Tami Hoag - Deeper Than the Dead

“So far nothing has stood out,” Mendez said.

“This custody case you talked about-how long ago was that?” Vince asked.

“About nine months ago,” Jane Thomas said. “The ex-husband in question is doing a year in county jail.”

“We’ll check out his friends and family,” Vince said. “Just in case one of them is bent on revenge on his behalf.”

“Of course.” She went to her desk and buzzed her assistant to get the file.

“Then we’ll let you get on with the rest of your day,” Vince said with a soft smile.

Jane Thomas looked worn-out and stressed out. The Thomas Center was her namesake, her baby by the looks of the framed photos on the walls: Jane Thomas receiving awards from women’s groups, photos with politicians, photos with various members of her staff and clients. Her work was being attacked via Lisa Warwick and Karly Vickers, and she had to be worried what-or who-might be next.

“My day is consisting of fretting,” she confessed.

With good reason, Vince thought. The center’s clients made for a perfect victim pool: women with patterns of abuse in their backgrounds, vulnerable women, women with self-esteem issues. These were the kinds of women predators sought out as being easy to prey on, easy to control. A sufficiently twisted mind would see these women as being less than women living in traditional settings with traditional families, and therefore it was not a loss to society to dispose of them.

Vince had interviewed a number of serial murderers of prostitutes. They had all felt that they had practically done a public service in taking whores off the streets.

“Do you really think this Alfano guy could be behind these murders?” Mendez asked as they walked down the hall to the front doors. “I can see him targeting Lisa Warwick because she helped his wife get the kids back. But we have two other victims before Lisa Warwick.”

“It’s not likely,” Vince said. “But, like you said, follow all leads to the end. I know of a case where an estranged wife’s parents stalked and murdered her husband to ensure she would get custody of their granddaughter. “

“Or the guy doing life for a freeway shooting, and his mother builds a pipe bomb, sends it to the key witness against him, and blows half the family to kingdom come,” Mendez said.

“People are un-fucking-believable,” Vince said, and like every cop he’d ever known, segued from talk of murder to food. “Where are we going? Lunch, I hope.”

“The beauty salon,” Mendez said. “I thought we could get manicures and bond.”

“Very funny.”

“Karly Vickers had an appointment the day she went missing,” Mendez said. “And there’s a sandwich place down the block.”

Karly Vickers had spent three hours at Spice Salon on the afternoon in question. She had a haircut and a perm, a manicure and a pedicure. One of the “beauty technicians,” as they called themselves, had spent half an hour showing her the latest makeup tricks.

Three hours of listening to disco’s biggest hits pumping over the speakers, Vince thought as he sat in a vacant stylist’s chair. The woman had probably killed herself afterward.

Karly had been excited about the whole process of her makeover, but in a shy kind of way, the hairstylist said. She had talked about the new job she was starting. She hadn’t said anything about a boyfriend, had in fact gotten quiet when the stylist had brought up the subject.

Vince observed Mendez at work. The owner of the salon came over to trim his mustache and flirt with him. Vince asked about their hours and the new addition to the salon-a tanning parlor.

“Vickers left here around three that afternoon,” Mendez said as they walked down the street to the sandwich place with tables out front. A waitress took their order and scurried off. “She said she had one more appointment for the day-the dentist.”

“How would you like that?” Vince said. “You get nabbed by a serial killer and your last memory of your normal life is going to the dentist.”

“Wouldn’t be my choice.”

“What would be your choice?”

Mendez considered. “Hmmm… Heather Locklear. How about you?”

Vince thought about it for a moment. What would he want his last memory to be? Would it even matter? Once you were dead, where did your memories go? He had technically been dead for three minutes when he was shot. He didn’t remember anything about it.

“Well?”

“Pitching a perfect game for the Cubs to win the World Series,” he said.

Mendez laughed. “Like that will ever happen.”

“What? Me pitching in the bigs?”

“The Cubs winning the World Series.”

“Hey!” Vince protested with a grin. “A guy’s gotta dream. Dream large!”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Franny said, staring aghast at the notebook page depicting one grizzly stabbing death after another. “Call an exorcist.”

Anne felt everything inside of her quivering like Jell-O. After seeing Dennis Farman’s artwork, she had gone directly from her classroom to Franny’s, where he was enjoying his break between his morning kindergartners and his afternoon kindergartners, sneaking a cigarette out by the sandbox.

“You have to come with me,” she said. “You have to come with me right now.”

She turned on her heel and started walking. Franny jogged up beside her in the hall.

“What’s going on?”

She shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Honey, what to do about what? Have you killed one of them? No one will blame you. They’re fifth graders. It’s justifiable homicide.”

Anne didn’t smile. She didn’t laugh. She led the way into her classroom, took him straight to Dennis Farman’s desk, and opened it.

“He was doing this all morning,” she said now, and she told him everything that had happened.

“You have to show this to Garnett,” he said, staring at the drawing. “This is really creepy, Anne. This isn’t something to mess around with-not when you add this to him screaming at you that he wishes you were dead.”

“If I take this to Garnett, Dennis will be expelled.”

“Yes, and… that would be bad… how?”

“He needs help, Franny,” she said. “He’s got so much rage inside him, and he doesn’t know what to do with it.”

Franny’s jaw dropped. He grabbed the notebook out of the desk and pointed at the drawings of women with knives sticking into their bodies. “This is what he wants to do with it! Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“He’s a little boy.”

“He’s the son of Satan!”

“He’s the son of a man who beat him so badly last night he can’t sit in a chair today!” Anne said, keeping her voice down even as her temper rose.

“Did he tell you that?”

“No.”

“Did you see any marks on him?”

“No.”

“Then tell Garnett, give this to him, and let him handle it,” he said, tapping his finger against the notebook to make her look at it. “You have to get this kid out of your classroom before he does this for real.”

“But, Franny, if Garnett expels him, what’s going to happen to him? He apparently has a difficult home situation. He’s socially maladjusted. He has no friends. He found a dead body, for Christ’s sake.”

“And let’s make sure the next one isn’t yours.”

“He’s eleven.”

“Do you not go to the movies?” he asked, incredulous. “Did you not see Halloween? Michael Myers was SIX YEARS OLD when he killed his sister.”

“And if we were living in a John Carpenter film, I’d be really scared.”

“You are really scared or you wouldn’t have come running to me. You would have told me tonight over Chinese. ‘Oh, by the way, Franny, one of my students did the most interesting thing today. He unleashed the contents of his disturbed mind in a sexually sadistic work of art. And how was your day?’