Faye Kellerman_Decker & Lazarus 19

by Hangman

  “Oh God!”

  “Yeah, exactly. Frieda had the presence of mind to repeat the word ‘dungeon’ back to her daughter. And that really spikes Mandy’s blood pressure. The girl becomes super agitated and buzzers start going off. The nurse rushes in, and is about to lace her IV with dope, but thank God for Frieda. She stops the nurse. The nurse and Frieda have words. Frieda wants a doctor to administer the sedation. The nurse gets all insulted and walks out in a huff and the doctor is paged.”

  “Bravo for Mom.”

  “You said it, because before the doctor could get to Mandy’s IV line, Mom managed to make out a few more words: ‘dungeon,’ ‘house’…‘murder.’ Then Mandy starts saying over and over: ‘the girl, the girl, the girl.’”

  “Good Lord!”

  “Yeah. Exactly. By this time, the doctor has come in and he’s really upset with Frieda. And Frieda is upset with the doctor and the nurse. So everyone is upset with everyone, but finally the doc puts Mandy under, she quiets down, and all is well in Sin City. It’s around seven-thirty by now. Frieda is finally calm enough to think. She decides it would be a good idea to call me up and tell me what Mandy said in her delirium. When I picked her up from the airport, I gave her my card, my cell number, and Scott’s cell number. She decided to give me a buzz.”

  “It’s amazing she had the presence of mind to call.”

  “Yes, it is, and not a moment too soon. Because all this is going down just as Carlotta’s walking to her car and about to take off. With the words ‘dungeon,’ ‘house,’ ‘murder,’ and ‘the girl,’ we think we have a very good reason for a second look and maybe a more intense search. Scott runs after Carlotta and we catch her just as she’s driving off. Matter of fact, she almost hit him. I can’t tell you how frenetic things were.”

  “I can picture it. Marge, I’m boarding the plane now. I’ll have to turn off my cell in a few minutes.”

  “I’ll speed it up. We go back into the house and poke around. At this point, we’re trying to find a trapdoor or a dummy wall or something that might indicate a hidden room. We come up empty. We check the garage. Nada. So I’m outside in the back looking around. Now mind you, this isn’t a ritzy development.”

  “Got it.”

  “All the houses have small properties with low cinder-block walls to divide one house from the next. And you can see into your neighbor’s yard if you look over the wall. I’m peeking into the neighbors’ yards, figuring that maybe Garth saw us coming and was hiding out in one of the houses. It’s like desperation time. Then I happen to notice that the two neighboring properties on either side of Garth’s property have cement slab patios. Garth’s patio is brick. I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why would anyone bother with the upgrade out here?’ Then I take a closer look. It’s a brick patio, but there isn’t any mortar or cement, Pete. It’s just bricks laid into sand and the bricks on the right side aren’t lying so neat.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Yeah, you can see where I’m going. Since Mandy mentioned something about a girl, a dungeon, and murder, we start throwing off the bricks. Underneath the patio, dug directly into the ground is a…” A pause. “Like a bomb shelter. It’s made out of cinder blocks with a trapdoor with a padlock on it. Rodney Major shoots it off the metal, we open the trapdoor, and the stench hits us immediately. It’s a fucking cesspool down there—pitch-dark and fetid. Silver has a flashlight. I take it and volunteer to go down first. I’m shaking like Jell-O. You know how I feel about dark, confined places.”

  Decker knew too well. Ever since Marge had rescued a group of children from a cult that used tunnels as escape routes, she’s been claustrophobic. “Good job, Dunn.”

  “Yeah. A pat on the back for me. Because on top of the dungeon being small and black, it really stinks. At this point sheer adrenaline is guiding me. I jump down…it’s a good eight feet.” A large sigh. “I find the girl, Pete. She’s nude, wrapped up in plastic garbage bags with a ligature around her neck. By my rough calculations—judging by the time Mandy had been in the hospital—she’s been that way for at least two days.”

  Marge’s voice had cracked.

  “I take her pulse…didn’t feel anything. It was cold down there and she felt cold. But not ice-cold. She’s not moving, though. I assume she’s dead. I mean why should she be alive? Then I shine a light in her eyes. She fucking blinks!”

  Decker couldn’t talk. How could he?

  “She’s unconscious but alive. I tear the ligature from her neck. We call the paramedics. They get her out and rush her to the hospital. As of right now, she’s in critical condition. We don’t know if she’ll come out of it. But for the time being, she’s still among the living. How do you figure something like that?”

  “You don’t. Does Mandy know who she is?”

  “Mandy’s still under sedation. We’ll have to wait until it wears off before we can talk to her.”

  The airplane door was closing. Decker had about thirty seconds. “You mentioned something about a strong stench. Was there anyone else in there besides the girl?”

  “There are two other bodies down there in various stages of decomposition. The coroner’s investigators have pulled out one body so far. It’s bloated and filled with maggots and most of the skin has peeled off. It’s gruesome. And that’s the best of the two.”

  “Oh, my word! How long do you think it’ll take before they clean the place out?”

  “I don’t know, Pete. They’ve still got a corpse to go. After that, they’ll get to work on the ossuary. The bodies were sitting atop a pile of bones.”

  WITH NOTHING TO obstruct the horizon, the sun rose in its full glory—a hot, gold disk pulsating with light. By seven in the morning, the outside spots that had allowed the investigators to work through the night were shut off, although the lights set up inside the bunker were shining full blast. It took many more hours before all the biological material could be properly removed from the cement grave.

  An APB was sent out for Garth Hammerling. North Las Vegas police also composed flyers and faxed them not only to Las Vegas Metro, but to most of the police departments in the state of Nevada, with emphasis on Reno and the Silver State’s side of Lake Tahoe. NLV police also faxed flyers to the poker clubs in Southern California and the casinos in Atlantic City. Everyone knew they were merely scratching the surface because there were thousands of Indian casinos and offshore gambling establishments throughout the nation. How to approach the situation was as confusing as it was dire. After discussing the matter, the consensus was that Garth wasn’t much of a gambler. What he liked was what went along with gambling: loose women whom he could pick up, seduce, and then murder.

  The house in the desert made headlines. The search for Garth Hammerling widened into a nationwide manhunt for a serial killer. Hopefully, he’d be caught before his compulsion to kill again became overwhelming.

  By Monday afternoon, exactly one week after from the gruesome discovery of Adrianna Blanc’s body, Mandy started talking, albeit unsteadily. There were so many queries that needed to be asked by so many detectives, it would take days if not weeks before the full story would come out.

  Four days after Mandy was pulled out of her medically induced coma, Decker was on an evening Southwest flight headed back into Burbank. At the same time, Marge and Oliver were on I-15, on their way home. The three of them had come away with a story told from Mandy’s perspective. Decker had cobbled together an unbelievable tale: a four-day odyssey of murder and destruction. There were gaps and some things didn’t make sense, but there was a narrative that could be followed from beginning to end. He wrote down the following summary as he flew back home.

  TEN DAYS AGO, at around eight-thirty in the morning, Mandy saw Adrianna slam down the phone at one of the nurses’ stations, and bury her face in her hands. Since she seemed so very upset, Mandy went over to ask her what was wrong. Adrianna began to cry.

  Mandy was surprised to see Adrianna still at the hospital because her shift had ended at eight.
But she was there, and Mandy, being a good friend, sensed she needed some help. She told Adrianna to wait for her in the hospital cafeteria. She signed out on break, showing up at the cafeteria ten minutes later to talk to her friend.

  Adrianna told her that she was furious with Garth, his endless trips that didn’t include her, and his pissy attitude in general. She was breaking it off for good this time. Mandy congratulated her. Adrianna was too good to put up with Garth’s nonsense. But then Adrianna broke down. During their telephone call, Garth had begged her to reconsider. He said he really loved her and would prove it by canceling his trip to Reno and coming down just to talk to her. Adrianna told Mandy that she didn’t know what to do. While she wanted to break up, there was part of her that still loved him. Mandy, who was playing the wise therapist, encouraged her to stay firm in her decision.

  Of course, it came out fairly soon into the interview that Mandy had more personal reasons for wanting Adrianna gone. The truth was that Garth had never planned to go with his pals to the mountains. His intentions all along were to come back to L.A. and sneak off with Mandy for a couple of days—just the two of them.

  Mandy was in love with Garth.

  Mandy suggested that Adrianna needed to go home and sleep. Adrianna wanted to go home, too, but Garth was coming in. They were going to meet at the hospital, so she couldn’t leave. Mandy “volunteered” to deal with Garth. Again she told Adrianna to go home and sit on her emotions for a couple of days. Then, with a clearer mind, she could deal with Garth. But Adrianna insisted on staying and meeting with boyfriend.

  That was the first mistake.

  Now Mandy was getting agitated. For the last six months, she had been planning this tryst and she was inwardly enraged at the prospect of having to cancel everything. Adrianna’s timing couldn’t have been worse. She had been putting up with Garth’s womanizing for two years. For once, she had decided to show some spine and it was totally messing up Mandy’s romantic getaway. She had to get rid of her. Not kill her, Mandy told them: that never entered her mind. Mandy just wanted Adrianna to go home and sleep for a very, very long time.

  Since Adrianna insisted on staying at the hospital, Mandy suggested that she go into one of the empty “on-call” rooms and grab a couple hours of sleep before Garth came in. Adrianna concurred. Then Mandy looked up and saw her head nurse giving her the evil eye in the cafeteria. She knew she had to act quickly.

  Mandy quickly found Adrianna an empty room. She attempted to give her friend an Ambien so she could get some good sleep, but Adrianna resisted, saying that Ambien would put her out for the next twelve hours. All she needed was a few hours rest. Instead Mandy gave her a couple of tabs of short-acting Benadryl. It would help her sleep but wouldn’t knock her out for the day.

  After Adrianna was tucked away, Mandy went back to work, stewing about how Adrianna was ruining her life. She knew that Garth put up with Adrianna because she was his cash cow. Mandy accepted that. Garth needed money. But she wasn’t about to let Adrianna screw up her few measly days alone with her secret lover. Garth would be arriving at the hospital in a couple of hours and all Mandy wanted was for Adrianna to be “indisposed.” Then she’d tell Garth that Adrianna left and didn’t want to be contacted. The two of them could go on their planned getaway. Garth would probably go back to Adrianna, but at least they’d have their time alone.

  Since Mandy worked in an ICU, she decided to knock Adrianna out with a strong muscle relaxant used in surgery called Pavulon. The drug, whose generic name is pancuronium, is used for muscle paralysis and is administered before a patient goes on a ventilator. Muscle paralysis usually takes place between two to four minutes after administration and the clinical effects usually last about an hour and a half. Full recovery in healthy adults comes anywhere from two to three hours later.

  Decker had some familiarity with Pavulon because it had been one of the drugs of choice for a serial-killer respiratory therapist named Efren Saldivar. The man had used Pavulon to murder his patients in a decade-long spree when he had worked at Glendale Adventist Medical Center about ten miles away from where Decker worked and lived. The local case was sensational and made national news. It had been a long-drawn-out affair that included confession, recantation, and exhumation of bodies. Most important, Decker knew that the drug did not show up on a routine tox exam.

  While Adrianna slept, Mandy, a deft nurse with a gentle touch, injected her with the drug in the neck. The coroner didn’t pick up on it because the cable ligature had broken some of the skin and had obscured the puncture wound. When Garth arrived, Mandy made excuses, but Garth didn’t buy them. When he became threatening, Mandy finally confessed that Adrianna was sleeping in one of the on-call rooms.

  How was he threatening? Decker had asked her.

  Not threatening…she had whispered…just he knew some embarrassing things about her. With that confession, Mandy’s monitor started beeping. Her blood pressure started spiking and the nurses came rushing in. Mandy had talked enough for the day.

  End of interview.

  Decker came back the next day. It took a while to get back to where they had left off but finally he brought Mandy up to speed—that Garth had just gotten her to admit that she had knocked out Adrianna with Pavulon.

  Mandy continued the saga.

  Once she confessed that Adrianna was still at the hospital, Garth insisted that the two of them go to the on-call room together to wake her up. By now two hours had elapsed and the drug’s effects should have been wearing off, but when they tried to rouse her, Adrianna was unresponsive. In truth, she appeared to be dead.

  Mandy was in a full-blown panic. Garth calmed her down and said he’d help her out. He told her that the best way to handle the situation was to make it look like Adrianna was murdered. At first, Mandy was appalled. They needed to go to the police and explain what happened—that it was an accident. But Garth told her that they’d book her for premeditated murder and that’s when she really lost it. When he gave her an out, she took it. He explained his reasoning.

  Adrianna was dead. Nothing they could do would bring her back. If she was “murdered,” they’d both have alibis and be cleared of any wrongdoing. His alibi was he was away camping with his friends. Aaron and Greg would cover for him. Her excuse was that she was on shift working.

  The first thing they needed to do was to get the body out of the hospital. They stuffed her into a doubled plastic garbage bag, and as they did this, Chuck Tinsley’s card fell to the floor. Mandy picked it up and they both realized it was a card that some guy had given to Adrianna. The card had his name, his occupation—contractor—his home address, and on the back were his cell number and his work address—some house near the hospital. Reading the card seemed to make Garth angry. Mandy thought that was good. The angrier Garth was at Adrianna, the more he’d help to dispose of the body.

  The two of them stuffed Adrianna into a double plastic trash bag along with other trash—discarded papers and the like—just in case someone asked them what was in the bag and they had to open it up.

  But no one questioned them as they schlepped the bag onto the loading dock at the emergency vehicle location. Garth pulled his car up to the dock, popped the trunk, and loaded the trash bag. He told Mandy that he’d call her and they’d meet up later on. Mandy never even thought about the security cameras on the dock—a major slipup that got the police looking in the right direction.

  When Adrianna’s murder hit the news—that the body was found swinging from a rafter—Mandy knew what happened. Garth had put Adrianna’s body at the address on the card, placing the focus on Chuck Tinsley. When Tinsley wasn’t immediately brought in for questioning, the two of them figured there was a screwup.

  Decker looked up from his writing. Fate had intervened. Chuck Tinsley had been the first one at the construction site and had come across the body. He had found his own card in her pocket and had swiped it so the police wouldn’t know that he had seen Adrianna the night before. Decker went back to
his notes.

  The next day was Tuesday. Garth and Mandy rented a motel while the two of them figured out their next step. By Wednesday, things were spinning out of control. They needed to get out of L.A. They needed to think without the police breathing down their necks. Garth said that he owned a place in Vegas. They could lay low there.

  The two of them hit the road.

  From that point on, it all got fuzzy in Mandy’s mind. The days and nights were filled with sex, a lot of booze, and copious amounts of drugs. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she remembered Garth bringing home a young girl—a runaway. The three of them took drugs and Mandy remembered Garth having sex with the girl. Then things became really out of focus. Mandy remembered the girl disappearing…but not murdered. She just went away. She also had no recollection of her car crash.

  All very well and fine, Decker thought, but there were some major holes big enough to walk an elephant through.

  Namely Crystal Larabee.

  Oh yeah, Mandy said. Crystal.

  She was even fuzzier on Crystal’s death than on what had happened with the runaway. Garth initially went to Crystal’s place just to ask her about Adrianna’s investigation. When Crystal told him that the cops were looking for him, he got really worried. Then Crystal started talking about this guy that Adrianna was talking to at Garage. She told Garth that she felt that the guy was a suspicious character and that he had come on to her after Adrianna left the bar. Crystal felt that he probably had something to do with Adrianna’s murder. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Crystal was referring to Chuck Tinsley.

  Then Garth got a bright idea. He thought that if Crystal was found murdered, it would really point the finger at Chuck Tinsley. Tinsley had chatted up both women and now both of them were dead. So Garth killed Crystal.

  Just like that.

  Although Mandy felt bad for Crystal, she bore no guilt. She didn’t know Garth’s plan, and wasn’t there when it happened. Crystal was not her fault. And she didn’t seem to feel much guilt about Adrianna, either. Mandy was quick to point out that the whole thing—meaning Adrianna’s death—was just a terrible “accident.”