Deeper Than the Dead

39

The search for Karly Vickers ceased to be the lead news story of the day. Word that skeletal remains had been found in the hog yard behind Gordon Sells’s salvage business shot through the media like a bolt of lightning. Mendez and Hicks had to fight through the crush of reporters and their support staff to get to the yellow-tape barrier.

The hogs were highly interested in the fuss and in the people in crime scene jumpsuits and knee-high rubber boots wading through their territory. They stood off to the side with individual members of the herd occasionally rushing toward the people, snorting bravado then rushing back to the safety of the group. Their squeals were ear-splitting.

“This smells almost as bad as the trailer,” Mendez said, wrinkling his nose.

“I’m glad I have a badge,” Hicks said, watching the crime scene techs systematically raking through the inches-deep muck of mud and feces and pig urine. “My granddad up in Sacramento used to raise hogs. When I was a kid, in the summers, I used to have to help him move them from one pen to another. You don’t shake that smell fast.”

Dixon motioned them over to a table set up along the back of a shed. The findings had been washed and laid out on a tarp: what appeared to be a human femur and several rib bones.

“What do we do now?” Mendez asked. “We have no way of knowing who these belonged to. Unless they can find a pelvis, we don’t even know if we’re looking at a male or a female.”

“The BFS team will take them,” Dixon said. “They’ll call in an anthropologist to have a look.”

Mendez picked up the femur and looked at it more closely. What appeared to be knife marks scarred both ends of the bone. “Whoever it was, Sells cut them up before he threw them out there.”

“And he did a neat job of it,” Hicks observed. “That was severed at the joint.”

“Let’s hope the victim was dead when he did it,” Dixon said. “He may not fit Leone’s profile, but we’ve definitely got ourselves a killer.”

“A killer,” Mendez said. “But is he the killer?”

“We’ve got the cars here. Now we’ve got remains here.”

“We don’t have Sells’s fingerprints on those cars yet, do we?” Mendez asked.

“The comparisons are being made,” Dixon said. “We’ll know this afternoon.”

He shook his head as he looked out at the crime scene techs raking through the shit. “The bastard has no respect for human life at all. Kills someone, cuts them up, throws them out like trash. In a hog yard.”

“You know why, right?” Hicks said.

Dixon just looked at him.

“Hogs will eat anything.”

Mendez put the femur down and walked away.

A call came from the crime scene techs. “We’ve got a skull!”

Vince avoided the scene at Sells’s junkyard. They didn’t need him there to look at bones. They certainly didn’t need him there to be recognized by the media.

Dixon would have his hands full now as it was. His case had just taken on Hollywood movie status: a creepy convicted pedophile living in a creepy junkyard on the outskirts of the idyllic college town, murdering people and throwing their corpses out to be devoured by farm animals.

All he needed was to have a top profiler step in from the FBI and he would have a blockbuster on his hands.

And all Vince needed was for the powers at the Bureau to see his face on the nightly news in the middle of it.

Bones or no bones, he still didn’t think Gordon Sells was the man who had murdered Lisa Warwick. Guys like Gordon Sells tried to fly under the radar as much as possible. He was by nature a pedophile. It was Vince’s theory that the majority of pedophiles were ashamed of what they did no matter how long they were at it or how prolific they were. What they did never became okay—not even to themselves.

Men like Sells operated in secret, in hiding. They asked their victims not to tell—or made sure that they couldn’t. They covered their tracks and disposed of all evidence.

The Gordon Sells theory of Lisa Warwick’s murder and Karly Vickers’s abduction could be packaged and wrapped with a big red bow for the press, but in reality that box was going to be empty.

He wondered how his UNSUB would take it when the press made Sells out to be the big bad serial killer. Would it amuse him? Piss him off? Drive him to do something to prove them wrong? In Vince’s experience, this kind of killer had an ego that needed feeding and stroking. He wouldn’t like someone else getting credit for his work.

That could be a good thing for the investigation, forcing him to make a move.

It could be a very bad thing for Karly Vickers, if she was still alive. Vince pulled Mendez’s car into the field where the searchers were parked, across the road from Gordon Sells’s property. Sunglasses in place, he pulled a Dodgers’ baseball cap on. He shucked his tie and sport coat in exchange for a windbreaker from the Oak Knoll Softball League, grateful Mendez was broad-shouldered.

Tables laid out with drinks and snacks sat under a couple of pop-up tents. Under a third tent, another table held flyers with a photo of Karly Vickers.

Have You Seen This Woman?

She was young. Pretty in a simple way. Permed blonde hair with a fountain of bangs sprayed in place. She wore a necklace with a small pendant—the figure of a woman with her arms raised in victory—the logo of the Thomas Center.

She had been missing nearly eight days. She was probably dead.

A woman asked if she could help him. She was in her midthirties, wearing a pink Thomas Center T-shirt, slender with a big head of auburn hair.

“I’m looking for Steve Morgan,” he said, setting the flyer down. “Have you seen him?”

“Steve and Jane are giving an interview in the media tent,” she said, looking off to her left to another pop-up tent set off by itself, maybe fifteen yards away. “They should be finished soon. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Do you work at the center?” Vince asked.

“Are you with the sheriff’s office?” she countered.

Vince flashed her a smile. “What gave me away?”

“The mustache,” she said, loosening up a little. “I grew up in a family of firemen and police officers.”

“Then we’re not exactly hard to spot.”

“No. I’m Maureen Collins.”

“Detective Leone. How long have you worked at the center?”

“Three years. I do family counseling.”

“You know Miss Vickers, then.”

“Yes. She’s a nice girl. I can’t believe this has happened to her.”

“Did you know Miss Warwick?”

“Yes. I knew Lisa fairly well. I’m sure you’re aware she was volunteering as a court advocate. We worked together on several cases.”

“With Steve Morgan?”

“Yes. Steve is our hero,” she said with a smile.

“Do you know if Miss Warwick was seeing anyone?” he asked. “We have reason to believe that she was, but we haven’t found anyone to confirm that, let alone tell us who she might have been involved with.”

She hesitated just a fraction of a second before saying, “I have no idea. Lisa was a very private person.”

“I find that strange,” Vince confessed. “Why be so secretive? Unless the guy wasn’t supposed to be seeing her.”

The woman looked over at the media tent and said, “It looks like they might be finished.”

“Thanks.”

Vince walked to the tent with his head down as the interviewer and photographer went past. Jane Thomas went in another direction. Steve Morgan stood looking at some papers on a clipboard.

“You’re getting a lot of media attention,” Vince said, strolling under the canopy of the open-sided tent.

Morgan glanced up. “The more, the better, right? Somebody had to see something. If just one person comes forward with a lead . . .”

“Sometimes that’s all it takes,” Vince said. “One person who saw something that struck them as odd. Like a man coming and going to and from a woman’s house at late hours of the night.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me personally, Detective?”

“A neighbor of Lisa Warwick thinks she saw you.”

“In the dark. In the middle of the night.”

“If you had a relationship with her, better for you to come clean now and tell us. We’ll find out eventually, and it won’t look good that you tried to hide it.”

Morgan went back to studying the papers on the clipboard.

Vince took a seat in one of several tall directors’ chairs that had been positioned for interviews.

“We’ve got semen on her sheets,” he said. “That gives us a blood type.”

“I didn’t kill Lisa,” Morgan said.

“I’m not saying you did. Just because you were sleeping with her doesn’t make you a murderer.”

“I wasn’t sleeping with her.”

“Your wife thinks you were.”

Morgan looked at him with a gaze that could have cut steel. “You talked to my wife?”

“I told you we would.”

“And she told you she thinks I was sleeping with Lisa.”

“Does that surprise you?”

“You’re lying. Sara wouldn’t say that.”

Vince let him wonder for a minute. Finally he sighed.

“You know, Steve, man to man, I don’t care if you were sleeping with her. You want to screw up your family situation—that’s none of my business. I care that you’re wasting our time by denying it. I care that you’re going to make us waste man hours looking into every goddamn day of your life for the past six months, digging through your financials, comparing hotel receipts with calendar dates with trips to Sacramento and trips you said you made that you never did because you were really in town fucking your mistress. I care about that.”

The muscles in Morgan’s square jaw flexed. “Are you finished?”

“No,” Vince said, leaning forward. “I care that if you were involved with this girl, and now she’s dead, that you’re that big an asshole you would waste time we could be spending finding her killer just because you don’t want to step up and be a man. You would do that to try to cover your own ass. Didn’t you care about her at all?”

Steve Morgan said nothing for several minutes. He turned and looked out across the field with no expression whatsoever. What he was seeing, what he was thinking, Vince could only imagine.

Maybe he saw his family slipping away from him, his wife divorcing him, his daughter hating him. Maybe he was remembering Lisa Warwick and how much he had loved her. Maybe he was looking back on his last visit to Lisa Warwick’s home, wondering if he had really been so careless as to leave traces of himself at the scene.

“Look, Steve, I’m not trying to bust your ass here. Maybe you really loved the girl, but now she’s gone and you don’t want to lose your family too. Unless you killed her, it’s nobody’s business. We can try to keep it quiet.”

“In the middle of a media circus.” Morgan laughed.

“I hear you have a suspect in custody,” he said quietly. “You found Lisa’s car, Karly’s car here on this property. Remains have been found.”

“We have a person of interest,” Vince said.

Morgan nodded. “Then I guess you’d better check his blood type,” he said, and walked away.