Read Online The Face of Death by Cody McFadyen - Free Book Online

swirls, and curlicues.
    He played here. Used their blood like finger paint to make patterns. To say something.
    I look over at Sarah. She continues to gaze out the window, unaware of me.
    She’s not the perpetrator. Not enough blood on her, and the corpses are all too big. She’d never have gotten any of them up the stairs by herself.
    I move forward into the room, trying not to step on evidence. I give up; I’d have to levitate.
    Too much blood, but none of it in the right places. Where’s the murder scene?
    Every bit of blood evidence I could see was purposeful. None of this was the result of a throat being slit.
    Focus.
    The investigator in me is a detached creature. It can view the worst of the worst with dispassion. But detachment isn’t what I need right now. I need empathy. I force myself to stop examining the scene, to stop calculating, and focus all of my attention on the girl.
    “Sarah?” I keep my voice soft, unthreatening.
    No response. She continues to sing in that awful monotone whisper.
    “Sarah.” A little louder now.
    Still no reaction. The gun stays at her temple. She keeps on singing.
    “Sarah! It’s Smoky. Smoky Barrett!” My voice booms, louder than I’d intended. I startle myself.
    Startle her too. The singing stops.
    Quieter: “You asked for me, honey. I’m here. Look at me.”
    This sudden silence is as bad in its own way as the singing had been. She’s still looking out the window. The gun hasn’t moved from her temple.
    Sarah begins turning toward me. It’s a montage of slow, jerky motions, an old door opening on rusted hinges. The first thing I notice is her beauty, because of its contrast with the horror around her. She is ethereal, something from another world. She has dark, shimmering hair, the impossible hair you see on models in shampoo commercials. She’s Caucasian, with an exoticness about her that speaks of European roots. French, perhaps. Her features have that ideal symmetry that most women dream of having, and too many living in Los Angeles go under the knife to get.
    Her face is the mirror opposite of mine, a counterpoint of perfection to my flaws.
    She has blood splattered on her arms and face, and soaked into the short-sleeved long white nightgown she’s wearing. She has full, cupid-lips, and while I’m sure they’re normally a beautiful pink, right now they are the pale white of a fish belly.
    I wonder about that nightgown. Why had she been wearing it in the afternoon?
    Her eyes are a rich blue, heart-stopping. The look of defeat I find in them is so profound, it makes me queasy.
    Pressed to all that beauty, the barrel of what I can now tell is a nine-mm Browning. This is no weak twenty-two. If she pulls the trigger, she’ll die.
    “Sarah? Can you hear me now?”
    She continues to look at me with those defeated, blue-flame eyes.
    “Honey, it’s me. Smoky Barrett. They said you asked for me, and I got here as fast as I could. Can you talk to me?”
    She sighs. It’s a full-body sigh, straight from the pit of her stomach. A sigh that says,
I want to lie down now, I want to lie down and die
. No other reply, but at least she keeps looking at me. I want this. I don’t want those eyes to start roaming, to remember the bodies on the bed.
    “Sarah? I have an idea. Why don’t we walk out into the hallway? We don’t have to go anywhere else—we can sit at the top of the stairs, if you want. You can keep that gun pointed right where it is. We’ll just sit down, and I’ll wait until you’re ready to talk.” I lick my lips. “How about it, sweetheart?”
    She cocks her head at me, a casual motion that becomes horrifying because she keeps the gun barrel against her temple
as
she does it. It makes her seem hollow. Puppet-like.
    Another deep sigh, even more ragged sounding. Her face is expressionless. Only the sighs and the eyes show me what’s going on inside her.
    Located somewhere in hell, I’d say.
    A long moment passes, and then she nods.
    I am almost