Chris Carter - I Am Death

Hunter and Garcia nodded their understanding.

‘Any signs of a break-in?’ Hunter’s question was directed more at the forensic agent checking the front door.

The agent stopped dusting the doorframe, looked back at the detective and shook his head.

‘Nothing here. The frame isn’t broken or cracked. The lock hasn’t been picked or tampered with. We’ve got a couple of fingerprints from the door handle. Judging by size alone, one of them is definitely female. The bloody hand-prints —’ he indicated the one just above the doorknob, and the one on the outside frame — ‘belong to the guy who found the body.’ He nodded toward the police unit on the drive-way. ‘He used the door and the frame to steady himself as he got up from the floor after fainting.’

‘Have you found a breaching point?’ Hunter asked. ‘Any idea of how the perpetrator got in?’

‘No, nothing yet. Apparently the front door was unlocked when the housemate got home,’ the agent revealed. ‘All the windows are unbroken, and they were all closed and shut from the inside. The back door was also locked.’

‘Here,’ Sergeant Perez said, handing Hunter and Garcia two brand new Tyvek coveralls inside sealed plastic bags.

Both detectives took the bags, ripped them open and started suiting up. When they were done, they pulled the hoods over their heads and each slipped on a pair of latex gloves.

‘I would sincerely suggest that you go for the nose masks too,’ Sergeant Perez commented.

Nose masks in place, they stepped up to the front door. The forensic agent who had been dusting the door handle and frame took a step to his right and pulled the door open.

‘Mind the blood,’ Sergeant Perez said as he turned and walked away.

At last Hunter and Garcia stepped into the living room and immediately paused. Their eyes tried to take everything in, but their brains struggled to comprehend the scene in front of them.

Garcia breathed out, and his words came out as a whisper.

‘What the fuck?’

The front door of the house opened straight into a small and sparsely decorated living room, with an open-plan kitchen at the back. A square table was positioned about four feet in front of the stove, which centered the cooking counter. The refrigerator was on the far left, just by the door that led into a short hallway and then deeper into the rest of the house. No windows were open, and all the curtains had been drawn shut, but the room was bright with light courtesy of the two high-powered crime-scene lamps that had been mounted on to tripods and placed at opposite corners of the room.

The living room area was covered with a beige, loop pile carpet. A tall, black-wood module occupied most of the west wall. On it were a few decorative items. No TV. A dark-blue fabric sofa with a matching armchair and a black coffee table had been positioned a few feet from the module, toward the center of the room.

Hunter and Garcia breathed out almost at the same time, but neither said a word, their gaze still taking in the entire space, which had been completely bathed in blood — the furniture, the decorative items, the walls, the ceiling, the curtains... everything was covered in splatters of crimson red.

The carpet under their feet had soaked a large amount of blood, but it was now covered by a thick, protective, see-through plastic sheet, which indicated that forensics had already photographed and vacuumed the floor for fibers, hairs, traces and residues. The protective sheet was to avoid any forensic agent, detective, or whoever else entered the crime scene from spreading their bloody footprints, since it was practically impossible to move around the living room without treading on a pool of blood.

Even with the nose masks on, the nauseating smell of human flesh in the early stages of decomposition still filled the room, forcing both detectives to breath mostly through their mouths.

The words I AM DEATH had been written in huge bloody letters across the carpet, just a few feet in front of what was undoubtedly the centerpiece of the sickening canvas that the living room had become. That centerpiece was Sharon Barnard.

She was naked and tied to a metal-framed chair, which was facing the front door. Her ankles had been securely fastened to the chair’s legs by plastic zip ties. Her arms had been pulled behind the chair’s backrest and zip-tied at the wrists. Her whole body was covered in blood. Blood that had come from her face and cascaded down her torso and legs before soaking the carpet beneath her feet. A face that simply wasn’t there anymore.

‘Her face was sanded off.’

The words came from the forensics agent who was by the high-powered lamp at the east end of the room. He was about six-foot one, with an athletic body, high cheekbones and a strong jaw. Unlike Hunter and Garcia, he wore no nose mask. The smell of putrid flesh didn’t seem to bother him.

Garcia turned to face him, but Hunter kept his attention on the victim in front of him.

‘I’m Doctor Brian Snyder,’ the man said, moving toward the detectives. ‘I’m the lead forensic agent assigned to this scene.’

‘Detective Carlos Garcia, LAPD UV Unit. You’re new,’ Garcia added, without any malice. Mike Brindle was the lead forensic agent who attended most UV crime scenes. Hunter and Garcia had worked with him for years.

‘To LA maybe,’ he replied. ‘But I’ve been a forensic agent for over ten years. I just got transferred from Sacramento.’

With an apologetic face, Garcia said, ‘Welcome to Los Angeles. This is Detective Robert Hunter.’

Hunter finally faced the forensic doctor, his expression asking a silent question.

Doctor Snyder read it and nodded to confirm his previous statement. ‘Yes, you heard it right, Detective. The perpetrator used a powerful random circular sander on her face,’ he said, as he indicated the machine inside a large plastic evidence bag that was resting on the kitchen counter. ‘The type used to sand off hard wood and metal,’ he added. ‘That explains the blood splatter pattern around this room, and why it reaches as far as the ceiling, the walls, and the curtains.’

The machine on the kitchen counter was gray in color, with a strong, rubber-coated grip handle. The on/off button sat on the upper part of the handle, just level with the operator’s thumb. Very easy to control. Like most items in that living room, the handheld sander was also drenched in blood.

‘If the killer used a handheld sander on her face,’ Garcia cut in, ‘that means he would’ve been covered in blood himself.’

‘Oh, there’s no doubt about that,’ the doctor confirmed. ‘And that would explain the several footprints you can see around the living room and in the kitchen.’ He indicated a few of the footmarks that littered most of the beige loop pile carpet and the kitchen’s tiled floor. ‘Given the footprint pattern,’ the doctor moved on. ‘I’d say that the killer was wearing some sort of protective clothing. At least around his feet. His shoe size seems to be eleven.’

Garcia looked at his partner and pulled a face. He and Hunter knew that around sixty-eight percent of the male population in the USA wore size eleven shoes.

Hunter cautiously stepped forward and approached the body. Garcia and Doctor Snyder followed. With each step, the blood-soaked carpet squished under their weight and against the thick plastic sheet, creating a squealing sound reminiscent of rubber flip-flops walking on a wet floor.

Because the victim’s head was slumped forward and downwards, hiding most of what would’ve been her face, Hunter had to squat down in front of her to have a better look. What he saw was truly grotesque. Her face had been almost entirely scraped off, from her forehead all the way down to her chin. All that was left was a gooey mess of flesh, muscle, cartilage and blood. Most of her facial bones were fully exposed. Her left eyeball had come into contact with the sander. Her cornea, pupil, iris, and ciliary body had been obliterated, releasing the jelly-like substance that makes up most of the ocular globe, deflating the eyeball, and leaving the eye socket lined with nothing more than a gelatinous matter and the exposed optic nerve. Her right eye, on the other hand, had been completely spared. It lay intact, speckled with blood, and wide open, with a dead, soul-chilling stare. It seemed that all the suffering she had been put through and all the agonizing terror she had felt had been immortalized on the surface of her right eye like a snapshot.