Deeper Than the Dead ok-1

by Tami Hoag

  Vince avoided the scene at Sells’s junkyard. They didn’t need him there to look at bones. They certainly didn’t need him there to be recognized by the media.

  Dixon would have his hands full now as it was. His case had just taken on Hollywood movie status: a creepy convicted pedophile living in a creepy junkyard on the outskirts of the idyllic college town, murdering people and throwing their corpses out to be devoured by farm animals.

  All he needed was to have a top profiler step in from the FBI and he would have a blockbuster on his hands.

  And all Vince needed was for the powers at the Bureau to see his face on the nightly news in the middle of it.

  Bones or no bones, he still didn’t think Gordon Sells was the man who had murdered Lisa Warwick. Guys like Gordon Sells tried to fly under the radar as much as possible. He was by nature a pedophile. It was Vince’s theory that the majority of pedophiles were ashamed of what they did no matter how long they were at it or how prolific they were. What they did never became okay—not even to themselves.

  Men like Sells operated in secret, in hiding. They asked their victims not to tell—or made sure that they couldn’t. They covered their tracks and disposed of all evidence.

  The Gordon Sells theory of Lisa Warwick’s murder and Karly Vickers’s abduction could be packaged and wrapped with a big red bow for the press, but in reality that box was going to be empty.

  He wondered how his UNSUB would take it when the press made Sells out to be the big bad serial killer. Would it amuse him? Piss him off? Drive him to do something to prove them wrong? In Vince’s experience, this kind of killer had an ego that needed feeding and stroking. He wouldn’t like someone else getting credit for his work.

  That could be a good thing for the investigation, forcing him to make a move.

  It could be a very bad thing for Karly Vickers, if she was still alive. Vince pulled Mendez’s car into the field where the searchers were parked, across the road from Gordon Sells’s property. Sunglasses in place, he pulled a Dodgers’ baseball cap on. He shucked his tie and sport coat in exchange for a windbreaker from the Oak Knoll Softball League, grateful Mendez was broad-shouldered.

  Tables laid out with drinks and snacks sat under a couple of pop-up tents. Under a third tent, another table held flyers with a photo of Karly Vickers.

  Have You Seen This Woman?

  She was young. Pretty in a simple way. Permed blonde hair with a fountain of bangs sprayed in place. She wore a necklace with a small pendant—the figure of a woman with her arms raised in victory—the logo of the Thomas Center.

  She had been missing nearly eight days. She was probably dead.

  A woman asked if she could help him. She was in her midthirties, wearing a pink Thomas Center T-shirt, slender with a big head of auburn hair.

  “I’m looking for Steve Morgan,” he said, setting the flyer down. “Have you seen him?”

  “Steve and Jane are giving an interview in the media tent,” she said, looking off to her left to another pop-up tent set off by itself, maybe fifteen yards away. “They should be finished soon. Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “Do you work at the center?” Vince asked.

  “Are you with the sheriff’s office?” she countered.

  Vince flashed her a smile. “What gave me away?”

  “The mustache,” she said, loosening up a little. “I grew up in a family of firemen and police officers.”

  “Then we’re not exactly hard to spot.”

  “No. I’m Maureen Collins.”

  “Detective Leone. How long have you worked at the center?”

  “Three years. I do family counseling.”

  “You know Miss Vickers, then.”

  “Yes. She’s a nice girl. I can’t believe this has happened to her.”

  “Did you know Miss Warwick?”

  “Yes. I knew Lisa fairly well. I’m sure you’re aware she was volunteering as a court advocate. We worked together on several cases.”

  “With Steve Morgan?”

  “Yes. Steve is our hero,” she said with a smile.

  “Do you know if Miss Warwick was seeing anyone?” he asked. “We have reason to believe that she was, but we haven’t found anyone to confirm that, let alone tell us who she might have been involved with.”

  She hesitated just a fraction of a second before saying, “I have no idea. Lisa was a very private person.”

  “I find that strange,” Vince confessed. “Why be so secretive? Unless the guy wasn’t supposed to be seeing her.”

  The woman looked over at the media tent and said, “It looks like they might be finished.”

  “Thanks.”

  Vince walked to the tent with his head down as the interviewer and photographer went past. Jane Thomas went in another direction. Steve Morgan stood looking at some papers on a clipboard.

  “You’re getting a lot of media attention,” Vince said, strolling under the canopy of the open-sided tent.

  Morgan glanced up. “The more, the better, right? Somebody had to see something. If just one person comes forward with a lead . . .”

  “Sometimes that’s all it takes,” Vince said. “One person who saw something that struck them as odd. Like a man coming and going to and from a woman’s house at late hours of the night.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me personally, Detective?”

  “A neighbor of Lisa Warwick thinks she saw you.”

  “In the dark. In the middle of the night.”

  “If you had a relationship with her, better for you to come clean now and tell us. We’ll find out eventually, and it won’t look good that you tried to hide it.”

  Morgan went back to studying the papers on the clipboard.

  Vince took a seat in one of several tall directors’ chairs that had been positioned for interviews.

  “We’ve got semen on her sheets,” he said. “That gives us a blood type.”

  “I didn’t kill Lisa,” Morgan said.

  “I’m not saying you did. Just because you were sleeping with her doesn’t make you a murderer.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping with her.”

  “Your wife thinks you were.”

  Morgan looked at him with a gaze that could have cut steel. “You talked to my wife?”

  “I told you we would.”

  “And she told you she thinks I was sleeping with Lisa.”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “You’re lying. Sara wouldn’t say that.”

  Vince let him wonder for a minute. Finally he sighed.

  “You know, Steve, man to man, I don’t care if you were sleeping with her. You want to screw up your family situation—that’s none of my business. I care that you’re wasting our time by denying it. I care that you’re going to make us waste man hours looking into every goddamn day of your life for the past six months, digging through your financials, comparing hotel receipts with calendar dates with trips to Sacramento and trips you said you made that you never did because you were really in town fucking your mistress. I care about that.”

  The muscles in Morgan’s square jaw flexed. “Are you finished?”

  “No,” Vince said, leaning forward. “I care that if you were involved with this girl, and now she’s dead, that you’re that big an asshole you would waste time we could be spending finding her killer just because you don’t want to step up and be a man. You would do that to try to cover your own ass. Didn’t you care about her at all?”

  Steve Morgan said nothing for several minutes. He turned and looked out across the field with no expression whatsoever. What he was seeing, what he was thinking, Vince could only imagine.

  Maybe he saw his family slipping away from him, his wife divorcing him, his daughter hating him. Maybe he was remembering Lisa Warwick and how much he had loved her. Maybe he was looking back on his last visit to Lisa Warwick’s home, wondering if he had really been so careless as to leave traces of himself at the scene.

  “Look,
Steve, I’m not trying to bust your ass here. Maybe you really loved the girl, but now she’s gone and you don’t want to lose your family too. Unless you killed her, it’s nobody’s business. We can try to keep it quiet.”

  “In the middle of a media circus.” Morgan laughed.

  “I hear you have a suspect in custody,” he said quietly. “You found Lisa’s car, Karly’s car here on this property. Remains have been found.”

  “We have a person of interest,” Vince said.

  Morgan nodded. “Then I guess you’d better check his blood type,” he said, and walked away.

  40

  The lower jaw was missing from the skull, still lost in the filth of the hog yard. But the upper part of the skull was intact with what looked to be a full set of teeth.

  Mendez and Hicks took the thing in a brown paper bag and went back to their car, ignoring the shouts and calls of reporters being held at bay on the far side of the crime scene tape. A virtual motorcade followed them back to the sheriff’s office. As they pulled into the parking lot the television reporters and cameramen rushed the lawn to lay claim to the prime backgrounds for their remote reports.

  Vultures, Mendez thought, as he and his partner cut through the maze of hallways in the building, and went out into the garage where the cars of Karly Vickers and Lisa Warwick were being gone over a second time.

  “Anything new?” Mendez asked.

  “Two sets of prints off both cars,” said the brunette from Latent Fingerprints—Marta. She stood beside Karly Vickers’s Nova, watching as someone else combed the carpet in the driver’s side foot well. “Two identical sets of prints from both cars, and nothing else. Not so much as a partial from any other party.”

  “Sells and Doug Lyle?” Hicks ventured. “Sells and his nephew?”

  “Walter is doing the comparisons now.”

  “The victims’ prints?” Mendez asked.

  Marta shook her head. “Nada. Already eliminated.”

  “Somebody wiped the cars clean,” Hicks said.

  “What’s in the bag?” Marta asked. “Did you bring me lunch?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Mendez said as he started for the side door.

  “Why would Sells get rid of the victims’ prints but not his own?” Hicks asked.

  “He wouldn’t. Someone else brought the cars there, wiped them down, and left them.”

  “Sells and his nephew find them in the field, think Christmas has come early, and put their hands all over them. You know what that means?” Hicks said as they got into a sedan parked behind the garage.

  “If Sells didn’t kill Lisa Warwick or grab Karly Vickers, but he killed whoever we have in this bag, then we’ve got more than one murderer,” Mendez said.

  “It’s a banner day for the chamber of commerce.”

  They drove to the back door of Peter Crane’s office and blocked in his Jaguar.

  “You just caught me,” Crane said, leading them down the hall to an empty examination room. “I told Steve I would close for the afternoon and join the search party.”

  “Steve Morgan?” Mendez asked.

  “Yeah. I’m sure you know Steve’s spearheading the search effort and helping Jane Thomas deal with the media.”

  “You’re good friends?”

  “Yeah. We golf when we can. Our kids are friends. Steve got me involved with the center,” Crane said, leaning back against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Do you happen to know if he has a girlfriend?” Mendez asked.

  Crane’s expression seemed carefully arranged. “Steve’s married. Happily.”

  “Yeah, we know that. But that doesn’t change the question. We have reason to suspect he and Lisa Warwick might have been seeing each other.”

  “Steve and Lisa?” The dentist looked at the floor as if he might be trying to picture the couple there. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  He was a poor liar.

  “We’re not looking to bust his balls over it,” Mendez said. “We need a clear picture of what was going on in her life before she was killed. That’s all.”

  Crane shrugged. “Sorry. I can’t help you with that. So, what can I help you with, detectives?”

  “Some remains were discovered this morning during a search,” Mendez said. “A skull, to be exact. We were hoping you could compare the teeth against the X-rays you took of Miss Vickers’s mouth last week.”

  Crane eyed the brown paper bag Hicks set on the counter. “Let me get the X-rays.”

  Mendez took the skull out of the bag and set it on the counter. The bone was dingy white, clean of all flesh. It seemed unlikely the person it belonged to had been alive a week past, that this shell had been filled with a brain, covered by a face, crowned with hair. It had been attached to a living breathing human, a person with thoughts and opinions and goals for a life that was then abruptly ended.

  Crane returned with the X-rays and clipped them to the light box on the wall, then he took a deep breath, sighed, and carefully picked up the skull, turning it upside down to look at the teeth.

  “No,” he said almost immediately. “Miss Vickers had several amalgam fillings in the upper molars. See here?” he said, pointing to the X-rays of individual teeth.

  “These teeth,” he said, looking at the thing he held in his hands like a halved cantaloupe, “were in need of attention. There’s significant decay in a couple of them. This filling in the premolar needed replacing. This bicuspid is chipped.”

  “How much can you tell about the person by looking at the teeth?” Mendez asked. “Can you tell their age?”

  “Like a horse?” Crane asked. “Not exactly. But this is a full set of teeth, so the person had to be at least a teenager. The teeth aren’t worn down, so not an older person. They haven’t been cared for, which would tend to make me think of someone in a poor financial situation. The teeth are on the small side, the jaw is relatively narrow, the skull is smallish with no pronounced brow ridge, so I’d guess it was a woman.”

  “How about a name and address?” Hicks asked.

  Crane gently set the skull down. “That’s your department, gentlemen. Can I ask where this came from?”

  “Sells Salvage Yard, outside of town.”

  “That’s the man you have in custody, right? That’s where you found the women’s cars? I saw it on the news this morning. You think he’s the killer.”

  “He’s being questioned,” Mendez said.

  Crane shook his head, staring at the skull. “This woman wasn’t Karly Vickers. So who was she? Is there another woman missing?”

  “Not that we’re aware of,” Hicks said. “The remains will be sent to the Bureau of Forensic Sciences for possible identification.”

  “So there really is a serial killer,” Crane said. “Thank God you have him in custody.”

  “Yeah,” Mendez said. “Thank God.”

  “Thanks for your help, Dr. Crane,” Hicks offered.

  “Anytime.”

  “So, you’re off to join the search?” Mendez asked.

  “Yes.” Crane looked at the skull again. “You see that . . . I hope we’re not too late.”

  “This is a nightmare,” Dixon said. “They’re absolutely sure about the prints?”

  “They’re a match for Sells and his nephew,” Hicks said, reaching for tuna salad on rye. They had called out for lunch and sat at the conference table, eating and catching up on the latest details.

  “Someone brought those cars out to Sells’s field, through the back gate,” Mendez said, “wiped them down and left them.”

  “And then what?” Dixon asked. “Walked back to town? Had an accomplice drive back? Or is Sells the accomplice?”

  “You have to take Sells out of the equation with Warwick and Vickers,” Vince said. “He’s not the kind of guy who has a partner. Him doing his own thing, at his own place, disposing of his victim in his own backyard—that I can see. But that kind of murder and Lisa Warwick are two entirely different
things.”

  “We’ve got two killers,” Dixon said. “Un-fucking-believable.”

  He got up to pace. He was in uniform and still looked starched and pressed, despite what the day had already put him through.

  “We do everything in our power to keep this out of the media,” he said. “Gordon Sells is in custody. The press can keep their eye on him for now.”

  “And you have to hope your UNSUB doesn’t get pissed off by that,” Vince said. “Sells getting credit could push him into something.”

  “It’s a no-win situation,” Dixon said. “If we admit there’s still a serial killer out there, he gets his ego fed, then he wants more. He wants more, he does more—right?”

  “Probably,” Vince conceded.

  Dixon swore under his breath and shook his head. “We’re working three murders and a missing person with at least two different perps in a county that doesn’t see three murders in a year. We’ve got to break this down.

  “Trammell and Campbell, check all missing persons reports from a five-county target area then work your way out if you have to. We’ve got to try to put a name to the victim at Sells’s. The Bureau of Forensic Sciences has a forensic artist who can come up with a likeness of the victim from the skull. And put some pressure on the nephew, see if he won’t crack.”

  The two detectives grabbed their lunches and headed to their desks to start making phone calls.

  “If we take Sells off the board, that leaves us where with Lisa Warwick?” Dixon asked.

  “Nowhere,” Mendez said. “But I’m pretty stuck on the idea she was having an affair with Steve Morgan. We asked Peter Crane about it this morning—he and Morgan are buddies—and he about turned himself inside out trying to deny it.”

  “I spoke to Morgan this morning,” Vince said. “He’s not interested in owning that. He’s a cool customer. I told him you’ve got semen on Lisa Warwick’s sheets. He said then you’d better test Gordon Sells’s blood type.”

  Brow furrowed, Hicks abandoned his sandwich and dug through a stack of papers that had been left on the table over the morning while they were out.