Free Deeper Than The Dead by Tami Hoag Page B

long when we found her,” Dixon said. “Decomposition is minimal, but not absent.”
    Jane Thomas stared at the body bag. “Just show me.”
    “I want you to be prepared—”
    “Damn it, Cal, just show me!” she snapped. “This is hard enough!”
    Dixon held his hands up in surrender. Mendez unzipped the bag and gently peeled it open.
    Jane Thomas put a hand over her mouth. What color she had drained from her face.
    “Is that her?” Dixon asked.
    She didn’t answer right away. She stared at the woman on the gurney for a long, silent moment.
    “Jane? Is that her? Is this Karly Vickers?”
    “No,” she said at last, her voice little more than a breath. “No. It’s Lisa.”
    “Lisa?”
    “Lisa Warwick,” she said, and she began to tremble. “She used to work for me.”
    “This woman used to work for you?” Mendez said.
    “Yes.”
    “And one of your clients is missing.”
    She didn’t answer. She’d gone into shock. Then she began to cry and sway, and Cal Dixon stepped close and put his hands on her shoulders to steady her.
    Mendez looked his boss in the eye. “Three dead, one missing. Do you still think we’re not dealing with a serial killer?”
    To his credit all Dixon said was, “Call Quantico.”
    Good thing, Mendez thought, because he already had.

14

    Vince Leone closed his car door. The sound seemed amplified. He looked up at the sky. The blue was so intense it hurt his eyes. He put his Ray-Bans on and breathed deeply of the crisp fall air. His head filled with the scents of Virginia: damp earth, forest, cut grass.
    The academy grounds were alive with people. Young agents going here, running there. Veterans, like himself, hustling between buildings, between meetings.
    The sounds of footfalls on concrete, snatches of conversation, a lawn mower, gunfire in the distance: All assaulted his ears. His sight, hearing, sense of smell—all seemed magnified, hypersensitive. It might have been an inner need to absorb as much of life as possible, or it might have had something to do with the bullet in his head.
    He went into the building, to the elevators, pushed the Down button. Down. Way down. People got on the car with him. A couple of them looked at him sideways, then looked away. He vaguely recognized faces but couldn’t recall names. He didn’t know them well—or they him, he suspected, though his short-term memory still had some holes in it.
    They knew
of
him, he suspected. He had signed on with the Bureau in 1971 after a stellar career in homicide in the Chicago PD. He had come to Quantico and the Behavioral Sciences Unit the fall of 1975, just as the unit was beginning to blaze some exciting trails. Being a part of that time had made him and his colleagues legends. He was forty-eight and a legend. Not bad.
    Or maybe these people knew
about
him, as in “The guy that got shot in the head and lived.” The academy was a small, incestuous community, and like in all small, incestuous communities, gossip ran thick and fast.
    The elevator stopped and most of the passengers got off, headed for the cafeteria or PX. The smell of coffee, eggs, and bacon grease hit him like a brick, then the doors closed and the car began to drop another twenty feet to what the agents lovingly referred to as the National Cellar for the Analysis of Violent Crime.
    The warren of offices and conference rooms had been a bomb shelter during the height of the Cold War, a hideout for J. Edgar and his cronies in the event of nuclear attack. The Bureau had seen fit to send the Behavioral Sciences/Investigative Support Unit down to the win dowless, sometimes musty-smelling, subbasement a year before.
    Closed off in their own giant tomb with their cases—the worst of the worst murders and sexual assaults the country had to offer—the agents joked (in the gallows humor that kept them for what passed as sane) that they lived and worked ten times deeper than the dead.
    Leone stepped off the elevator.
    “Vince!”
    He glanced up at