is quicker.”

  Callie is walking around the room, looking at the blood and shaking her head.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  She indicates a dark puddle near her feet. “This is wrong.” She points at another pool off to the left. “That’s wrong.”

  “Why, Red?” Barry asks.

  “Blood-spatter analysis is a mix of physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics. No time for a detailed course here, but suffice to say that physics, blood viscosity, and the carpet material itself tell me these two puddles are likely here by design.” She walks closer to us, points to the much larger blood patch near the entrance to the family room. “Note the lines here.” She leans forward, indicating a line of blood that widens as it moves away from us, ending in a somewhat rounded head with jagged edges. “See how it almost looks like a giant tadpole?”

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “You see this all the time on a smaller scale. Castoff spatter produces a long, narrow stain with a defined, discernible head. The sharper end of the stain, or the ‘tail,’ always points back to the origin point. This is simply a larger version of that, and fits with someone getting their throat cut.” She points. “You see it here, and here. And note the blood on the wall nearby?”