Mendez stood in the middle of the living room and took in the space. Lisa Warwick hadn’t been as tidy as Karly Vickers. She had clutter, but her clutter was loosely organized all around the place: A pile of magazines on the ottoman, a stack of books on the end table, a bag of knitting on the floor next to the sofa. There was no sign of a struggle, no sign anyone else had been in the house.
“Somebody had to see something,” Hicks said. “We just have to find that somebody.”
On the other hand, Mendez recalled, Bundy had abducted two of his victims in broad daylight from a crowded lakeshore state park-one within feet of her friends-and no one had noticed anything out of the ordinary.
In the blink of an eye a woman could be gone, sucked into a terrible alternate universe where existence meant unspeakable torture and unbearable pain, a world beyond the darkest imagining, unseen by everyone but the killer and his victim.
They went up the stairs to check out the two bedrooms and the bath. The smaller of the bedrooms was undisturbed. In the bathroom, someone had left a towel on the floor next to the tub. Makeup and costume jewelry littered the vanity. She had been getting ready for something.
In the master bedroom the bed was unmade. Clothes had been tossed over a chair. A framed photo sat on one of the nightstands. Lisa Warwick posing with a small group of people, Jane Thomas among them. Three women and a good-looking man in his mid-thirties, all in business attire, each with a glass of champagne in hand.
A celebration, Mendez thought. A happy moment. But it didn’t strike him as the sort of photo a woman would keep on her night-stand. Except for one thing: the way Lisa Warwick was looking up at the man on her left.
“Ten bucks says this is the guy she was having the affair with,” he said. “Look how she’s looking at him.”
“And ten bucks says he’s married,” Hicks said. “Look at how he’s not looking at her.”
“Like his life depends on it.”
“Or half of everything he owns.”
They darkened the room and repeated the black light test they had done on Karly Vickers’s bed with no result. This time as Mendez passed the light over the sheets small dots lit up like tiny fluorescent stars. Not many of them, but enough to suggest a story of lovers in bed, a drop of semen here and there-spillage when taking off a condom perhaps, or maybe during oral sex.
“Looks like we’ve got us a suspect,” Mendez said. “Let’s bag that photograph and go find out who he is.”
24
There was a part of him that never wanted to wake up. Vince couldn’t decide if it was the damaged part of his brain that didn’t want him to wake up, or the rest of his brain that didn’t want to wake up and be subjected to the aftereffects of the bullet fragmented in his head.
The doctors, specialists, and neurosurgeons he had seen in the months since being shot had all been stunned by the fact he had survived at all. There were only a handful of cases like his in the world, each of them a little different from the others, dependent on the parts of the brain that had been impacted.
The doctors had no idea what would happen next. They had exhumed what shrapnel they could, but the largest piece of the.22 caliber slug had lodged in a place the surgeons wouldn’t go near. There was too great a chance of causing severe brain damage. Yet they couldn’t tell him what damage would be caused by leaving a bullet in his head.
They couldn’t be sued for that damage, they knew that.
So he was a living, breathing science project, a case study, a freak in the medical circus, an article in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The effects of what had happened to him varied. Some days his sense of smell or hearing seemed heightened. Some days he couldn’t get the taste of metal out of his mouth. Nearly every day he had a headache that could have knocked a mule off its feet.
In the initial weeks after the shooting he had experienced the frustration of aphasia, a disorder that made it difficult for him to grab the words he wanted from his brain and put them into coherent sentences.
Some days he found himself to be lacking impulse control, but whether that was damage to the frontal lobe or the result of fully realizing his own mortality, he couldn’t say. He was a walking, talking second chance. He had no interest in passing up experiences or putting opportunities off to a tomorrow that might never come.
The trauma had left his body weak and lacking the endurance to get through simple tasks. Now, months later, he could get through a day, but stamina was still an issue.
He had been so exhausted by the time Mendez dropped him off at the hotel he’d barely had the energy to try to shower off the smell of the morgue. He had no memory of falling naked across the bed. He had no memory of dreams. He had managed a full seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. That was the first time that had happened in months.
With the phantom smell of morgue still in his nose, he took another shower and made a pot of bad coffee in the little machine on the bathroom counter. Breathing deep the scents of coffee and soap in the steamy bathroom, he wiped off a section of mirror and took his daily inventory.
He had looked worse. He had looked better. If he had been a woman, he at least could have improved himself with makeup.
“You’d be a hell of an ugly woman, Vince,” he said, finding a chuckle in that.
He made a mental note to look into visiting a tanning parlor to get some of the gray out of his skin. He was in California, after all. Cali fornians loved their tans. He had no doubt that he would feel like an idiot doing it, but if it kept people from thinking he had one foot in the grave, it was probably worth it.
Room service brought a basket of muffins and toast. He ate what he could just to put a layer of something in his stomach before the first round of pills. The brown prescription bottles were arrayed on the dresser. Painkillers, antiseizure medication, antinausea medication, antipsychotic meds to ward off the paranoia sometimes brought on by pressure against some crucial part of his brain of which he couldn’t remember the name.
He had yet to take that one. So far he had managed to fend off the anxiety himself. He looked at the prescription bottle and wondered if he really needed it, would he be sane enough to take it.
As he picked at the food, he listened to his tape of the conversation in the car from the night before. Mendez had given him an overview of what had happened so far. Three probable victims and one woman missing. He made notes as he listened and mulled over the notes when the tape clicked off. He studied the Polaroids he had taken at the autopsy, particularly intrigued by the cutting wounds that seemed so deliberate and symmetrically placed on the limbs-where there was a vertical cut on one arm there was a corresponding cut in exactly the same place on the other arm. The same with the legs.
He pulled a paper from his briefcase that depicted a simple line drawing of the female human form, front and back, and drew in the marks on Lisa Warwick’s body. He would fax the form to Quantico later to find out if anyone in ISU had come across this pattern before.
He would go in to the sheriff’s office this morning and go over the particulars of all three cases, with a particular eye out for any similar marks on the previous victims, and begin work on the profile in earnest.
Not that he didn’t already have some strong ideas. He had worked enough cases, interviewed enough killers to have the checklist ingrained in his brain. There were maybe nine people on the planet who knew as much about the minds of murderers as he did. They were a small club. Too small for the ever-growing ranks of serial predators.
He picked up the phone and called the sheriff’s office.
“Detective Mendez, please.”