The Face of Death (27 page)

Vargas holds up the switch. Smiles.

“Teach the property. But never leave marks that make the property less valuable. Jose remembers.”

Vargas pulls his arm back. His mouth falls open. It’s almost cavernous. An indescribably hungry look comes over him. I doubt he’s aware of it. The switch pauses at the top of the arc, trembles in his excited hand, and then comes whistling down. The impact on her feet is barely audible, but the girl’s response is extreme. Her eyes bug out, her mouth opens in a wide O. A moment later, silent tears begin to fall. She clenches her teeth, trying to ride the pain.

“Say the words,
puta
!” Vargas barks.

“Y-you are the God,” the girl stammers. “So I t-thank you the God.”

“Accent sounds Russian,” James notes.

Vargas comes down with the switch again. His eyes are brighter, his mouth wider. He drools a little. Madness.

This time, the girl arches her whole body, and cries out.

“The words!” Vargas shouts, grinning now.

It goes on like this a few more times. When it’s over, Vargas is panting and sweating and his eyes are fluttering. I can see a bulge in his jeans. The girl sobs openly.

Vargas stumbles a little, seems to remember his original purpose. He brushes a lock of greasy hair from his eyes, gives the camera another sly and dirty smile.

“You see? I remember
everything
.” The girl sobs louder. “Shut up, fucking
puta
!” Vargas snarls at her, incensed by the interruption. She puts her hands to her mouth to stifle the noise.

“I think, Mr. You Know Who, that you will give Jose money for what he remembers.” Another grotesque smile. “You go now, watch this again. I know you will, anyway, yes? Jose remembers that about you. You enjoy these things. You watch this again and you think about what you are going to say to Jose when you talk to him.
Adios.
”

Vargas glances at the sobbing girl, rubs his crotch, and smiles at the camera.

Blackness.

“Wow,” I say. I feel ill.

“Mr. You Know Who. That’s original. So we have Vargas blackmailing someone who’s familiar with this whole practice of caning feet,” Alan says.

“Behavior modification,” James opines. “Torture combined with forced, repetitive usage of a degrading phrase that admits subservience.”

“Beats the feet so as not to mark up other parts of the body and reduce value,” Alan adds.

“It continues to fit,” I say. “The Stranger has the same marks. That’s no coincidence. Vargas’s attempt at blackmail confirms the involvement of others and it points toward the sexual abuse, as well.”

“You know,” Alan says, shaking his head, “if he’d stuck with Vargas and his kind, I might not have much of a problem with our perp.” His face is grim. “Man that would do that to a child? That’s a man that deserves to die.”

No one argues this point.

“I did a thorough search of his hard drive,” Callie says. “I was hopeful. Vargas encoded the video for some reason, I thought he might have uploaded it to a server somewhere or the like.” She shakes her head. “No such luck. I suppose he encoded it and then he burned it to disc and sent it to whomever he was blackmailing.”

“This seems to lead back to the human-trafficking angle,” I say. “Barry says that was handled at our level. Here in California, actually. It’s a key point of follow-up.” I rub my face, move back to the front of the office. “Okay, what else?”

“Key change in his behavior,” James says. “When he murdered the Langstroms, he took steps to conceal himself. Now he’s stepped out into the open. Why?”

“All kinds of reasons that could be,” Alan rumbles. “Maybe he’s sick, dying, running out of time. Maybe it’s taken him a while to figure out the identities of the guys he thinks need killing. The interesting confluence is that it’s all happening at the same time that Vargas is getting his blackmail scheme going. Looks like some things that were buried dug themselves up.”

“It points to an endgame,” I say. “He knows that we’ll be after him. Hell, he’s invited it. He sees things coming to a conclusion.”

“So where do we go from here, honey-love?”

I consider this question. We have many different directions we could go in. Which are the most likely to bear fruit?

“Time to divide and conquer. Alan, I want you to take the Langstroms. Gather up all the information you can get on them, their deaths, their background. No stone unturned. Find out who the grandfather is. If my hunch is right, he’s important. Call Barry if you need someone to run local interference.”

“Got it.”

“James, I want you to work on two things. I want a VICAP search on the murders of our poet and philosophy student. Let’s see if we can find out who they were.”

VICAP stands for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Its purpose is to create a collated database of violent crimes that allows for a nationwide cross-referencing of violent acts.

“Fine. The second thing?”

I fill him in on the computer program found on Michael Kingsley’s computer. “Check the progress with that, see if they need assistance with resources. And I’m going to want to have a talk in my office shortly.”

“Very well.”

He doesn’t ask what I mean when I say we need to “talk.” He knows I want us to have a closer mental look at The Stranger together, the only “meeting of the minds” he and I are capable of.

“And me?” Callie asks.

“Call Barry and see where things stand on the sketch artist for the tattoo. Also, see if he’s made any progress on identifying the Russian girl.”

“Anything else?”

“Not for now. Okay, that’s it.”

Everyone gets rolling. I go into my own office and close the door. I need to go see AD Jones, to find out what he knows about Vargas, but in light of everything I read last night, there’s something else that needs doing first. I dial Tommy’s number. He answers on the second ring.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” I reply, smiling to myself. “I need a professional favor from you.”

“Name it.”

“I need a bodyguard.”

“For you?”

“No. For the victim I told you about. Sixteen-year-old girl named Sarah Langstrom.”

Tommy is all business. “Do we know who’s after her?”

“Not by sight.”

“Do we know when he’s going to do it?”

“No. And there’s a twist. She’s probably only the target by proxy; it’s the people close to her that end up dead.”

He pauses. “I can’t do it myself. You know I would if I could, but I’m in the middle of something.”

“I know.” I don’t press him on what his “middle of something” is. Tommy’s use of the understatement is an art form. For all I know, he’s talking to me on the phone while his car is surrounded by gunmen.

“Don’t you have people for this?” he asks.

“For general surveillance, but I want a full-time professional bodyguard. I’ll sell it to the boss and the Bureau will pay the bills.”

“Gotcha. Well, I have someone. A woman. She’s good.”

I sense hesitation in his voice.

“What?” I ask.

“Just rumors.”

“About her?”

“Yeah.”

“Like?”

“That she spent some time killing people.”

I pause.

“What kind of people?” I ask.

“The kind of people the United States government needs dead.” He pauses. “Allegedly. If you believe in stuff like that.”

I digest this.

“What do you think about her, Tommy?”

“She’s loyal and she’s lethal. You can trust her.”

I rub my eyes, thinking. I sigh. “Fine. Give her my number.”

“Will do.”

“You know some interesting people, Tommy.”

“Like you.”

I smile, again. “Yeah. Like me.”

“I have to go.”

“I know, I know. You’re in the middle of something. I’ll call you later.”

He hangs up. I sit for a moment, wondering what someone described as “loyal and lethal” will be like. A knock on the door interrupts this train of thought.

James pokes his head in.

“Are you ready?” he asks.

I glance at the clock on my wall. AD Jones can wait a little while longer, I suppose.

“Yeah. Let’s talk about our psycho.”

31

JAMES AND I ARE IN MY OFFICE, BEHIND CLOSED DOORS.

Just thee and me, my disagreeable friend.

James, misanthropic James, has the same gift I do. His lack of tact, his rudeness—the man is a consummate asshole, it’s true—none of that matters when we sit down to commiserate on evil. He sees it like I do. He hears and feels and understands.

“You have an edge on me, James. You finished the diary. Did you read the notes I faxed you?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what you think.”

He stares at a space on the wall above my head.

“I believe the revenge motive is correct. The video with Vargas, the messages on the wall—the references to justice in particular—it all fits. The thing that I felt reading the diary, however, is that he’s begun to mix his paradigms.”

“English, James.”

“Look, the original purpose is a pure one, within its own framework. Revenge. He was the recipient of bad acts. He’s visiting bad acts on those directly responsible—or in Sarah’s case, we’re theorizing—the descendants of those directly responsible. That’s the path we’re following, and I believe it will bear fruit.” He leans back in his chair. “But let’s examine the way in which he dispenses justice.”

“Pain.”

James smiles, a rare thing. “That’s right. The endgame is murder, sure. But how quickly you arrive at dead…well, that depends on how much pain he thinks you deserve. He’s obsessed with the subject. I think he’s crossed the line from dispensing justice with clarity to a true enjoyment of inflicting pain.”

I consider this. The behavior James is describing is common, too common. The abused becomes the abuser. Molest a child, and he often grows up to become the molester. Violence is contagious.

I imagine The Stranger, on his knees like that poor blond girl in the video, while some drooling stranger whips his feet, again and again.

Pain.

He grows up, chock-full of rage, and he decides it’s time for pay-back. He gets going on his plan, and everything is moving along, but then somewhere along the way, a switch flips. The rage he’s attempting to expiate mutates into a twisted type of
joy
.

So much better to be the one holding the whip than the one being struck. So much better, in fact, that it begins to feel good. Hell, it begins to feel
great
. Once an individual falls down that rabbit hole, the white lines blur into gray and a journey back is pretty much impossible. It would explain the contradictions at the scenes. The blood-painting and erection versus the calm, cool, and collected of a man-with-a-plan.

“So he likes it now,” I say.

“I think he
needs
it,” James replies. “And the best thing is, he’s got the perfect rationalization in place. That old standby: The end justifies the means. He’s owed, the guilty will be punished. If innocents suffer along the way, that’s unfortunate.”

“Not really unfortunate, though, you’re saying.”

“Correct. Look at Sarah. He’s loving what he’s done to her. It moves him.” James shrugs. “He’s hooked. I bet his creativity extends further, to other victims. If we scratch the surface, I think we’re going to find imaginative, colorful deaths, all of them variations on a quintessence of pain.”

Everything he’s saying is unproven and for now, unprovable. But it
feels right.
It shifts something inside me, lets it slide into an oily waiting place. He’s not delusional. He knows what he’s doing and why, and his victims aren’t just of a type—they’re directly involved with his past.
But
—and it’s a big
but
—he’s hooked on death now. Murder isn’t just a resolution to injustice anymore. It’s become a sexual act.

“Let’s talk about two specific things,” I say. “The change in his behavior and his plan for how to end things for Sarah.”

James shakes his head. “I’m concerned about the first. I can understand him going public with his actions and the reasons for that. It goes hand and hand with revenge as a motive. You don’t just want them to experience justice, you want the world to know why.”

“Sure.”

“But he’s become aware of changes, in himself. I think his original plan might have involved him getting caught, going out in a blaze of glory that would highlight his story for the world. But now he’s discovered that he really
enjoys
killing people. If he dies, he can’t do that anymore. That’s a strong addiction to turn away from.”

“If he doesn’t want to get caught, he’s had plenty of time to plan for an escape route.”

“Exactly. I believe that the original
intent
of the plan remains the mandate. He wants everything to come out, wants the sinners and their sins revealed. But he’d prefer to walk away from that. Probably with the rationalization of continuing his ‘work.’ Lots of other sinners out there, after all.”

“We need to be careful,” I murmur. “At some point he’s going to try and lead us by the nose. We need to watch out for that, challenge our conclusions.”

“Yes.”

I sigh. “Fine. What about Sarah? Does he end this by killing her? Or does she get to live?”

James ponders this, staring up at the ceiling. “I think,” he says, “that it all depends on how successful he is in his goal to make her over in his own image, and then, how much he identifies with her as a result. Is she really him? If so, does he let her live, suffering, or does he perform a mercy killing? I’m not sure.”

“I’m arranging for her to be protected.”

“Advisable.”

I tap my fingers on the desk. “Based on the Vargas video, the motive, the scars on his feet, I’m going with the following: He was a victim of commercial-level child trafficking, resulting in heavy physical and sexual abuse. This occurred over a long period, and now that he’s grown up, he’s pissed and he’s working to make things right. So to speak.”

James shrugs. “It’s plausible. At least some aspects of it, I think, are true. It’s a shame, really.”

“What’s that?”

“You saw the Russian girl. She was broken. Nothing substantial left inside. Our perpetrator, though—he’s not broken, not at all. It means he started out strong. The basic building blocks were tough ones.”

“In the biggest picture, he’s broken too. But I understand what you’re saying. Anything else you can think to add?”

“Just one thing. You asked me if there was anything probative about the diary. Obviously, most of it’s true, or her version or view of the truth, but—”

“Wait. Tell me why you think that. Why you believe it.”

“Simple logic. We’re accepting as a known that Sarah Langstrom is not the doer in the Kingsley murders. Fine. This girl spends the last few months writing about a lunatic who kills the people around her
and then it actually happens
? The odds of that being a coincidence are beyond astronomical. In light of the Kingsley killings, Sarah’s story only makes sense if at least some part of it is true—unless she can see the future.”

I blink. “Right. Makes sense. You were saying?”

“I was saying that while I believe in most of her story, there’s something missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something, some aspect of her story, is bothering me.”

“You think she’s lying about something?”

He sighs, frustrated. “I can’t say that. It’s just a feeling. I’m going to be rereading it. If I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

“You should trust that feeling,” I say.

He gets up to leave. He stops at the door. Turns to me.

“Have you figured out what Sarah is for us?”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“What Sarah represents to us. We know how The Stranger sees her, she’s his sculpture. A creation made of pain for the purpose of vengeance. But she’s something for us too. I realized it last night. I was wondering if you had.”

I stare at him, searching for an answer.

“Sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“She’s
Every Victim,
Smoky. You read her story and that’s what you get: She’s every victim we’ve ever failed to save. I think he knows that. That’s why he’s dangling her in front of us. He’s holding her just out of reach and making us watch her scream.”

He exits, leaving me dumbfounded.

He’s right, I see that. It fits with my own sense of things.

I’m just surprised that James cares enough to see it himself.

Then I remember James’s sister, and I wonder about what he said, and about the depth of feeling required to come to that conclusion. Rosa was a victim he failed to save.

Is that the real reason James is always so disagreeable? Because he couldn’t stop caring about the death of his sister?

Maybe.

Regardless, he was right, and his observation dictated even more caution from us.

Sarah wasn’t just The Stranger’s revenge—she was his bait.