Deeper Than the Dead

by Tami Hoag

  Petal and Violet were both at the back door, barking incessantly, Petal jumping up and hurling herself at the door again and again in a vain attempt to break out.

  “Girls! Girls, calm down,” Jane said, setting her gun on the washing machine.

  She caught hold of Petal’s collar and nearly had her arm pulled out of the socket as she tried for three seconds to restrain the pit bull. The dog was like a torpedo of solid muscle.

  “Calm down, sweetheart!” Jane shouted, her ridiculous words falling on small deaf ears.

  Petal lunged at the door again and again, snapping, fangs bared, ready to tear to pieces whatever—or whoever—was outside.

  Jane stood back, shaken by the dog’s ferocity. She looked out the window above the washing machine, seeing nothing in the arc of lighted lawn. Taking her gun with her, she went into the kitchen, cut the light, and went to the window above the sink. She opened the window and strained to listen, hearing only the barking of the two dogs in the laundry room at first. Then came an eerie accompaniment in the distance: Coyotes yipping wildly down in the arroyo behind her property, celebrating the death of some unfortunate creature.

  She hated that sound. It was not the semiromantic howl of the wild people most often associated with the animals. It was a frenzied, hysterical cacophony of voices that preceded prey being ripped apart and devoured by the pack. It made the hair stand up on the back of her neck and ran goose bumps down her arms.

  The dogs went wild to hear it, but Jane never allowed them outside at night off leash. Violet would have made a nice appetizer for a coyote. Even Petal wouldn’t have been a match for a pack of them. Bold and criminally clever, coyotes routinely lured dogs away from safety with one member of the pack dancing and bowing, inviting the dog to play, only to draw the dog into an ambush by the rest of its cohorts.

  Breathing a sigh of some relief, she closed and locked the window and went back to bed, not to sleep, but to sit and fret and pretend to read. Violet joined her eventually, jumping on the bed to spin around like a tiny whirling dervish before settling in her spot to sleep. Petal remained at the back door, her barking gradually subsiding to a piteous whining.

  Jane debated breaking down and calling Cal, deciding against it. The dogs were calming down. The coyote victory party had died down. Her doors and windows were locked. She had her gun. What did she need with a man?

  Reassurance and strong arms around her.

  Her relationship with Dixon had teetered off and on between friendship and something more for a long time, never entirely tipping one way or the other. Her choice. She chose not to push it over the edge tonight . . . again.

  At some point exhaustion won the battle, and Jane fell asleep only to be tormented by dark dreams of captivity and torture at the hands of a madman. When the alarm went off, she was relieved to be dragged up out of that hell.

  Still wearing the sweatshirt and leggings she had fallen asleep in, she got up and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face and brush her long hair back into a loose ponytail. Violet came to the doorway and began hopping up and down like a flea.

  “I know, I know,” Jane said. “I’m coming.”

  Dogs were the great levelers of life. It didn’t matter what had happened the day before. When the sun came up, the dogs would always need to go outside. Life would go on.

  The doorbell rang as she walked through the house. She could see Steve Morgan through the glass in the front door. What a godsend he had been through this ordeal, taking some of the weight of managing the press off her.

  They had agreed to meet early to go over everything that had gone on, every scrap of information that had come in to date on both Lisa’s murder and Karly’s disappearance, in preparation for a press conference set for nine.

  “Hi, Steve,” she said, opening the door. “Come on in. I have to let the dogs out. Sorry.”

  “No problem,” he said, following her back through the house. “I brought doughnuts. I figured we could both stand a big jolt of fat and sugar to start the day.”

  “I’ll supply the coffee,” Jane said as they walked through the kitchen.

  Petal was still sitting by the back door and had scratched the paint to shreds overnight. Both dogs flew out into the yard like a mismatched pair of rocks from slingshots, disappearing into the wilds of the garden.

  Jane walked out onto the stone patio, crossing her arms over her I SLEEP WITH DOGS sweatshirt. The sun was barely up, and the air was cold. She glanced at Steve, taking in the dark circles under his eyes, the lines creased around his mouth.

  “You look like you got about as much sleep as I did last night,” she said.

  Somewhere at the back of the garden the dogs were going crazy, barking, howling, yelping.

  “What in the world?” Jane asked, heading back toward the commotion. She grabbed a hoe away from the potting bench as she went. She glanced back over her shoulder. “If this is a snake, I’m calling on you.”

  “I’ll pass, thanks.”

  She took a right at the iceberg roses and stepped into a waking nightmare.

  There, at the very back of the garden, planted among the calla lilies was Karly Vickers.

  54

  Jane didn’t hear her own scream. The shock had rendered her deaf and weirdly numb. She knew she was running, but couldn’t feel her legs. She flung herself down on overturned soil of the shallow grave and began digging frantically with her hands, but couldn’t feel the earth between her fingers. She stared at Karly Vickers’s face, pale blue-white against the dark earth, but couldn’t feel the horror of that reality.

  “Oh my God!” Steve Morgan exclaimed behind her.

  “Call for help! Call for help!” Jane shouted, digging and digging like a frantic animal. She uncovered the girl’s throat, part of one shoulder. She glanced back over her shoulder to see Steve standing, flat-footed.

  “Call 9-1-1!” she screamed at him.

  “She’s dead, Jane.”

  “No!”

  “She’s dead.”

  “No!”

  Like in a nightmare, he didn’t move, didn’t seem to grasp the urgency of the situation.

  Jane pushed to her feet and ran past him back to the house.

  It wouldn’t penetrate her brain that Karly Vickers was dead. Hands trembling wildly, she grabbed the phone and dialed 911.

  “I need an ambulance! I need an ambulance at five eighty-nine Arroyo Verde. Hurry!”

  “What’s the problem, ma’am?” the operator asked with a sense of calm that struck Jane as being insane.

  “I need an ambulance! Are you deaf? Send the damn ambulance!”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, but ended the call and dialed Cal Dixon’s pager number, leaving her number and 911 for the message.

  Operating purely on instinct, she ran back outside and grabbed a spade as she passed the potting bench.

  “Jane, we shouldn’t disturb the scene,” Steve said, trying to block her from the grave.

  Without hesitation she swung the spade and hit him in the shins with the business end of it. He jumped back, shouting something she didn’t hear.

  She turned the loose earth as quickly as she could, exposing an arm, a leg. In the distance she could hear a siren wail.

  Oh my God, oh my God, she chanted inside her head over and over. Had this been what the dogs had gone crazy for in the night? She had believed it was just the coyotes. Had some madman been back here doing this? Why hadn’t she gone to look? Why hadn’t she called Cal? What if it was too late because she had done none of those things?

  Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

  The EMTs came charging around the rose hedge, skidding to a stop at the sight.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Holy shit!”

  Jane threw the shovel down and shouted at them, “Help her! Help her, damn you!”

  The two men moved hesitantly closer. She grabbed hold of one of them by a fistful of uniform. “Help her!”

  �
�There’s no helping her, ma’am,” he said. “She’s gone.”

  The other one got down on the ground and put two fingers on the side of Karly Vickers’s bruised throat.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “I think she might have a pulse.”

  “No way.”

  “Way. Get down here!”

  Jane stepped back, shaking uncontrollably as she watched the two men go to work.

  “What the hell?!”

  She turned to see Cal Dixon, his face a mask of shock and horror as he ran to her. Somehow she managed not to faint until he was close enough to catch her.

  55

  Mendez abandoned his car at the curb in a red zone and ran into the ER at Mercy General Hospital. An ambulance had delivered Karly Vickers ahead of him. There was a chance she might be alive.

  He held his badge up to the staff, not listening to them and not speaking.

  It was plain where the action was. Half a dozen people in surgical scrubs swarmed around the bloody, filthy, naked woman on the table in the first exam room. The doctor in charge was shouting orders like a field general. Hang this, push that, get labs stat. The girl had been hooked up to an array of beeping, buzzing machines. She had tubes and wires coming and going. One person stood squeezing the big blue ball of a ventilator bag, sending air into her lungs via the hole that had been cut in her throat. The floor of the room was awash with debris—bloody gauze, discarded packaging, tubing, syringes.

  “She’s in V-fib!”

  “Paddles! Charge! Clear!”

  BAM! Her body jumped on the table.

  “Charge! Clear!”

  BAM!

  The process was repeated again and again with the staff swearing and begging in between jolts.

  “Come on, damn it!”

  “Hang on, Karly!”

  BAM!

  “We’ve got a sinus rhythm!”

  “All right, Karly, don’t die on us now!” the doctor shouted. “I’ve got money riding on you. Stats!”

  Pulse. Blood pressure. Respiration. Numbers all too low.

  “We need another liter of ringers, wide-open!”

  Mendez turned to one of the EMTs standing at the nurses’ station, scribbling on paperwork.

  “Is she going to make it?”

  “I doubt it,” the guy said. “But she shouldn’t have been alive when we picked her up, either. Guess it depends on whether or not she wants to fight for it.”

  Not an easy answer to that, Mendez thought. He had yet to get a close look at Karly Vickers, but if their killer had followed form, she had been blinded and her eardrums destroyed. She would have multiple stab wounds. She would have been sexually tortured and mutilated. Would she want to live? He hoped so. At least long enough to tell them who killed her.

  Dixon was in the next exam room with Jane Thomas, who sat on the exam table wrapped in a blanket and shaking like a seizure victim. If she had been any paler she would have become invisible.

  “What happened?” Mendez asked, pulling his notebook out of his coat pocket.

  “The girl was buried in Jane’s garden,” Dixon said. “Same as Lisa Warwick, with just her head exposed.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Lucky for the girl Jane didn’t just assume she was dead.”

  “The dogs were barking,” Jane Thomas said, her voice soft and tremulous. She looked at the floor as if that might help her concentrate. “Last night. Petal woke me up. I looked at the clock. It was three twenty-three. She was beside herself, howling and wanting out. I thought it was just that there were coyotes in the arroyo. I never imagined . . . If only I had gone to look—”

  “Jane, we’ve been over this,” Dixon said, his hand on her shoulder. “You couldn’t have known, and you sure as hell shouldn’t have gone out to look.”

  “I could have called you,” she said, big teardrops tumbling down her cheeks. “But I didn’t do that, either.”

  “It’s not your fault, Miss Thomas,” Mendez said. “This is the fault of the man who took her and abused her, no one else’s.”

  “Thank God I had to get up early to meet Steve,” she said. “Where is he? Did he come?”

  She looked around as if he might suddenly materialize in the room.

  “Steve Morgan?” Mendez asked.

  “Yes. He came over at seven. We had a meeting scheduled to plan the press conference.” Her eyes went round. “Oh my God. The press conference! What time is it?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about the press,” Dixon said. “Whenever you’re ready, they’ll come running. It’s more important for you to be here. Right? If Miss Vickers comes around, you’ll want to be the first to know.”

  “Yes, right,” she murmured, shivering inside the blanket again. “But someone will have to call them.”

  “It’ll be taken care of, Jane. And I want you looked at,” he said, giving her a warning eye.

  She didn’t object as another tremor rattled through her. “He didn’t help me,” she said.

  “Who didn’t help you?”

  “Steve. It was like one of those nightmares where you’re trying to tell somebody something, but they don’t understand you. He just stood there.”

  Dixon stepped away from her. Mendez moved with him.

  “I want everyone in the war room in an hour.”

  Mendez nodded. “The media is going to be in a feeding frenzy over this.”

  “And we’ve got nothing to tell them. Do we?”

  “Is that a question or an order?”

  “A question.”

  “Leads are being followed. We have no comment to make on persons of interest at this time,” Mendez said. “Vince was right. This guy wants credit for his work.”

  “He wants to make us look like fools.”

  “So far, he’s succeeding.”

  “She didn’t have her necklace,” Jane said, seemingly talking to herself.

  Dixon looked at her. “What?”

  “Karly,” she said. “She didn’t have her necklace. Her graduation necklace from the center. She would never have taken it off. I have to get her another one. I have to go to the office.”

  “That can wait.”

  She shook her head and climbed down off the table. “No. No, it can’t. I have to go get her another one.”

  “You have to sit down, Jane. You fainted.”

  “I can go pick it up,” Mendez offered. “If you can call someone to have it at the desk.”

  Dixon sighed. “Thanks, Tony.”

  “De nada. That’s the least I can do for the heroine of the day.”

  On his way back out to his car, Mendez spied the front page of the Saturday LA Times. The headline read: CASE CLOSED? SUSPECT ARRESTED IN OAK KNOLL HOMICIDE.

  56

  Dennis got up early and dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved rugby shirt. He went into his closet and dug through the dirty clothes to find his cigar box. From the box he took the pocketknife he had stolen from his dad’s dresser and shoved it deep into the front pocket of his jeans.

  The knife was his most prized possession. He liked to pretend his father had given it to him for his birthday. He wished that was true, but his father never even remembered his birthday.

  He took the lighter he had stolen out of his mother’s purse, and put it and the half-dozen cigarettes into a zippered pocket on his backpack. He hadn’t tried to smoke before, but he thought maybe he would start.

  Almost as an afterthought, he tossed the dried-out rattlesnake head in there too—just because it was his. Then he put on his blue jean jacket, hiked his backpack up over one shoulder, and headed downstairs.

  The house was completely quiet. Usually, Dennis’s mother was up by now to make breakfast. Even on the weekends, his father liked breakfast early. His father was a busy man, and had a lot of important things to do, even on his days off.

  But there was no sign of his mother.

  Dennis had never heard her car come home, and he had been awake all night. Even when he had finally climbed back do
wn from the roof to his bedroom, he hadn’t wanted to sleep. Not because he was afraid of bad dreams, but because he just didn’t feel anything. He didn’t feel pain. He didn’t feel sadness or anger. He didn’t feel tired.

  He had crept through the house like a burglar to see what he could see. The downstairs looked like a bomb had gone off with broken stuff all over the floors of the dining room and kitchen. His mother was gone. His father too. Dennis was all alone.

  He lay on his bed all the rest of the night, just staring at the ceiling. Now, in the light of day, the kitchen was a terrible mess. Dirty dishes had been thrown in the sink. A pot with macaroni and cheese in it had been knocked off the stove and spilled all over the floor. There must have been a thousand ants crawling on the gooey pile. There was red stuff smeared on one wall by the light switch. Blood, Dennis thought. He stared at it and felt nothing.

  The dining room was no better. There were broken glasses on the floor, and a couple of broken plates.

  For sure his mother had not come home. She would never have gone to bed and left the place like this. She kept everything clean and tidy because that was the way his father liked it.

  Dennis got a bowl and fixed himself some cereal. He was halfway done when his father came walking in, looking like he hurt all over. He had a hangover. Dennis could tell by the color of his skin and the bags under his eyes.

  His father didn’t get drunk very often, and when he did he didn’t try to hide it like Dennis’s mother did. He knew his mother drank almost every day on account of he knew where she hid her bottle. But it was her secret, and most of the time even his father couldn’t tell.

  Dennis stopped chewing and just stared at his dad now, not sure what to expect from him. Would he be normal? Would he still be mad?

  His father made a face like his mouth tasted bad, went to the coffeemaker, and stared at the empty pot.

  He looked at Dennis. “Where’s your mother?”