Deeper Than the Dead ok-1

by Tami Hoag

  Sells glared at him and literally spat out the words, “Fuck you, you fuckin’ spic!”

  Mendez shot up out of his chair and leaned across the table. Sells went backward so fast, he tipped his chair over and spilled himself onto the floor.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Mendez said. “I need a cup of coffee. This case is such a slam dunk, I’m bored with it.”

  With the Sells file tucked under his arm, he walked out the door and across the hall where Hicks and Dixon were watching the video monitor.

  “How do you like that?” Mendez asked. “This guy’s a member of the master race.”

  “Unbelievable,” Hicks said.

  “Did the cars come in?” Mendez asked, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  “Yeah.” Dixon nodded. He looked a little frayed around the edges. “I’m mobilizing a ground search for Karly Vickers at first light.”

  “If she isn’t found in a fifty-five-gallon drum in Gordon Sells’s garage tonight,” Mendez said. “The crime scene unit is still out there, right?”

  “It’s going to take days for them just to get through the trailer,” Dixon said. “The guy is an animal.”

  “That’s an insult to the animal kingdom,” Hicks declared.

  “How do you think he’s connected to the Thomas Center?” Dixon asked.

  “Maybe the fact that both women were associated with the center is just a coincidence.”

  “Three women,” Dixon corrected him. “Julie Paulson was there briefly in eighty-four. She washed out of the program. Jane was out of the country. That’s why the name didn’t ring a bell with her. Can’t be a coincidence times three. How could he know these women? How could he abduct three women without somebody seeing something? If you were a woman and this guy tried to get his hands on you—”

  “People would hear me screaming five miles away,” Hicks said. “But maybe he’s not the one who nabbed them.”

  “Tweedle Dumb in the other room?” Mendez asked. “That’s hard to imagine. He probably can’t figure out how to roll the window down in a car, let alone persuade some woman to get in with him.”

  “No,” Hicks said. “I’m thinking about this maintenance guy from the center.”

  “What maintenance guy?” Dixon asked.

  “Hamilton found out the guy has a record for car theft and domestic abuse.”

  “That’s impossible,” Dixon said. “Jane does background checks on everyone working there. She never would have hired someone like that.”

  “The guy’s been using his brother’s name and identity,” Hicks explained. “They live together. Hamilton goes to the house to interview the guy—Doug Lyle—but the Doug Lyle he talks to doesn’t work at the Thomas Center. The brother, Dave, used Doug’s information because he didn’t think anyone would hire a car thief fresh out of prison.”

  “Jesus,” Dixon said. “Jane is going to flip out when she hears that story. She goes to such lengths to make sure her women are safe and protected, and it turns out she let the fox in the henhouse herself.”

  “And how do Doug Lyle and Gordon Sells connect?” Mendez asked.

  “My theory,” Hicks said. “Lyle steals the cars, takes them to Sells, Sells ships them somewhere, and they split the proceeds.”

  “And kill a woman or three in the process?”

  “Why not? The Hillside Strangler in LA turned out to be two guys working together.”

  “It’s a viable scenario,” Dixon said. “See if you can connect Sells to Lyle. You take a crack at him, Bill. You guys can tag team him until he decides he wants a lawyer.”

  Hicks took the “Sells file” and went across the hall.

  Mendez sipped his coffee, anxious for the caffeine to kick in.

  “What do you think, Tony?” Dixon asked. “Do you like this guy for it?”

  Mendez stared at the monitor, watching Sells pick his nose until the door opened and Hicks walked in. “That would be an easy solution. If we can tie him to Lyle, and prove that Lyle stole the cars, et cetera.”

  “But?”

  He shrugged. “Sells is a pedophile. They don’t usually graduate to crimes against adult women. They go after kids because kids are most vulnerable, kids can’t fight back, because something in their own background attaches their sex drive to a certain age group.”

  “Maybe the other guy is the sexual predator.”

  “Maybe.”

  They listened while Hicks questioned Sells about any association to Doug Lyle. Sells denied it.

  “You’re bringing in the maintenance guy?”

  “We sent a unit to pick him up.”

  “I want to know when he gets here,” Dixon said, heading for the door.

  “Right. Did you find anything inside the cars yet?”

  He stopped in the doorway and turned back around slowly, looking like the weight of the world had descended on him.

  “Karly Vickers had a traffic ticket in her glove compartment, dated the day she disappeared,” he said.

  “Yeah? So?”

  “The ticket was written by Frank Farman.”

  35

  Friday, October 11, 1985

  12:47 A.M.

  Karly had no idea how much time had passed since she had last been visited. It might have been a day. It might have been a matter of a few hours.

  She was losing her sanity. Exhausted and weak, she had begun lapsing into hallucinations. She would see Petal walking around the room, coming over to look at her quizzically. Karly would go to pet her and realize she couldn’t move her hand, though she didn’t understand why. Then Petal would speak as clearly as any person.

  “You can’t get up. We have to kill you.” And the dog would lunge for her throat and tear it out.

  This time when the hallucination came and she went to pet the dog, her hand was free. If only that was true, she thought. Then the dog vanished and darkness descended, and she began to think she might actually be conscious. And her hand was still free.

  And her other hand was free.

  And she was able to move her legs.

  Was this really happening or was it another dream? Slowly, carefully she tried to sit up. The pain was terrible in her stomach, her ribs, but she sat up. Dizziness swirled around in her head like water in a toilet bowl. She waited for it to pass. When it had, she carefully turned herself until her legs dangled over the side of the table.

  Was she alone? Was she being watched?

  She had no way of knowing if her tormentor ever left. He could have been right there, sitting at a table, eating his breakfast, casually watching her, knowing she would never be able to get away.

  But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t try. She had fought so hard to rise above her past. Having her future snatched away from her wasn’t fair. She had to get angry. She had to try to help herself. Miss Thomas always said, “God helps those who help themselves.”

  She had to try to help herself.

  Having no idea how far it might be to the ground, she started to slide off the table, reaching downward with her toes. And there was the floor. It was cold. Pain bolted up her legs, up her spine to her brain. The soles of her feet had been cut numerous times. The half-closed wounds burst open as she put weight on her feet. It had been so long since she had been upright, her legs felt as if they didn’t really belong to her.

  She gripped the edge of the table, fighting not to pass out or collapse to the floor. She couldn’t think about the pain. She had to fight.

  Slowly, she began to walk. One step and then another. She clutched the edge of the table as she inched along. If she could make it to a wall, she would follow the wall around until she came to a door. When she found a door, she would go through it.

  Without sight or hearing she had a difficult time trying to balance. Her head felt as huge and heavy as a bowling ball perched on top of her neck. As she moved it would feel as if the bowling ball began to roll one way and she would overcorrect and tip in the other direction.

  She began to panic wh
en she realized the table was not sitting against a wall. She would have to walk across open space.

  Three steps and she couldn’t tell up from down. She stumbled and flailed with her arms, pitched forward. She didn’t realize she was falling until she hit the hard floor. Because she was disoriented, she didn’t even try to break the fall with her hands. She hit the floor head-first, her skull hitting so hard it bounced twice before she lost consciousness.

  She didn’t know how long she had been out when she came around again. It didn’t matter. She had to get out. Maybe she would walk out a door into a neighborhood and someone would see her and call for help. Or she might walk out into the wilderness, wander aimlessly, and die of exposure. At least that would be on her own terms.

  Karly pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and began to crawl. Better to stay on the ground, and still she lost her balance and fell again and again. She ran into a cabinet and slowly felt her way up the front of it until she was standing again.

  Her hands swept over the surface—a counter, cluttered with things, tools maybe. Maybe she could find a weapon. Each object she picked up she carefully studied with her fingers until she found a screwdriver. That would do. She could stab someone with a screwdriver. Maybe she could gouge his eyes out, blind him as he had blinded her. Maybe she could sink it into his body and tear at his internal organs as he had torn at her.

  Adrenaline came with the ideas of revenge. She began to feel giddy. Laughter bounced up and down inside her chest. The laughter segued into hysteria. She was losing it. She had to pull herself from that mental ledge. She had to keep going. She had to keep moving. She had to get out.

  Now that she had found a wall, she lowered herself back down to the ground and began to crawl again. There had to be a door. And she had to get out.

  36

  Dawn was a pale sliver of color on the eastern horizon when Mendez pulled into Gordon Sells’s salvage yard. Despite the hour, the place was a hive of activity.

  Crime scene teams from two counties and the state Bureau of Forensic Sciences were working over the property. Besides the trailer house, the place was cluttered with garages and sheds half falling down—all packed with machinery, parts, cars, and junk of all varieties. Behind the salvage business was a dilapidated barn and a pen full of twenty to thirty hogs. As if the place wasn’t disgusting enough to begin with.

  Mendez went on in search of Dixon. In an hour the main investigative team would meet and they would be briefed as to what had been found so far during the search.

  He walked down the field of cars, the dew-damp grass soaking his shoes and wetting the hem of his pants. A crowd had gathered at the end of the first rows. Deputies, people in street clothes, forty or fifty volunteers in search and rescue windbreakers, all milled around, waiting for something to happen.

  Photographers and camera crews from half a dozen television stations recorded the event while on-air reporters stood in front of blinding portable lights relating the latest to viewers of the early morning news programs in LA and Santa Barbara and who-knew-where.

  Jane Thomas and Steve Morgan stood in the flood of harsh light with Petal the pit bull sitting at Jane’s feet. Dixon stood behind the camera crew with his arms crossed over his chest. Mendez stepped up beside him.

  “. . . as you can see,” Jane Thomas was saying to the blonde with the microphone, “a ground search has been organized and will be getting under way shortly. I encourage any of your viewers who might be able to join the search. Karly Vickers has been missing now for an entire week. It’s imperative that we do all we can to find her.”

  “And I understand your center has posted a reward,” the blonde said.

  “Yes, the Thomas Centers for Women have established a reward of ten thousand dollars for information leading to Karly’s recovery and to the conviction of the person who took her.”

  “A tip line has been set up . . .”

  “How’s she holding up?” Mendez asked quietly.

  “She feels better doing something,” Dixon said. “She’s got the women at the center helping with the hotline, running off posters, helping organize food and beverages for the searchers.”

  The reporter introduced Steve Morgan. He spoke about the importance of the Thomas Center to the community, and about the professionals—like himself—who donated their time and services to the center.

  “I hope to God they don’t find a body out there,” Dixon said.

  “The odds of finding this girl alive are getting longer by the day,” Mendez said.

  “It’s not impossible. Maybe Sells—if Sells is our man—decided he had to lay low for a while and he’s got her stashed. Maybe he was enjoying this girl more than the other. Maybe he decided to keep her.”

  None of that seemed very likely to Mendez but he kept that to himself for now.

  “Sells hasn’t said anything yet?” Dixon asked.

  “He told me to go fuck myself, but that’s not what you wanted to hear.”

  “What a nightmare,” Dixon said. “I moved up here to get away from this kind of craziness.”

  “Bad is everywhere, boss.”

  The sky was brightening enough to see beyond the lights. The field beyond the cars was tinted green from rain they had had the week before, and studded with the big spreading oak trees the area was known for. It was a pretty place, a place where people might want to have a picnic, not to search for a corpse.

  “Did you talk to Farman?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “How did that go?”

  “About how you’d think,” Dixon said. “I assigned him to desk duty. He’s not a happy camper. But I didn’t have a choice. I can’t have any hint of impropriety in this investigation. When these cases go to trial, I’m not going to have some defense attorney get up and point out that we had a potential suspect working the investigation.”

  “Are we supposed to consider him a suspect?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “His wife has a connection to the Thomas Center.”

  Dixon looked at him. “How?”

  “She’s a secretary at Quinn, Morgan.”

  Dixon frowned darkly. “I asked him about the ticket he wrote Karly Vickers. He says he didn’t remember her, which is why he didn’t say anything about it.”

  “He didn’t remember stopping a woman that we’re now looking for?” Mendez said. “We’ve all been looking at her picture for two days. We’re looking for a ten-year-old gold Chevy Nova. He stopped that car with that woman in it, and he didn’t remember?”

  Dixon sighed and rubbed his temples. “I know. It’s lame. There’s no reason he shouldn’t have mentioned it, though. Frank writes half a dozen citations every day. That’s part of his job.”

  “What did he stop her for?”

  “He stopped her for doing twenty-nine in a twenty-five zone.”

  “What an ass,” Mendez said. But that was just like Farman—by the book, no mercy. “What time did he write the ticket?”

  “Fifteen thirty-eight.”

  “Before her dental appointment. That’s good.”

  On their time line, Farman wouldn’t be listed as the last person to have seen the woman. Not that it should have mattered. Farman had a clean record. There was no reason for anyone to look at him as a suspect. The fact that his son had been in possession of Lisa Warwick’s finger was the complicating factor.

  Any defense attorney worth his salt would use that to plant the seeds of reasonable doubt. What if the kid didn’t pick up the finger at the scene? What if he found it at home hidden among his father’s things?

  Defense attorneys loved nothing better than trying to make cops look dirty. They would find someone who had overheard Frank make a derogatory remark about women—not that difficult to do, him being the chauvinist he was. They would look at every traffic citation he had ever written and manufacture a pattern of harassment against women. They would drag in Anne Navarre and get her to say she believed Frank beat his kid
, that he had a volatile temper.

  Mendez could see Frank spanking his son for skipping school—and who was to say that was so wrong? Mendez had suffered a couple of good strappings as a boy bent on mischief, and he had straightened up because of it. And Farman could certainly come across as a bully, but brutally murder a woman? Mr. Law Enforcement? No.

  Dixon sighed and shook his head. “Maybe Sells will confess today.”

  And maybe pigs will fly, Mendez thought, as he walked back to his car, passing the hog lot.

  An hour later the team of six detectives and Vince Leone met in the conference room that had now been fully converted into their war room. Photographs had been moved from the smaller bulletin board and tacked up on a freestanding corkboard at one end of the room. A time line had been drawn out on the big white board.

  Mendez took a marker and added to the line for the day Karly Vickers disappeared: 15:38 traffic ticket issued by F. Farman.

  He added to the line for Thursday: L. Warwick index finger in possession of D. Farman.

  Leone came over, tapped a finger on the line about the traffic citation, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Yeah,” Mendez said. He looked his mentor over. “You look good today. You’ve got some color.”

  Vince grinned. “I had a lovely evening, thanks for asking.”

  “I didn’t ask,” Mendez said, cranky. “Spare me the details, please.”

  “The food was excellent. Miss Navarre was a lovely dinner companion. We talked about her students. I walked her to her car, then I took a walk back down the alley behind the dentist’s office.”

  Mendez chose to skip past the date part and jump right back into the case. “Yeah? What did you find?”

  “The vacant building next door has a big roll-up garage door, like you could back a truck through. Could be a good place to stash a victim say from five until dark.”

  “I don’t see the dentist as a suspect,” Mendez said. “The only thing we have on him is that he saw Vickers late in the day. Anybody could have grabbed the girl in the alley. And Sells had the cars.”