Deeper Than the Dead

“Did you know Miss Warwick?”

“Yes. I knew Lisa fairly well. I’m sure you’re aware she was volunteering as a court advocate. We worked together on several cases.”

“With Steve Morgan?”

“Yes. Steve is our hero,” she said with a smile.

“Do you know if Miss Warwick was seeing anyone?” he asked. “We have reason to believe that she was, but we haven’t found anyone to confirm that, let alone tell us who she might have been involved with.”

She hesitated just a fraction of a second before saying, “I have no idea. Lisa was a very private person.”

“I find that strange,” Vince confessed. “Why be so secretive? Unless the guy wasn’t supposed to be seeing her.”

The woman looked over at the media tent and said, “It looks like they might be finished.”

“Thanks.”

Vince walked to the tent with his head down as the interviewer and photographer went past. Jane Thomas went in another direction. Steve Morgan stood looking at some papers on a clipboard.

“You’re getting a lot of media attention,” Vince said, strolling under the canopy of the open-sided tent.

Morgan glanced up. “The more, the better, right? Somebody had to see something. If just one person comes forward with a lead . . .”

“Sometimes that’s all it takes,” Vince said. “One person who saw something that struck them as odd. Like a man coming and going to and from a woman’s house at late hours of the night.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me personally, Detective?”

“A neighbor of Lisa Warwick thinks she saw you.”

“In the dark. In the middle of the night.”

“If you had a relationship with her, better for you to come clean now and tell us. We’ll find out eventually, and it won’t look good that you tried to hide it.”

Morgan went back to studying the papers on the clipboard.

Vince took a seat in one of several tall directors’ chairs that had been positioned for interviews.

“We’ve got semen on her sheets,” he said. “That gives us a blood type.”

“I didn’t kill Lisa,” Morgan said.

“I’m not saying you did. Just because you were sleeping with her doesn’t make you a murderer.”

“I wasn’t sleeping with her.”

“Your wife thinks you were.”

Morgan looked at him with a gaze that could have cut steel. “You talked to my wife?”

“I told you we would.”

“And she told you she thinks I was sleeping with Lisa.”

“Does that surprise you?”

“You’re lying. Sara wouldn’t say that.”

Vince let him wonder for a minute. Finally he sighed.

“You know, Steve, man to man, I don’t care if you were sleeping with her. You want to screw up your family situation—that’s none of my business. I care that you’re wasting our time by denying it. I care that you’re going to make us waste man hours looking into every goddamn day of your life for the past six months, digging through your financials, comparing hotel receipts with calendar dates with trips to Sacramento and trips you said you made that you never did because you were really in town fucking your mistress. I care about that.”

The muscles in Morgan’s square jaw flexed. “Are you finished?”

“No,” Vince said, leaning forward. “I care that if you were involved with this girl, and now she’s dead, that you’re that big an asshole you would waste time we could be spending finding her killer just because you don’t want to step up and be a man. You would do that to try to cover your own ass. Didn’t you care about her at all?”

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.

40

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,