Deeper Than The Dead (14 page)

His back and butt were still stinging like stripes of fire where his father had hit him for lying and for skipping school. He lay now on his stomach because he couldn’t lie any other way. He pushed himself up onto his knees, the anger inside him spinning around like a wild animal. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he started hitting his pillow with both fists, over and over and over.

He pretended the pillow was Miss Navarre’s face, and he punched her and punched her until there was nothing but blood.

Stupid bitch
.
Fucking cunt.

The rage welled up in him again, and he punched the pillow some more until his arms were tired and tears were running down his face.

He would show them all one day. Nobody would push him around or embarrass him or tell him he was worthless. He would be the one doing the pushing. They would all be afraid of him.

Dennis slipped out of bed, got down on the floor, and stuck his arm as far under the bed as he could reach until he got hold of what he wanted. The flashlight he had shoplifted from the hardware store. With the yellow beam of light leading his way, he went to his closet and dug down deep through the pile of dirty clothes to the old cigar box he kept hidden there.

Pride filled him that he had been able to get away with it. No one had seen him take the thing. No one had suspected he had it in his pocket. Cops all around, and no one had caught him.

He took the box over by the window and set it down on the chair. Still holding the flashlight in one hand, he opened the lid and peered inside.

The cigar box was where he kept his most treasured possessions: his pocketknife, the cigarettes he had stolen from his mother, a lighter, the dried-out head of a rattlesnake he had watched a gardener kill, and his newest, most prized addition.

It was squishy and had started to smell, but that only added to the wonderful grossness of it. This was what the corpse would smell like if they had left it in the ground. It excited him to think about it.

He smiled as he carefully lifted the treasure out of the box and held it under the light.

The severed finger of a dead woman.

Thursday, October 10, 1985

1:37 A.M.

Karly Vickers lay in absolute darkness, in absolute silence, in absolute pain, in absolute terror.

Most people would never in their lives know what true terror really is. There were no adjectives to describe it. It was like the hottest, whit est light and the fiercest, highest-pitched sound imaginable put together to assault every part of the brain and nervous system. And even that was an inadequate description.

She remembered very little about her abduction—a moment of recognition, but no memory of a face; a blast of panic, like a bomb going off inside her, then nothing. What had followed was both surreal and too real. Nothing made sense except the pain.

She had no idea when the pain would come, or from where. She had no concept of time, of day or night. She couldn’t always tell up from down. Sometimes she felt like she was falling only to realize with a start that she was lying flat. She could see nothing. She could hear nothing. She couldn’t open her mouth to speak.

She had no idea how long she had been in this place, or where or what this place was. It was cold. The thing she lay on was hard. She was in too much pain to feel hunger. Periodically, a straw was inserted in the smallest of gaps between her lips, and she was given water, just enough to keep her alive.

The fear would come on her in waves, huge waves that crashed over her, leaving her struggling for air, struggling against her bonds. She had no idea when her tormentor would come, what he would do to her, when he would leave. Because she couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see him, the only way she knew he was there was to have him inflict pain on her.

When the panic exhausted her, sometimes she would think about the job she was supposed to have started. Had they told anyone she hadn’t come to work? Had anyone gone to the cottage to check on her? Had her mother begun to wonder why she hadn’t called Sunday night? Was anyone taking care of Petal?

Then she would start to cry, but her eyes produced no tears, nor could she open her eyelids to let them escape if they had come. She could feel the sobs wrack her chest, but if any sound came out at all, she couldn’t hear it.

Why would anyone do this to her?

Early on, before her hearing had been destroyed, she had heard another woman struggle, had heard a single, blood-curdling scream that had cut through her like a knife. But that had been what seemed long ago. She had no way of knowing if that woman was still here. She thought not. She felt so alone.

That was the worst thing: the isolation, the sense of being trapped inside her own body, inside her own mind.

She began to pray that the next time her tormentor came he would kill her.

He sat on a stool at the foot of the metal table, watching his victim, wondering what must be going through her mind. Was she still sane? Had she tried to imagine who her tormentor was?

This was his other life, his release from the so-called normal world where pressures built inside him on a daily basis; where the demands on his time, on his energy, on his sense of self came from other people with their own expectations of who he was and who he should be. A husband, a father, a professional, an upstanding citizen.

With his victim, he was in control, he could let loose the self that existed in the innermost part of him.

It excited him that his victim didn’t know and would never have suspected who he really was. She had believed him to be trustworthy and deserving of respect. Respect had taken on a whole new meaning in the face of his absolute control of her.

Absolute control. Absolute power.

Absolutely thrilling.

Thursday, October 10, 1985

6:15 A.M.

Mendez and Hicks took the first pass through Karly Vickers’s, wanting to see it pristine, exactly as she had left it. It was a small place, neat as a pin. They went carefully through drawers and closets, looking for anything that might have pointed to Vickers having a current boyfriend or a current connection to her past boyfriend, the Simi Valley thug.

She had crossed Greg Usher’s entry out of her address book. If she was still in contact with him, the contact probably wasn’t being initiated by her. Mendez held the book open for Jane Thomas to see.

“I told you she was through with him,” she said.

“People don’t always turn out to be as strong as we would like for them to be, ma’am,” he said. “That’s part of my job.”

“Disillusionment?”

“Sometimes. Doubt, always.”

He would have preferred not to have her there. He knew she was anxious, and she was undoubtedly feeling violated on behalf of her client as she watched them go through Karly Vickers’s things.

That was how he had felt when he was a teenager, and the cops had come to search his family home: violated. They had been looking for evidence against his older brother, a gang member accused of dealing drugs. They had gone through the house like a human tornado, with no regard for personal property or personal feelings. He remembered his mother crying as they riffled through her dresser, touching her clothing, her undergarments, her mementos.

He had never forgotten that when he searched through the homes of victims and perps alike. A little respect went a long way.

Hicks turned the bedding down and pulled the shades. Mendez turned off the lamp then went over the sheets with a black light, looking for bodily fluids—specifically semen—to fluoresce. There was nothing.

“She isn’t seeing anyone,” Jane Thomas said. “She’s been completely focused on getting her life on track.”

“Is she always this neat?” Hicks asked.

“She always was at the center. She’s very respectful of the chances she’s been given.”

“Does she have any close friends that you know of?” Mendez asked. “Any of the other women at the center? Someone she might confide in if she was interested in someone or if someone was bothering her?”

“Maybe Brandy Henson. I saw them together a lot.”

This was why he allowed Jane Thomas to hang close. She knew Karly Vickers, knew about her life, her friends. There was a good chance if something wasn’t right here, it would jump out at her.

Unfortunately, as they made their way through the tiny house, nothing jumped out. Mendez opened the front door and motioned in the crime scene team.

“They’re going to dust for fingerprints,” he said as he held the back door open for Thomas. “It’ll be a mess. But if there was anyone else in here, we’ll know about it. If any of the prints match up with a known offender, we’ll have a direction to go in.”

Of course, months could pass before they got a match, but he didn’t mention that. Comparing latent fingerprints was a manual needle-in-a-haystack process that relied completely on the trained eye of a fingerprint specialist. Someday the system would be automated and offender prints would go into a national database easily accessed. But the prints taken today would be of little use until they had a suspect to compare them with, a scenario that was less than optimal for Karly Vickers if she had in fact been abducted.

“Anything you need to do.”

“We’ll want to get her phone records. Is the account in her name?”

“No. The account will be in the name of the center with a numeric suffix. That’s how it’s set up with all the properties we own. The numbers are all unlisted.” She forced an ironic smile, looking off in the distance as if she might see Karly Vickers down the street. “We take all the precautions we can to keep the women as safe as possible. The bills come to the center and are on file. But Karly just moved into this house. We haven’t had a bill yet.”

“We’ll get the local usage details from the phone company.”

“What about search and rescue?” she asked. “Why aren’t there search parties out looking for her?”

“You’d have to ask Sheriff Dixon that question, ma’am,” Mendez said.

He was glad to dodge the question himself even though he knew the answer. Dixon hadn’t moved on a search because they had no idea where to begin searching. They had no idea where Karly Vickers had gone missing, what direction she might have gone in or been taken. With her car still missing, Jane Thomas or no Jane Thomas, they still had to consider that Karly Vickers might have left of her own free will. She might have received a threat from the ex-boyfriend, panicked, and taken off to parts unknown.

“If she was the twelve-year-old daughter of some professor, he would have called out the National Guard by now,” she said angrily.

“I know the helicopter is going up this morning,” Mendez said. “They’ll be looking for her car, and for Lisa Warwick’s car.”

They would be looking for a body, as well, but he didn’t mention that.

“Miss Vickers’s picture will be in every paper and on every news channel in California by tonight. If someone has seen her, then we have a starting point for a ground search.”

The sun was a fat orange ball ten feet off the horizon, up but not yet strong enough to burn off the damp chill clinging to the fall air. Mendez was glad for the sport coat he had on. Jane Thomas was wrapped in a hand-knit, moss green sweater that reflected the color of her eyes—except for the red rims from hours of crying.

He felt bad for her. To find out someone you knew had been murdered was a terrible thing. To find out someone else you knew was missing and could very well be the next murder victim . . . he couldn’t imagine.

The backyard of the cottage was fenced in to contain the pit bull that sidled up to Jane Thomas, growling low in its throat. Not a warning growl so much as a sound of discontentment. The dog sat and leaned against the woman’s legs, looking mournfully up at her.

“This is Petal?” Mendez asked.

“Yes. I took her home with me last night. She’s lost without Karly.”

He lifted his Polaroid and snapped a shot of the dog. He would take it to Anne Navarre later to see if her students could ID this as the dog they had seen in the woods.

Maybe the dog had jumped the fence and had been in search of its owner when it had come across the body of Lisa Warwick. If this was television, they would give Petal a piece of Karly Vickers’s clothing to sniff, and the dog would bark and take off, leading them to her owner who was trapped in the lair of a madman.

Unfortunately, they weren’t living in a TV show, and Mendez had never known a pit bull to be much in the way of a hunting dog.

“We’ll have deputies interview all the neighbors,” he said. “To see if maybe someone saw her leave the house, or saw her with anyone, or saw someone going into the house.

“The fact that her car isn’t here makes me think she probably met her abductor elsewhere,” he said. “We’ll need a list of everyone you know she saw on Thursday.”

“I can tell you,” she said. “She was at the center. She saw the staff. She had her hair and nails done at Spice Salon. She had her teeth cleaned.”

“What dentist?” Mendez asked, pulling out his notebook and pen.

“Either Dr. Pratt or Dr. Crane. They both offer their services to the center.”

Petal the pit bull got to her feet and began to growl in earnest. The back door of the cottage opened and Frank Farman stepped out.

“I’ve got two units here to start knocking on doors,” he said. He looked at Jane Thomas. “You’d better have a leash on that dog, ma’am. That’s a dangerous animal.”

Jane Thomas took hold of the dog’s pink collar. “Only to people she doesn’t like.”

Farman frowned at her.

“Thanks, Frank,” Mendez said. “Can you send a unit over to the Warwick woman’s residence? We’ll canvass that neighborhood as well. Hicks and I will be heading over there next.”

“They’re already there.”

“Great. Thanks.”

Farman shot another disapproving glance at the still-growling dog and went back into the cottage.

Petal settled on Jane’s feet, grumbling. Thomas patted her big square head. “Good girl, Petal.”