With his victim, he was in control, he could let loose the self that existed in the innermost part of him.

It excited him that his victim didn’t know and would never have suspected who he really was. She had believed him to be trustworthy and deserving of respect. Respect had taken on a whole new meaning in the face of his absolute control of her.

Absolute control. Absolute power.

Absolutely thrilling.

Thursday, October 10, 1985

6:15 A.M.

Mendez and Hicks took the first pass through Karly Vickers’s, wanting to see it pristine, exactly as she had left it. It was a small place, neat as a pin. They went carefully through drawers and closets, looking for anything that might have pointed to Vickers having a current boyfriend or a current connection to her past boyfriend, the Simi Valley thug.

She had crossed Greg Usher’s entry out of her address book. If she was still in contact with him, the contact probably wasn’t being initiated by her. Mendez held the book open for Jane Thomas to see.

“I told you she was through with him,” she said.

“People don’t always turn out to be as strong as we would like for them to be, ma’am,” he said. “That’s part of my job.”

“Disillusionment?”

“Sometimes. Doubt, always.”

He would have preferred not to have her there. He knew she was anxious, and she was undoubtedly feeling violated on behalf of her client as she watched them go through Karly Vickers’s things.

That was how he had felt when he was a teenager, and the cops had come to search his family home: violated. They had been looking for evidence against his older brother, a gang member accused of dealing drugs. They had gone through the house like a human tornado, with no regard for personal property or personal feelings. He remembered his mother crying as they riffled through her dresser, touching her clothing, her undergarments, her mementos.

He had never forgotten that when he searched through the homes of victims and perps alike. A little respect went a long way.

Hicks turned the bedding down and pulled the shades. Mendez turned off the lamp then went over the sheets with a black light, looking for bodily fluids-specifically semen-to fluoresce. There was nothing.

“She isn’t seeing anyone,” Jane Thomas said. “She’s been completely focused on getting her life on track.”

“Is she always this neat?” Hicks asked.

“She always was at the center. She’s very respectful of the chances she’s been given.”

“Does she have any close friends that you know of?” Mendez asked. “Any of the other women at the center? Someone she might confide in if she was interested in someone or if someone was bothering her?”

“Maybe Brandy Henson. I saw them together a lot.”

This was why he allowed Jane Thomas to hang close. She knew Karly Vickers, knew about her life, her friends. There was a good chance if something wasn’t right here, it would jump out at her.

Unfortunately, as they made their way through the tiny house, nothing jumped out. Mendez opened the front door and motioned in the crime scene team.

“They’re going to dust for fingerprints,” he said as he held the back door open for Thomas. “It’ll be a mess. But if there was anyone else in here, we’ll know about it. If any of the prints match up with a known offender, we’ll have a direction to go in.”

Of course, months could pass before they got a match, but he didn’t mention that. Comparing latent fingerprints was a manual needle-in-a-haystack process that relied completely on the trained eye of a fingerprint specialist. Someday the system would be automated and offender prints would go into a national database easily accessed. But the prints taken today would be of little use until they had a suspect to compare them with, a scenario that was less than optimal for Karly Vickers if she had in fact been abducted.

“Anything you need to do.”

“We’ll want to get her phone records. Is the account in her name?”

“No. The account will be in the name of the center with a numeric suffix. That’s how it’s set up with all the properties we own. The numbers are all unlisted.” She forced an ironic smile, looking off in the distance as if she might see Karly Vickers down the street. “We take all the precautions we can to keep the women as safe as possible. The bills come to the center and are on file. But Karly just moved into this house. We haven’t had a bill yet.”

“We’ll get the local usage details from the phone company.”

“What about search and rescue?” she asked. “Why aren’t there search parties out looking for her?”

“You’d have to ask Sheriff Dixon that question, ma’am,” Mendez said.

He was glad to dodge the question himself even though he knew the answer. Dixon hadn’t moved on a search because they had no idea where to begin searching. They had no idea where Karly Vickers had gone missing, what direction she might have gone in or been taken. With her car still missing, Jane Thomas or no Jane Thomas, they still had to consider that Karly Vickers might have left of her own free will. She might have received a threat from the ex-boyfriend, panicked, and taken off to parts unknown.

“If she was the twelve-year-old daughter of some professor, he would have called out the National Guard by now,” she said angrily.

“I know the helicopter is going up this morning,” Mendez said. “They’ll be looking for her car, and for Lisa Warwick’s car.”

They would be looking for a body, as well, but he didn’t mention that.

“Miss Vickers’s picture will be in every paper and on every news channel in California by tonight. If someone has seen her, then we have a starting point for a ground search.”

The sun was a fat orange ball ten feet off the horizon, up but not yet strong enough to burn off the damp chill clinging to the fall air. Mendez was glad for the sport coat he had on. Jane Thomas was wrapped in a hand-knit, moss green sweater that reflected the color of her eyes-except for the red rims from hours of crying.

He felt bad for her. To find out someone you knew had been murdered was a terrible thing. To find out someone else you knew was missing and could very well be the next murder victim… he couldn’t imagine.

The backyard of the cottage was fenced in to contain the pit bull that sidled up to Jane Thomas, growling low in its throat. Not a warning growl so much as a sound of discontentment. The dog sat and leaned against the woman’s legs, looking mournfully up at her.

“This is Petal?” Mendez asked.

“Yes. I took her home with me last night. She’s lost without Karly.”

He lifted his Polaroid and snapped a shot of the dog. He would take it to Anne Navarre later to see if her students could ID this as the dog they had seen in the woods.

Maybe the dog had jumped the fence and had been in search of its owner when it had come across the body of Lisa Warwick. If this was television, they would give Petal a piece of Karly Vickers’s clothing to sniff, and the dog would bark and take off, leading them to her owner who was trapped in the lair of a madman.

Unfortunately, they weren’t living in a TV show, and Mendez had never known a pit bull to be much in the way of a hunting dog.

“We’ll have deputies interview all the neighbors,” he said. “To see if maybe someone saw her leave the house, or saw her with anyone, or saw someone going into the house.

“The fact that her car isn’t here makes me think she probably met her abductor elsewhere,” he said. “We’ll need a list of everyone you know she saw on Thursday.”

“I can tell you,” she said. “She was at the center. She saw the staff. She had her hair and nails done at Spice Salon. She had her teeth cleaned.”

“What dentist?” Mendez asked, pulling out his notebook and pen.