The Face of Death (6 page)

“If I was going to be careful, I wouldn’t go in there at all.”

“Even so.”

Even so, I think. What a great turn of phrase. Short and sweet, but fraught (another great word) with meaning.

You could die in there.

Even so.

8

I’M STANDING IN FRONT OF THE HOME’S OPEN FRONT DOOR. I’M
sweating and scratchy in the ill-fitting body armor I’ve thrown over my shirt. I have my Glock out and ready. The day is moving toward dusk, shadows are starting to stretch, and my heart is pounding like a drummer on speed.

I glance back at the law-enforcement presence behind me.

Barricades have been erected in front of the home, starting at the street. I count four patrol cars and the SWAT van. The uniforms are standing guard at the barricades, ready to speak one phrase, and one phrase only: “Go away.” The SWAT team waits inside the perimeter, a deadly group of six, black helmets gleaming. The lights on the patrol cars are all on, and they’re trained on the house.

On me.

Law enforcement is a dirty job. It’s about body fluids, decay, and people at their worst. It’s about life and death decisions made with too little information. The most trained cop or agent is still never trained enough to deal with everything. When crisis comes (and it
always
comes), it’s often solved the way we’re solving it now: an agent with a two-week class in hostage negotiation, called away from her vacation, wearing a loose-fitting Kevlar vest, doubting her ability to do what she’s about to do. In other words, we do our best with what we have.

I shut it all out and peer through the door.

A few drops of sweat pop out on my forehead. Salty pearls.

It’s a newer home for this area, a two-story with a stucco and wood exterior, topped by a clay-tile roof. Classic Southern California. It looks well cared for, possibly repainted in the last few years. Not huge, the owners weren’t rich, but nice enough. A middle-class family home not trying to be anything else.

“Sarah?” I call in. “It’s Smoky Barrett, honey. You asked to see me, and I’m here.”

No answer.

“I’m going to come in to see you, Sarah. I just want to talk to you. To find out what’s going on.” I pause. “I know you have a gun, honey. I need you to know that I have one too, and that I’m going to have it out. Don’t be scared when you see it. I’m not going to shoot you.”

I wait, and again, there’s no answer.

I sigh and curse and try to think of a reason to keep from walking into this house. Nothing comes to mind. Some part of me doesn’t want anything to come to mind. This is a not-so-secret truth of law enforcement: These moments are terrifying, but they are also when you feel most alive. I feel it now, adrenaline and endorphins, fear and euphoria. Wonderful and awful and addictive.

“I’m coming in now, Sarah. Don’t shoot me or yourself, okay?” I’m going for light humor, I come off sounding nervous. Which I am.

I squeeze the gun butt, take a deep breath, and walk through the front door.

The first thing I smell is murder.

A writer asked me once what murder smells like. He was looking for material for a book he was writing, some authenticity.

“It’s the blood,” I’d said. “Death stinks, but when you smell blood more than anything else, you’re usually smelling murder.”

He’d asked me then to describe the smell of blood.

“It’s like having a mouthful of pennies that you can’t get rid of.”

I smell it now, that cloying copper tang. It excites me at some level.

A killer was here. I hunt killers.

I keep walking. The entryway floor is red hardwood over concrete, quiet, polished, squeak-free. To my right is a spacious living room with medium-thick beige carpet, a fireplace, and vaulted ceilings. A two-section matching beige couch is arranged in an L-shape facing the fireplace. Large double-paned windows look out onto the lawn. Everything I can see is clean and nice but unimaginative. The owners were trying to impress by blending in, not by standing out.

The living room continues on the right toward the back of the house, meeting the dining room seamlessly. The beige carpet follows. A honey-colored wooden dining table sits under a light hanging from a long black chain attached to the high ceiling. A single white French door beyond the table leads into the kitchen. Again, all very unsurprising. Pleasing, not passionate.

Ahead of me is a stairway, zigging right to a landing, then zagging left to take you to its destination, the second floor. It’s covered with the same beige carpet. The walls on the way up the stairs are filled with framed photographs. I see a man and a woman standing together, smiling and young. The same man and woman, a little older now, holding a baby. The baby, I assume, grown into a teenage boy, handsome. Dark hair on all of them. I scan the photos and note no pictures of a girl.

To the left of the stairs is what I assume to be a family room. I can see thick sliding glass doors leading from that room into the now-shadowy backyard.

I smell blood, blood, and more blood. Even with every light in the house blazing the atmosphere is heavy and jagged. Harm happened here. Terror filled the air here. People died violently here, and the feel of it all is stifling. My heart rate continues to rat-a-tat-tat. The fear is still there, sharp and strong. The euphoria too.

“Sarah?” I call out.

No answer.

I move forward, toward the stairs. The smell of blood gets stronger. Now that I can see into the family room, I understand why. This room also has a couch, which faces a large-screen television. The carpet is
soaked
in crimson. Blood came out here by the pints, more than the pile or fabric could absorb. I can see puddles of it, dark, thick, and congealing. Whoever bled that much there, died there.

No bodies, though.

Means they were moved, I think.

I look, but I don’t see any blood trails, any evidence of bodies being dragged. All the blood is pooled, self-contained, except for the large, jagged patch nearest to me.

Maybe they were picked up.

That would mean someone strong. A human adult body, at dead-weight, is a formidable thing to lift, much less carry. Any fireman or paramedic will tell you this. Without the leverage a helpful and conscious person provides, carrying a grown man’s body can be like carrying a six-foot bag of bowling balls.

Unless the blood came from a child, in which case the lift and carry would not have been as difficult. Wonderful thought.

“Sarah?” I call out. “I’m coming up the stairs.” My voice sounds overloud to me, cautious.

I’m still sweating. Air-conditioning is off, I realize. Why? I’m noting a thousand things at once. Fear and euphoria, euphoria and fear.

I grip my gun with both hands and start to move up the stairs. I reach the first landing, and turn left. The smell of blood is even stronger now. I smell new scents. Familiar odors. Urine and feces. Other,
wetter
things. Guts, they have an aroma all their own.

I can hear something now. A faint sound. I cock my head and strain my ears.

Sarah is singing.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. My stomach does a single loop-de-loop as the adrenaline overwhelms the endorphins and fills me with the clangy-jitters.

Because this is not a happy sound. It’s a horror sound. It’s the kind of song you’d expect to hear coming out of the earth in a graveyard, at night, or maybe from the shadowy corner of a cell in a mental institution. It’s a single word and a single note, sung in a monotone.

“Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa.”

Over and over, that single word, that single note, in a voice just above a whisper.

I start to worry in a way I hadn’t before, because this is the sound of insanity.

I move up the last flight of stairs in quick strides, passing all those smiling faces in the photographs. Their teeth seem to glitter in the light.

Look at that, I think when I reach the top, more beige carpet.

I’m standing in a short hallway. A bathroom is at the end of the hall. Its lights are on, its door flung wide. I can see
(surprise!)
a beige tile floor, more evidence of the uninspired tastefulness I’ve come to expect from this home.

The hallway turns to the right at the bathroom, and I surmise that a bedroom door is just beyond that turn.

More beige, I’ll bet.

My heartbeat hammers, and
God
am I sweating.

To my immediate right is a set of white double doors. The entrance, I’m sure, to someplace terrible. The smells have all become stronger. Sarah’s horrible singing tickles my skin.

I reach out a hand to open the right door. It pauses just above the brass handle and trembles.

Girl with a gun on the other side of that. Girl with a gun, covered in blood, in a house that smells like death, singing like a crazy person.

Go on, I think. The worst thing she can do is shoot me.

No, moron. The worst thing she can do is look right at me and then blow her brains out or smile and blow her brains out or—

Enough, I command.

Silence inside. My soul goes quiet.

My hand stops trembling.

A new voice comes, one familiar to soldiers and cops and victims. It doesn’t offer comfort. It offers certainty. It speaks the hardest words and it never, ever lies. The patron saint of impossible choices.

Save her if you can. But kill her if you must.

My hand drops and I open the door.

9

THE ROOM IS DECORATED IN DEATH.

It’s an extra-large master bedroom. The king-sized bed has a large wooden hutch and a mirror behind it, and still takes up less than a third of the floor space. There is a plasma TV mounted on the wall. A ceiling fan hangs, turned off, its silence anointing all the other stillness in this room. The beige carpet is present, almost comforting under the circumstances.

Because blood is
everywhere
. Splashed on the ceiling, smeared on the off-yellow walls, beaded on the ceiling fan. The smell is overpowering; my mouth fills with still more pennies and I swallow my own saliva.

I count three bodies. A man, a woman, and what looks like a teenage boy. I recognize them all from the photographs on the stairway walls. They are all naked, all lying on their backs in the bed.

The bed itself has been stripped bare. The blankets and sheets lie on the floor, wadded and blood-soaked.

The man and woman are on either side, with the boy in the middle. The two adults have been disemboweled, in the worst sense of the word. Someone cut them from throat to crotch and then reached into them and
pulled.
They have been turned inside out. The throats of all three have been slit like hogs, sopping grins from ear to ear.

“Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa.”

My eyes go to the girl. She’s sitting on the windowsill, looking out into the night and what I can only guess is the backyard. I can see the dim silhouettes of other rooftops in the distance. It’s a twilight world, caught between the dying sun and the awakening streetlamps. Apropos.

The girl has a gun in her hand, and she’s pressing the barrel against her right temple. She hadn’t turned around at the sound of the door opening.

I can’t blame her. I wouldn’t want to turn around either.

Even as my heart hammers, the clinical part of me takes notes.

The blood on the walls was put there by the killer. I know this because I can see patterns. Slashes, swirls, and curlicues.

He played here. Used their blood like finger paint to make patterns. To say something.

I look over at Sarah. She continues to gaze out the window, unaware of me.

She’s not the perpetrator. Not enough blood on her, and the corpses are all too big. She’d never have gotten any of them up the stairs by herself.

I move forward into the room, trying not to step on evidence. I give up; I’d have to levitate.

Too much blood, but none of it in the right places. Where’s the murder scene?

Every bit of blood evidence I could see was purposeful. None of this was the result of a throat being slit.

Focus.

The investigator in me is a detached creature. It can view the worst of the worst with dispassion. But detachment isn’t what I need right now. I need empathy. I force myself to stop examining the scene, to stop calculating, and focus all of my attention on the girl.

“Sarah?” I keep my voice soft, unthreatening.

No response. She continues to sing in that awful monotone whisper.

“Sarah.” A little louder now.

Still no reaction. The gun stays at her temple. She keeps on singing.

“Sarah! It’s Smoky. Smoky Barrett!” My voice booms, louder than I’d intended. I startle myself.

Startle her too. The singing stops.

Quieter: “You asked for me, honey. I’m here. Look at me.”

This sudden silence is as bad in its own way as the singing had been. She’s still looking out the window. The gun hasn’t moved from her temple.

Sarah begins turning toward me. It’s a montage of slow, jerky motions, an old door opening on rusted hinges. The first thing I notice is her beauty, because of its contrast with the horror around her. She is ethereal, something from another world. She has dark, shimmering hair, the impossible hair you see on models in shampoo commercials. She’s Caucasian, with an exoticness about her that speaks of European roots. French, perhaps. Her features have that ideal symmetry that most women dream of having, and too many living in Los Angeles go under the knife to get.

Her face is the mirror opposite of mine, a counterpoint of perfection to my flaws.

She has blood splattered on her arms and face, and soaked into the short-sleeved long white nightgown she’s wearing. She has full, cupid-lips, and while I’m sure they’re normally a beautiful pink, right now they are the pale white of a fish belly.

I wonder about that nightgown. Why had she been wearing it in the afternoon?

Her eyes are a rich blue, heart-stopping. The look of defeat I find in them is so profound, it makes me queasy.

Pressed to all that beauty, the barrel of what I can now tell is a nine-mm Browning. This is no weak twenty-two. If she pulls the trigger, she’ll die.

“Sarah? Can you hear me now?”

She continues to look at me with those defeated, blue-flame eyes.

“Honey, it’s me. Smoky Barrett. They said you asked for me, and I got here as fast as I could. Can you talk to me?”

She sighs. It’s a full-body sigh, straight from the pit of her stomach. A sigh that says,
I want to lie down now, I want to lie down and die
. No other reply, but at least she keeps looking at me. I want this. I don’t want those eyes to start roaming, to remember the bodies on the bed.

“Sarah? I have an idea. Why don’t we walk out into the hallway? We don’t have to go anywhere else—we can sit at the top of the stairs, if you want. You can keep that gun pointed right where it is. We’ll just sit down, and I’ll wait until you’re ready to talk.” I lick my lips. “How about it, sweetheart?”

She cocks her head at me, a casual motion that becomes horrifying because she keeps the gun barrel against her temple
as
she does it. It makes her seem hollow. Puppet-like.

Another deep sigh, even more ragged sounding. Her face is expressionless. Only the sighs and the eyes show me what’s going on inside her.

Located somewhere in hell, I’d say.

A long moment passes, and then she nods.

I am almost thankful, at this moment, for Bonnie’s muteness. It’s made me comfortable with nonverbal communication, able to understand nuanced meaning regardless of words.

Okay,
that nod says.
But the gun stays, and I’ll probably still use it.

Just get her out of this room, I think. That’s the first step.

“Great, Sarah,” I reply, nodding back to her. “I’m going to put away my gun.” Her eyes follow my hands as I do this. “Now, I’m going to back out of the room. I want you to follow me. I want you to keep your eyes on mine. That’s
important,
Sarah. Only on me. Don’t look right or left or up or down. Look at me.”

I start to move backward, going in a straight line. I keep my eyes locked on hers, willing her to do the same. I stop when I’m standing in the doorway.

“Come on, honey. I’m right here. Walk to me.”

A hesitation, and then she slides off the windowsill. Kind of
pours
off it, like water. The gun is still at her head. Her eyes stay on mine as she moves toward the doorway. They never stray to the bed, not once.

Good, I think. Nothing like looking at that mess to make you want to kill yourself.

Now that she’s standing, I can tell that she’s about five foot two inches. In spite of her shock, her movements are graceful and precise. She glides.

She looks small surrounded by the murdered dead. Her bare feet are splashed with blood; she either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care.

I walk back to let her move through the doorway. She plods past me, keeping her eyes on my hands. A watchful zombie.

“I’m going to reach over and close the door. Okay, honey?”

She nods.
I don’t care,
the nod says.
About living or dying or anything at all.

I close the door and allow myself a moment of relief. I wipe sweat from my forehead with a trembling hand.

I take a deep breath and turn to Sarah. Now let’s see if I can get her to give me that gun.

“You know what? I’m going to sit down.”

I take a seat so the bedroom doors are at my back. I do this without breaking eye contact.
I’m here, I see you, you have all my attention,
I’m saying.

“It’s a little hard to talk while you’re up there and I’m down here,” I say, squinting up at her. I indicate the space in front of me. “Why don’t you take a seat?” I examine her face. “You look tired, sweetheart.”

That eerie head-cocking gesture again. I lean forward and pat the carpet.

“Come on, Sarah. It’s just you and me. No one is going to come in here until I tell them to. No one’s going to hurt you while I’m here. You wanted to see me.” I pat the carpet again, still maintaining eye contact. “Sit down and relax. I’ll shut up and we’ll wait here until you’re ready to tell me whatever it is you wanted to tell me.”

She moves without warning, stepping backward and then lowering herself to the floor. It’s done with the same pouring-of-water grace that she displayed as she slid off the windowsill. I wonder idly if she’s a dancer, or perhaps a gymnast.

I give her a reassuring smile. “Good, honey,” I say. “Very good.”

Her eyes stay on mine. The gun is still glued to her right temple.

As I consider my next move, I remember one of the key lessons my negotiations instructor gave:

“Speaking when you want, not speaking when you want, it’s all about control,” he’d observed. “When you’re dealing with someone who’s refusing to speak, and you don’t know what buttons to push—don’t know much about them personally, in other words—you need to shut up. Your instinct will be to fill that silence. Resist it. It’s like letting a phone ring—it makes you crazy, but it’ll stop ringing sooner or later. Same thing here. Wait them out, and they’ll fill that silence for you.”

I keep my face calm, my eyes on hers, and I stay silent.

Sarah’s face is a superlative of stillness, and absence of motion, formed from wax. The corners of her mouth don’t twitch. I feel like I’m having a staring contest with a mannequin that blinks.

Her blue eyes are the most “alive” part of her, and even they seem glassy and unreal.

I examine the blood on her as I wait.

The spatter on the right side of her face looks like a collection of sideways teardrops. Elongated, as though each drop hit her skin with force and then was stretched by inertia.

Flung there, maybe? By fingertips soaked in blood?

Her nightgown is a mess. The front is soaked. I see spots at the knees.

As if she knelt. Maybe she was trying to revive someone?

My train of thought derails when she blinks, sighs, and then looks away.

“Are you really Smoky Barrett?” she asks. It’s a tired voice, filled with defeat and doubt.

Hearing her speak is both elating and surreal. Her voice is dusky and subdued, older than she is, a hint of the woman she’ll become.

“Yep,” I reply. I point to my scars. “Can’t fake these.”

She keeps the gun to her head, but as she looks at my scars, sorrow replaces some of the deadness in her face.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “For what happened to you. I read about it. It made me cry.”

“Thank you.”

Wait for her. Don’t press.

She looks down. Sighs. Looks back up at me.

“I know what it’s like,” she says.

“What, honey?” I ask in a soft voice. “You know what what’s like?”

I watch the pain rise in her eyes, like two moons being filled up with blood.

“I know what it’s like to lose everything you love,” she says, her voice cracking, then dropping to a whisper. “I’ve been losing things since I was six.”

“Is that why you wanted to see me? To tell me about what happened then?”

“When I was six,” she says, continuing as though I hadn’t said anything, “he started it all by murdering my mother and my father.”

“Who is ‘he,’ Sarah?”

She locks eyes with me, something in them flares up for a moment before dying back down.

What was that? I wonder. Sorrow? Anger?

It was something huge, that’s for sure. That was no minnow that had swum to the surface before diving back down into deeper waters, it was a soul-leviathan.

“He,” she says, her voice flat. “The Stranger. The one who killed my parents. The one who kills anything I love. The…
artist
.” The way she says “artist,” she could be saying “child molester” or “shit on a hot sidewalk.” The revulsion is strong and pure and palpable.

“Did The Stranger do this, Sarah? Was he here, in this house?”

Her sorrow and fear are swept away by a look of cynicism that rocks me. It’s far, far too terrible and cunning for a sixteen-year-old girl. If that dusky voice belongs to a twenty-five-year-old woman, this look belongs to a world-worn hag.

“Don’t
humor
me!” she cries, her voice high-pitched and derisive. “I know you’re only listening to me because of”—she wiggles the gun—“this. You don’t really believe me!”

What just happened here?

The quiet air between us starts to hum.

You’re losing her, I realize. Fear thrills through me.

Do something!

I gaze into those rage-filled eyes. I remember what Alan said.

Don’t lie, I think. Truth. Only truth. She’ll smell a lie from a thousand yards away right now and then it’s game over.

My words come from somewhere effortless, almost extemporaneous. “I’ll tell you what I care about right now, Sarah,” I say, my voice strong. “I care about
you.
I know you didn’t do what happened here. I know that you’re very close to killing yourself. I know you asked for me, and that means that
maybe
I have something to give you, something to tell you, that will keep you from pulling that trigger.” I lean forward. “Honey, I don’t know enough about anything going on here to
humor
you, I promise. All I’m trying to do is understand. Help me understand. Please. You asked for me. Why? Why did you ask for me, Sarah?” I wish I could reach out and shake her. I plead instead. “Please tell me.”

Don’t die, I think. Not here, not like this.

“Please, Sarah. Talk to me. Make me understand.”

The words work: The anger leaves her eyes. Her trigger finger relaxes and she looks away.