“Did everyone get here before me?” I ask. “Geez. I thought I was being an early bird. The conscientious boss and all that.”
“James isn’t here yet,” Alan offers. “I couldn’t sleep last night. Started reading that diary.” He gives me another toast with his cup, a bit sarcastic this time. “Thanks for that.”
“Likewise,” Callie says.
“Then we’re a club,” I reply. I rub my eyes with one hand. “How far did you guys get?”
“I got to the arrival at her second foster home,” Alan says.
“I’m not there, yet,” I say. “Callie?”
“I finished it,” she says.
The door opens and James enters. I nurse a secret satisfaction that he’s as soaked as I am. Later in arriving too. Ha ha.
He doesn’t say anything to anyone. Just marches past us toward his desk.
“Good morning,” Callie calls after him.
“I finished the diary last night,” he calls back.
That’s all he says. No “hello” or “good morning.” James is all business.
“That’s our cue,” I say. “Let’s get to work.”
I’m facing everyone. They’re seated, I’m standing.
“Let’s begin with the diary.” I tell them where I’ve gotten to. “James, you finished it. Fill me in. Anything immediately probative past what I’ve already read?”
He considers this. “Yes and no. She goes into another foster home, and that doesn’t end up well. She has some bad experiences in the group home. Oh, she intimates at one point to having been sexually abused.”
“Great,” I mutter.
“From a purely investigatory standpoint,” James continues, “there are three areas of immediate follow-up based on what she wrote. There’s the original crime scene—the murder of her parents. There’s the cop who took an interest in her. Cathy Jones. Jones disappears later, and Sarah doesn’t know why.”
“Interesting,” Alan notes. “And there is his mention to her of prior victims. The poet, the philosophy student.”
“Okay, that’s good,” I say. “Now let’s talk about motive,” I begin. “Revenge. Does anyone disagree?”
“Makes sense,” Alan says. “‘Pain,’ ‘justice,’ all that. The question is, revenge for what? And why is Sarah in the mix?”
“Sins of the father,” I say.
They all look puzzled. I fill them in on my deductions from last night.
“Interesting,” Callie murmurs. “Something the grandfather did. It’s possible.”
“Let’s examine the overall picture. He stated to Sarah that he is ‘making her over in his own image.’ He calls her his sculpture and gives that sculpture a title: A Ruined Life. What does that tell us?”
“If he’s making her into him, that he thinks his life was ruined,” Alan replies.
“Right. So he devises a long-term plan, not to kill her, but to destroy her emotionally. That’s pretty severe pathology. It tells us he wasn’t just ignored by Mommy. Something was done that requires devastation of a girl’s life as a response. What are some possibilities?”
“Going off the ‘own image’ concept,” Alan says, “he orphaned her. So he was probably orphaned at an early age himself.”
“Good. What else?”
“I think he was raised in an unsupportive environment,” James says. “He destroyed anyone or anything that vaguely promised to become a support system for Sarah. He isolated her completely.”
“Okay.”
“Additionally,” James continues, “we can surmise that he was the recipient of sexual abuse.”
“Based on?”
“It’s inductive. Orphaned, a lack of emotional support—he fell into the wrong hands. Statistically, that means he was sexually abused. It fits with the sheer ambition of his plan for Sarah. Fits with the need for a plan at all.”
“Callie? Anything to add?” I ask.
Her smile is cryptic. “Yes, but for now I’ll just say I agree. Let’s get to me last.”
I frown at her, she sips her coffee and smiles, unfazed.
“So he was orphaned and abused,” I continue. “The question: Which does he want revenge for, one or both? And why multiple victims?”
“I don’t follow,” Alan says.
“We have Sarah as a living victim, a kind of symbolic recipient of revenge. Fine. If we follow that line of thought, the Kingsleys become incidental. Collateral damage, their bad luck to have fostered Sarah. But we also have, per Sarah’s accounts, the poet and the philosophy student. Why were they in the line of fire? And why the difference in MO between them and Vargas?”
Alan shakes his head. “You’ve lost me.”
“Vargas got the same treatment as the Kingsleys,” James explains. “His throat was cut, he was disemboweled. Terrible enough, I guess, but not the most painful way to go. When he talks about the poet and the philosophy student, it’s different. Sounds like their deaths were no fun at all. The same goes for Sam and Linda Langstrom. Nothing quick or painless about that.”
“You’re saying he changes his MO based on what he considers to be the severity of their crime?” Callie asks.
“I’m saying he feels like he’s handing out justice. Within that paradigm, not every offense merits the same punishment.”
Alan nods. “I’ll buy that. Let’s call them primary and secondary victims. Vargas and the Kingsleys would be secondary victims. Sarah and her parents, the poet and the philosopher, they’d be primary victims, deserving the worst he can dish out.”
“Yes,” James replies.
“Except we’re theorizing that Sam and Linda are secondary, in their own way,” Alan muses. “Descended from the actual bad guy.”
“Not secondary to him, though. It still fits the construct. If Grandfather Langstrom did something to affect The Stranger as a child, and he’s no longer available for justice, then his progeny deserve to suffer by proxy,” James says.
“It would also mean that The Stranger views Granddad’s crimes as particularly bad,” I say.
“You’re basing that on what he’s done with Sarah?” James asks.
“Of course.”
“How do you know the poet and the philosophy student, whoever they are, didn’t have children as well? How do you know there aren’t other Sarahs out there?” he asks.
I pause, considering this pretty unsavory, pretty terrible thought. “I guess I don’t. Okay, so we theorize he was orphaned, fell into the wrong hands, and suffered abuse. The scars on his feet support that. Anything else?”
Silence.
“My turn,” Callie says. “I spent a good part of my evening digging through Mr. Vargas’s computer. It’s infested with pornography of every kind, including hardcore kiddie porn. He’s indiscriminate in his perversion. In addition to the kiddie porn I saw scat, bestiality.” She makes a face. “Vomit eating.”
“Okay, we get the idea,” Alan says, looking distressed.
“Sorry. All of that, however, seemed to have been for personal consumption. It supports what we already know: Mr. Vargas was an unpleasant individual. His e-mail wasn’t revelatory either. The video clip, however, was.”
“Video? Of what?” I ask.
She indicates her monitor. “Crowd around and I’ll show you.”
We form a semicircle. The media player has already been invoked. “Ready?” she asks.
“Go ahead,” I reply.
She hits play. A moment of blackness. An ugly rug comes into view.
“I recognize that,” I murmur. “The carpet in Vargas’s apartment.”
The camera jitters and the shot moves up, rolling around like a drunk as the camera is wrestled onto a tripod. It settles down to auto-focus on the same sad bed, the one I’d found Vargas and the girl dead on. A nude girl clambers onto the mattress. She’s too young, only just pubescent. She takes a moment to arrange herself. Gets on her hands and knees. Her wrists are in handcuffs.
“That’s the girl from last night,” I say.
A voice outside the shot murmurs something. I can’t make out the words, but she turns her head up and looks right into the camera lens. Her living face is placid, almost docile. It’s not all that different from her dead face. She has beautiful blue eyes, but they’re as hollow as a drum. Full of nothing.
Jose Vargas comes into view. He’s dressed, wearing blue jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. He looks his age. His back is slightly stooped. He’s unshaven. His face is tired, but his eyes, they’re bright. He’s looking forward to whatever it is he’s about to do.
“Is that a switch in his hand?” Alan asks.
“Yes it is,” Callie replies.
The switch is a thin branch that’s been stripped from a tree. I can see a hint of its green core at one end. Vargas has prepared for corporal punishment the old-fashioned way.
He moves behind the girl. Leans forward, seems to be checking the camera. Nods to himself. He gives the girl a critical eye.
“Ass higher in the air, fucking puta,” he barks.
The girl hardly blinks. She wiggles a little, forcing her posterior higher.
“That’s better.” Checks the room again, the camera, again. “That’s good.” A last nod to himself and Vargas gives the camera his full attention. He smiles and it’s an ugly smile, full of brown teeth or the spaces where teeth should be.
“Man needs a dentist,” Alan mutters.
“So, Mr. You Know Who,” Vargas begins. “Hello. Buenos dias. It’s your old friend, Jose.” Vargas gestures at the girl. “Some things, I guess, never change.” He spreads his hands to indicate the room. Shrugs. “Other things, they change a lot. Money is not so good these days. All that time in prison, it left me with not many—what do they say?—job skills.” Another gap-toothed smile. “But I have skills, yes? You know this. I remember them, the things you taught me when I was younger, in those times that were better. I’ll show you how much I remember. Yes?”
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.
The Face of Death Page 25
