The Face of Death (28 page)

32

“
I’M GOING TO SEE AD JONES,” I TELL CALLIE AS I EXIT MY OFFICE.
“Come with me.”

“Why?”

“The trafficking case? It turns out he was involved.”

“You don’t say?”

“Cross my heart and you know the rest.”

I am back in that windowless office, seated with Callie in front of the gray megalith AD Jones calls a desk.

“Tell me about the case,” AD Jones says without preamble. “In particular, talk to me about Jose Vargas.”

I launch into a recap of everything that’s happened up to this point. When I’m done, AD Jones leans back, staring at me while he taps his fingers on the arm of his chair.

“You think this perp—The Stranger—is an abused kid from Vargas’s past?”

“It’s the current working theory,” I say.

“It’s a good theory. The scarring on the feet of the perp and the Russian girl? I’ve seen that before.”

“You said you were involved in the trafficking case that Vargas was suspected of participating in.”

“Yep. I was on the task force in 1979, directly under the agent-in-charge, Daniel Haliburton.” He shakes his head. “Haliburton was a fixture here, a dinosaur, but a great investigator. Tough. I was new, just two years out of the academy. It was a messy case. Real bad stuff. I was excited anyway. You know how it is.”

“Yes, sir.”

“LAPD Vice had experienced a spike in child hookers and kiddie porn. It was always an ongoing problem, but this was different. They noticed a lot of these kids shared commonalities.”

“Let me guess,” Callie says. “Scarring on the feet.”

“That was one of them. The other was that none of them came from the US. They were predominately South American, some were European. We guessed the Europeans were being routed through South America and then up here into the States.”

He pauses, looking off into the past.

“Most of the victims were girls, but there were some boys too. They ranged in age from seven to thirteen, none older. All of them were in bad shape. Many of them were suffering from multiple STDs, unhealed vaginal and anal tearing…” He waves a hand. “You get the idea. Suffice to say, it was the kind of case that makes an impression on people.”

“The only good thing about pedophiles,” I say, “is that they’re universally hated.”

“Yeah. So the LAPD called us in. No one cared about credit or PR or politics. It was refreshing. We formed a task force, they did the same, and it was a full-court press.” A faint smile. “That meant different things back then than it does now. Ethical debate in law enforcement was a little more…fluid.”

“I take it you mean—hypothetically speaking, of course—that suspects were questioned in an overly aggressive manner.”

His smile is grim. “That’s one way to put it. ‘Patient presented with unexplained brusing.’ Like that. Not my thing, but”—he shrugs, pained—“Haliburton and his buddies came from a different time.

“The traffickers were smart. One point of contact. Money changed hands then the child changed hands. No further concourse between the buyer and the seller after that.”

“How many children are we talking about?” I ask.

“Five. Three girls, two boys. That number dropped to two girls and one boy not long after we had them in protective custody.”

“Why?”

“One of the boys and one of the girls had had enough. Committed suicide. So we had the children,” he continues, rolling over this tragedy, wanting to get past it, “and we had the dirt who bought them. One of the girls and one of the boys were owned by a pimp, a real scumbag by the name of Leroy Perkins. That guy had a soul like a block of dry ice. He wasn’t even personally into kids, he just liked the money they could bring in.”

“That seems worse, somehow,” I say.

“The other girl was owned by a pervert who
did
like kids. He generated some cash on the side by filming himself having sex with them and then selling the movies to like-minded baby-rapers. His name was Tommy O’Dell.

“Hypothetically, a certain segment of cops and agents leaned on Leroy and Tommy very, very hard. They wouldn’t talk. We threatened to put them into the prison general population and to leak who and what they were to the other cons. No go. I thought Tommy O’Dell would crack, I really did. He was a worm. He didn’t. Leroy never came close. He told Haliburton at one point, ‘I talk to you, it’ll take weeks for me to die. Then they’ll kill my sister, my mom—hell, they’ll even kill my houseplants. I’ll take my chances inside.’”

“It sounds like he was convinced that he was dealing with some very scary people,” Callie says.

“Scarier than us, that’s for sure. We tried longer than we should have and got nowhere. That left us with the kids. It took some time and coaxing, but we got a couple of them to talk about what they’d gone through.” AD Jones grimaces. “Bad, bad stuff. Conditioning—the caning of the feet—combined with verbal degradation and rape. A lot of the time they were hooded or blindfolded, and they were kept very isolated, from one another as well as from the traffickers. Even so, one of the kids had seen Vargas, and had heard his name. He was able to describe him. We gathered Vargas up.” The look in his eyes is chilling. “We were committed to doing just about anything to get him to talk, and this time—hypothetically—I was ready to lend a fist.”

He pauses then. It’s a long, thoughtful pause, layered through with regret.

“The boy’s name was Juan. He was nine. Cute kid, smart kid, talked a lot once he got going, even though he had a slight stutter. He was from Argentina. I admired him, we all did. He’d been through hell but was still fighting to keep his head above water, and trying to do it with dignity.” AD Jones gives me a look that’s about a million years old. “Dignity. And he was nine.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“We had the kids stashed at a safe house. The night before Juan was going to officially lay things out on tape for us, someone hit it. They killed a cop, an agent, and took all three kids.”

“Took them?”

“Yes. Back to hell, would be my guess.”

I can’t speak for a moment, I’m so appalled by this thought. Those children had been rescued from the monsters. They should have been safe.

“Didn’t that point to—”

“An inside job?” He nods. “Of course. Things got turned upside down, here and at the LAPD. Everyone on the task force was put under a microscope and got a metaphorical rectal exam. Nothing was ever found. The best part? We had no physical evidence to tie Vargas to the children. All we had was the word of a long-gone witness. Vargas walked, O’Dell and Perkins went away. Perkins survived. O’Dell got shanked. No more kids with scarred feet showed up. We never found Juan or the other two girls, but we heard from an informant that some children matching their description had crossed back into Mexico and then been shot.” He shrugs, frustrated even now. “Every other lead dead-ended, from Immigration to Vice to Organized Crime. We cast our nets wider. Let other cities know what to watch out for. Nothing. The task force was disbanded.”

“It sounds like whoever was behind this then is still around now,” I say. “Vargas made that video for blackmail purposes.”

“Doesn’t that seem odd to you?” Callie asks.

“What’s that?”

“The bad guys were scary in 1979. Vargas didn’t strike me as a particularly heroic individual.”

“Get the case files, Smoky. If you need questions answered by someone who was there, let me know.” His smile is humorless. “That was the one for me. Up to that point, I figured we’d always get the bad guy. Justice would prevail and all that. That’s the case where I realized there were going to be plenty of times the bad guys got away. It’s also where I realized that there were”—he hesitates—“men who eat children.” A pause. “Metaphorically speaking, I mean.”

Except it’s not really a metaphor is it, sir? That’s why you paused. They do eat them, raw and weeping and warm. They swallow them whole.

I’m back at Death Central. Callie is getting the administrative wheels in motion that will deliver the files on the human-trafficking case to us. My cell rings.

“Something I wanted to let you know about right away,” Alan says.

“What?”

“In the process of digging into the Kingsleys, I decided to check in with Cathy Jones. The cop from the diary?”

“Good thinking.” It’s a good idea. She was a trained observer who was there, and she also knew Sarah in the years following. “What did you find?”

“What I found was bad and weird. A lot bad. Well, a lot weird too. Jones made detective two years ago. A month after that, she was off the force for good.”

“Why?”

“She was attacked in her home. She was beaten into a three-day coma. And it gets worse.”

“Worse how?”

“He beat her head with a pipe. Various injuries resulted, but the most severe was permanent damage to her optic nerves. She’s legally blind, Smoky.”

I’m silent, taking this in. Failing to some degree.

“But that’s not all.”

“What else?”

“The attacker whipped her. On the bottoms of her feet. Bad enough to leave scars.”

“What?!” I almost shout, I’m so surprised.

“No kidding. I had the same reaction. So that’s bad, but—”

“I already know what’s weird—that he let her live.”

“Exactly. He’s killed everyone else we know about so far, except for Sarah. Why not Jones?”

“Have you talked to her?”

“That’s why I’m calling. I got an address on her, but I’m in the middle here…”

“Give it to me. Callie and I will go see—” I stumble over the word
see
for a moment. “We’ll go talk to her.”

33

CATHY JONES LIVES IN A CONDO IN TARZANA, HER NEIGHBORHOOD
yet another example of a suburb tucked away amidst the urban sprawl of greater Los Angeles. It’s a nice enough building, kept up, but perhaps a little worn around the edges.

The rain has stopped for now, but the sky is gray and the clouds still look angry. Callie and I spent almost an hour navigating our way here. LA hates the rain and it shows; we’d passed two accidents on the freeway.

We’d called ahead, but had gotten only her voice mail.

“Ready?” I ask Callie, as we stand in front of the door.

“No. But knock anyway.”

I do.

A moment passes. I hear the sound of footsteps on a hardwood floor, and then a voice, clear but uncertain.

“Who’s there?”

“Cathy Jones?” I ask.

A pause. Then a dry reply:

“No,
I’m
Cathy Jones.”

Callie looks at me with an eyebrow raised.

“Ms. Jones, this is Special Agent Smoky Barrett, of the FBI. I’m here with another agent, Callie Thorne. We’d like to speak with you.”

The silence is heavy.

“About what?”

I could reply, “Your attack.” I decide to take a different approach.

“Sarah Langstrom.”

“What’s happened?”

I hear raw alarm in the question, mixed with perhaps a hint of resignation.

“Can we come in, Ms. Jones?”

Another pause, followed by a sigh.

“I guess you’ll have to. I don’t go outside anymore.”

I hear the sound of a dead bolt being turned, and the door opens.

Cathy is wearing a pair of sunglasses. I see small scars at her hairline and temples. She’s a short woman, slender but compact. Athletic. She’s wearing slacks and a sleeveless blouse; I can see the wiry muscle in her arms.

“Come in,” she says.

We enter. The condo is dark.

“Feel free to turn on some lights. I don’t need them. Obviously. So make sure you turn them off before you leave.”

She leads us into the living room, sure-footed. The interior of the condo is newer than the outside facade. The carpet is a muted beige, the walls an off-white. The furniture is clean and tasteful.

“You have a very nice home,” I offer.

She sits down in an easy chair, indicating the couch to us with a sweep of her hand.

“I hired a decorator six months ago.”

We sit.

“Ms. Jones—”

“Cathy.”

“Cathy,” I correct. “We’re here because of Sarah Langstrom.”

“You said that already. Cut to the chase or hit the road.”

“Blind
and
disagreeable,” Callie says.

I shoot a furious look at Callie, aghast. I should have known better; Callie is the undisputed master of incisive ice-breaking. She’d assessed Cathy Jones and had understood sooner than I had: Cathy wanted to be treated like a normal person more than anything else. She knew she was being an ass; she wanted to see if we were going to coddle her or call her on it.

Cathy grins at Callie. “Sorry. I get tired of being treated like a cripple, even when it’s a little bit true. I found that pissing people offtends to even the playing field the fastest.” The smile disappears. “Tell me, please. About Sarah.”

I relate the story of the Kingsleys, of Sarah’s diary. I talk about The Stranger, and recount our analysis of him. She sits and listens, her ears turned toward my voice.

When I finish, she sits back. Her head turns toward the window in the kitchen. I wonder if this is an unconscious mannerism, something she did when she still had her sight.

“So he’s finally shown his face,” she murmurs. “So to speak.”

“It appears that way,” Callie replies.

“Well, that’s a first,” Cathy says, shaking her head. “He never did when I was around. Not with the Langstroms, not later with the others. Not even with me.”

I frown. “I don’t understand. He did this to you—how do you figure he wasn’t revealing himself?”

Cathy’s smile is humorless and bitter. “Because he made sure that I’d keep my mouth shut. That’s the same as staying hidden, isn’t it?”

“How did he do that?”

“The way he does everything. He uses the things you care for. For me, it was Sarah. He said, quote, ‘to take my lumps and keep my mouth shut’ or he’d do to Sarah what he was going to do to me.” She grimaces, a haunted mix of anger and fear and remembered pain. “Then he did what he did. I knew I could never let him do that to her. So I kept my mouth shut. That and…” She pauses, miserable.

“What?” I prod.

“It’s one of the reasons you’re here, right? You want to know why he kept me alive. Why he didn’t kill me. Well, that’s one of the reasons I kept my mouth shut. Because I lived. Because I was afraid. Not for her. For me. He told me if I didn’t do what he said, he’d come back for me.” Her lips tremble as she says this.

“I understand, Cathy. Truly, I do.”

Cathy nods. Her mouth twists and she puts her head in her hands. Her shoulders tremble some, though not much, and not for long. It’s a quiet cry, a summer thunderstorm, there and then gone.

“I’m sorry,” she says, raising her head. “I don’t know why I bother. I can’t actually cry anymore. My tear ducts were damaged along with everything else.”

“Tears aren’t the important part,” I say, the phrase seeming lame even as it comes out of my mouth.

Who are you, Dr. Phil?

She fixes her sightless gaze on me. I can’t see her eyes through the black lenses of the sunglasses, but I can feel them. “I know you,” she says. “About you, I mean. You’re the one who lost her family. Who got raped and got her face cut up.”

“That’s me.”

Even blind, the gaze is piercing.

“There is a reason.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That he didn’t kill me. There is a reason. But let’s get to that last. Tell me what else you want to know.”

I want to press her, but discard the idea. We need to know everything. Impatience with the sequences of it all would just be counterproductive.

We cover the Langstrom murders, as per what we read in Sarah’s diary.

“Very accurate,” she confirms. “I’m surprised she remembers so many details. But I guess she’s had a lot of time to think about it.”

“So that we’re clear,” I say. “You were one of the responding officers? You were there, you saw the bodies and Sarah?”

“Yes.”

“In Sarah’s diary, she says that no one believed that her parents had been forced to do what they did. Is that true?”

“It was true then, it’s still true now. Go and pull the case file. You’re going to find that it’s never been ruled as anything other than a murder-suicide, case closed.”

I’m skeptical. “Come on. You’re saying there was nothing there, forensically?”

Cathy holds up a finger. “No. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that no one took a hard, close look because he’d set up the scene so well. You get a sense, sometimes, when a scene has been staged. You know?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. Well, you didn’t get that sense here. You had a suicide note, held down by a glass of water with Mrs. Langstrom’s fingerprints and saliva on it. You had her fingerprints on the gun, as well as blowback of both gunshot residue and blood consistent with what you’d expect from a suicide. You had her fingerprints around her husband’s neck. Her fingerprints on the hacksaw used to decapitate the dog. She was taking antidepressants on the sly. What would you have thought?”

I sigh. “Point taken.”

Hearing the story from the lips of another professional puts it into a different light for me. I see it as Cathy saw it, as the homicide detectives would have seen it, without the benefit of a Kingsley crime scene or Sarah’s diary.

“You hinted that there
was
something there to find,” Callie murmurs.

“Two things. Small, but there. The autopsy report on Mrs. Langstrom noted some bruising around both her wrists. It wasn’t considered probative because we weren’t looking for anything. But if you do have a reason to look…”

“Then you think about handcuffs and Sarah’s story,” I say. “You think about Mrs. Langstrom getting angry and yanking on those padded cuffs as hard as she could and bruising up her wrists.”

“That’s right.”

“What was the other thing?”

“In the accepted scenario she shot the dog and she shot herself. No one reported hearing gunshots, and we’re not talking about a twenty-two popgun. Which makes you start thinking about a silencer, even though no silencer was on the gun at the scene.”

“What made
you
start looking?” Callie asks.

Cathy is quiet for a moment, thinking.

“It was Sarah. It took a while, but as time went on, and I got to know her, I began to wonder. She’s an honest girl. And the story was so damn
dark
for a girl her age. People kept dying or getting hurt around her. Once you give in to the possibility, you start seeing clues everywhere.” She leans forward. “His real brilliance has always been in his subtlety, his understanding of how we think, and in his choice of victim. He doesn’t overdo his staging, so it looks natural. He leads us to a conclusion, but not with so many bread crumbs that we’d get suspicious. He knows we’re trained to reverse-engineer in the direction of simplicity rather than complexity. And he chose a victim in Sarah with no relatives, so there’s no one that’s going to hang around and demand that we take a closer look, no one that’s going to worry at it.”

“But there was, wasn’t there?” I say in a quiet voice. “There was you.”

Cathy does that looking-toward-the-window thing again. “That’s right.”

“Is that why he did this to you?”

Cathy swallows. “Maybe that was part of it, but I don’t think it was the big reason. Doing what he did to me was useful to him.” She seems to be breathing a little faster.

“Is there anything about what he did to you—about what happened to you—that would be helpful?” I ask, prodding. “I know it’s difficult.”

She turns to me. “This guy is—or has been—a ghost. I think anything that puts a face on him is going to help, don’t you?”

I don’t reply; it’s a rhetorical question.

Cathy sighs, a ragged sigh. Her hands tremble and the quickened breathing continues.

“Funny. I’ve been wanting to tell the real story for almost two years. Now that I can, I feel like I want to jump out of my skin.”

I take a gamble. I reach over and grab one of her hands. It’s clammy with sweat and it shakes. She doesn’t pull it away.

“I used to pass out,” I tell her. “After it happened. For no reason at all.”

“Really?”

“Don’t pass it around,” I say, smiling, “but yes. Really.”

“Truth, honey-love,” Callie says, her voice soft.

Cathy pulls her hand away from mine. I take this as a struggle for strength on her part.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve been taking pills for anxiety since it happened, until about two weeks ago. I decided I wanted to wean myself off them. They turned me into a zombie, and it’s time to get strong again. I still think I made the right decision, but”—she waggles her hand—“it makes things harder, sometimes.”

“Do you have coffee?” Callie chirps.

Cathy frowns. “Sorry?”

“Coffee. Caffeine. Nectar of the gods. If we’re going to sit and listen to something horrible, I think coffee is sensible and recommended.”

Cathy gives her a faint, grateful smile.

“That’s a great idea.”

The normality of a cup of coffee seems to calm Cathy. She holds on to the cup as she speaks, stopping to take a sip when things get too rough.

“I’d been poking around in the case files for years, trying to find something that would convince a senior detective to take another look. You have to understand, while I was considered a decent cop, I was still just a uniform. It’s a whole different social strata, the plain-clothes and the unies. The guys in Homicide are driven by statistics. Solve rates, murder rates per capita, all that stuff. If you want them to add an unsolved to the pile—particularly if it means taking it out of the solved column—you’d better have something compelling. I didn’t.”

“The wrist-bruising wasn’t enough?” I ask.

“No. And let’s be honest, I don’t know if it would be enough for me, if the situations were reversed. The bruising was noted, but per the ME’s notes, it could have come from any number of things. Her husband grabbing her wrists too hard, for one. Remember, she’s supposed to have strangled him.”

“That’s true.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I’d been chasing this for a few years, on my own time, and getting nowhere.” She pauses, looking uncomfortable and ashamed. “To be honest, I wasn’t always pushing on it the way I should have. Sometimes, I doubted the whole scenario. I’d lie in bed at night, thinking, and I’d decide I
didn’t
believe her, that she was just a messed-up kid who’d cooked up a story to explain the otherwise senseless deaths of her parents. I’d generally come back to my senses, but…” She shrugs. “I could have done more. I always knew that, in the back of my mind. Life just kept moving forward. I can’t really explain it.” She sighs. “In the meantime, I did my job and got my promotions. And then, I went for detective.” She smiles at the memory. She’s probably unaware that she’s doing it. “Passed the test with flying colors. It was cool. A big deal. Even my dad would have approved.”