Deeper Than the Dead

32

The cars were parked in a field with a hundred others. Hiding in plain sight. The field belonged to a scrap dealer named Gordon Sells.

Mendez got out of his car and walked into a circus. The sheriff’s office helicopter had landed, but three other helicopters adorned with logos of LA television stations hovered overhead, blades beating the air. News vans clogged the sides of the country road, and cameramen and reporters were swarming the area like mosquitoes frantic to land on something juicy.

Frank Farman shouted instructions at half a dozen deputies trying to cordon off the scene with yellow tape. Dixon stood near Karly Vickers’s gold Chevy Nova, instructing his photographer and videographer as they captured every possible angle of the car, the cars around the car, the ground around the car.

“Tony. Good,” Dixon said. “We’re going to haul the cars in and process them in our garage.”

“Right. Where’s Lisa Warwick’s car?”

“Two rows back.” He pointed in the direction of several deputies, who stood guard around that car. “The chopper pilot said this car definitely came onto the property from a back gate off a dirt road. He could still see the tracks in the grass.”

“In the last couple of days,” Mendez said.

“And now we’ve got the press all over us,” Dixon said. “Someone heard about the eyes and mouths being glued shut on Warwick and Julie Paulson.”

“Shit. We have a leak in our department?”

“I don’t know where it came from.”

“It could have come from the killer,” Mendez said. “Vince thinks the guy wants publicity.”

“Where is he?”

“At his hotel. He’s working on the profile.”

And a date with Anne Navarre, he thought, still out of sorts about it, even though it was none of his business, and it wasn’t exactly a date. Leone wanted an angle on the kids. Crane’s father was the last person to have seen Karly Vickers. Wendy Morgan’s father had a connection to Lisa Warwick. And the Farman kid was a budding serial killer who had the victim’s severed finger as a souvenir. Any insights she could give them would be welcome.

“Do you think he might have helped out with the publicity?” Dixon asked.

“Vince? Tip the press? No,” Mendez said automatically.

“Don’t be so sure, Tony. The guy has a reputation.”

“As one of the top profilers in the world.”

“And one of the most well-known. He didn’t get that way being shy and retiring. He might tell us he’s gone low profile, but that’s not his MO.”

Mendez didn’t like the assessment. “It’s moot now. The press is here. They know what they know. We’ve got a job to do. Have you talked to the owner of the property yet? What’s his story?”

“I’ve got a couple of deputies sitting on him, they’re waiting for you and Hicks. I wanted to get these cars secured first.”

“Are you going in with the cars?”

“Yeah.”

“And who else?” Mendez asked.

“Why?”

Mendez made a face as if the whole subject tasted bad. “Farman’s kid brought Lisa Warwick’s severed finger to school for show-and-tell today.”

Dixon’s eyes went wide. “What?”

“Yeah. It’s in a brown bag in my trunk. He tried to feed it to a classmate.”

“Oh my God.”

“The kid probably picked it up at the scene, but how is that going to look in the press? The boy had the victim’s finger and we’re letting his father into the victim’s car? I don’t want to get into it with Frank, but that’s going to look improper. A lawyer could use that down the road.”

Dixon took a moment to let it soak in. He would look at the situation from the perspective of nearly two decades spent as a detective himself. It wouldn’t matter how well he knew Frank Farman. It wouldn’t matter that Farman had a spotless record. This was now a procedural issue.

“Point taken,” he said. “Go talk to the property owner. I’ll deal with Frank. Does he know about this incident with his son?”

“Yes.”

Mendez breathed a short sigh of relief. He walked across the field two rows to Lisa Warwick’s car, where Hicks was standing talking with a couple of deputies.

“We’re up to speak to the property owner,” he said.

“Did you tell Dixon about the finger?”

“Yeah. He said he’ll deal with Frank.”

“Better him than you.”

They took Mendez’s car out of the field and down the road to the main entrance of the junkyard, which was blocked with reporters and deputies.

Mendez honked his horn impatiently. Hicks held his ID up. A photographer snapped a picture.

“Guess now we find out what it’s like to be in the big time,” Hicks said.

“Looks like it’s a pain in the ass.”

The junkyard office was a rusty trailer house that appeared to be a residence as well. Mendez and Hicks walked in, squinting at the harsh fluorescent lighting that shone down from an acoustic tile ceiling yellowed with cigarette smoke. The place was a mess and stank with the smell of sour sweat and fried onions.

A deputy sat at the kitchen table with the man Mendez presumed to be Gordon Sells. Sells looked a hard midforties, balding, grim-faced. Chest and back hair sprouted out around the confines of his stained wife-beater.

“Mr. Sells,” Mendez said, holding out his hand. “I’m Detective Mendez. This is my partner Detective Hicks.”

Unmoved by social niceties, Sells scowled up at him and said, “I ain’t got nothing to do with them cars. I don’t know how they got here.”

Mendez took a chair. Hicks leaned back against the cluttered kitchen counter, flushing out a cat that had been busy hunting for food scraps among the dirty dishes.

“You’ve never seen those cars before?” Mendez asked.

Sells shook his head. Mendez imagined what a woman’s reaction would be to this guy. What hair he had was unkempt. What looked like four or five days of beard roughened his jaw line.

“How is that, Mr. Sells?” he asked. “Your property is fenced in, isn’t it?”

“Yep.”

“So somebody had to open a gate to get those cars in.”

“I don’t know nothing about it.”

Mendez took the snapshot of Karly Vickers out of his jacket pocket. “Have you ever seen this woman?”

Sells barely glanced at it. “Nope.”

“Does the name Lisa Warwick mean anything to you?”

“Nope.”

“Those are the women who own those cars. One of them is dead. One of them is missing.”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” he said, unfazed by the terrible news.

“Do you have any employees, Mr. Sells?” Hicks asked.

“It’s me and my nephew, that’s all. He don’t know nothing either.”

“And where is he?” Hicks asked.

Sells yelled out. “Kenny! Get in here!”

Kenny emerged from the next room, a huge, stupid-looking kid of maybe twenty. He looked like he had walked right off the set of Deliverance in his coveralls with one strap hanging down and his mouth hanging open.

Mendez got up and went through the introductions again. Kenny just stared at him blankly.

“Have you ever seen this woman?” Mendez asked, showing him Karly Vickers’s photo.

Kenny shrugged.

“He don’t know nothing,” Sells said impatiently. “He’s half a retard.”

“Am not,” Kenny said in a low dull voice.

“This woman is missing,” Mendez said. “The woman that owned the other car is dead. Murdered.”

Sells scowled. “He don’t know—”

Mendez slammed his hand down on the table and leaned over him. “Shut the fuck up! I don’t want to hear how you don’t know nothing, you ignorant rube!”

“I ain’t under arrest!” Sells shouted back.

Mendez grabbed his cuffs off his belt. “You want to change that? I can change that right now.”

Hicks stepped forward calmly and put a hand on his arm. “Tony, calm down. I’m sure Mr. Sells just isn’t understanding the seriousness of the situation.”

“What part of a murder charge isn’t clear to him?” Mendez demanded.

“Take a break,” Hicks instructed.

Mendez walked away a few feet to pace restlessly in front of the refrigerator. He grumbled nasty menacing threats in Spanish. Sells didn’t have to understand Spanish to know none of it was good.

Hicks took a seat at the table and spoke in a confidential tone. “I apologize for my partner, Mr. Sells, but the woman who was murdered was his cousin, so . . .”

Sells narrowed his eyes, suspicious. “He’s a spic. I seen that woman on TV—”

“His cousin by marriage,” Hicks specified without missing a beat.

“If I find out you laid a hand on her—,” Mendez started, pointing a finger at Sells.

Hicks held his hand up. “Tony, please.”

He sighed as he turned back to Sells. “You know, Mr. Sells, if you bought those cars off somebody, you’re not in any trouble,” he lied. “Our only interest is in finding a killer, and finding that other girl before something bad happens to her.”

Sells looked from one to the other of them. Mendez had a feeling he’d seen Good Cop/Bad Cop before. He probably had a record for something.

Sells looked right at Hicks and said, “I don’t know nothing about them cars.”

Mendez nodded at the deputy, who rose from his seat and turned to the nephew. Mendez went to Sells, opening one of the handcuffs.

“You can stand up, Mr. Sells,” he said. “Or I can drag you out of that chair. I don’t care which.”

“For what?” Sells demanded, but started to get up just the same.

“You’re under arrest for possession of stolen property.”

They ran Sells and his nephew to the sheriff’s office in separate cars. Sells behind a cage in a radio car, the nephew in the backseat of Mendez’s sedan. The hope was that separated from his uncle, the kid might have something to say. He didn’t.

Hicks put Sells in one interview room and left him there. Mendez stuck the nephew in the room next door. The two of them walked down the hall to get coffee. It was going to be a long night.

“What do you think?” Hicks said.

“The guy gives me the creeps,” Mendez said. “You running his record? He’s got to have a sheet.”

“Not back yet, but I agree.”

“Did he ask for a lawyer?”

“Not yet.”

“If we can book him for the car theft, we get his prints. I called the ADA for search warrants.”

Hicks made a face. “I can’t wait to look under the furniture in that place.”

“I’ll flip you for the bathroom.”

“Oh, man . . .”

They doctored their coffees and went to their desks. Sells and his nephew could sit and reflect.

Hicks checked the message slips that had been left on his desk and held one up. “Greg Usher—Karly Vickers’s ex—is doing a nickel in LA County for growing pot in his apartment.”

“Cross him off the list.”

“Here’s a good one. One of the maintenance guys at the Thomas Center has a record. His current name is an alias.”

“A record for what?”

Hicks raised a brow. “Car theft among other things.”

“Anything violent?”

“Domestic violence on a girlfriend six years ago.”

“Can we pick him up for something?”

Hicks laughed. “He has outstanding parking and traffic violations to the tune of four hundred and fifty-eight dollars.”

Mendez shook his head.

The phone they shared between their two desks rang. He picked it up and listened, and when he hung up he said, “I can trump your car thief. Gordon Sells has a record. As a sex offender.”