Tami Hoag - Deeper Than the Dead

“She had a record, right?”

“A couple of old prostitution charges in another jurisdiction.”

“See if she got busted with a john. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

“I’ll make some calls. Did you get anything from Quantico?”

“One of the agents knew a case in Ohio where a guy went away for killing a ten-year-old girl. When he got out, he switched to killing prostitutes of small stature-childlike. He figured when a kid goes missing, people notice. When a hooker disappears, c’est la vie.”

“Karly Vickers is small,” Mendez said. “But Lisa Warwick was pretty curvy. No mistaking her for-or pretending she might have been-a child.”

“Let’s go see your Mr. Sells,” Vince said, getting up slowly. He stuck his reading glasses on top of his head and picked a folder from a neat stack on the table. “Dixon gave me the go-ahead to interview him. I want to know what pushes his buttons.”

Gordon Sells looked at Mendez as they entered the room, and jabbed a finger in his direction. “I got nothin’ to say to you , you fuckin’ spic.”

Mendez looked at Vince and shrugged. Vince tipped his head toward the door. He didn’t want Sells pissed off just because he didn’t like Mendez.

Vince sat down, perched his reading glasses on his nose and paged slowly through the notes that had been made thus far regarding Gordon Sells. Sells watched him suspiciously and fidgeted in his chair as the minutes ticked past.

Finally Vince sighed and looked up.

“Mr. Sells,” he said with a friendly smile. “I don’t care how many stolen cars you’ve shipped to Mexico.”

Sells didn’t deny it.

“That’s not important. Not to me, not to you. You’ve got other issues,” Vince said. “I’ve talked to a lot of guys like you over the years. Guys who had that same… attraction… you have. None of them wanted to have it, you know. You probably don’t want to have it either. I mean we all know it’s against society, but you didn’t ask to be that way. It’s not your fault you like girls younger than other people think is right.”

“Who are you?” Sells asked. “Are you a shrink?”

“Something like that,” Vince said. “I’m Vince.”

He reached across the table to shake the grubby hand of Gordon Sells.

“Now, Gordon. May I call you Gordon?”

Sells shrugged. “I guess.”

“So, Gordon, Detective Mendez thinks you have something to do with the murder of a woman-Lisa Warwick.”

“Never heard of her.”

“And the disappearance of another woman-Karly Vickers.”

“Don’t know nothing about it.”

Vince got up, went to the wall, and taped up three black-and-white crime scene photos. The partially decomposed remains of Julie Paulson. “Come have a look.”

Sells came over and looked at the gruesome pictures, held his hands up and turned away. “That’s sick. I got no stomach for that. I maybe have done some things in my time that ain’t right, but nothing like that.”

“See? That’s what I figured,” Vince said. He went back to the table and took a couple more photos out of the file, pornographic images of well-endowed women in their twenties. He stuck them up on the wall beside the others.

“I need coffee,” he said. “Would you like some coffee, Gordon?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’ll be right back.”

He went out the door and across the hall.

Dixon looked at him as he strolled into the monitor room and went to the coffeemaker. “What’s the point of that?”

“The porn?” Vince said, pouring two cups of black coffee. “You’ll see.”

He doctored his coffee with four plastic thimbles of fake cream, stirring as he came over to the monitor. In the other room, Sells went over to the wall, looked at the porn for a minute, looked at the other photographs, and walked away.

Mendez opened the interview room door and let Vince back in. Vince handed a cup to Sells. “I brought it black. I didn’t know. Me, I’ve got to load up the cream. Bad stomach.”

Sells took the coffee and sipped at it.

“See, I said to Detective Mendez you wouldn’t be interested in anything like that,” Vince said, hooking a thumb toward the photos. “That’s not what you’re about. You’re not a violent man. You don’t want to hurt women.”

“That’s right,” Sells said. “I never hurt nobody.”

Vince went back to the wall and took down all the photographs. He replaced them with three photographs of a twelve-year-old girl, her unripe body naked, just beginning to bud into something more. She looked at the camera as she touched herself provocatively.

Vince went back to the table and promptly knocked over his coffee.

“Oh, shit! Look at that! Oh, man…”

He scooped up the file, the jacket dripping coffee. “Shit. Excuse me. I’ve got to get some towels.”

He went back out the door and across the hall, dropping the file jacket into the trash. He joined Dixon, Hicks, and Mendez at the monitor, and they all watched as Gordon Sells went to the door and glanced out to see no one in the hall. He went back to the wall to stare at the photographs. Not thirty seconds had gone by before he began to fondle himself through his baggy pants. Another thirty seconds and he was fully aroused.

“Barnum and Bailey could pitch a tent on that pole,” Vince said. “He’s not your guy.”

But before Dixon could say anything, Detective Trammell hustled into the room.

“We’ve got something at Sells’s place,” he said. “Bones. They look human.”

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.