Deeper Than the Dead

ALSO BY TAMI HOAG

The Alibi Man

Prior Bad Acts

Kill the Messenger

Dark Horse

Dust to Dust

Ashes to Ashes

A Thin Dark Line

Guilty as Sin

Night Sins

Dark Paradise

Cry Wolf

Still Waters

Lucky’s Lady

Sarah’s Sin

Magic

Copyright © 2010 by Indelible Ink, Inc.

All rights reserved

For Gryphon.

My first effort without you, old friend.

I hope it measures up.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first heartfelt thanks go to Jane Thomas, whose generosity to the cause of the United States Equestrian Team Foundation won her a place in this book. I hope you enjoy your character as much as I enjoyed creating her.

And to a true character and dear friend: Happy birthday, Franny lein! Ich liebe dich.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Do you remember 1985?

In 1985, I was working at the Bath Boutique in Rochester, Minnesota, selling designer toilet seats and ceramic rabbit toothbrush holders. I was two years away from selling my first book (The Trouble with J. J.), and three years away from its publication.

In 1985, Ronald Reagan was in the first year of his second term as president of the United States. Real women wore shoulder pads, permed their hair, and lusted after Tom Selleck and Don Johnson. Cell phones were the size of bricks and had to be carried around in a case with a handle. The Go-Go’s disbanded, Madonna was the hot new thing, and Bruce Springsteen was Born in the U.S.A.

As I began to develop the idea for Deeper Than the Dead, I knew the book would be set in the past. I thought this would be fun. Maybe I would dredge up some nostalgia for leg warmers and heavy metal hair bands (as in Van Halen and Motley Crue). It wasn’t until I got into the book that I realized something very inconvenient about 1985: In terms of forensic science and technology, it was the freaking Stone Age.

Imagine a sheriff’s department without computers on every detective’s desk. I can actually remember seeing law enforcement agency wish lists in the late eighties longing for such exotic items as fax machines and photocopiers.

Imagine no DNA technology. The first case adjudicated in the United States in which DNA evidence was presented was in 1987, and the science was considered controversial still for years after that. That’s hard to grasp today, in the days of the CSI effect, when juries expect DNA evidence and are often reluctant to convict without it.

In 1985, fingerprint examples were still matched by the human eye.

Now, I am by no means gifted in the technological sense. If it had been left up to me to harness electricity, we would all still be reading by oil lamps. I have no clue how my computer works. I still haven’t figured out how all those tiny little people get inside my television.

And yet, compared with the 1985 Tami, I am a technology junkie. I am never without my iPhone or iPod. “Have laptop, will travel” is my motto. My DVR records every rerun of House. I even occasionally tweet on Twitter.

So, used to all this modern convenience, I found it a major inconvenience when I couldn’t have my detectives jump on the information superhighway to gather information. And no cell phones for instant contact? How did we live?

In fact, criminal profiling—so commonly used today and so familiar to law enforcement and civilians alike— was still something of a fledgling science in the mid-eighties. That was what we think of now as the golden age of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. Those were the days of the Nine: nine legends in the making (Conrad Hassel, Larry Monroe, Roger Depue, Howard Teten, Pat Mullany, Roy Hazelwood, Dick Ault, Robert Ressler, and John Douglas) who came together in three or four different groups over that time span to bring profiling and the BSU to