This was why he allowed Jane Thomas to hang close. She knew Karly Vickers, knew about her life, her friends. There was a good chance if something wasn’t right here, it would jump out at her.
Unfortunately, as they made their way through the tiny house, nothing jumped out. Mendez opened the front door and motioned in the crime scene team.
“They’re going to dust for fingerprints,” he said as he held the back door open for Thomas. “It’ll be a mess. But if there was anyone else in here, we’ll know about it. If any of the prints match up with a known offender, we’ll have a direction to go in.”
Of course, months could pass before they got a match, but he didn’t mention that. Comparing latent fingerprints was a manual needle-in-a-haystack process that relied completely on the trained eye of a fingerprint specialist. Someday the system would be automated and offender prints would go into a national database easily accessed. But the prints taken today would be of little use until they had a suspect to compare them with, a scenario that was less than optimal for Karly Vickers if she had in fact been abducted.
“Anything you need to do.”
“We’ll want to get her phone records. Is the account in her name?”
“No. The account will be in the name of the center with a numeric suffix. That’s how it’s set up with all the properties we own. The numbers are all unlisted.” She forced an ironic smile, looking off in the distance as if she might see Karly Vickers down the street. “We take all the precautions we can to keep the women as safe as possible. The bills come to the center and are on file. But Karly just moved into this house. We haven’t had a bill yet.”
“We’ll get the local usage details from the phone company.”
“What about search and rescue?” she asked. “Why aren’t there search parties out looking for her?”
“You’d have to ask Sheriff Dixon that question, ma’am,” Mendez said.
He was glad to dodge the question himself even though he knew the answer. Dixon hadn’t moved on a search because they had no idea where to begin searching. They had no idea where Karly Vickers had gone missing, what direction she might have gone in or been taken. With her car still missing, Jane Thomas or no Jane Thomas, they still had to consider that Karly Vickers might have left of her own free will. She might have received a threat from the ex-boyfriend, panicked, and taken off to parts unknown.
“If she was the twelve-year-old daughter of some professor, he would have called out the National Guard by now,” she said angrily.
“I know the helicopter is going up this morning,” Mendez said. “They’ll be looking for her car, and for Lisa Warwick’s car.”
They would be looking for a body, as well, but he didn’t mention that.
“Miss Vickers’s picture will be in every paper and on every news channel in California by tonight. If someone has seen her, then we have a starting point for a ground search.”
The sun was a fat orange ball ten feet off the horizon, up but not yet strong enough to burn off the damp chill clinging to the fall air. Mendez was glad for the sport coat he had on. Jane Thomas was wrapped in a hand-knit, moss green sweater that reflected the color of her eyes—except for the red rims from hours of crying.
He felt bad for her. To find out someone you knew had been murdered was a terrible thing. To find out someone else you knew was missing and could very well be the next murder victim . . . he couldn’t imagine.
The backyard of the cottage was fenced in to contain the pit bull that sidled up to Jane Thomas, growling low in its throat. Not a warning growl so much as a sound of discontentment. The dog sat and leaned against the woman’s legs, looking mournfully up at her.
“This is Petal?” Mendez asked.
“Yes. I took her home with me last night. She’s lost without Karly.”
He lifted his Polaroid and snapped a shot of the dog. He would take it to Anne Navarre later to see if her students could ID this as the dog they had seen in the woods.
Maybe the dog had jumped the fence and had been in search of its owner when it had come across the body of Lisa Warwick. If this was television, they would give Petal a piece of Karly Vickers’s clothing to sniff, and the dog would bark and take off, leading them to her owner who was trapped in the lair of a madman.
Unfortunately, they weren’t living in a TV show, and Mendez had never known a pit bull to be much in the way of a hunting dog.
“We’ll have deputies interview all the neighbors,” he said. “To see if maybe someone saw her leave the house, or saw her with anyone, or saw someone going into the house.
“The fact that her car isn’t here makes me think she probably met her abductor elsewhere,” he said. “We’ll need a list of everyone you know she saw on Thursday.”
“I can tell you,” she said. “She was at the center. She saw the staff. She had her hair and nails done at Spice Salon. She had her teeth cleaned.”
“What dentist?” Mendez asked, pulling out his notebook and pen.
“Either Dr. Pratt or Dr. Crane. They both offer their services to the center.”
Petal the pit bull got to her feet and began to growl in earnest. The back door of the cottage opened and Frank Farman stepped out.
“I’ve got two units here to start knocking on doors,” he said. He looked at Jane Thomas. “You’d better have a leash on that dog, ma’am. That’s a dangerous animal.”
Jane Thomas took hold of the dog’s pink collar. “Only to people she doesn’t like.”
Farman frowned at her.
“Thanks, Frank,” Mendez said. “Can you send a unit over to the Warwick woman’s residence? We’ll canvass that neighborhood as well. Hicks and I will be heading over there next.”
“They’re already there.”
“Great. Thanks.”
Farman shot another disapproving glance at the still-growling dog and went back into the cottage.
Petal settled on Jane’s feet, grumbling. Thomas patted her big square head. “Good girl, Petal.”
Mendez raised an eyebrow. “You know Frank?”
“I know his wife, Sharon. She’s a secretary for Quinn, Morgan—the same firm Karly was going to work for. In my humble opinion, her husband is a condescending, misogynistic ass.”
He dismissed the remark. Frank being a chauvinist was not news. Farman was old-school and had been vocal in his objection to the idea of hiring female deputies. He had hardly been alone in his opinion. Law enforcement was traditionally the bastion of men. A lot of them wanted to keep it that way.
He left Jane Thomas with Petal the pit bull and drove with Bill Hicks a mile or so across town to the home of Lisa Warwick for their second search of the day.
The address they had been given by the personnel office at Mercy General was a beige stucco side-by-side duplex a few blocks from the hospital in one direction, a few blocks from the college in the other direction. The landlord met them with the key.
“I can’t believe Lisa is the woman those kids found in the park,” the man said as he opened the front door.
Donald Kent, professor of economics, was a neat, distinguished gentleman with a Colonel Sanders goatee and a blue-striped yellow bow tie at the throat of his buttondown shirt.
“How well did you know Miss Warwick?” Hicks asked.
“Enough to say hello, to chat about nothing.” He had the kind of well-modulated voice that belonged on public radio. “A very nice young woman. Never a problem. Always pays—paid—her rent early, if you can imagine that. She told me she had family in Sacramento.”
“They’ve been contacted,” Mendez said. “They’re driving down today. In case they contact you, they won’t be able to come in here until we’re through with the investigation. The place will be sealed.”
Kent seemed troubled at the idea. “I’m sorry for them. I think if I lost someone so suddenly, I would take some comfort being in their surroundings at least.”
“I think it’s going to be difficult for them to take comfort in much of anything, considering,” Mendez said.
“How did she die?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Were you aware of Miss Warwick dating anyone, having company over?” Hicks asked.
The professor shook his head. “I didn’t see her that frequently. I live in another building on the next block.
