The Face of Death

walking around in the daylight. This scene is about power and ownership. Confidence in coming here during the day, confidence in his use of knife as the murder weapon. It fits.'

'Sick fuck,' Barry says, shaking his head. He sighs. 'So, he does a few laps in the pool, maybe lies around listening to the neighbors while he pats himself on the back. The question though is sequences. You say the scene downstairs was fresh. I'll buy that, but how does it play? He kills two vics upstairs, creates a little abstract art with their blood, comes and swims, then kills the third victim? And what's Sarah doing while all this is happening?'

I shrug. 'We don't know yet.'

'I hate when they make me work for it.' He sighs. 'Hey, Thompson!' he bellows, startling me. As if by magic, the twentysomething uniform who had tried to prevent our entrance earlier today appears.

'Yes, sir?' he asks.

'Don't let anyone into the backyard unless the head of CSU says so.'

'Yes, sir.' He takes his place by the sliding glass door. He's too young. Still excited about getting to be here.

'Ready to see the bedroom?' Barry asks us.

It's a rhetorical question. We're sniffing the trail, making things happen, putting the picture together in our heads. Get it while it's hot.

We leave the family room and head up the stairs, Barry taking the lead, Callie behind me. We reach the top. Barry peers into the room.

'Is it necessary for both of you to come in?' a critical voice asks.

'To tramp all over everything?'

This sourness belongs to John Simmons, head of this shift's LAPD Crime Scene Unit. He's crabby, crusty, and absolutely untrusting of anyone but himself when it comes to handling the evidentiary part of a homicide. These traits are forgivable; he's one of the best.

'Three, actually,' Callie says, moving forward so that he can see her too.

Simmons is not a young man. He's been doing this for a very long time, he's in his late fifties, and it shows. Smiles, for him, are like diamonds: rare, and only worn on the right occasions. Callie, it appears, merits one.

'Calpurnia!' he cries, grinning from ear to ear. He moves toward us, shoving Barry and me out of the way to embrace her. Callie smiles and hugs him back while Barry looks on, bemused. I have seen this behavior before, and know its source. Barry does not.

'I did an internship under Johnny while I was getting my degree in forensics,' Callie explains to Barry.

'Very gifted,' Simmons says, fondly. 'Calpurnia was one of my few successes. Someone who truly appreciates the science.'

Simmons looks over at me now. His study of my scars is frank, but it doesn't bother me. I know the basis of his interest is judgment-free curiosity.

'Agent Barrett,' he says, nodding.

'Hello, sir.'

I've always called John Simmons 'sir.' He's always seemed like a 'sir' to me, and he's never disabused me of the fact. Callie is the only person I know of who calls him 'Johnny,' just as he's the only person I can imagine getting away with calling her 'Calpurnia,' the given name she hates with such ferocity.

'So, Calpurnia,' he says, turning back to Callie, 'I trust you'll watch over my crime scene? Ensure nothing gets trampled or touched that shouldn't?'

Callie raises her right hand, puts her left one on her heart. 'I promise. And, Johnny?'

She tells him about the backyard. He favors her with another fond smile.

'I'll get someone onto that directly.' He gives Barry and me a last, suspicious look before stepping aside.

We enter the room. Simmons heads downstairs to crack the whip, leaving us alone. For all his grumbling, he understands this part of it--the need to soak it in. He's always given me the space I need to do this, never crowding me or peering over my shoulder. Now that I don't have my attention fixed on Sarah, I stop and really look.

Mr. and Mrs. Dean and Laurel Kingsley, as I now know them to be, fall easily into the 'fit-forties' niche. They are tanned, with goodlooking faces, muscular legs, and a certain polish about them, a vitality I can still sense, even in these circumstances.

'God, he was confident,' I say. 'Not just in coming here on the weekend and in the daytime. He subdued two fit, healthy parents and two teenage children.'

Dean's eyes are wide and turning into the eyes of the dead, gray and filmy, like soap scum in a bathtub. Laurel's eyes are closed. Both of them have their lips pulled back, reminding me of a snarling dog, or someone being forced to smile at gunpoint. Dean's tongue protrudes, while Laurel's teeth are clenched together. Forever now, I think. She'll never pull her teeth apart. Something tells me that this carefully cared for woman would have hated that.

'He would have used a weapon to intimidate them, and it wouldn't have been just a knife,' I say. 'Not threatening enough for so many victims. It would have been a gun. Something big and scary looking.'

From the collarbone down, it's as if they each swallowed a hand grenade.

'A single long slice on each of them,' Barry says. 'He used something sharp.'

'Probably a scalpel,' I murmur. 'Not clean, though. I see signs of hesitation in the wounds. Note the ragged spots?'

'Yep.'

He cut them open with a halting, trembling hand. Then he reached into them, grabbed hold of whatever he touched, and pulled, like a fisherman cleaning a fish. Standing over Mrs. Kingsley now, I'm able to make out the middle third of her spine; key organs aren't there to block my view of it.

'Hesitation cuts are odd,' I murmur.

'Why?' Barry asks.

'Because in every other way he was confident.' I lean forward for a closer look, examining the throats this time. 'When he cut their throats, it was clean, no hesitation.' I stand up. 'Maybe they weren't hesitation marks. Maybe the cuts were uneven because he was excited. He might have come to orgasm slicing them open.'

'Lovely,' Callie says.

In contrast to Dean and Laurel, the boy--Michael--is untouched. He's white from blood loss, but he was spared the indignity of being gutted.

'Why'd he leave the boy alone?' Barry wonders.

'He either wasn't as important--or he was the most important one of all,' I say.

Callie walks around the bed at a slow pace, examining the bodies. She casts looks around the floor, squints at the blood on the walls.

'What do you see?' I ask.

'The jugular veins of all three victims have been severed. Based on the color of the skin, they were bled dry. This was done prior to the disembowelment.'

'How can you tell that?' Barry asks.

'Not enough blood pooled in the abdominal cavities or visible on the exposed organs. Which is the general problem: Where's the rest of the blood? I can account for place of death for one of the victims--the family room downstairs. What about the other two?' She gestures around the room. 'The blood in here is primarily on the walls. There are some blotches on the carpet, but it's not enough. The sheets and blankets from the bed are bloody, true, but the amount seems superficial.' She shakes her head. 'No one had their throat cut in this room.'

'I noticed the same thing earlier,' I say. 'They were bled out somewhere else. Where?'

A moment passes before we all gaze down the short hallway that leads from the master bedroom to the master bathroom. I move without speaking; Barry and Callie follow. Everything becomes clear as we enter.

'Well,' Barry says, grim, 'that explains it, all right.'

The bathtub is a large one, made for lazing around in, built with languor in mind. It's a little over one-quarter full of congealing blood.

'He bled them out in the tub,' I murmur. I point to two large rusty blotches on the carpet. 'Pulled them out when he was done and laid them there, next to each other.'