Deeper Than the Dead

40

The lower jaw was missing from the skull, still lost in the filth of the hog yard. But the upper part of the skull was intact with what looked to be a full set of teeth.

Mendez and Hicks took the thing in a brown paper bag and went back to their car, ignoring the shouts and calls of reporters being held at bay on the far side of the crime scene tape. A virtual motorcade followed them back to the sheriff’s office. As they pulled into the parking lot the television reporters and cameramen rushed the lawn to lay claim to the prime backgrounds for their remote reports.

Vultures, Mendez thought, as he and his partner cut through the maze of hallways in the building, and went out into the garage where the cars of Karly Vickers and Lisa Warwick were being gone over a second time.

“Anything new?” Mendez asked.

“Two sets of prints off both cars,” said the brunette from Latent Fingerprints—Marta. She stood beside Karly Vickers’s Nova, watching as someone else combed the carpet in the driver’s side foot well. “Two identical sets of prints from both cars, and nothing else. Not so much as a partial from any other party.”

“Sells and Doug Lyle?” Hicks ventured. “Sells and his nephew?”

“Walter is doing the comparisons now.”

“The victims’ prints?” Mendez asked.

Marta shook her head. “Nada. Already eliminated.”

“Somebody wiped the cars clean,” Hicks said.

“What’s in the bag?” Marta asked. “Did you bring me lunch?”

“You don’t want to know,” Mendez said as he started for the side door.

“Why would Sells get rid of the victims’ prints but not his own?” Hicks asked.

“He wouldn’t. Someone else brought the cars there, wiped them down, and left them.”

“Sells and his nephew find them in the field, think Christmas has come early, and put their hands all over them. You know what that means?” Hicks said as they got into a sedan parked behind the garage.

“If Sells didn’t kill Lisa Warwick or grab Karly Vickers, but he killed whoever we have in this bag, then we’ve got more than one murderer,” Mendez said.

“It’s a banner day for the chamber of commerce.”

They drove to the back door of Peter Crane’s office and blocked in his Jaguar.

“You just caught me,” Crane said, leading them down the hall to an empty examination room. “I told Steve I would close for the afternoon and join the search party.”

“Steve Morgan?” Mendez asked.

“Yeah. I’m sure you know Steve’s spearheading the search effort and helping Jane Thomas deal with the media.”

“You’re good friends?”

“Yeah. We golf when we can. Our kids are friends. Steve got me involved with the center,” Crane said, leaning back against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Do you happen to know if he has a girlfriend?” Mendez asked.

Crane’s expression seemed carefully arranged. “Steve’s married. Happily.”

“Yeah, we know that. But that doesn’t change the question. We have reason to suspect he and Lisa Warwick might have been seeing each other.”

“Steve and Lisa?” The dentist looked at the floor as if he might be trying to picture the couple there. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

He was a poor liar.

“We’re not looking to bust his balls over it,” Mendez said. “We need a clear picture of what was going on in her life before she was killed. That’s all.”

Crane shrugged. “Sorry. I can’t help you with that. So, what can I help you with, detectives?”

“Some remains were discovered this morning during a search,” Mendez said. “A skull, to be exact. We were hoping you could compare the teeth against the X-rays you took of Miss Vickers’s mouth last week.”

Crane eyed the brown paper bag Hicks set on the counter. “Let me get the X-rays.”

Mendez took the skull out of the bag and set it on the counter. The bone was dingy white, clean of all flesh. It seemed unlikely the person it belonged to had been alive a week past, that this shell had been filled with a brain, covered by a face, crowned with hair. It had been attached to a living breathing human, a person with thoughts and opinions and goals for a life that was then abruptly ended.

Crane returned with the X-rays and clipped them to the light box on the wall, then he took a deep breath, sighed, and carefully picked up the skull, turning it upside down to look at the teeth.

“No,” he said almost immediately. “Miss Vickers had several amalgam fillings in the upper molars. See here?” he said, pointing to the X-rays of individual teeth.

“These teeth,” he said, looking at the thing he held in his hands like a halved cantaloupe, “were in need of attention. There’s significant decay in a couple of them. This filling in the premolar needed replacing. This bicuspid is chipped.”

“How much can you tell about the person by looking at the teeth?” Mendez asked. “Can you tell their age?”

“Like a horse?” Crane asked. “Not exactly. But this is a full set of teeth, so the person had to be at least a teenager. The teeth aren’t worn down, so not an older person. They haven’t been cared for, which would tend to make me think of someone in a poor financial situation. The teeth are on the small side, the jaw is relatively narrow, the skull is smallish with no pronounced brow ridge, so I’d guess it was a woman.”

“How about a name and address?” Hicks asked.

Crane gently set the skull down. “That’s your department, gentlemen. Can I ask where this came from?”

“Sells Salvage Yard, outside of town.”

“That’s the man you have in custody, right? That’s where you found the women’s cars? I saw it on the news this morning. You think he’s the killer.”

“He’s being questioned,” Mendez said.

Crane shook his head, staring at the skull. “This woman wasn’t Karly Vickers. So who was she? Is there another woman missing?”

“Not that we’re aware of,” Hicks said. “The remains will be sent to the Bureau of Forensic Sciences for possible identification.”

“So there really is a serial killer,” Crane said. “Thank God you have him in custody.”

“Yeah,” Mendez said. “Thank God.”

“Thanks for your help, Dr. Crane,” Hicks offered.

“Anytime.”

“So, you’re off to join the search?” Mendez asked.

“Yes.” Crane looked at the skull again. “You see that . . . I hope we’re not too late.”

“This is a nightmare,” Dixon said. “They’re absolutely sure about the prints?”

“They’re a match for Sells and his nephew,” Hicks said, reaching for tuna salad on rye. They had called out for lunch and sat at the conference table, eating and catching up on the latest details.

“Someone brought those cars out to Sells’s field, through the back gate,” Mendez said, “wiped them down and left them.”

“And then what?” Dixon asked. “Walked back to town? Had an accomplice drive back? Or is Sells the accomplice?”

“You have to take Sells out of the equation with Warwick and Vickers,” Vince said. “He’s not the kind of guy who has a partner. Him doing his own thing, at his own place, disposing of his victim in his own backyard—that I can see. But that kind of murder and Lisa Warwick are two entirely different things.”

“We’ve got two killers,” Dixon said. “Un-fucking-believable.”

He got up to pace. He was in uniform and still looked starched and pressed, despite what the day had already put him through.

“We do everything in our power to keep this out of the media,” he said. “Gordon Sells is in custody. The press can keep their eye on him for now.”

“And you have to hope your UNSUB doesn’t get pissed off by that,” Vince said. “Sells getting credit could push him into something.”

“It’s a no-win situation,” Dixon said. “If we admit there’s still a serial killer out there, he gets his ego fed, then he wants more. He wants more, he does more—right?”

“Probably,” Vince conceded.

Dixon swore under his breath and shook his head. “We’re working three murders and a missing person with at least two different perps in a county that doesn’t see three murders in a year. We’ve got to break this down.

“Trammell and Campbell, check all missing persons reports from a five-county target area then work your way out if you have to. We’ve got to try to put a name to the victim at Sells’s. The Bureau of Forensic Sciences has a forensic artist who can come up with a likeness of the victim from the skull. And put some pressure on the nephew, see if he won’t crack.”

The two detectives grabbed their lunches and headed to their desks to start making phone calls.

“If we take Sells off the board, that leaves us where with Lisa Warwick?” Dixon asked.

“Nowhere,” Mendez said. “But I’m pretty stuck on the idea she was having an affair with Steve Morgan. We asked Peter Crane about it this morning—he and Morgan are buddies—and he about turned himself inside out trying to deny it.”

“I spoke to Morgan this morning,” Vince said. “He’s not interested in owning that. He’s a cool customer. I told him you’ve got semen on Lisa Warwick’s sheets. He said then you’d better test Gordon Sells’s blood type.”

Brow furrowed, Hicks abandoned his sandwich and dug through a stack of papers that had been left on the table over the morning while they were out.

“Here’s why,” he said, holding up a report. “I asked for labs back ASAP on the semen stains. No blood type available. Whoever left that sample for us is a nonsecretor. He wouldn’t be worried we’d match his blood type if he knew his blood-type antigens didn’t carry into his semen.”

“How many people know if they’re secretors or nonsecretors? Most people don’t even know what that means,” Mendez said. “And only twenty percent of the population are nonsecretors. It’s not like he had a fifty-fifty shot at being right. He had to know.”

“Having an affair doesn’t make him a sexually sadistic homicidal maniac,” Dixon said.

“Have you done a thorough background check on him?” Vince asked. “Has he been in any kind of trouble with the law? Where did he come from? What do you know about him? He spends a lot of time with at-risk women. That could make him the Man of the Year, but that same set of circumstances could attract a predator. Has he been involved with other women associated with the center?”

“Jane would never have it,” Dixon said. “If she caught a whiff of impropriety, he would have been out of there. It’s not like the world is short on lawyers.”

“When we asked Dr. Crane if he knew where Karly Vickers was going after her appointment, he suggested she might have stopped by the Quinn, Morgan offices to find out about getting time off to have her dental work done,” Vince said. “Has anybody checked that out?”

“If she left the dentist at five o’clock, the law office was already closed,” Mendez said. “The sign on their door says they close at four thirty.”

“They lock the door at four thirty. That doesn’t mean there might not have been someone still there,” Vince pointed out. “Appointments run late. Lawyers love to rack up those billable hours.”

“Check it out,” Dixon said.

“She probably never made it out of the dentist’s office. Janet Crane probably killed her and ate her,” Mendez said. “That’s the meanest woman alive. I don’t get why he would be married to her. He’s a successful, educated, good-looking guy. Why would he hook up with a ballbuster like that one?”

“Maybe he sees another side of her,” Vince offered. “Or maybe he’s a masochist. Can you picture her wearing leather and spike-heeled boots?”

“If I want to have nightmares.”

“Don’t add another killer to the mix,” Dixon said. “We’ve got enough trouble. If you can’t find anyone at Quinn, Morgan who saw Karly Vickers after her appointment, find out where Peter Crane was.”

“Home with the family,” Mendez said. “That’s his alibi. We’re not going to break that unless someone saw him somewhere else.”

“I’m meeting his wife this afternoon. I’ll see what I can find out,” Vince said, drawing a stunned look from Mendez. “I’m curious. What can I say? And she’s the agent representing the vacant building next to her husband’s office. A great place for a newcomer to start a business—or for a kidnapper to stash a victim while he establishes an alibi. I’ll scout it out for you.”

“I’ve made a call to the Oxnard PD,” Mendez said. “That was where Julie Paulson had her last two arrests for prostitution. They’ll get back to me if they can connect her to any johns who might have gotten caught up in a sweep with her.”

“Steve Morgan spends a lot of time in Sacramento,” Dixon said, grim-faced. “I can reach out to a friend in the PD, see if they’ve had anything going on up there. I hope to God not.”

“If we’re dotting i’s and crossing t’s,” Mendez said, “Someone has to account for Frank’s whereabouts last Thursday night. Otherwise it’ll look like we gave him a pass.”

“Talk to his wife,” Dixon said, checking his watch. “I told him we have to do this by the book, and no one is more by the book than Frank. He’ll deal with it.”

Famous last words, Mendez would think later. For the moment it was just one more thing on the endless checklist of a murder investigation.