Tami Hoag - Deeper Than the Dead

Steve Morgan said nothing for several minutes. He turned and looked out across the field with no expression whatsoever. What he was seeing, what he was thinking, Vince could only imagine.

Maybe he saw his family slipping away from him, his wife divorcing him, his daughter hating him. Maybe he was remembering Lisa Warwick and how much he had loved her. Maybe he was looking back on his last visit to Lisa Warwick’s home, wondering if he had really been so careless as to leave traces of himself at the scene.

“Look, Steve, I’m not trying to bust your ass here. Maybe you really loved the girl, but now she’s gone and you don’t want to lose your family too. Unless you killed her, it’s nobody’s business. We can try to keep it quiet.”

“In the middle of a media circus.” Morgan laughed.

“I hear you have a suspect in custody,” he said quietly. “You found Lisa’s car, Karly’s car here on this property. Remains have been found.”

“We have a person of interest,” Vince said.

Morgan nodded. “Then I guess you’d better check his blood type,” he said, and walked away.

The lower jaw was missing from the skull, still lost in the filth of the hog yard. But the upper part of the skull was intact with what looked to be a full set of teeth.

Mendez and Hicks took the thing in a brown paper bag and went back to their car, ignoring the shouts and calls of reporters being held at bay on the far side of the crime scene tape. A virtual motorcade followed them back to the sheriff’s office. As they pulled into the parking lot the television reporters and cameramen rushed the lawn to lay claim to the prime backgrounds for their remote reports.

Vultures, Mendez thought, as he and his partner cut through the maze of hallways in the building, and went out into the garage where the cars of Karly Vickers and Lisa Warwick were being gone over a second time.

“Anything new?” Mendez asked.

“Two sets of prints off both cars,” said the brunette from Latent Fingerprints-Marta. She stood beside Karly Vickers’s Nova, watching as someone else combed the carpet in the driver’s side foot well. “Two identical sets of prints from both cars, and nothing else. Not so much as a partial from any other party.”

“Sells and Doug Lyle?” Hicks ventured. “Sells and his nephew?”

“Walter is doing the comparisons now.”

“The victims’ prints?” Mendez asked.

Marta shook her head. “Nada. Already eliminated.”

“Somebody wiped the cars clean,” Hicks said.

“What’s in the bag?” Marta asked. “Did you bring me lunch?”

“You don’t want to know,” Mendez said as he started for the side door.

“Why would Sells get rid of the victims’ prints but not his own?” Hicks asked.

“He wouldn’t. Someone else brought the cars there, wiped them down, and left them.”

“Sells and his nephew find them in the field, think Christmas has come early, and put their hands all over them. You know what that means?” Hicks said as they got into a sedan parked behind the garage.

“If Sells didn’t kill Lisa Warwick or grab Karly Vickers, but he killed whoever we have in this bag, then we’ve got more than one murderer,” Mendez said.

“It’s a banner day for the chamber of commerce.”

They drove to the back door of Peter Crane’s office and blocked in his Jaguar.

“You just caught me,” Crane said, leading them down the hall to an empty examination room. “I told Steve I would close for the afternoon and join the search party.”

“Steve Morgan?” Mendez asked.

“Yeah. I’m sure you know Steve’s spearheading the search effort and helping Jane Thomas deal with the media.”

“You’re good friends?”

“Yeah. We golf when we can. Our kids are friends. Steve got me involved with the center,” Crane said, leaning back against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Do you happen to know if he has a girlfriend?” Mendez asked.

Crane’s expression seemed carefully arranged. “Steve’s married. Happily.”

“Yeah, we know that. But that doesn’t change the question. We have reason to suspect he and Lisa Warwick might have been seeing each other.”

“Steve and Lisa?” The dentist looked at the floor as if he might be trying to picture the couple there. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

He was a poor liar.

“We’re not looking to bust his balls over it,” Mendez said. “We need a clear picture of what was going on in her life before she was killed. That’s all.”

Crane shrugged. “Sorry. I can’t help you with that. So, what can I help you with, detectives?”

“Some remains were discovered this morning during a search,” Mendez said. “A skull, to be exact. We were hoping you could compare the teeth against the X-rays you took of Miss Vickers’s mouth last week.”

Crane eyed the brown paper bag Hicks set on the counter. “Let me get the X-rays.”

Mendez took the skull out of the bag and set it on the counter. The bone was dingy white, clean of all flesh. It seemed unlikely the person it belonged to had been alive a week past, that this shell had been filled with a brain, covered by a face, crowned with hair. It had been attached to a living breathing human, a person with thoughts and opinions and goals for a life that was then abruptly ended.

Crane returned with the X-rays and clipped them to the light box on the wall, then he took a deep breath, sighed, and carefully picked up the skull, turning it upside down to look at the teeth.

“No,” he said almost immediately. “Miss Vickers had several amalgam fillings in the upper molars. See here?” he said, pointing to the X-rays of individual teeth.

“These teeth,” he said, looking at the thing he held in his hands like a halved cantaloupe, “were in need of attention. There’s significant decay in a couple of them. This filling in the premolar needed replacing. This bicuspid is chipped.”

“How much can you tell about the person by looking at the teeth?” Mendez asked. “Can you tell their age?”

“Like a horse?” Crane asked. “Not exactly. But this is a full set of teeth, so the person had to be at least a teenager. The teeth aren’t worn down, so not an older person. They haven’t been cared for, which would tend to make me think of someone in a poor financial situation. The teeth are on the small side, the jaw is relatively narrow, the skull is smallish with no pronounced brow ridge, so I’d guess it was a woman.”

“How about a name and address?” Hicks asked.

Crane gently set the skull down. “That’s your department, gentlemen. Can I ask where this came from?”

“Sells Salvage Yard, outside of town.”

“That’s the man you have in custody, right? That’s where you found the women’s cars? I saw it on the news this morning. You think he’s the killer.”

“He’s being questioned,” Mendez said.

Crane shook his head, staring at the skull. “This woman wasn’t Karly Vickers. So who was she? Is there another woman missing?”

“Not that we’re aware of,” Hicks said. “The remains will be sent to the Bureau of Forensic Sciences for possible identification.”

“So there really is a serial killer,” Crane said. “Thank God you have him in custody.”

“Yeah,” Mendez said. “Thank God.”

“Thanks for your help, Dr. Crane,” Hicks offered.

“Anytime.”

“So, you’re off to join the search?” Mendez asked.

“Yes.” Crane looked at the skull again. “You see that… I hope we’re not too late.”

“This is a nightmare,” Dixon said. “They’re absolutely sure about the prints?”

“They’re a match for Sells and his nephew,” Hicks said, reaching for tuna salad on rye. They had called out for lunch and sat at the conference table, eating and catching up on the latest details.