The Face of Death

spread across it, and what appears to be a jar of Vaseline. An ashtray, overflowing with butts, sits to the right.

'Smells like feet and ass in here,' Barry mutters. He moves into the apartment, gun still at the ready. I follow. Callie comes in behind me. We see nothing in the kitchen as we approach it other than a ceramic-lined sink full of dirty dishes. An old-fashioned split-level refrigerator hums.

'Bedrooms are in the back,' Barry says.

It's a very short walk through a very small hallway to get to the bedrooms. We pass a single bathroom on the right. I see white tile, a white tub. It's small and dirty and smells of urine. Nothing to speak of on the counter around the sink. The mirror is specked and unclean. The bedrooms are situated next to each other. The door to the one on the right is open and I see what appears to be some kind of a home office. There's a computer on an old metal desk, a nineteen-inch flat screen monitor, and a bunch of shelves made from cinder blocks and one-by-six boards. The shelves are almost empty, filled with a few paperback books and adult videotapes. A bong sits on the top of one, a quarter-full of murky pot-water.

It occurs to me that this is a sad, strange place. The only things of value I've seen have been the couch, the television, and the computer system. Everything else is cheap and salvaged and timeworn, with a layered hint of seedy degradation.

'I'm smelling something now,' Barry murmurs, nodding toward the door to the other bedroom, which is closed.

I move closer and there it is: that cloying tang, pennies in my mouth.

'I'm going to open it,' Barry says.

'Go ahead,' I reply, gripping my weapon. My heart hammers away. Barry and Callie look as tense as I feel. I probably look as tense as I feel. He grips the knob, hesitates for a moment and throws it wide. He raises his weapon in a single motion.

The smell of blood rushes out to greet us, along with the odors of sweat, feces, and urine. I see the promised words, on the wall above the bed:

THIS PLACE = JUSTICE

They seem proud and bold, almost joyous to me.

Below the words, something that used to be a man. Next to the man lies a girl, her skin an unnatural alabaster. We all lower our weapons. The threat was here, but it has come and gone.

This bedroom continues the apartment's motif, small and sad. Dirty clothes lie on a floor in the corner. The bed is a double, consisting of just a mattress on a box spring on a metal frame. No headboard or baseboard. No chest of drawers.

On the bed is a naked man with his insides torn out. He's Hispanic. He's a small man; I put him at approximately five foot seven inches, and he's skinny--too skinny. He's probably the smoker. His dark hair is flecked with gray and I'm guessing his age to be somewhere between fifty and fifty-five.

The girl is Caucasian, and looks to be in her early to mid-teens. She has a pretty enough face, with dirty- blond hair. Small, pert breasts. Freckles on her shoulders. Her pubic area has been shaved. Other than the slash across her throat, she's uninjured. I note that her eyes, like those of Laurel Kingsley, are closed. She doesn't look like she'd be related to the man, and I wonder about her presence here, in this sad place with this older man and his coffee table decorations of girlie mags and Vaseline.

I wonder about something else, a more subtle similarity between this scene and the Kingsleys': The fact that he left both the children intact, while all the adults have been disemboweled. He kills the kids but he doesn't mutilate them. Why?

'This area is too small,' Callie says. 'I don't recommend entering the room prior to CSU.'

'Roger that,' Barry says, holstering his gun. 'Definitely the same guy, Smoky, wouldn't you say?'

'Without a doubt.'

The man's face is frozen in a shout, or maybe a scream. The girl's face is calm, passive, which I find a lot creepier and a little more depressing.

'Well, Smoky, I'm officially overburdened now, and I'm officially requesting assistance.'

I force myself to turn away from the dead girl's too-bland features.

'You know what that means,' I say to Callie.

She sighs, a puff of the cheeks. 'I'll wake up Gene and we'll get going on this.'

Gene Sykes is the head of the LA FBI's Crime Lab. He and Callie have worked together in the past. They'll work together now to handle this scene, and I know they'll find anything that's there to find.

'Wait,' I say as a thought comes to me. 'What timeline do you see between this and the Kingsley murders?'

'Based on the state of the corpses, I would guess this scene is approximately a day old,' she says.

'So he killed here first, and then went right to doing the Kingsleys. Strange.'

'How's that?' Barry asks.

'Ritual serial homicide follows a cycle. Murder is the peak of the cycle. Depression follows the act. We're not talking about feeling a little down, we're talking deep, debilitating depression. And yet our perp killed here, woke up the next day, and murdered the Kingsleys. It's not impossible, but it's unusual.'

'Everything about this sucks,' Barry observes.

As Callie contacts Gene, I get a call from Alan.

'I'm done here. Everything go okay?' he asks.

'That depends on your definition of 'okay.' ' I fill him in on the second scene.

'He did us the big favor.'

'The big favor' is our way of saying that the perpetrator gave us a second scene without us having to think about it first. Many times, the first scene we get simply doesn't provide enough evidence to lead us to a perp. In those cases, all we can do is wait for him to strike again, and hope he's more careless the second time around. Or the third. Or the fourth. It's disheartening and guilt-creating. 'The big favor' is sarcastic--and yet it's not. He's provided us with a second scene and we don't have to feel guilty about it because it happened before it was our responsibility. Everything from this point forward is on us.

'Yep. What did you find out?'

'Nothing. No one noted anything unusual. No strange vehicles, no strange people. But this is one of those neighborhoods. Middle of the middle.'

Alan is referring to a study he forwarded to me recently. It was an application of sociology to criminal investigation. It made a note of how changes in technology and perception of rising crime, coupled with economic factors, conspired to make our jobs harder. Neighborhoods used to tend toward community. People as a rule knew their neighbors. The result, in terms of non-forensic investigation, was a more observant witness pool and an environment where the outsider stuck out as such.

Time marched on, things changed. Women went to work. The access to information about crime and criminals expanded as the reach of television grew. People began to realize that a neighbor could be a child molester, the high school quarterback could be a date rapist, and in general they began to circle the wagons.

These days, the study found, most middle-class neighborhoods--

the 'middle of the middle'--lack that old sense of community. The vast majority of residents know the names of the neighbors on either side, but that's it.

Poorer neighborhoods, in contrast, tend to be more tight-knit. Wealthy neighborhoods tend to be more security conscious and watchful. The study concluded that the best place for a criminal to work was in the 'middle of the middle,' where every home was an island, and that in those neighborhoods, forensics were more likely to solve a crime than witnesses.

'Even so,' Alan continues, 'there was a birthday party just three houses down. Lots of kids and parents around.'

'Which tells us he doesn't stick out.' I consider this. 'He might have worn a uniform.'

'I don't think so. I asked, no one remembered seeing anyone from the gas, electric, or phone companies. On a weekend, that wouldn't have been the smartest move anyway.'

'It would stand out more than it would blend in.'

'Right.'