Deeper Than the Dead ok-1

by Tami Hoag

  “You’d have to ask Sheriff Dixon that question, ma’am,” Mendez said.

  He was glad to dodge the question himself even though he knew the answer. Dixon hadn’t moved on a search because they had no idea where to begin searching. They had no idea where Karly Vickers had gone missing, what direction she might have gone in or been taken. With her car still missing, Jane Thomas or no Jane Thomas, they still had to consider that Karly Vickers might have left of her own free will. She might have received a threat from the ex-boyfriend, panicked, and taken off to parts unknown.

  “If she was the twelve-year-old daughter of some professor, he would have called out the National Guard by now,” she said angrily.

  “I know the helicopter is going up this morning,” Mendez said. “They’ll be looking for her car, and for Lisa Warwick’s car.”

  They would be looking for a body, as well, but he didn’t mention that.

  “Miss Vickers’s picture will be in every paper and on every news channel in California by tonight. If someone has seen her, then we have a starting point for a ground search.”

  The sun was a fat orange ball ten feet off the horizon, up but not yet strong enough to burn off the damp chill clinging to the fall air. Mendez was glad for the sport coat he had on. Jane Thomas was wrapped in a hand-knit, moss green sweater that reflected the color of her eyes—except for the red rims from hours of crying.

  He felt bad for her. To find out someone you knew had been murdered was a terrible thing. To find out someone else you knew was missing and could very well be the next murder victim . . . he couldn’t imagine.

  The backyard of the cottage was fenced in to contain the pit bull that sidled up to Jane Thomas, growling low in its throat. Not a warning growl so much as a sound of discontentment. The dog sat and leaned against the woman’s legs, looking mournfully up at her.

  “This is Petal?” Mendez asked.

  “Yes. I took her home with me last night. She’s lost without Karly.”

  He lifted his Polaroid and snapped a shot of the dog. He would take it to Anne Navarre later to see if her students could ID this as the dog they had seen in the woods.

  Maybe the dog had jumped the fence and had been in search of its owner when it had come across the body of Lisa Warwick. If this was television, they would give Petal a piece of Karly Vickers’s clothing to sniff, and the dog would bark and take off, leading them to her owner who was trapped in the lair of a madman.

  Unfortunately, they weren’t living in a TV show, and Mendez had never known a pit bull to be much in the way of a hunting dog.

  “We’ll have deputies interview all the neighbors,” he said. “To see if maybe someone saw her leave the house, or saw her with anyone, or saw someone going into the house.

  “The fact that her car isn’t here makes me think she probably met her abductor elsewhere,” he said. “We’ll need a list of everyone you know she saw on Thursday.”

  “I can tell you,” she said. “She was at the center. She saw the staff. She had her hair and nails done at Spice Salon. She had her teeth cleaned.”

  “What dentist?” Mendez asked, pulling out his notebook and pen.

  “Either Dr. Pratt or Dr. Crane. They both offer their services to the center.”

  Petal the pit bull got to her feet and began to growl in earnest. The back door of the cottage opened and Frank Farman stepped out.

  “I’ve got two units here to start knocking on doors,” he said. He looked at Jane Thomas. “You’d better have a leash on that dog, ma’am. That’s a dangerous animal.”

  Jane Thomas took hold of the dog’s pink collar. “Only to people she doesn’t like.”

  Farman frowned at her.

  “Thanks, Frank,” Mendez said. “Can you send a unit over to the Warwick woman’s residence? We’ll canvass that neighborhood as well. Hicks and I will be heading over there next.”

  “They’re already there.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  Farman shot another disapproving glance at the still-growling dog and went back into the cottage.

  Petal settled on Jane’s feet, grumbling. Thomas patted her big square head. “Good girl, Petal.”

  Mendez raised an eyebrow. “You know Frank?”

  “I know his wife, Sharon. She’s a secretary for Quinn, Morgan—the same firm Karly was going to work for. In my humble opinion, her husband is a condescending, misogynistic ass.”

  He dismissed the remark. Frank being a chauvinist was not news. Farman was old-school and had been vocal in his objection to the idea of hiring female deputies. He had hardly been alone in his opinion. Law enforcement was traditionally the bastion of men. A lot of them wanted to keep it that way.

  He left Jane Thomas with Petal the pit bull and drove with Bill Hicks a mile or so across town to the home of Lisa Warwick for their second search of the day.

  The address they had been given by the personnel office at Mercy General was a beige stucco side-by-side duplex a few blocks from the hospital in one direction, a few blocks from the college in the other direction. The landlord met them with the key.

  “I can’t believe Lisa is the woman those kids found in the park,” the man said as he opened the front door.

  Donald Kent, professor of economics, was a neat, distinguished gentleman with a Colonel Sanders goatee and a blue-striped yellow bow tie at the throat of his buttondown shirt.

  “How well did you know Miss Warwick?” Hicks asked.

  “Enough to say hello, to chat about nothing.” He had the kind of well-modulated voice that belonged on public radio. “A very nice young woman. Never a problem. Always pays—paid—her rent early, if you can imagine that. She told me she had family in Sacramento.”

  “They’ve been contacted,” Mendez said. “They’re driving down today. In case they contact you, they won’t be able to come in here until we’re through with the investigation. The place will be sealed.”

  Kent seemed troubled at the idea. “I’m sorry for them. I think if I lost someone so suddenly, I would take some comfort being in their surroundings at least.”

  “I think it’s going to be difficult for them to take comfort in much of anything, considering,” Mendez said.

  “How did she die?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Were you aware of Miss Warwick dating anyone, having company over?” Hicks asked.

  The professor shook his head. “I didn’t see her that frequently. I live in another building on the next block. She wasn’t one to talk about her private life, though, and I’m not one to ask.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Unless you gentlemen need me, I have a faculty meeting at nine.”

  Mendez thanked him and let him go.

  “Our job would be so much easier if our victims were loud, obnoxious, and talked incessantly about their sex lives,” Hicks said as he browsed the contents of Lisa Warwick’s bookshelf in the living room. “Like my wife’s sister, for instance. Every person who has ever been within earshot of that woman knows all the details about every guy she’s ever slept with.”

  Mendez chuckled. Hicks was a little older than him. Tall, lean, and red-haired, he was a cowboy in his free time. He had an easygoing way about him, and never had a problem with someone else being lead on an investigation. That was not the case with everyone in the department. There were guys with more years on the job who openly resented Mendez for being Dixon’s chosen one. All Hicks cared about was working at a case until it was solved. They worked well together.

  “Glad I’m not one of them,” Mendez said, snooping in a buffet drawer.

  “You fail to meet her low standards,” Hicks said. “You’re employed and have all your own teeth.”

  They searched in a comfortable silence for few minutes before Hicks went back to his original point.

  “We have to have two vics that never said boo to anybody.”

  “I’m betting that’s not a coincidence,” Mendez said. “Just like it’s not a coincidence
they both had some connection to the Thomas Center. I don’t think they were random victims, do you?”

  “Nope. What’s the statistic? Most victims of murder know their killer. Makes you want to put the steak knives away when your relatives come to visit, doesn’t it?”

  “I wonder,” Mendez said, going to the tiny kitchen that was separated from the dining area by a counter. “Did this girl even get a look at him? Or did he grab her from behind and get the glue in her eyes first thing?”

  “If he glues their eyes shut to keep them from seeing him, what’s that all about? If he knows he’s going to kill them, and it seems pretty clear that’s his intent, why bother to keep them from seeing him?”

  “I don’t think he does it for practical reasons.”

  As they made their way through her house, it seemed Lisa Warwick was private about her private life even with herself. They found no diary, no journal. Her travel plans for her wine country weekend were carefully noted in her day planner on the dining room table, but with no annotations as to a traveling companion.

  “Even shy girls doodle hearts on their calendars,” Hicks said, paging through the book. “There’s nothing in here.”

  The only photograph they discovered on the first floor showing Lisa Warwick with a man was a framed snapshot of her with her parents at her graduation from nursing school.

  Mendez stood in the middle of the living room and took in the space. Lisa Warwick hadn’t been as tidy as Karly Vickers. She had clutter, but her clutter was loosely organized all around the place: A pile of magazines on the ottoman, a stack of books on the end table, a bag of knitting on the floor next to the sofa. There was no sign of a struggle, no sign anyone else had been in the house.

  “Somebody had to see something,” Hicks said. “We just have to find that somebody.”

  On the other hand, Mendez recalled, Bundy had abducted two of his victims in broad daylight from a crowded lakeshore state park—one within feet of her friends—and no one had noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  In the blink of an eye a woman could be gone, sucked into a terrible alternate universe where existence meant unspeakable torture and unbearable pain, a world beyond the darkest imagining, unseen by everyone but the killer and his victim.

  They went up the stairs to check out the two bedrooms and the bath. The smaller of the bedrooms was undisturbed. In the bathroom, someone had left a towel on the floor next to the tub. Makeup and costume jewelry littered the vanity. She had been getting ready for something.

  In the master bedroom the bed was unmade. Clothes had been tossed over a chair. A framed photo sat on one of the nightstands. Lisa Warwick posing with a small group of people, Jane Thomas among them. Three women and a good-looking man in his mid-thirties, all in business attire, each with a glass of champagne in hand.

  A celebration, Mendez thought. A happy moment. But it didn’t strike him as the sort of photo a woman would keep on her night-stand. Except for one thing: the way Lisa Warwick was looking up at the man on her left.

  “Ten bucks says this is the guy she was having the affair with,” he said. “Look how she’s looking at him.”

  “And ten bucks says he’s married,” Hicks said. “Look at how he’s not looking at her.”

  “Like his life depends on it.”

  “Or half of everything he owns.”

  They darkened the room and repeated the black light test they had done on Karly Vickers’s bed with no result. This time as Mendez passed the light over the sheets small dots lit up like tiny fluorescent stars. Not many of them, but enough to suggest a story of lovers in bed, a drop of semen here and there—spillage when taking off a condom perhaps, or maybe during oral sex.

  “Looks like we’ve got us a suspect,” Mendez said. “Let’s bag that photograph and go find out who he is.”

  24

  There was a part of him that never wanted to wake up. Vince couldn’t decide if it was the damaged part of his brain that didn’t want him to wake up, or the rest of his brain that didn’t want to wake up and be subjected to the aftereffects of the bullet fragmented in his head.

  The doctors, specialists, and neurosurgeons he had seen in the months since being shot had all been stunned by the fact he had survived at all. There were only a handful of cases like his in the world, each of them a little different from the others, dependent on the parts of the brain that had been impacted.

  The doctors had no idea what would happen next. They had exhumed what shrapnel they could, but the largest piece of the .22 caliber slug had lodged in a place the surgeons wouldn’t go near. There was too great a chance of causing severe brain damage. Yet they couldn’t tell him what damage would be caused by leaving a bullet in his head.

  They couldn’t be sued for that damage, they knew that.

  So he was a living, breathing science project, a case study, a freak in the medical circus, an article in The New England Journal of Medicine.

  The effects of what had happened to him varied. Some days his sense of smell or hearing seemed heightened. Some days he couldn’t get the taste of metal out of his mouth. Nearly every day he had a headache that could have knocked a mule off its feet.

  In the initial weeks after the shooting he had experienced the frustration of aphasia, a disorder that made it difficult for him to grab the words he wanted from his brain and put them into coherent sentences.

  Some days he found himself to be lacking impulse control, but whether that was damage to the frontal lobe or the result of fully realizing his own mortality, he couldn’t say. He was a walking, talking second chance. He had no interest in passing up experiences or putting opportunities off to a tomorrow that might never come.

  The trauma had left his body weak and lacking the endurance to get through simple tasks. Now, months later, he could get through a day, but stamina was still an issue.

  He had been so exhausted by the time Mendez dropped him off at the hotel he’d barely had the energy to try to shower off the smell of the morgue. He had no memory of falling naked across the bed. He had no memory of dreams. He had managed a full seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. That was the first time that had happened in months.

  With the phantom smell of morgue still in his nose, he took another shower and made a pot of bad coffee in the little machine on the bathroom counter. Breathing deep the scents of coffee and soap in the steamy bathroom, he wiped off a section of mirror and took his daily inventory.

  He had looked worse. He had looked better. If he had been a woman, he at least could have improved himself with makeup.

  “You’d be a hell of an ugly woman, Vince,” he said, finding a chuckle in that.

  He made a mental note to look into visiting a tanning parlor to get some of the gray out of his skin. He was in California, after all. Cali fornians loved their tans. He had no doubt that he would feel like an idiot doing it, but if it kept people from thinking he had one foot in the grave, it was probably worth it.

  Room service brought a basket of muffins and toast. He ate what he could just to put a layer of something in his stomach before the first round of pills. The brown prescription bottles were arrayed on the dresser. Painkillers, antiseizure medication, antinausea medication, antipsychotic meds to ward off the paranoia sometimes brought on by pressure against some crucial part of his brain of which he couldn’t remember the name.

  He had yet to take that one. So far he had managed to fend off the anxiety himself. He looked at the prescription bottle and wondered if he really needed it, would he be sane enough to take it.

  As he picked at the food, he listened to his tape of the conversation in the car from the night before. Mendez had given him an overview of what had happened so far. Three probable victims and one woman missing. He made notes as he listened and mulled over the notes when the tape clicked off. He studied the Polaroids he had taken at the autopsy, particularly intrigued by the cutting wounds that seemed so deliberate and symmetrically placed on the limbs—where there was a vertical
cut on one arm there was a corresponding cut in exactly the same place on the other arm. The same with the legs.

  He pulled a paper from his briefcase that depicted a simple line drawing of the female human form, front and back, and drew in the marks on Lisa Warwick’s body. He would fax the form to Quantico later to find out if anyone in ISU had come across this pattern before.

  He would go in to the sheriff’s office this morning and go over the particulars of all three cases, with a particular eye out for any similar marks on the previous victims, and begin work on the profile in earnest.

  Not that he didn’t already have some strong ideas. He had worked enough cases, interviewed enough killers to have the checklist ingrained in his brain. There were maybe nine people on the planet who knew as much about the minds of murderers as he did. They were a small club. Too small for the ever-growing ranks of serial predators.

  He picked up the phone and called the sheriff’s office.

  “Detective Mendez, please.”

  “What do you know today you didn’t know last night?”

  “Not much,” Mendez said.

  “Not much?” Vince said. “What have you been doing all morning? Golfing? And why wasn’t I invited?”

  “We searched the home of the missing girl, Karly Vickers, and found nothing of significance.”

  “And that’s not significant to you?”

  Mendez conceded the point. “No signs of forced entry. No signs of a struggle. No indication she was involved with a man. So far, we haven’t found anyone who saw anything happen anywhere.”

  “What does that tell you?”

  “He’s careful.”

  They sat in a nice white conference room with big windows looking out on huge, spreading oak trees and green grass. Nice.

  “This beats the hell out of the basement at Quantico,” he said, getting up from his chair and going to the window.

  “You work in the basement?” Detective Hicks asked.

  “Deeper than the dead,” he said. “I think the Bureau should put that on T-shirts and sell them. BSU could be the next big thing in pop culture.”