Cody McFadyen - The Face of Death

"This is a family neighborhood," I say. "Crowded. Active. It was Saturday, so people would have been at home. Coming here, today, was a bold move. He's either overconfident or very competent. Not likely a first-timer. I'm guessing he's killed before."

I walk forward, moving up the walkway and toward the front door. I imagine him, moving up this same path. He could have been doing it while I was shopping with Bonnie, or perhaps while I was clearing out Matt's master-bedroom closet. Life and death, side by side, each one unaware of the other.

I pause before walking through the front door. I try to imagine him here. Was he excited? Was he calm? Was he insane? I come up blank. I don't know enough about him yet.

I enter the home. Barry and Callie follow.

The house still smells like murder. Worse now, as time has passed, and the odors have begun to deepen.

We move to the family room. I stare down at the blood-soaked carpet. The CSU photographer is busy taking pictures of it all.

"That's a hell of a lot of blood," Barry observes.

"He cut their throats," I say. "Ear to ear."

"That'd do it." He looks around. "Like you said. No blood trails."

"Right. But all of this tells us things about him."

"Such as?" Barry asks.

"He likes what he does. Using a blade is personal. It's an act of anger, sure, but on another level, it's an act of joy. The way you kill a lover. The only thing more intimate is using your bare hands. It can also be the way you kill a stranger that you love. A sign of respect, a thank-you for the death they're giving you." I indicate the bloody room with a sweep of my hand. "Bloodletting can be intimate or impersonal. Blood is life. You cut the stranger you love so you can be close to the blood when it starts flowing. Blood is also a path to death. You drain pigs of blood pretty much the same way. Which way did he see them? As pigs, or lovers? Were they nothing, or everything?"

"Which do you think?"

"Don't know yet. The point is, however he viewed them, there wasn't any doubt. You don't kill with a knife if you're conflicted. It's an act of certainty. A gun gives you distance, but a knife? A knife has to be used up close. A knife is also evidence that the manner of death is as important to him as the death itself."

"How's that?"

I shrug. "A gun is quicker."

Callie is walking around the room, looking at the blood and shaking her head.

"What's wrong?" I ask.

She indicates a dark puddle near her feet. "This is wrong." She points at another pool off to the left. "That's wrong."

"Why, Red?" Barry asks.

"Blood-spatter analysis is a mix of physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics. No time for a detailed course here, but suffice to say that physics, blood viscosity, and the carpet material itself tell me these two puddles are likely here by design." She walks closer to us, points to the much larger blood patch near the entrance to the family room. "Note the lines here." She leans forward, indicating a line of blood that widens as it moves away from us, ending in a somewhat rounded head with jagged edges. "See how it almost looks like a giant tadpole?"

"Yes," I reply.

"You see this all the time on a smaller scale. Castoff spatter produces a long, narrow stain with a defined, discernible head. The sharper end of the stain, or the 'tail,' always points back to the origin point. This is simply a larger version of that, and fits with someone getting their throat cut." She points. "You see it here, and here. And note the blood on the wall nearby?"

I look. I see more tadpoles, only smaller, along with a number of drops, big and little. "Yes."

"Think of blood in the body as contents under pressure. Poke a hole in the container and it flows out. Blood spatter is caused by the force of the flow outward, which determines speed and distance. Cutting an artery produces a lot of force. Smashing a hammer into a head creates a lot of force. However you slice it--pun intended--blood leaves the body, moves outward with greater or lesser force, until it impacts a surface, at which point it transfers that motion and energy to the surface, thereby creating a pattern against it. The results are your tadpoles, your droplets with scalloped edges, and so on, blah-deblah." She points again to the carpet and nearby wall. "You can see evidence of arterial spray near the baseboard, and in the lines of blood on the carpet. Spontaneous motion, with directionality created by force. This is murder. Those other two are not. If I had to guess, I'd say that blood was poured onto both those spots. From a container of some kind. They are pools, not castoff or spatter. The directionality would have come from above, and the size of the pools, as well as the lack of spatter near their edges, indicate a leisurely pour. Very little force."

Now that she's pointed it out, I can see it. The puddles in question are too orderly, too aesthetically proper, too round. Like syrup onto pancakes.

"So . . . he kills someone down here," Barry says, "and then . . . what? He decides he didn't get the room bloody enough?"

Callie shrugs. "I can't tell you why he did it. I can tell you that those two spots came last. They're wetter than the kill-spot and more congealed."

"Huh." He looks at me. "What do you think? The victim killed down here was the last to die? Or the first?"

"I think the last," I say. "When I arrived, the blood here was still fresh, while the blood on the walls upstairs looked dry."

Something about the sliding glass door has caught my eye. I walk toward it.

"Barry," I say. "Look at this."

I point at the latch. It's unlocked, and the door is open a crack. Hard to see unless you are right on it as we are now.

"That's probably the point of entry," Callie muses.

"Get some shots of this before I open the door," Barry says to the CSU photographer.

The CSU--a studious-looking guy I know as Dan--snaps pictures of the latch area and the door.

"That should do it," Dan says.

"Thanks," Callie says, smiling.

Dan turns red and looks down at the carpet, smiling but tonguetied. I realize that he's been made speechless by a combination of his own natural shyness and Callie's formidable beauty.

"You're welcome," he manages, before trotting off.

"Cute," Callie says to Barry.

"Uh-huh." He's distracted by his examination of the latch. "Looks broken," he muses. "Definitely forced by something. I can see tool marks."

He straightens back up and uses his gloved hands to open the door. It moves from right to left as we're facing it now. From the outside, coming in, it would be left to right. A right-handed killer would probably have opened it with his left hand, as his right would have been filled with . . . what? A knife? A backpack?

We step through the door into the backyard. It's dark, but I can tell the yard is large, and I can see the shadowy outlines of a squareshaped swimming pool. A single medium-sized palm tree to the far left reaches for the night sky.

"Is there a light back here?" Barry wonders.

Callie fumbles around on the wall near the sliding glass door in the family room, looking for a switch. When she finds it and flips it, all the banter we've been using to distance ourselves from this tableau dissipates.

The switch had been set to turn on not just the yard lights, but the pool lights, as well.

"Jesus," Barry mutters.

The light blue bottom of the pool combines with the underwater lights to create an island of shimmering brightness in the dark. The blood in the water stands out against this brightness, a suspended crimson cloud. It floats on the top, in places a mix of clots, pink foam, smooth oil.

I walk over to the side of the pool and peer into the water.

"No weapon or clothing in here," I say.