Deeper Than the Dead

nine.

“Hi, Steve,” she said, opening the door. “Come on in. I have to let the dogs out. Sorry.”

“No problem,” he said, following her back through the house. “I brought doughnuts. I figured we could both stand a big jolt of fat and sugar to start the day.”

“I’ll supply the coffee,” Jane said as they walked through the kitchen.

Petal was still sitting by the back door and had scratched the paint to shreds overnight. Both dogs flew out into the yard like a mismatched pair of rocks from slingshots, disappearing into the wilds of the garden.

Jane walked out onto the stone patio, crossing her arms over her I SLEEP WITH DOGS sweatshirt. The sun was barely up, and the air was cold. She glanced at Steve, taking in the dark circles under his eyes, the lines creased around his mouth.

“You look like you got about as much sleep as I did last night,” she said.

Somewhere at the back of the garden the dogs were going crazy, barking, howling, yelping.

“What in the world?” Jane asked, heading back toward the commotion. She grabbed a hoe away from the potting bench as she went. She glanced back over her shoulder. “If this is a snake, I’m calling on you.”

“I’ll pass, thanks.”

She took a right at the iceberg roses and stepped into a waking nightmare.

There, at the very back of the garden, planted among the calla lilies was Karly Vickers.

54

Jane didn’t hear her own scream. The shock had rendered her deaf and weirdly numb. She knew she was running, but couldn’t feel her legs. She flung herself down on overturned soil of the shallow grave and began digging frantically with her hands, but couldn’t feel the earth between her fingers. She stared at Karly Vickers’s face, pale blue-white against the dark earth, but couldn’t feel the horror of that reality.

“Oh my God!” Steve Morgan exclaimed behind her.

“Call for help! Call for help!” Jane shouted, digging and digging like a frantic animal. She uncovered the girl’s throat, part of one shoulder. She glanced back over her shoulder to see Steve standing, flat-footed.

“Call 9-1-1!” she screamed at him.

“She’s dead, Jane.”

“No!”

“She’s dead.”

“No!”

Like in a nightmare, he didn’t move, didn’t seem to grasp the urgency of the situation.

Jane pushed to her feet and ran past him back to the house.

It wouldn’t penetrate her brain that Karly Vickers was dead. Hands trembling wildly, she grabbed the phone and dialed 911.

“I need an ambulance! I need an ambulance at five eighty-nine Arroyo Verde. Hurry!”

“What’s the problem, ma’am?” the operator asked with a sense of calm that struck Jane as being insane.

“I need an ambulance! Are you deaf? Send the damn ambulance!”

She didn’t wait for an answer, but ended the call and dialed Cal Dixon’s pager number, leaving her number and 911 for the message.

Operating purely on instinct, she ran back outside and grabbed a spade as she passed the potting bench.

“Jane, we shouldn’t disturb the scene,” Steve said, trying to block her from the grave.

Without hesitation she swung the spade and hit him in the shins with the business end of it. He jumped back, shouting something she didn’t hear.

She turned the loose earth as quickly as she could, exposing an arm, a leg. In the distance she could hear a siren wail.

Oh my God, oh my God, she chanted inside her head over and over. Had this been what the dogs had gone crazy for in the night? She had believed it was just the coyotes. Had some madman been back here doing this? Why hadn’t she gone to look? Why hadn’t she called Cal? What if it was too late because she had done none of those things?

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

The EMTs came charging around the rose hedge, skidding to a stop at the sight.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Holy shit!”

Jane threw the shovel down and shouted at them, “Help her! Help her, damn you!”

The two men moved hesitantly closer. She grabbed hold of one of them by a fistful of uniform. “Help her!”

“There’s no helping her, ma’am,” he said. “She’s gone.”

The other one got down on the ground and put two fingers on the side of Karly Vickers’s bruised throat.

“Oh my God,” he said. “I think she might have a pulse.”

“No way.”

“Way. Get down here!”

Jane stepped back, shaking uncontrollably as she watched the two men go to work.

“What the hell?!”

She turned to see Cal Dixon, his face a mask of shock and horror as he ran to her. Somehow she managed not to faint until he was close enough to catch her.

55

Mendez abandoned his car at the curb in a red zone and ran into the ER at Mercy General Hospital. An ambulance had delivered Karly Vickers ahead of him. There was a chance she might be alive.

He held his badge up to the staff, not listening to them and not speaking.

It was plain where the action was. Half a dozen people in surgical scrubs swarmed around the bloody, filthy, naked woman on the table in the first exam room. The doctor in charge was shouting orders like a field general. Hang this, push that, get labs stat. The girl had been hooked up to an array of beeping, buzzing machines. She had tubes and wires coming and going. One person stood squeezing the big blue ball of a ventilator bag, sending air into her lungs via the hole that had been cut in her throat. The floor of the room was awash with debris—bloody gauze, discarded packaging, tubing, syringes.

“She’s in V-fib!”

“Paddles! Charge! Clear!”

BAM! Her body jumped on the table.

“Charge! Clear!”

BAM!

The process was repeated again and again with the staff swearing and begging in between jolts.

“Come on, damn it!”

“Hang on, Karly!”

BAM!

“We’ve got a sinus rhythm!”

“All right, Karly, don’t die on us now!” the doctor shouted. “I’ve got money riding on you. Stats!”

Pulse. Blood pressure. Respiration. Numbers all too low.

“We need another liter of ringers, wide-open!”

Mendez turned to one of the EMTs standing at the nurses’ station, scribbling on paperwork.