Deeper Than the Dead

13

“Mom’s a piece of work,” Mendez said as the teacher came back into the conference room. “Wound a little too tight, huh?”

She frowned, glancing back toward the door. “A little. When I took Tommy home yesterday she was furious he had missed his piano lesson.”

“And what will the neighbors think now?” Mendez asked, settling in his chair. “Her kid fell on a corpse.”

“What would the neighbors think if they knew she was doping him up to make him sleep?”

“A little antihistamine is nothing,” Mendez said. “When I was in a uniform in Bakersfield, I saw mothers get their kids drunk, make them smoke crack—”

“That’s horrible.”

“Makes Mrs. Crane look like the Mother of the Year.”

Anne Navarre rolled her eyes as she turned away from him and walked toward the bank of windows. “She probably already has that plaque on her wall, along with Realtor of the Year, Volunteer of the Year, Chamber of Commerce Person of the Year.”

“Image is everything,” Mendez said.

He was happy to see she sided with the kids, and the kids liked her. There might be a chance they would confide something to her that they might not tell their parents or him. Provided they had anything to tell anyone.

Peter Crane was probably right in assuming the killer had been long gone by the time the kids had come across his handiwork. On the other hand, Vince Leone, one of his instructors at the National Academy and one of the pioneers of criminal profiling at the Bureau, had talked about killers who returned to the crime scene either to relive the experience or to watch the police investigation.

Some of them got an ego boost by watching the cops and believing they were superior to the dumb clods trying to figure it out. Some of them got sexual gratification revisiting the scene. Sick bastards.

“Tell me about Tommy.”

“Tommy?” Anne Navarre turned her back to the windows, leaned back against the credenza, and crossed her arms—but not as tightly as before. A step in the right direction. “He’s very bright, conscientious, quiet, sweet.”

“He has a crush on you.”

She made a little face and shook her head.

“Yes, he does,” Mendez insisted. “He watched you almost the whole time.”

“He watched everyone. That’s what he does. He takes in everything then decides what to do. He probably watched me more because he feels safe with me.”

Mendez chuckled. “Trust me. You might know kids’ heads, but I was a ten-year-old boy once.”

“I suppose I can’t argue with that.”

“Why do you think he didn’t tell us the Farman kid touched the corpse?”

“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, Mendez thought, because he already had.