Cody McFadyen - The Face of Death

"I hired a decorator six months ago."

We sit.

"Ms. Jones--"

"Cathy."

"Cathy," I correct. "We're here because of Sarah Langstrom."

"You said that already. Cut to the chase or hit the road."

"Blind and disagreeable," Callie says.

I shoot a furious look at Callie, aghast. I should have known better; Callie is the undisputed master of incisive ice-breaking. She'd assessed Cathy Jones and had understood sooner than I had: Cathy wanted to be treated like a normal person more than anything else. She knew she was being an ass; she wanted to see if we were going to coddle her or call her on it.

Cathy grins at Callie. "Sorry. I get tired of being treated like a cripple, even when it's a little bit true. I found that pissing people off tends to even the playing field the fastest." The smile disappears. "Tell me, please. About Sarah."

I relate the story of the Kingsleys, of Sarah's diary. I talk about The Stranger, and recount our analysis of him. She sits and listens, her ears turned toward my voice.

When I finish, she sits back. Her head turns toward the window in the kitchen. I wonder if this is an unconscious mannerism, something she did when she still had her sight.

"So he's finally shown his face," she murmurs. "So to speak."

"It appears that way," Callie replies.

"Well, that's a first," Cathy says, shaking her head. "He never did when I was around. Not with the Langstroms, not later with the others. Not even with me."

I frown. "I don't understand. He did this to you--how do you figure he wasn't revealing himself?"

Cathy's smile is humorless and bitter. "Because he made sure that I'd keep my mouth shut. That's the same as staying hidden, isn't it?"

"How did he do that?"

"The way he does everything. He uses the things you care for. For me, it was Sarah. He said, quote, 'to take my lumps and keep my mouth shut' or he'd do to Sarah what he was going to do to me." She grimaces, a haunted mix of anger and fear and remembered pain.

"Then he did what he did. I knew I could never let him do that to her. So I kept my mouth shut. That and . . ." She pauses, miserable.

"What?" I prod.

"It's one of the reasons you're here, right? You want to know why he kept me alive. Why he didn't kill me. Well, that's one of the reasons I kept my mouth shut. Because I lived. Because I was afraid. Not for her. For me. He told me if I didn't do what he said, he'd come back for me." Her lips tremble as she says this.

"I understand, Cathy. Truly, I do."

Cathy nods. Her mouth twists and she puts her head in her hands. Her shoulders tremble some, though not much, and not for long. It's a quiet cry, a summer thunderstorm, there and then gone.

"I'm sorry," she says, raising her head. "I don't know why I bother. I can't actually cry anymore. My tear ducts were damaged along with everything else."

"Tears aren't the important part," I say, the phrase seeming lame even as it comes out of my mouth.

Who are you, Dr. Phil?

She fixes her sightless gaze on me. I can't see her eyes through the black lenses of the sunglasses, but I can feel them. "I know you," she says. "About you, I mean. You're the one who lost her family. Who got raped and got her face cut up."

"That's me."

Even blind, the gaze is piercing.

"There is a reason."

"I'm sorry?"

"That he didn't kill me. There is a reason. But let's get to that last. Tell me what else you want to know."

I want to press her, but discard the idea. We need to know everything. Impatience with the sequences of it all would just be counterproductive. We cover the Langstrom murders, as per what we read in Sarah's diary.

"Very accurate," she confirms. "I'm surprised she remembers so many details. But I guess she's had a lot of time to think about it."

"So that we're clear," I say. "You were one of the responding officers? You were there, you saw the bodies and Sarah?"

"Yes."

"In Sarah's diary, she says that no one believed that her parents had been forced to do what they did. Is that true?"

"It was true then, it's still true now. Go and pull the case file. You're going to find that it's never been ruled as anything other than a murder-suicide, case closed."

I'm skeptical. "Come on. You're saying there was nothing there, forensically?"

Cathy holds up a finger. "No. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that no one took a hard, close look because he'd set up the scene so well. You get a sense, sometimes, when a scene has been staged. You know?"

"Yeah."

"Right. Well, you didn't get that sense here. You had a suicide note, held down by a glass of water with Mrs. Langstrom's fingerprints and saliva on it. You had her fingerprints on the gun, as well as blowback of both gunshot residue and blood consistent with what you'd expect from a suicide. You had her fingerprints around her husband's neck. Her fingerprints on the hacksaw used to decapitate the dog. She was taking antidepressants on the sly. What would you have thought?"

I sigh. "Point taken."

Hearing the story from the lips of another professional puts it into a different light for me. I see it as Cathy saw it, as the homicide detectives would have seen it, without the benefit of a Kingsley crime scene or Sarah's diary.

"You hinted that there was something there to find," Callie murmurs.

"Two things. Small, but there. The autopsy report on Mrs. Langstrom noted some bruising around both her wrists. It wasn't considered probative because we weren't looking for anything. But if you do have a reason to look . . ."

"Then you think about handcuffs and Sarah's story," I say. "You think about Mrs. Langstrom getting angry and yanking on those padded cuffs as hard as she could and bruising up her wrists."

"That's right."

"What was the other thing?"

"In the accepted scenario she shot the dog and she shot herself. No one reported hearing gunshots, and we're not talking about a twentytwo popgun. Which makes you start thinking about a silencer, even though no silencer was on the gun at the scene."

"What made you start looking?" Callie asks. Cathy is quiet for a moment, thinking.

"It was Sarah. It took a while, but as time went on, and I got to know her, I began to wonder. She's an honest girl. And the story was so damn dark for a girl her age. People kept dying or getting hurt around her. Once you give in to the possibility, you start seeing clues everywhere." She leans forward. "His real brilliance has always been in his subtlety, his understanding of how we think, and in his choice of victim. He doesn't overdo his staging, so it looks natural. He leads us to a conclusion, but not with so many bread crumbs that we'd get suspicious. He knows we're trained to reverse-engineer in the direction of simplicity rather than complexity. And he chose a victim in Sarah with no relatives, so there's no one that's going to hang around and demand that we take a closer look, no one that's going to worry at it."

"But there was, wasn't there?" I say in a quiet voice. "There was you."

Cathy does that looking-toward-the-window thing again. "That's right."

"Is that why he did this to you?"

Cathy swallows. "Maybe that was part of it, but I don't think it was the big reason. Doing what he did to me was useful to him." She seems to be breathing a little faster.

"Is there anything about what he did to you--about what happened to you--that would be helpful?" I ask, prodding. "I know it's difficult."

She turns to me. "This guy is--or has been--a ghost. I think anything that puts a face on him is going to help, don't you?"

I don't reply; it's a rhetorical question.

Cathy sighs, a ragged sigh. Her hands tremble and the quickened breathing continues.

"Funny. I've been wanting to tell the real story for almost two years. Now that I can, I feel like I want to jump out of my skin."