The Face of Death

  “Gotcha,” Barry says, jotting in his notepad.

  I gaze around the room, at the streaks of blood on the walls and ceilings. In some places it seems splashed, like an artist had tossed a can of paint onto a blank canvas. But there are intricacies as well. Curls and symbols. Streaks. The most obvious thing about it is that it is everywhere.

  “The blood is key to him,” I murmur. “And the disembowelment. There’s no evidence of torture on any of the victims, and they were bled out prior to being cut open. Their pain wasn’t important to him. He wanted what was inside. Especially the blood.”

  “Why?” Barry asks.

  “I can’t say. There’s too many possible paradigms when it comes to blood. Blood is life, you can drink blood, you can use blood to tell the future—take your pick. But it’s important.” I shake my head. “Strange.”

  “What?”

  “Everything I’ve seen so far points to a disorganized offender. The mutilation, the blood painting. Disorganized offenders are chaotic. They have trouble planning and they get caught up in the moment. They lose control.”

  “So?”

  “So how is it that the boy wasn’t gutted and Sarah is still alive? It doesn’t fit.”

  Barry gives me a considering look. Shrugs.

  “Let’s go see her room,” he says. “Maybe there’ll be some answers there.”

  11

  “WOW,” CALLIE REMARKS.

  The reason for this soft exclamation is twofold.

  First, and most obvious, the words written on the blank wall next to the bed.

  “Is that blood?” Barry asks.

  “Yes,” Callie confirms.

  The letters are large. The slashes that form them are angry, each one a mark of hate and rage.

  THIS PLACE = PAIN

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Barry gripes.

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “But it was important to him.”

  Just like the blood and the disembowelment.

  “Interesting that he wrote it in Sarah’s bedroom, don’t you think?” Callie asks.

  “Yeah, yeah, puzzle puzzle cauldron bubble,” Barry grumbles. “Why can’t they ever write anything useful. Like: ‘Hi, my name is John Smith, you can find me at 222 Oak Street. I confess.’”

  The second reason for Callie’s “wow” can be found in the décor. The memory of standing in Alexa’s room earlier today comes to me by comparison. Sarah’s room is about as far from froufrou girly-girl as you can get.

  The carpet is black. The drapes on the windows are black and they’re pulled shut. The bed, a queen-sized four-poster, isn’t black—but the pillowcases, sheets, and comforter on it are. It all contrasts with the white of the walls.

  The room itself is a good-sized room for a child. It’s about half as big as the standard-sized “kids’ room” in most homes, perhaps ten by fifteen. Even with the large bed, a dresser, a small computer desk, a bookshelf, and an end table with drawers next to the bed, space remains in the center of the room to move around in. The extra space doesn’t help. The room feels stark and isolated.

  “I’m no expert,” Barry says, “but it looks to me like this kid has problems. And I’m not just talking about a bunch of dead people in her house.”

  I examine the wooden end table next to the bed. It’s about the height and width of a barstool. A black alarm clock sits on top of it. Its three small drawers are what interest me the most.

  “Can we get someone in here to fingerprint this?” I ask Barry. “Now, I mean?”

  He shrugs. “I guess. Why?”

  I relate the end of my conversation with Sarah. When I finish, Barry looks uncomfortable.

  “You shouldn’t have made that promise, Smoky,” he says. “I can’t let you take the diary. Period. You know that.”

  I look at him, startled. He’s right, I do know it. It goes against the chain of evidence, and at least a dozen other forensic rules, the violation of which would probably send John Simmons into some kind of apoplectic seizure.

  “Let’s get Johnny up here,” Callie says. “I have an idea on how to handle this.”

  Simmons looks around Sarah Kingsley’s bedroom. “So, Calpurnia. Explain to me what it is you’re trying to accomplish here.”

  “Obviously, Johnny, Smoky can’t take the diary. My idea was to make a copy via photographs of each page.”

  “You want my photographer to spend time—now—taking a picture of every page in the girl’s diary?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why should I give this a particular priority?”

  “Because you can, honey-love, and because it’s necessary.”

  “Fine, then,” he says, turning away and heading toward the door. “I’ll send Dan up.”

  I stare after him, bemused at his instantaneous and complete capitulation.

  “How was that so easy?” Barry asks.

  “The magic word was ‘necessary,’” Callie says. “Johnny won’t tolerate wasted motion on his crime scene. But if something is needed from his team to clear a case, he’ll work them for days.” She gives us a wry smile. “I speak from experience.”

  The diary is black, of course. Smooth black leather and small. It’s not masculine or feminine. It’s functional.

  Blushing Dan the Photographer Man is here, camera ready.

  “What we want is an image of each page, in sequence, large enough to be printed out on letter-sized paper and read.”

  Dan nods. “You want to photocopy the diary with the camera.”

  “Exactly right,” Callie says.

  Dan blushes, again. He coughs. This proximity to Callie seems to be overwhelming him. “No—uh—problem,” he manages to stammer out. “I have a spare one gigabyte memory card I can use and let you take with you.”

  “All we need then, is someone to prop it open.” She holds up her hands, showing the surgical gloves she’s already slipped on. “That would be me.”

  Dan calms down once he’s back and safe behind his camera lens. Barry and I watch as he shoots. The room is quiet, punctuated by the sound of the camera firing and by Dan murmuring for Callie to turn the pages when needed.

  I glimpse Sarah’s handwriting and at last see a hint of femininity. It’s precise without being prissy. A smooth, exacting cursive, written in—surprise—black ink.

  There’s a lot of it. Page after page after page. I find myself wondering what a girl who surrounds herself with the color black writes about. I find myself wondering if I want to know.

  This is a lifelong battle for me: the struggle to “unknow” things. I am aware of the beauty of life, when it exists. But I’m also never unaware of how terrible life can become, or how monstrous. Happiness, in my estimate, would be an easier state to achieve if I didn’t have to reconcile these opposing forces, if I never had to ask the question: “How can I be happy when I know, right now, at this very moment, that someone else is experiencing something terrible?”

  I remember flying into Los Angeles at night with Matt and Alexa. We were coming home from a vacation. Alexa had the window seat and as we’d come down through the clouds, she’d gasped.

  “Look, Mommy!”

  I’d leaned over and looked through the window. I’d seen Los Angeles below, outlined in a sea of lights that stretched from horizon to horizon.

  “Isn’t it pretty?” Alexa had exclaimed.

  I’d smiled. “It sure is, honey.”

  It had been pretty. But it was also terrifying. I knew right then, at that very moment, that sharks were swimming down there in that sea of lights. I knew that as Alexa smiled and goggled, women were getting raped down there, children were being molested, someone was screaming as they died too soon.

  My dad once told me, “Given a choice, the average man would rather smile than hear the truth.”

  I had found that to be true, in victims, and in myself.

  It was all just wishful thinking, that hope of “unknowing.” I would read the diary and I’d let that black
cursive writing take me wherever it wanted to take me, and then I’d know whatever it wanted me to know.

  The sound of the camera fills the room, startling me each time it goes off, like gunfire.

  It’s not quite nine o’clock when I head downstairs. John Simmons sees Barry and me and motions us over. He’s holding a digital camera in his hand.

  “I thought you’d be pleased to know,” he says, “that we were able to lift a set of latent footprints from the tile. Very clean.”

  “That’s great,” I reply.

  “Too bad there’s no database to run it against,” Barry remarks.

  “Even so, the prints are noteworthy.”

  Barry frowns. “How’s that?”

  Simmons hands over the camera. “See for yourself.”

  It’s a digital 35mm SLR camera, with an LCD screen on the back so that you can preview the photos taken. The resolution on these cameras is significant enough these days that they are the primary tool used to record raised prints. The photo on the screen is small, but we can see what John is referring to.

  “Are those scars?” I ask.

  “I believe so.”

  The sole of the foot is covered with them. They are all long and thin and horizontal, going from one side of the foot to the next, none of them lengthwise.

  Barry hands the camera back to Simmons. “You seen anything like that before?”

  “I have, in fact. I’ve done volunteer work for Amnesty International on three occasions, assisting in postmortem examinations of possible torture victims as well as evidence collection from suspected torture sites. These scars resemble the kind created when the soles of the feet are caned or switched.”

  I wince. “I take it that’s painful?”

  “Excruciating. Done inexpertly—or expertly depending on your goal, I suppose—it can be crippling, but it is generally done to punish, not to maim.”

  “These on both feet?” Barry asks.

  “Both.”

  We’re silent, considering this turn of events. The possibility that our perpetrator had been tortured sometime in his life was germane to his profile, if nothing else.

  “It fits with the picture of him as a disorganized offender,” I remark.

  Even if other things don’t.

  “Caning of the feet is rare here,” Simmons says. “Its use is predominant in South America and parts of the Middle East, as well as Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines.”

  “Anything else we should know about?” Barry asks.

  “Not as yet. We’ll be capturing the contents of the filtration system, of course, so we’ll have to wait and see.”

  Forensic handling of a crime scene is a process of identification and individualization. Individualization occurs when a piece of evidence comes from a unique source. Fingerprints are individualized to a single person. Bullets can, in most cases, be individualized to a specific weapon. DNA is the ultimate in individualization.

  The vast majority of evidence can only be identified. Identification is the process of classifying evidence as coming from a common—but not unique—source. Metal shavings are found in the crushed skull of a victim. The shavings are examined and identified as a metal commonly used in making hammers. Identification.

  The paths can cross. We have a suspect. We check to see if the suspect owns a hammer. He does. Marks on the victim’s skull match the claw of the suspect’s hammer and further investigation finds the victim’s DNA on the edges of the claw. We fingerprint the handle and find only the suspect’s prints on it. Identification and individualization, back and forth, conspiring to seal his fate.

  It’s a laborious process, one that requires not just technical expertise, but the ability to apply logic and connect the dots. I had observed the visible, the blood in the pool water, and surmised that our suspect took a swim. Callie processed this information, saw the wet tile, and led us to an invisible footprint.

  The precision of Sherlock Holmes is a nice fantasy. The reality is that we are thinking vacuums. We suck up everything and then we parse it and hope we’ll understand what we find.

  I’m standing on the lawn with Barry, waiting for Callie to wrap up with Photographer Dan. It’s been a long day, and the thinking vacuums are in there sucking away. Alan should be wrapping up soon. I ache to leave.

  Barry pulls a pack of Marlboros from his front shirt pocket. My old brand, I think, wistful.

  “You want one?” he asks, offering the pack to me.

  I fight the omnipresent urge to accept. “No, thanks.”

  “You quit?”

  “I’ll have to live vicariously through you.”

  “Hey,” he says, magnanimous, as he strikes a match. “I’ll even blow some smoke into your face, if you ask me nice.”

  He brings the flame close, gets his cherry tip, and takes a deep, satisfying drag.

  I watch him blow the smoke out. It forms a huge cloud that hangs in front of us, no breeze available to move it along. My nostrils flare. The sweet smell of addiction, yum, yum, yum.

  “I’m gonna go see the girl in the morning,” Barry says. “Be helpful if you came along.”

  “Call me early on my cell.”

  “You got it.” He puffs again, indicates the house with a nod. “How do you see it so far?”

  “A lot of it is confusing. The one thing that’s clear is that there’s a message behind his actions. The question is: Is it a message for us, or just for himself? Does he want us to understand what all that blood means, is that why he left the words on the wall? Was that a calculated act? Or was he doing it because voices in his head told him to?” I turn so I’m facing the house. “We do know he’s confident and bold and competent. We don’t know if he’s an organized or disorganized offender. We don’t know what he fears, yet.”

  Barry frowns. “Fears? What do you mean?”

  “Serial killers are narcissists. They lack empathy. They don’t choose their method of death or torture based on what they think their victims will fear. That would require empathy. They choose their methods and their victims based on what they fear. A man who fears rejection from beautiful blond women kidnaps and tortures them with lit cigarettes until they tell him they love him, because beautiful blond Mommy burnt his penis with her menthols. That’s oversimplified, but it’s the basic truth. Method and victim are everything. The question I still need to answer is: Who was the victim here? Sarah or the Kingsleys or both? The answer to that will lead us to everything.”

  Barry stares at me. “You got some dark shit going on in that mind of yours, Barrett.”

  I’m about to reply when my cell phone rings.

  “Is this Agent Barrett?” A man’s voice, vaguely familiar to me.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Al Hoffman, ma’am. I’m on the hotline.”

  The “hotline” is what we call the LA FBI’s 24–7 version of an answering service. They have the contact numbers for everyone from the Assistant Director on down. If someone from Quantico wants to talk to someone here, for example, and it’s after hours, they call the hotline.

  “What’s up, Al?”

  “I just got a weird anonymous call for you.”

  My hackles go up.

  “Male or female?”

  “Male. Voice was muffled, like he was holding something over the mouthpiece.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, quote: ‘Tell the bitch with the scars that there’s been another killing, and that this place equals justice.’ He gave me an address in Granada Hills.”

  I’m silent.

  “Agent Barrett?”

  “Did you get a trace on the number, Al?”

  This question is a formality. The hotline had automatic tracing installed post 9/11, but that’s supposed to be classified information.

  “It’s a cell phone. Probably cloned, stolen, or untraceable disposable.”

  “Give me the number anyway. And the address, please.”

  He reads off the address. I than
k him and hang up.

  “What’s going on?”

  I tell Barry about the call.

  He stares at me for a moment. “Fuck and shit and all the rest!” he exclaims. “You kidding me? You think it’s for real?”

  “‘This place equals justice’? That’s too close, too coincidental. It’s for real.”

  “This nut really knows how to ruin a Saturday night,” he mutters.

  He tosses his cigarette into the street. “Lemme tell Simmons I’m leaving. You grab Red and I guess we’ll go and see what the difference between pain and justice is for this guy.”

  Alan is still nowhere to be seen. I call him on his cell phone.

  “I’m three doors down eating cookies with Mrs. Monaghan,” he says. “A very nice lady who also volunteers with the neighborhood watch.”

  Alan is inhumanly patient when it comes to witness interviews. Unfazeable. His “nice lady who volunteers with the neighborhood watch” probably translates to “cranky, nosy woman who watches everybody with a sharp eye and talks about them with an even sharper tongue.”

  I fill him in on the phone call from the hotline.

  “Want me to come with?” he asks.

  “No, you and Ned eat your cookies and finish the canvass.”

  “We will, but call me and let me know what happened. And be careful.”

  I consider using the same “If I was going to be careful, I wouldn’t be going” quip I’d given Dawes but decide against it. Alan’s voice sounds too serious.

  “I will be,” I reply instead.

  12

  WE’VE TAKEN THE 118 FREEWAY HEADING EAST. THE ROAD IS half-packed, neither busy nor deserted, the constant state of freeways in Los Angeles.

  I feel tense and crabby and dark. This day continues to fall farther and farther down the rabbit hole.

  “Why you?” Callie asks, startling me from my self-pity party.

  “Why me what?”