He scooped up the file, the jacket dripping coffee. “Shit. Excuse me. I’ve got to get some towels.”
He went back out the door and across the hall, dropping the file jacket into the trash. He joined Dixon, Hicks, and Mendez at the monitor, and they all watched as Gordon Sells went to the door and glanced out to see no one in the hall. He went back to the wall to stare at the photographs. Not thirty seconds had gone by before he began to fondle himself through his baggy pants. Another thirty seconds and he was fully aroused.
“Barnum and Bailey could pitch a tent on that pole,” Vince said. “He’s not your guy.”
But before Dixon could say anything, Detective Trammell hustled into the room.
“We’ve got something at Sells’s place,” he said. “Bones. They look human.”
39
The search for Karly Vickers ceased to be the lead news story of the day. Word that skeletal remains had been found in the hog yard behind Gordon Sells’s salvage business shot through the media like a bolt of lightning. Mendez and Hicks had to fight through the crush of reporters and their support staff to get to the yellow-tape barrier.
The hogs were highly interested in the fuss and in the people in crime scene jumpsuits and knee-high rubber boots wading through their territory. They stood off to the side with individual members of the herd occasionally rushing toward the people, snorting bravado then rushing back to the safety of the group. Their squeals were ear- splitting.
“This smells almost as bad as the trailer,” Mendez said, wrinkling his nose.
“I’m glad I have a badge,” Hicks said, watching the crime scene techs systematically raking through the inches-deep muck of mud and feces and pig urine. “My granddad up in Sacramento used to raise hogs. When I was a kid, in the summers, I used to have to help him move them from one pen to another. You don’t shake that smell fast.”
Dixon motioned them over to a table set up along the back of a shed. The findings had been washed and laid out on a tarp: what appeared to be a human femur and several rib bones.
“What do we do now?” Mendez asked. “We have no way of knowing who these belonged to. Unless they can find a pelvis, we don’t even know if we’re looking at a male or a female.”
“The BFS team will take them,” Dixon said. “They’ll call in an anthropologist to have a look.”
Mendez picked up the femur and looked at it more closely. What appeared to be knife marks scarred both ends of the bone. “Whoever it was, Sells cut them up before he threw them out there.”
“And he did a neat job of it,” Hicks observed. “That was severed at the joint.”
“Let’s hope the victim was dead when he did it,” Dixon said. “He may not fit Leone’s profile, but we’ve definitely got ourselves a killer.”
“
“We’ve got the cars here. Now we’ve got remains here.”
“We don’t have Sells’s fingerprints on those cars yet, do we?” Mendez asked.
“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.
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.”
