Tami Hoag - Deeper Than the Dead

“The comparisons are being made,” Dixon said. “We’ll know this afternoon.”

He shook his head as he looked out at the crime scene techs raking through the shit. “The bastard has no respect for human life at all. Kills someone, cuts them up, throws them out like trash. In a hog yard.”

“You know why, right?” Hicks said.

Dixon just looked at him.

“Hogs will eat anything.”

Mendez put the femur down and walked away.

A call came from the crime scene techs. “We’ve got a skull!”

Vince avoided the scene at Sells’s junkyard. They didn’t need him there to look at bones. They certainly didn’t need him there to be recognized by the media.

Dixon would have his hands full now as it was. His case had just taken on Hollywood movie status: a creepy convicted pedophile living in a creepy junkyard on the outskirts of the idyllic college town, murdering people and throwing their corpses out to be devoured by farm animals.

All he needed was to have a top profiler step in from the FBI and he would have a blockbuster on his hands.

And all Vince needed was for the powers at the Bureau to see his face on the nightly news in the middle of it.

Bones or no bones, he still didn’t think Gordon Sells was the man who had murdered Lisa Warwick. Guys like Gordon Sells tried to fly under the radar as much as possible. He was by nature a pedophile. It was Vince’s theory that the majority of pedophiles were ashamed of what they did no matter how long they were at it or how prolific they were. What they did never became okay-not even to themselves.

Men like Sells operated in secret, in hiding. They asked their victims not to tell-or made sure that they couldn’t. They covered their tracks and disposed of all evidence.

The Gordon Sells theory of Lisa Warwick’s murder and Karly Vickers’s abduction could be packaged and wrapped with a big red bow for the press, but in reality that box was going to be empty.

He wondered how his UNSUB would take it when the press made Sells out to be the big bad serial killer. Would it amuse him? Piss him off? Drive him to do something to prove them wrong? In Vince’s experience, this kind of killer had an ego that needed feeding and stroking. He wouldn’t like someone else getting credit for his work.

That could be a good thing for the investigation, forcing him to make a move.

It could be a very bad thing for Karly Vickers, if she was still alive. Vince pulled Mendez’s car into the field where the searchers were parked, across the road from Gordon Sells’s property. Sunglasses in place, he pulled a Dodgers’ baseball cap on. He shucked his tie and sport coat in exchange for a windbreaker from the Oak Knoll Softball League, grateful Mendez was broad-shouldered.

Tables laid out with drinks and snacks sat under a couple of pop-up tents. Under a third tent, another table held flyers with a photo of Karly Vickers.

Have You Seen This Woman?

She was young. Pretty in a simple way. Permed blonde hair with a fountain of bangs sprayed in place. She wore a necklace with a small pendant-the figure of a woman with her arms raised in victory-the logo of the Thomas Center.

She had been missing nearly eight days. She was probably dead.

A woman asked if she could help him. She was in her midthirties, wearing a pink Thomas Center T-shirt, slender with a big head of auburn hair.

“I’m looking for Steve Morgan,” he said, setting the flyer down. “Have you seen him?”

“Steve and Jane are giving an interview in the media tent,” she said, looking off to her left to another pop-up tent set off by itself, maybe fifteen yards away. “They should be finished soon. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Do you work at the center?” Vince asked.

“Are you with the sheriff’s office?” she countered.

Vince flashed her a smile. “What gave me away?”

“The mustache,” she said, loosening up a little. “I grew up in a family of firemen and police officers.”

“Then we’re not exactly hard to spot.”

“No. I’m Maureen Collins.”

“Detective Leone. How long have you worked at the center?”

“Three years. I do family counseling.”

“You know Miss Vickers, then.”

“Yes. She’s a nice girl. I can’t believe this has happened to her.”

“Did you know Miss Warwick?”

“Yes. I knew Lisa fairly well. I’m sure you’re aware she was volunteering as a court advocate. We worked together on several cases.”

“With Steve Morgan?”

“Yes. Steve is our hero,” she said with a smile.

“Do you know if Miss Warwick was seeing anyone?” he asked. “We have reason to believe that she was, but we haven’t found anyone to confirm that, let alone tell us who she might have been involved with.”

She hesitated just a fraction of a second before saying, “I have no idea. Lisa was a very private person.”

“I find that strange,” Vince confessed. “Why be so secretive? Unless the guy wasn’t supposed to be seeing her.”

The woman looked over at the media tent and said, “It looks like they might be finished.”

“Thanks.”

Vince walked to the tent with his head down as the interviewer and photographer went past. Jane Thomas went in another direction. Steve Morgan stood looking at some papers on a clipboard.

“You’re getting a lot of media attention,” Vince said, strolling under the canopy of the open-sided tent.

Morgan glanced up. “The more, the better, right? Somebody had to see something. If just one person comes forward with a lead…”

“Sometimes that’s all it takes,” Vince said. “One person who saw something that struck them as odd. Like a man coming and going to and from a woman’s house at late hours of the night.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me personally, Detective?”

“A neighbor of Lisa Warwick thinks she saw you.”

“In the dark. In the middle of the night.”

“If you had a relationship with her, better for you to come clean now and tell us. We’ll find out eventually, and it won’t look good that you tried to hide it.”

Morgan went back to studying the papers on the clipboard.

Vince took a seat in one of several tall directors’ chairs that had been positioned for interviews.

“We’ve got semen on her sheets,” he said. “That gives us a blood type.”

“I didn’t kill Lisa,” Morgan said.

“I’m not saying you did. Just because you were sleeping with her doesn’t make you a murderer.”

“I wasn’t sleeping with her.”

“Your wife thinks you were.”

Morgan looked at him with a gaze that could have cut steel. “You talked to my wife?”

“I told you we would.”

“And she told you she thinks I was sleeping with Lisa.”

“Does that surprise you?”

“You’re lying. Sara wouldn’t say that.”

Vince let him wonder for a minute. Finally he sighed.

“You know, Steve, man to man, I don’t care if you were sleeping with her. You want to screw up your family situation-that’s none of my business. I care that you’re wasting our time by denying it. I care that you’re going to make us waste man hours looking into every goddamn day of your life for the past six months, digging through your financials, comparing hotel receipts with calendar dates with trips to Sacramento and trips you said you made that you never did because you were really in town fucking your mistress. I care about that.”

The muscles in Morgan’s square jaw flexed. “Are you finished?”

“No,” Vince said, leaning forward. “I care that if you were involved with this girl, and now she’s dead, that you’re that big an asshole you would waste time we could be spending finding her killer just because you don’t want to step up and be a man. You would do that to try to cover your own ass. Didn’t you care about her at all?”