The Face of Death

phones. Callie finishes and comes over, plopping down next to me.

'Good news, honey-love. I called Barry Franklin, and he agreed, after much grumbling, to ask for this case. He'll be here shortly.'

'Thanks,' I say.

Homicides, with some exceptions, are not federal crimes. I'm not allowed to walk into a jurisdiction and take over a murder just because I feel like it. Everything we do involves and requires liaison with the locals to be on the up-and-up. Like most agents (and local cops) I prefer to engineer my 'liaison relationships.' This is where Barry comes in. Barry is a homicide detective for the LAPD, one of the elite few to reach the rank of Detective First Grade. If he wants a case, it's his.

I met him on the very first case I had as a unit head in Los Angeles. A crazy young man was torching homeless people and taking their feet for trophies. Barry had asked the Bureau to help with a profile. Neither of us had cared about politics or credit. We just wanted to catch the bad guy and we did.

The pragmatic end of things: He's an excellent investigator, he won't deny me access to the crime scene, and if I ask him nicely, he'll utter the magic words, request for assistance. Those words open the door to full and unfettered involvement on our part. Until then, we are legally no more than observers.

'How are you doing, honey-love?' Callie asks.

I rub my face with my hands. 'I'm supposed to be on vacation, Callie. The whole thing in there . . .' I shake my head. 'It was surreal. And fucked up. The day started out great. Now I feel crappy and . . . yuck. Too many messy cases in a row.'

People think every murder is a bad one, and while they're technically right, horror comes in degrees. The gutting of an entire family is a jolt.

'You need a dog,' she says.

'I need a good laugh,' I reply, forlorn.

'Just one?'

I give her a wry smile. 'Nope. I need something on a trend. A series of good laughs. I need to wake up and smile, and then I need to do it again the next day, and again the day after that. Then I can have a shitty day, and it won't feel so bad.'

'True,' she muses. ' 'Into every life a little rain,' and all that--but you've taken it to a new level.' She pats my hand. 'Get a dog.'

I laugh, as she'd intended.

Quantico, Quantico, a voice sings inside my head. No Sarahs, no up close and personal, no clangy-jitters there.

Alan heads toward us, still talking on his cell phone. When he gets to us, he holds the phone away from his ear. 'Elaina wants to know the outlook on tonight. As far as Bonnie goes.'

I think it through. I need Barry to arrive. I need him to get his Crime Scene Unit onto processing the house. I need to go through the home and soak in the scene.

It isn't officially ours yet, but I'm not willing to just walk away. I sigh.

'It's going to be a late one. Can you ask her if she minds taking Bonnie for the night?'

'No problem.'

'Tell Elaina I'll be in touch tomorrow.'

He puts the phone to his ear and walks away, delivering the news.

'What about me?' Callie asks.

I give her a tired grin. 'You get to work on your vacation, just like me. We're going to meet Barry, check things out . . .' I shrug. 'And then we'll see. Maybe it will be back to vacation-time, maybe not.'

She sighs, an overdramatic, long-suffering sigh. 'Slave driver,' she mutters. 'I want a raise.'

'I want world peace,' I reply. 'Disappointment abounds. Get used to it.'

'Bonnie's covered,' Alan says as he returns. 'So what's the plan of action here?'

Time to take command.

This is my primary function, above all others. I run a group, really, of luminaries. Everyone has an area they shine in. Callie is a star when it comes to forensics. Alan is a legend in the interrogation room, and he's the best there is when it comes to beating feet and canvassing an area. He's tireless and he misses nothing. You don't get people like that to follow you because they like you. They have to respect you. It requires just a touch of arrogance. You have to be willing to acknowledge your own strengths, to be a star in your own area and know it. Where I excel is in the understanding of those we hunt. In seeing a scene, not just looking at it. Anyone can walk through a murder site and observe a body. All the skill is in the reverse-engineering. Why that body? Why here? What does that say about the killer? Some are skilled at it. Some are very skilled. I'm gifted, and just arrogant enough to acknowledge it. My personal talent in my chosen field is my ability to understand the darkness that makes up the men I hunt.

Lots of people think they understand the mind of serial killers. They read their true-crime books, perhaps they steel themselves and give a series of gory crime photos an unblinking eye. They talk about predators, the psychosexuality of it all, and they feel enlightened. All of that is fine, there's nothing wrong with it--but they miss the boat by a mile.

I tried to explain this once in a lecture. Quantico was doing their version of career day, and various guest speakers were giving command performances to rooms full of bright young trainees. My turn came and I stared out at them, at their youth and hope, and tried to explain what I was talking about.

I told them about a famous case in New Mexico. A man and his girlfriend had spent years hunting and capturing women. They would bring the abductees into a specially equipped room, filled with restraints and instruments of torture. They'd spend days and weeks raping and torturing their victims. They videotaped most of what they did. One of their favorite implements was a cattle prod.

'There is video,' I'd said, 'where you can see smoke pouring out of a young woman's vagina because they used a cattle prod to penetrate her.'

Just this, this tiny bit of information, far from the worst available, silences the room and turns some of those young faces white.

'One of our agents, a woman, had the job of making a series of detailed drawings of all the whips and chains and saws and sex toys and other perversities that this couple had used on the women they'd brought into that room. She did her job. She spent four days doing it. I've seen the drawings and they were good. They were used in court, actually. Her superior praised her and told her to take a few days off. To go home, see her family, clear her head.' I had paused, letting my eyes roam over all those young faces. 'She went home and spent the day with her husband and her little girl. That night, while they were asleep, she crept downstairs, got her service pistol out of the gun safe, and shot herself in the head.'

There had been a few gasps. There had been a lot of silence. I had shrugged. 'It would be easy to take that strong young woman and classify her and not think anything more about it. We could call her weak, or say that she must have already been depressed, or decide that something else was going on in her life that no one knew about. And you're welcome to do that. All I can tell you is that she'd been an agent for eight years. She'd had a spotless record and had no history of mental illness.' I'd shaken my head. 'I think she looked too much, went out too far, and got lost. Like a boat on the ocean with the shore nowhere in sight. I think this agent found herself floating on that boat and couldn't figure out a way to get back.' I had leaned forward on the podium. 'And that's what I do, what my team does: We look. We look and we don't turn away, and we hope that we can deal with that.'

The administrator running the program hadn't been all that happy with my talk. I hadn't cared. It was the truth. I wasn't mystified by the act of that female agent. It wasn't the seeing that was the problem, not really. The problem was the un-seeing and the stop seeing. You had to be able to go home and turn off the images that wanted to giggle through your mind, all sly feet and whispers. This agent hadn't been able to do that. She'd put a bullet in her head so she could. I empathized.

I guess that's what I was trying to tell those fresh-scrubbed faces: This isn't fun. It's not titillating, or challenging, or a roller-coaster scare.

It's something that must be done.

It's my gift, or my curse, to understand the desires of serial killers. To know why they feel the way they do. To feel them feeling it, just a little, or just a lot. It's something that happens inside me, something based in part on