The Face of Death

  I look. I see more tadpoles, only smaller, along with a number of drops, big and little. “Yes.”

  “Think of blood in the body as contents under pressure. Poke a hole in the container and it flows out. Blood spatter is caused by the force of the flow outward, which determines speed and distance. Cutting an artery produces a lot of force. Smashing a hammer into a head creates a lot of force. However you slice it—pun intended—blood leaves the body, moves outward with greater or lesser force, until it impacts a surface, at which point it transfers that motion and energy to the surface, thereby creating a pattern against it. The results are your tadpoles, your droplets with scalloped edges, and so on, blah-deblah.” She points again to the carpet and nearby wall. “You can see evidence of arterial spray near the baseboard, and in the lines of blood on the carpet. Spontaneous motion, with directionality created by force. This is murder. Those other two are not. If I had to guess, I’d say that blood was poured onto both those spots. From a container of some kind. They are pools, not castoff or spatter. The directionality would have come from above, and the size of the pools, as well as the lack of spatter near their edges, indicate a leisurely pour. Very little force.”

  Now that she’s pointed it out, I can see it. The puddles in question are too orderly, too aesthetically proper, too round. Like syrup onto pancakes.

  “So…he kills someone down here,” Barry says, “and then…what? He decides he didn’t get the room bloody enough?”

  Callie shrugs. “I can’t tell you why he did it. I can tell you that those two spots came last. They’re wetter than the kill-spot and more congealed.”

  “Huh.” He looks at me. “What do you think? The victim killed down here was the last to die? Or the first?”

  “I think the last,” I say. “When I arrived, the blood here was still fresh, while the blood on the walls upstairs looked dry.”

  Something about the sliding glass door has caught my eye. I walk toward it.

  “Barry,” I say. “Look at this.”

  I point at the latch. It’s unlocked, and the door is open a crack. Hard to see unless you are right on it as we are now.

  “That’s probably the point of entry,” Callie muses.

  “Get some shots of this before I open the door,” Barry says to the CSU photographer.

  The CSU—a studious-looking guy I know as Dan—snaps pictures of the latch area and the door.

  “That should do it,” Dan says.

  “Thanks,” Callie says, smiling.

  Dan turns red and looks down at the carpet, smiling but tongue-tied. I realize that he’s been made speechless by a combination of his own natural shyness and Callie’s formidable beauty.

  “You’re welcome,” he manages, before trotting off.

  “Cute,” Callie says to Barry.

  “Uh-huh.” He’s distracted by his examination of the latch. “Looks broken,” he muses. “Definitely forced by something. I can see tool marks.”

  He straightens back up and uses his gloved hands to open the door. It moves from right to left as we’re facing it now. From the outside, coming in, it would be left to right.

  A right-handed killer would probably have opened it with his left hand, as his right would have been filled with…what? A knife? A backpack?

  We step through the door into the backyard. It’s dark, but I can tell the yard is large, and I can see the shadowy outlines of a square-shaped swimming pool. A single medium-sized palm tree to the far left reaches for the night sky.

  “Is there a light back here?” Barry wonders.

  Callie fumbles around on the wall near the sliding glass door in the family room, looking for a switch. When she finds it and flips it, all the banter we’ve been using to distance ourselves from this tableau dissipates.

  The switch had been set to turn on not just the yard lights, but the pool lights, as well.

  “Jesus,” Barry mutters.

  The light blue bottom of the pool combines with the underwater lights to create an island of shimmering brightness in the dark. The blood in the water stands out against this brightness, a suspended crimson cloud. It floats on the top, in places a mix of clots, pink foam, smooth oil.

  I walk over to the side of the pool and peer into the water.

  “No weapon or clothing in here,” I say.

  “Lot of blood though,” Barry notes. “Can’t even see the bottom from some angles.”

  I look around the yard. It’s walled on every side by actual six-foot-high concrete and brick, a rarity in suburban Los Angeles. Ivy grows along the top and combines with tall bushes in this and adjoining yards to create tremendous privacy. The house itself may have been built to let the light in, but the backyard was all about keeping out prying eyes.

  I think about the room upstairs, splashed with blood.

  He took his time up there, I think. Playing and painting and having a ball. That would have been messy work.

  “The killer used the pool,” I say.

  Callie raises her eyebrows. Barry gives me a quizzical look. I realize that I’m a step ahead; I’ve seen the bedroom, they haven’t.

  “Look, he’s doing this midday. It’s a Saturday, so people in this neighborhood are home. Even more significant: It’s a beautiful, sunny Saturday. People are out in their yards, riding their bikes, enjoying the weather.” I point toward the master-bedroom window. “He played in the bedroom. Blood’s everywhere on the ceiling and walls—but it’s not spatter from the killings. It’s there because he put it there. He would have been covered in blood. He’d have to wash it off somehow, and he wanted to do it here. Liked doing it here.”

  “Why not use the bathroom inside?” Callie asks. “Quite a risk, coming into the yard, don’t you think? Privacy or not—he has to leave the house proper. Someone could come knocking while he’s out here, or come home, and he’d never know it.”

  “For one thing, it’s smarter,” Barry says. “He probably knows that we’ll be checking the drain traps in the bathrooms. It’s going to be a lot harder to find anything that belongs to him in the pool filtration system. And chlorine isn’t exactly investigation friendly.”

  I examine the pool. It’s about twenty feet long and appears to be a uniform depth all the way across. A single set of steps leads down into the water. Glossy clay tiles surround it and form a deck.

  “Tile is wet in places,” I observe.

  “We need to get out of here,” Callie says, her voice sharp. “Right now.”

  Barry and I look over at her, surprised.

  “Why is it wet?” she asks.

  I get it. “Because he walked around out here, probably naked, probably barefoot, and probably left footprints. That we’ll probably destroy if we keep tramping around.”

  “Right,” Barry says. “Oops.”

  “They’re going to have to go over this entire area with an ultraviolet light,” Callie says. “Inch by agonizing inch. Thank goodness that’s someone else’s job tonight.”

  Trace evidence, including latent prints, semen, and blood, can fluoresce under ultraviolet light. Callie is right. If he was nude out here and walking around with impunity, this is a potential hot spot for evidence.

  We move back through the sliding glass door, but continue gazing out into the yard.

  “You said you think the pool was about more than washing away evidence?” Barry asks.

  “I think…” My voice trails off. It comes to me the way it always does: swimming from out of some dark place, fully formed. “I think he liked the fact that he could do something dark out in the open. He killed this family in the middle of the day, he all but bathed in their blood, and then he stripped down and took a nice, long swim while their bodies began to bake in an unventilated home. In the meantime, the people in this neighborhood held their kids’ birthday parties and clipped their hedges and barbecued their steaks, not knowing that he was here, enjoying the day in his own way.” I look at Barry. “The feeling of triumph must have been overwhelming. Like a vampi
re walking around in the daylight. This scene is about power and ownership. Confidence in coming here during the day, confidence in his use of knife as the murder weapon. It fits.”

  “Sick fuck,” Barry says, shaking his head. He sighs. “So, he does a few laps in the pool, maybe lies around listening to the neighbors while he pats himself on the back. The question though is sequences. You say the scene downstairs was fresh. I’ll buy that, but how does it play? He kills two vics upstairs, creates a little abstract art with their blood, comes and swims, then kills the third victim? And what’s Sarah doing while all this is happening?”

  I shrug. “We don’t know yet.”

  “I hate when they make me work for it.” He sighs. “Hey, Thompson!” he bellows, startling me. As if by magic, the twentysomething uniform who had tried to prevent our entrance earlier today appears.

  “Yes, sir?” he asks.

  “Don’t let anyone into the backyard unless the head of CSU says so.”

  “Yes, sir.” He takes his place by the sliding glass door. He’s too young. Still excited about getting to be here.

  “Ready to see the bedroom?” Barry asks us.

  It’s a rhetorical question. We’re sniffing the trail, making things happen, putting the picture together in our heads.

  Get it while it’s hot.

  We leave the family room and head up the stairs, Barry taking the lead, Callie behind me. We reach the top. Barry peers into the room.

  “Is it necessary for both of you to come in?” a critical voice asks. “To tramp all over everything?”

  This sourness belongs to John Simmons, head of this shift’s LAPD Crime Scene Unit. He’s crabby, crusty, and absolutely untrusting of anyone but himself when it comes to handling the evidentiary part of a homicide. These traits are forgivable; he’s one of the best.

  “Three, actually,” Callie says, moving forward so that he can see her too.

  Simmons is not a young man. He’s been doing this for a very long time, he’s in his late fifties, and it shows. Smiles, for him, are like diamonds: rare, and only worn on the right occasions. Callie, it appears, merits one.

  “Calpurnia!” he cries, grinning from ear to ear. He moves toward us, shoving Barry and me out of the way to embrace her.

  Callie smiles and hugs him back while Barry looks on, bemused. I have seen this behavior before, and know its source. Barry does not.

  “I did an internship under Johnny while I was getting my degree in forensics,” Callie explains to Barry.

  “Very gifted,” Simmons says, fondly. “Calpurnia was one of my few successes. Someone who truly appreciates the science.”

  Simmons looks over at me now. His study of my scars is frank, but it doesn’t bother me. I know the basis of his interest is judgment-free curiosity.

  “Agent Barrett,” he says, nodding.

  “Hello, sir.”

  I’ve always called John Simmons “sir.” He’s always seemed like a “sir” to me, and he’s never disabused me of the fact. Callie is the only person I know of who calls him “Johnny,” just as he’s the only person I can imagine getting away with calling her “Calpurnia,” the given name she hates with such ferocity.

  “So, Calpurnia,” he says, turning back to Callie, “I trust you’ll watch over my crime scene? Ensure nothing gets trampled or touched that shouldn’t?”

  Callie raises her right hand, puts her left one on her heart. “I promise. And, Johnny?”

  She tells him about the backyard. He favors her with another fond smile.

  “I’ll get someone onto that directly.” He gives Barry and me a last, suspicious look before stepping aside.

  We enter the room. Simmons heads downstairs to crack the whip, leaving us alone. For all his grumbling, he understands this part of it—the need to soak it in. He’s always given me the space I need to do this, never crowding me or peering over my shoulder.

  Now that I don’t have my attention fixed on Sarah, I stop and really look.

  Mr. and Mrs. Dean and Laurel Kingsley, as I now know them to be, fall easily into the “fit-forties” niche. They are tanned, with good-looking faces, muscular legs, and a certain polish about them, a vitality I can still sense, even in these circumstances.

  “God, he was confident,” I say. “Not just in coming here on the weekend and in the daytime. He subdued two fit, healthy parents and two teenage children.”

  Dean’s eyes are wide and turning into the eyes of the dead, gray and filmy, like soap scum in a bathtub. Laurel’s eyes are closed. Both of them have their lips pulled back, reminding me of a snarling dog, or someone being forced to smile at gunpoint. Dean’s tongue protrudes, while Laurel’s teeth are clenched together.

  Forever now, I think. She’ll never pull her teeth apart.

  Something tells me that this carefully cared for woman would have hated that.

  “He would have used a weapon to intimidate them, and it wouldn’t have been just a knife,” I say. “Not threatening enough for so many victims. It would have been a gun. Something big and scary looking.”

  From the collarbone down, it’s as if they each swallowed a hand grenade.

  “A single long slice on each of them,” Barry says. “He used something sharp.”

  “Probably a scalpel,” I murmur. “Not clean, though. I see signs of hesitation in the wounds. Note the ragged spots?”

  “Yep.”

  He cut them open with a halting, trembling hand. Then he reached into them, grabbed hold of whatever he touched, and pulled, like a fisherman cleaning a fish. Standing over Mrs. Kingsley now, I’m able to make out the middle third of her spine; key organs aren’t there to block my view of it.

  “Hesitation cuts are odd,” I murmur.

  “Why?” Barry asks.

  “Because in every other way he was confident.” I lean forward for a closer look, examining the throats this time. “When he cut their throats, it was clean, no hesitation.” I stand up. “Maybe they weren’t hesitation marks. Maybe the cuts were uneven because he was excited. He might have come to orgasm slicing them open.”

  “Lovely,” Callie says.

  In contrast to Dean and Laurel, the boy—Michael—is untouched. He’s white from blood loss, but he was spared the indignity of being gutted.

  “Why’d he leave the boy alone?” Barry wonders.

  “He either wasn’t as important—or he was the most important one of all,” I say.

  Callie walks around the bed at a slow pace, examining the bodies. She casts looks around the floor, squints at the blood on the walls.

  “What do you see?” I ask.

  “The jugular veins of all three victims have been severed. Based on the color of the skin, they were bled dry. This was done prior to the disembowelment.”

  “How can you tell that?” Barry asks.

  “Not enough blood pooled in the abdominal cavities or visible on the exposed organs. Which is the general problem: Where’s the rest of the blood? I can account for place of death for one of the victims—the family room downstairs. What about the other two?” She gestures around the room. “The blood in here is primarily on the walls. There are some blotches on the carpet, but it’s not enough. The sheets and blankets from the bed are bloody, true, but the amount seems superficial.” She shakes her head. “No one had their throat cut in this room.”

  “I noticed the same thing earlier,” I say. “They were bled out somewhere else. Where?”

  A moment passes before we all gaze down the short hallway that leads from the master bedroom to the master bathroom. I move without speaking; Barry and Callie follow.

  Everything becomes clear as we enter.

  “Well,” Barry says, grim, “that explains it, all right.”

  The bathtub is a large one, made for lazing around in, built with languor in mind. It’s a little over one-quarter full of congealing blood.

  “He bled them out in the tub,” I murmur. I point to two large rusty blotches on the carpet. “Pulled them out when he was
done and laid them there, next to each other.”

  My mind is moving, my perception of the connectedness of things picking up speed. I turn without speaking and walk back into the bedroom. I examine the wrists and ankles of Dean and Laurel Kingsley. Callie and Barry have followed and look at me with their eyebrows raised.

  I point at the bodies. “No marks on their wrists or their ankles. You have two adults. You get them to strip naked, you put them into a tub, one at a time, you slit their throats, one at a time, bleed them out, one at a time—does that make any sense?”

  “I see what you mean,” Barry says. “They would have been fighting back. How does he get it done? I don’t think saying ‘Take a number, I’ll kill you next’ would’ve cut it.”

  “Occam’s razor,” I reply. “The simplest answer: They weren’t fighting back.”

  Barry frowns, perplexed, and then his face clears and he nods. “Right,” he says. “They were out cold. Maybe drugged.” He makes another note on his pad. “I’ll have them look for that during autopsy.”

  “You know,” I say, shaking my head, “if that’s true, then that makes three bodies he had to carry, including one he’d had to have moved up the stairs.” I look at Barry. “How tall would you say Mr. Kingsley is? Six feet?”

  “Six or six-one.” He nods. “Probably weighs one-ninety.”

  I whistle. “He’d have to muscle Kingsley into the tub, drugged…” I shake my head. “He’s either tall or strong or both.”

  “Helps.” Barry nods. “We’re not looking for a little guy.”

  “Of course, there could have been two of them,” Callie says, glancing at me. “We know about tag teams, don’t we?”

  She’s right. Partnerships in murder are not uncommon. My team and I have chased more than one twisted coffee klatch.

  “No visible evidence of sexual violation,” Barry notes, “but that doesn’t mean much. We won’t know for sure until the medical examiner gets a good look at the bodies.”

  “Have them check the boy first,” I say.

  Barry raises a single eyebrow at me.

  “He wasn’t gutted.” I point to Michael’s body. “And he’s clean. I think the killer washed him, postmortem. It looks like he combed his hair. It might not have been sexual—but there was something going on there. Less anger at Michael, for whatever reason.”