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 venge
ance. 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.
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 in
formant 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.”
The Face of Death Page 26
