The Face of Death (7 page)

Thank God, I think, fighting down a bubble of semi-hysteria, a bout of the

(clangy-jitters)

When she looks back, anguish has replaced the rage.

“You’re my last hope,” she says. Her voice is small and hollow.

“I’m listening, Sarah,” I urge her. “Tell me. Last hope for what?”

“Last hope…” She sighs, and it rattles in her throat. “Of finding someone that’ll believe I’m not just bad luck,” she whispers. “That’ll believe The Stranger is real.”

I stare at her, incredulous.

“
Believe
you?” I blurt. I yank a thumb behind me, indicating the bedroom and what’s inside. “Sarah, I know something happened here that you didn’t have anything to do with. And I’m willing to listen to whatever you have to say.”

I think she’s caught off guard by the fact that my response comes as such a reflex action and that I seem so genuinely astonished at the idea of
not
taking her seriously. Hope lights up her eyes and wars with that terrible cynicism. Her face twists, her mouth wrenches. She looks like a fish drowning in the air.

“Really?”
she asks in an agonized whisper.

“Really.”
I pause. “Sarah, I don’t understand what’s happened to you up to this point. But from what I’ve seen so far, the person responsible for this had to be strong. Stronger than you. Or me, for that matter.”

A kind of fearful wonder runs through her eyes. “Did he…” Her lower lip trembles. “Do you mean that you can
tell
he was here?”

“Yep.”

Is that so?

But there’s another possibility, yes? Maybe she made the father do all the heavy lifting at gunpoint. She could still be the one.

I dismiss the thought with an imaginary wave of my hand.

Too advanced, too dark. She’s too young to have honed her tastes to that degree.

“Maybe,” Sarah whispers, more to herself than me. “Maybe he screwed up this time.”

Her face crumples, then smoothes back out, crumples, then smoothes back out. Hope and despair battle for the steering wheel. She drops the gun. She brings her hands to her face. A moment later, that raw, naked anguish again. It bursts from her, piercing, primal, terrible, pure. The sound of a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf.

I grab the gun from the carpet, say “Thank God” to myself once, safety it, and stuff it into the waist of my jeans. I grab Sarah as she shrieks, and stuff her into the space between my arms and my chest.

Her grief is a hurricane. It pounds against me.

I hold her tight, and we ride out the storm.

I rock and croon and say wordless things and feel helpless and miserable and yet relieved.

Better crying than dead.

When it’s over, I’m soaked with tears. Sarah clings to me, semi-boneless. She’s exhausted.

In spite of this, she struggles and pushes away from me. Her face is swollen from crying, and pale.

“Smoky?” she says. Her voice is faint.

“Yes, Sarah?”

She looks at me, and I’m surprised at the strength I see, swimming up through the exhaustion that’s pulling her down.

“I need you to promise me you’ll do something.”

“What?”

She points down the hall. “My bedroom is back there. In a drawer by the bed is my diary. Everything is in it, everything about The Stranger.” She grips my arms. “
Promise
me you’ll read it.
You
—not someone else.” Her voice is fierce.
“Promise me.”

“I promise,” I say without hesitation.

At this point, you couldn’t keep me from it.

“Thanks,” she whispers.

Her eyes roll up into her head and she passes out in my arms.

I shiver once, an after-reaction. I unclip the radio from my belt and turn it on.

“All clear in here,” I say into it, my voice steadier than I feel. “Send in a medic for the girl.”

10

NIGHT HAS OFFICIALLY FALLEN IN CANOGA PARK. THE HOUSE IS
lit up by patrol cars and streetlamps, but SWAT is getting ready to leave and the helicopter has gone. The neighborhood is quiet again, though I can hear the sounds of the city just a few blocks away. Windows are lit up along the street, families are inside, every curtain is drawn. I imagine if I checked them, I’d find every door locked too.

“Good work,” Dawes said to me as we watched the EMTs load an unconscious Sarah into the back of an ambulance. They were moving fast; she’d started to turn gray and her teeth were chattering. Signs of shock.

“Thanks.”

“I mean it, Agent Barrett. This could have turned out a lot worse.” He pauses. “We had a hostage situation six months ago. A meth-freak dad with a gun. He’d beat up his wife, but what really worried us was the fact that he was waving that gun around with one hand while he cradled his five-month-old daughter in his free arm.”

“Bad,” I say.

“Real bad. Add to it that he was high, I mean flying. You ever see a meth-freak when they’re wigging out? It’s a combination of hallucinations and paranoia. Not much for a hostage negotiator to work with.”

“So what happened?”

Dawes looks away for a moment, but not before I catch a glimpse of the grief in his eyes.

“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.