Deeper Than the Dead

58

“The girl is in critical condition,” Dixon said. “She’s not expected to make it. Just like Lisa Warwick, her eyes and mouth had been glued shut. She was strangled. Somehow he didn’t quite finish off the job. Who knows how long her brain was deprived of oxygen. She’s severely dehydrated and suffering from hypothermia.”

He stood at the front of the room, the eyes of all of his detectives, along with personnel from two neighboring counties, riveted on him. Mendez passed out new flyers with a close-up photo of the necklace Karly Vickers had probably been wearing at the time of her abduction.

“We believe she was wearing this necklace,” Dixon went on. “It’s the logo from the Thomas Center. All women who graduate the program get a gold one. Staff have the same necklace in silver. Karly Vickers was not wearing hers when she was discovered. The perp might have kept it as a souvenir.”

“Did the Warwick woman have one?” Hamilton asked.

“She was an ex-staffer. She would have owned one. Go back into her apartment to see if it’s there.”

“He took the time to bury the Vickers girl, but not to make sure she was dead?” Hicks said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“She barely had a pulse,” Dixon said. “He probably just didn’t pick up on it.”

“Or it might not be an accident,” Vince said. “He could have left her alive as part of a taunt. He leaves a living victim and we still can’t find him. Proves his omnipotence.”

“How are we supposed to respond to that?” Dixon asked. “This guy’s running around thinking he’s God.”

“Tell him he made a mistake. Go in front of the press and announce that he made a crucial mistake and it’s only a matter of time before you close him down.”

“A bluff,” Mendez said. “But what if he calls us on it?”

“It’s got to be a damn good bluff. Something he can’t prove or disprove, something that gets under his skin and starts to make him worry a little.

“He’s intelligent. Hard science will get his attention. Something to do with trace evidence or we tell him the FBI has come up with a new method of lifting fingerprints from a human body or that he can be linked to a victim through DNA. We don’t quite have that technology yet, but it’s coming soon. We can certainly talk a good game about it, enough to make him worry a little.

“That’s what we want,” Vince said. “We want him either careless or worried. That’s when he’ll make a mistake.”

“But at whose expense?” Mendez asked. “He’s going to be trolling for another victim, isn’t he?”

“He will be whether you challenge him or not. He’s at a place where he’s sure he’s smarter than all of us combined. He’ll get drunk on that power.”

“Let’s table the idea for the moment,” Dixon said. “We need to finish processing the scene at Jane’s. Maybe the CSIs will come up with some actual forensic evidence and we can make a bluff with some teeth in it.”

“A little truth sells a lie every time,” Vince agreed.

“What’s going on with Gordon Sells?” Dixon asked.

“He’s still not talking,” Trammell said. “The nephew lawyered up last night, but we’ve got him talking deal with the DA’s office. I think we’ll get something out of him soon. He’s not liking what he’s hearing about prison.”

“What about the victim?”

“There are about half a dozen possible victims among the missing persons we’ve looked at within the target area,” Campbell said. “Based on gender—we’re assuming female; based on size—relative to the length of the femur found; and looking at an age range from twelve to thirty. BFS will be doing the comparisons of dental records.”

Detectives were assigned to canvass Jane Thomas’s neighbors in the event anyone might have been up at three in the morning to see a car drive by. The deputy assigned to patrol the neighborhood had been called to report in.

It probably hadn’t been dumb luck that their UNSUB had happened into that yard to bury a body just after the prowl car had left the street not to return for an hour. He had to have been watching from somewhere.

“Tony,” Dixon said. “What’s your agenda?”

“I want to go to the scene, then talk to Steve Morgan, and I want to bring Peter Crane in and question him about that solicitation bust and Julie Paulson. He also needs to account for himself for last night.”

Dixon nodded. “I’m going to make a statement to the press regarding Karly Vickers at noon. We’ll do it here out in front of the building. Try to get them away from the hospital. I’ve posted deputies at all entrances to Mercy General, and I have no doubt they’ll still try to get in.”

“Where’s Miss Thomas?” Vince asked.

“She’s still at the hospital. Sedated for the time being. She was pretty shaken up.”

“Have somebody keep an eye on her, Sheriff,” Vince said. “If this guy decides to make a big gesture with his next victim, she’s the obvious choice.”

Vince, Mendez, and Hicks rode together to the Thomas home where news vans lined the street, and reporters crowded the front lawn.

Ball cap pulled low over his eyes, Vince hung back, letting the two detectives take the attention of the media, then slipping past while they barked out “No comment’s.” If Dixon decided to go along with the idea of challenging their killer, Vince would be stepping into the spotlight soon enough. But the disclosure of his involvement would come on his terms, not the media’s.

Jane Thomas’s property was slightly larger than the average lot, and bordered on two sides by a narrow, shallow ravine, thick with trees. Their killer could have made his way around to the backyard garden this way without risking a neighbor seeing him. Karly Vickers was a small woman—105 pounds according to her driver’s license—easily carried by an average-size man in good shape.

He wouldn’t have been visible from the house, digging at the back of the garden. If he knew the garden was there, he wouldn’t have even had to bring his own shovel. One had been generously provided for him by the garden owner.

Still, it was a bolder move to bury a body here than in the park where Lisa Warwick had been found. Cocky. Theatrical. Personal? Did he have some axe to grind with Jane Thomas? Maybe she was the one with the enemy, not the victims.

It was interesting to him that the victims had been women trying to make their lives better, not women stuck on the low end of society.

Prostitutes were always favorite victims of serial killers because they were considered by the killer to be despicable, disposable, and easy prey. The other end of that spectrum was the killer who hunted young women perceived to be of good virtue, for lack of a more modern word. High school girls, college coeds, young single women.

This killer chose women trying to move up from poorer circumstances. Trying to fool people into believing they were something they weren’t? Was that it? Or were they simply vulnerable and accessible through the connection to the center?

Nothing was ever that simple.

Steve Morgan sat at a table on the stone patio, watching the swarm of law enforcement going over the yard. Vince walked over and sat down across from him.

“Hell of a thing, huh?”

Morgan looked at him, his expression unreadable. “Not the way you want to start your day: finding someone half-buried in your friend’s yard.”

“But she’s alive.”

“Unbelievable.” He shook his head at some private thought. “I heard Jane scream. She had gone to see what her dogs were barking at.”

“Where are the dogs now?”

“Jane’s assistant came and got them. Why?”

“We’ll need to collect hair samples from them, in the event hairs were recovered from Miss Vickers. A stray hair from an unknown source could open the investigation in a different direction. Maybe the perpetrator owns a dog or a cat. One stray hair could make a connection. It only takes one loose thread to unravel a cheap sweater.”

“The science is that sophisticated?” he asked.

“You can’t imagine the things they’re doing at the FBI lab in Washington, the advances in analyzing trace evidence, DNA evidence. One day soon there’ll be a national DNA databank with the DNA codes of every convicted criminal in the country.”

“That’s a little Orwellian, don’t you think?”

“Big Brother is sure as hell going to be watching the criminal population,” Vince said. He shrugged. “It’s nothing to worry about if you haven’t done anything wrong.”

He sat back and squared his left ankle over his right knee, settling in as if watching evidence collection at a crime scene was all part of a normal, relaxing Saturday morning.

“Good thing you were here so early today,” he said.

“Jane and I had scheduled a meeting. We were supposed to be having a press conference this morning.”

“Another five, ten minutes, that girl probably would have been dead. Now there’s a shot she can tell us who abducted her.”

“I read the man glued Lisa’s eyes closed,” Morgan said. “So she couldn’t see him. Did he do that to Karly?”

“I don’t think that’s why he did it,” Vince said, watching him carefully. “I think it has to do with his fantasy. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I think the women become objects to him—pretty to look at, but no trouble. A lot of guys would say when a woman opens her mouth it spoils everything.”

Morgan tipped his head in acknowledgment.

“How’s your family, Steve?” he asked, surprising the man a little. “Your daughter—how’s she holding up after what she saw?”

“Wendy is very resilient.”

“How about yourself? Now you know exactly what it was like for her, stumbling on that body in the woods.”

“I certainly wish that hadn’t happened to her.”

“Yeah.”

Mendez wandered over from the gravesite, scribbling in his notebook. “They found a couple of good shoe prints in the arroyo.”

“In the what?” Vince asked. “I’m from Chicago here. Don’t go throwing language at me.”

“The arroyo. Down the hill in the trees. There’s a stream. The ground is just damp enough to hold a good impression.”

“Great.”

“Mr. Morgan,” Mendez said. “I have to ask you where you were last night.”

“In bed like any sane person. Jane thinks she might have heard the guy back here—or that the dogs did—sometime after three.”

“And you arrived . . . ?”

“Just before seven.”

“Hell of a deal, huh?” Mendez said. “Finding that girl alive.”

“Hell of a deal,” Morgan said. He pushed to his feet with the effort of a much older man. The dark circles beneath his eyes spoke of another long night. “Unless you gentlemen need me, I’m going out to the search site and let people know what’s happened. The search is over.”

They watched him round the corner of the house and disappear.

“You know,” Mendez said, “he didn’t lift a finger to help her—Jane. She came out here and found that girl half buried, and started digging her out, and Morgan just stood there and watched her. I find that odd, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Vince said. “But he might have been in shock.”

“Or he might have been enjoying the show.”

Vince slapped him on the back. “Now you’re thinking like a profiler, kid.”