“He rarely gets home before seven. I leave for my class at six.”
Which meant she couldn’t account for his whereabouts during the time period Karly Vickers went missing.
He waited for Sara Morgan to ask why he wanted to know, but she had had enough.
“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Morgan,” he said. “I’ll let you go. Have a nice day.”
She laughed without humor, already on her way to her car.
“I spoke with Sara Morgan,” Mendez said, walking into the war room, where Vince had carved out a spot for himself at a small table in one corner.
He glanced up from making notes, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. “And?”
“It’s a good bet Steve Morgan was having an affair with Lisa Warwick. Mrs. Morgan was very uncomfortable with the topic,” Mendez said, pulling up a chair.
“She didn’t come right out and say he was cheating on her?”
“No. She couldn’t deny it fast enough. She’s trying to hold together what she has,” Mendez said. “It’s a sore point with her that he dedicates so much time to the Thomas Center.”
“With other women,” Vince said. “Vulnerable women, women in need of heroes. That’s a rich prowling ground for the wrong kind of guy.”
“Everybody says he’s a Boy Scout.”
Vince arched a brow. “What kind of merit badge do they give out for adultery these days?”
“A scarlet letter?”
“Good one,” Vince said. He pulled his glasses off and set them aside. “So, let’s say he’s having an affair with her. That’s a long way from doing what was done to her.”
“Maybe she was threatening to tell the missus, giving him an ultimatum he couldn’t live with.”
“Motive for murder, yes. But a guy murders his mistress in the heat of the moment. He gets rid of the body. He doesn’t carve it up like a totem pole and plant it in a public park for school kids to stumble on.”
“Maybe he wants to make it look like some maniac did it.”
“How much information about the Paulson murder was made public knowledge?” Vince asked. “The strangulation? The cutting? The mutilation? The glued eyes?”
“Almost none of it,” Mendez admitted. “And the wife couldn’t account for his whereabouts when Karly Vickers went missing, either. Guess we’d better find out if he ever met Julie Paulson.”
“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,
“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
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 . . .”
