The Face of Death (8 page)

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 stranger 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?”

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.