Deeper Than the Dead

by Tami Hoag

“Fear of retribution. Dennis Farman is a bully.”

  A quick knock sounded on the door to the outer office and a uniformed deputy stepped in.

  “Farman’s not coming.”

  “The hell he’s not,” Mendez said.

  “He’s not coming. He said he’ll take his kid’s statement himself. He said it was a waste of everybody’s time to come in here and talk to you.”

  “The fuck!” Mendez caught himself too late and glanced over at Anne Navarre. “Sorry.”

  “I could call Mrs. Farman,” the teacher offered. “Maybe she would come in with Dennis.”

  “You’ve got to go now anyway,” the deputy said. “Some woman came into the office to report a missing person. Could be our victim.”

  The woman waiting in Sheriff Dixon’s office was in her early forties, tall and slender, and dressed in jeans with dirty knees and a bright green T-shirt with an oversize denim shirt thrown over it and left open. Her long blonde hair was scraped back into a messy ponytail with strands falling loose to frame her pale oval face. She stood in front of the visitor’s chair with her arms wrapped around herself. She looked worried.

  Cal Dixon was sitting against the front edge of his desk, head down, speaking quietly to the woman when Mendez walked in.

  Dixon looked up. “Tony, I’m glad you made it back. I want you to meet Jane Thomas from the Thomas Center for Women. Ms. Thomas, this is Detective Mendez. He’s my lead investigator on this case.”

  Mendez reached out and shook her hand.

  “Jane is concerned the murder victim may be someone she knows.”

  “One of our clients,” she said. “Karly Vickers. No one has seen or heard from her since last Thursday night.”

  “And you just noticed her missing?” Mendez said. “Don’t you do a head count or something?”

  Many of the Thomas Center “clients” were at-risk women from abusive situations. From what Mendez had heard, they ran a pretty tight ship for security reasons.

  “We had recently moved Karly out of the center into one of our cottages. She was ready to transition to independent living.”

  “What makes you think she didn’t take that idea to the next level and just split?”

  Jane Thomas shook her head. “No. No. She was excited about starting over. She was a little nervous, but excited about starting her new job. Yesterday was supposed to be her first day.”

  “But she didn’t show up,” Mendez said.

  “No.”

  “The employer is . . . ?”

  “Quinn, Morgan and Associates. A law firm that helps us out with family court cases.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I saw her last week—Thursday morning at the center. I helped her pick out her new work wardrobe. We have our own store in-house, clothing donated from working women here in town, from Santa Barbara, from Los Angeles.

  “Thursday was Karly’s makeover day. She had her hair done, her nails, her makeup. I remember her saying she felt like Cinderella.”

  “Could she have gone out looking for Prince Charming?” Mendez asked. “She had a new look, new clothes. She was feeling pretty—”

  “She’s shy. She was still recovering emotionally from being beaten nearly to death by her boyfriend.”

  Mendez dug his notebook and pen out of the patch pocket of his tweed sport coat and started scribbling. “Do you have a name for him?”

  “Greg Usher. I have all the information available on him in Karly’s file at my office. He has a record.”

  “And he’s walking around loose?”

  “The last I heard.”

  “Do you have a photograph of Karly?” Dixon asked.

  “Not with me.”

  “Do you know if he tried to contact her recently?” Mendez asked.

  “She would have told us.”

  “Maybe she was afraid to.”

  She didn’t have an answer for that. She wasn’t sure.

  “Does she have a car?”

  “Yes, a gold Chevy Nova. 1974 or ’75. I have the license plate number in her file.”

  “Where’s the car?” Mendez asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s not at the cottage.”

  “So she could have gone somewhere on her own.”

  “No. She didn’t just leave.”

  “You know as well I do, Jane,” Dixon said quietly. “How many of these women go back to their abusers?”

  “Not our women.”

  Dixon lifted one white eyebrow. “None of them?”

  Jane Thomas scowled. She knew better. “Not this one. She wouldn’t. She would never just leave Petal.”

  Mendez stopped writing mid-word. “Petal? Who’s Petal?”

  “Karly’s dog.”

  His heart gave a big thump then began to beat faster. “What kind of dog?”

  “A pit bull. Why?”

  He turned to Dixon. “The kids said there was a black-and-white dog at the scene. It might have been a pit bull.”

  “Oh my God,” Jane Thomas whispered, sinking down onto the chair behind her. She covered her mouth with her hand as her green eyes filled with tears.

  “Where is she?” she asked. She didn’t look at Mendez or at Dixon but stared at the floor as if her life depended on it. “Can I see her?”

  Dixon sighed. “We’ll be sending the body to the LA County coroner for an autopsy, but it hasn’t left yet. But it might be better just to have you look at some Polaroids from the scene—”

  “No.”

  “Jane—”

  “I want to see her.” She looked up at Dixon now in a way that made Mendez wonder just how well they knew each other. “I need to see her.”

  Dixon started to say something, then clamped his mouth shut and looked out the window. The silence hung in the air like fog. The image of the dead woman’s face slid through Mendez’s memory. He wished he hadn’t had to look at it, and that was his job.

  Finally Dixon nodded. “Okay. But I’m warning you, Jane, it’s going to be hard.”

  “Then let’s get it over with.”

  The three of them got in a sedan and Mendez drove them to Orrison Funeral Home. No one said anything. Dixon sat in the backseat with Jane Thomas, but neither of them looked at the other, Mendez noted, glancing at them via the rearview mirror.

  The funeral home director took them to the yellow-tiled embalming room where their vic was on a gurney in a body bag, waiting for her ride to the city.

  Dixon dismissed the man, who closed the door behind him as he left.

  “We don’t think she had been dead that long when we found her,” Dixon said. “Decomposition is minimal, but not absent.”

  Jane Thomas stared at the body bag. “Just show me.”

  “I want you to be prepared—”

  “Damn it, Cal, just show me!” she snapped. “This is hard enough!”

  Dixon held his hands up in surrender. Mendez unzipped the bag and gently peeled it open.

  Jane Thomas put a hand over her mouth. What color she had drained from her face.

  “Is that her?” Dixon asked.

  She didn’t answer right away. She stared at the woman on the gurney for a long, silent moment.

  “Jane? Is that her? Is this Karly Vickers?”

  “No,” she said at last, her voice little more than a breath. “No. It’s Lisa.”

  “Lisa?”

  “Lisa Warwick,” she said, and she began to tremble. “She used to work for me.”

  “This woman used to work for you?” Mendez said.

  “Yes.”

  “And one of your clients is missing.”

  She didn’t answer. She’d gone into shock. Then she began to cry and sway, and Cal Dixon stepped close and put his hands on her shoulders to steady her.

  Mendez looked his boss in the eye. “Three dead, one missing. Do you still think we’re not dealing with a serial killer?”

  To his credit all Dixon said was, “Call Quantico.”

  Good thing, M
endez thought, because he already had.

  14

  Vince Leone closed his car door. The sound seemed amplified. He looked up at the sky. The blue was so intense it hurt his eyes. He put his Ray-Bans on and breathed deeply of the crisp fall air. His head filled with the scents of Virginia: damp earth, forest, cut grass.

  The academy grounds were alive with people. Young agents going here, running there. Veterans, like himself, hustling between buildings, between meetings.

  The sounds of footfalls on concrete, snatches of conversation, a lawn mower, gunfire in the distance: All assaulted his ears. His sight, hearing, sense of smell—all seemed magnified, hypersensitive. It might have been an inner need to absorb as much of life as possible, or it might have had something to do with the bullet in his head.

  He went into the building, to the elevators, pushed the Down button. Down. Way down. People got on the car with him. A couple of them looked at him sideways, then looked away. He vaguely recognized faces but couldn’t recall names. He didn’t know them well—or they him, he suspected, though his short-term memory still had some holes in it.

  They knew of him, he suspected. He had signed on with the Bureau in 1971 after a stellar career in homicide in the Chicago PD. He had come to Quantico and the Behavioral Sciences Unit the fall of 1975, just as the unit was beginning to blaze some exciting trails. Being a part of that time had made him and his colleagues legends. He was forty-eight and a legend. Not bad.

  Or maybe these people knew about him, as in “The guy that got shot in the head and lived.” The academy was a small, incestuous community, and like in all small, incestuous communities, gossip ran thick and fast.

  The elevator stopped and most of the passengers got off, headed for the cafeteria or PX. The smell of coffee, eggs, and bacon grease hit him like a brick, then the doors closed and the car began to drop another twenty feet to what the agents lovingly referred to as the National Cellar for the Analysis of Violent Crime.

  The warren of offices and conference rooms had been a bomb shelter during the height of the Cold War, a hideout for J. Edgar and his cronies in the event of nuclear attack. The Bureau had seen fit to send the Behavioral Sciences/Investigative Support Unit down to the win dowless, sometimes musty-smelling, subbasement a year before.

  Closed off in their own giant tomb with their cases—the worst of the worst murders and sexual assaults the country had to offer—the agents joked (in the gallows humor that kept them for what passed as sane) that they lived and worked ten times deeper than the dead.

  Leone stepped off the elevator.

  “Vince!”

  He glanced up at his colleague, wearily amused by the expression on his face. “Bob. I’m not a ghost.”

  “Geez, no. Not at all. I’m just surprised to see you, that’s all. What are you doing here?”

  “Last I knew, I worked here,” Vince said, turning in the opposite direction.

  He went into the men’s room, went into a stall, and puked, a wave of heat sweeping over him. The meds or maybe nerves, he admitted to himself. He’d been gone six months.

  A couple of stalls down, someone else vomited.

  They came out of the stalls and went to the sinks together.

  “Vince!”

  “Got a bad one, Ken?” Leone asked. He ran the faucet, scooped water into his hand, and rinsed his mouth.

  Ken’s face was gray and drawn, his eyes haunted. “Three little kids, sexually assaulted, their faces blown off with a shotgun.

  “We don’t know who they are, where they came from. We can’t compare dental records to missing kids’ because they don’t have any teeth left. We keep hearing about DNA profiling as the coming thing, but it can’t come fast enough for these kids.”

  “It’s years out,” Vince said. It would be a miracle for law enforcement when the technology came, but as Ken had said, it couldn’t come fast enough.

  Ken shook his head as if he were trying to shake the images from his brain. Ken was a top profiler, but he had never quite mastered the ability to close the door between analysis and sympathy. Therein lay the road to an ulcer, at the very least.

  “It’s always worse when it’s kids,” Vince said.

  “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” he admitted. “The vics were about the same ages as my boys. I go home at night . . . You know how it is.”

  “Yep.”

  Vince went home at night to a big-screen TV. He’d been divorced seven years. His oldest was in college now. But he remembered how it had been to try to leave cases at the office so he could go home and pretend to be normal.

  “I played golf with Howard on the weekend,” Ken said. “IRDU is looking pretty good to me.”

  “Research and Development. Hmmm . . .” Vince would have sooner stayed home and hit his thumb with a hammer over and over, but that was him.

  “Hey,” Ken said, as if he had only just realized. “What are you doing here?”

  Vince shrugged. “It’s Wednesday.”

  All of the profilers also taught about fifteen hours a week, both in the FBI Academy and the National Academy for law enforcement officers. But they didn’t teach on Wednesday mornings. For those not out in the field on assignments, Wednesday mornings were spent in the conference room, going over case facts, picking one another’s brains, bouncing ideas off one another.

  BSU had grown over the ten years of its existence to include six full-time profilers, working to assist local law enforcement in solving tough cases. When John Douglas had been made chief of the operational side of BSU, the profilers had been given their own acronym—ISU, Investigative Support Unit—within the BSU. Douglas had wanted to take the BS out of what they did. Ironically, the agents in the unit continued to call themselves BSUers.

  BSU. ISU. Another three letters added into the giant vat of alphabet soup that was the Bureau. Unit names seemed to change with every new unit chief, and every new chief seemed to have some pet subgroup to create. IRDU (Institutional Research and Development Unit). SOARU (Special Operations and Research Unit). NCAVC (National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime). NCIC (National Crime Information Center). VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program).

  Despite John’s best hope, BS was the Bureau’s specialty.

  Vince went into the conference room, turning his back to the long table as he poured himself a cup of coffee to burn the taste of vomit out of his mouth.

  The discussion of Ken’s case was already under way. Crime scene photos were being passed around and remarked upon. What did this mean? What did that mean? If the children were related, it meant this. If the children had been abducted individually, it meant that. How would authorities go about the task of identifying the bodies? How many children had been reported missing in a two-hundred-mile radius in the past year?

  Vince slipped into a chair, reserving comment on any of it. He needed a few minutes to regroup, to build up another charge of energy. The coffee was bitter and acidic, and his stomach lining felt raw.

  “There’s an NCIC search under way for reports of missing children in the age groups of the victims,” Ken said.

  “Once VICAP is totally operational, we’ll be able to search the database based on the perp’s MO,” another agent said.

  “And once the technology is developed I’ll be able to watch the World Series on my wristwatch,” said another. “Someday isn’t going to help us today.”

  Had anybody ever heard of anything on a violent child predator with a similar MO? Why a shotgun? Why obliterate the faces? Did that point to murder by a relative or someone else who knew the children? Or was the shotgun a signature meant to make a statement as to the psychological state of the UNSUB (unknown subject)?

  Ken stood at the gigantic whiteboard, jotting down ideas being thrown at him on one part of the board and noting pertinent questions on another.

  Vince took it all in, his mind half on the case details, half on his colleagues. They were all in shirtsleeves, but the day was young,
and all neckties were still neatly in place.

  He had known most of these guys a long time. They had worked a lot of cases together and they had a lot in common in addition to backgrounds in law enforcement and years in the Bureau. Three of the five guys in the room right now—including Vince—had been in the marines. John had served in the air force. They had the common experiences of trying to juggle marriage and family with the job—and in several cases the common experience of marriages falling apart because of the job.

  “You’re quiet, Vince.” The voice came from the head of the table.

  Vince met eyes with his old friend—who seemed not the least bit surprised to see him. Vince spread his hands and shrugged.

  “Sorry, Ken,” he said to the agent at the board. “But we’re just spinning our wheels until they figure out who these kids are. Unless you want to do two profiles: one for a stranger as the UNSUB, one for a person known to the kids. That’s a hell of a lot of work when you’ve got how many other cases ongoing? Ten? Twelve?”

  Ken looked at the end of his rope.

  “But hey,” Vince said. “What do I know? I’m just an old cop from Chicago. I can reach out to a gal I know at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They’re only up and running for a year, but they get a lot of anecdotal information we don’t. I can go make the call right now.”

  Ken nodded. “Thanks, Vince. I appreciate it.”

  Vince got up and left the room, going directly back to the men’s room where he puked up the coffee. He rinsed his mouth out and stood for a moment, assessing himself in the mirror, seeing what his colleagues were seeing.

  He had always been a big, good-looking guy: six three, two hundred pounds, built to play football. Now he was a tall, raw-boned man, twenty pounds underweight. He hadn’t lost the chiseled bone structure of his face, or his large dark eyes, or his wide white smile, thank God. He had something to fall back on. And there was color in his face at the moment, but when his blood pressure returned to pre-puking normal, his complexion would be a pale reflection of the steel gray heavily threaded through his black hair.

  The hair had grown back thick and wavy, thank God. Bald had not been a good look on him.