Hangman (35 page)

A
S DECKER WAITED
to board his flight to Las Vegas, Marge gave him a recap. Talking like a speed demon, she was breathless. Decker could hear sharp intakes of air as she spoke.

“This is the deal,” she said. “Scott and I have been scouring apartment buildings, condo complexes, and housing developments all day. No results, but that’s what we expected. We stopped around six, ate dinner, and decided to hit a couple of cheap housing developments nearby. One last shot. This was around seven.”

Decker looked at his watch. It was almost eleven. “Okay.”

“You’ve got to picture that we’re out in the middle of nowhere. I mean this is the boonies. These particular units abut the desert, and after that, it’s miles of empty space. To buy into the development is no money down and small monthly payments. Plus, about two-thirds of the houses have yet to be erected. Scott and I don’t see any signs of building going on. We figure it’s a perfect place for a loner without a lot of cash.”

“I can see where this is heading.”

“Yeah, and it’s not a good place. Anyway, there’s a model home of
fice. By sheer luck, there’s a woman inside. This is Sunday, mind you, and there’s nothing going on. She tells us that it’s late and she’s about to lock up. We tell her we just need a few minutes. We ask her about Garth Hammerling. No response. Then Oliver shows her the pictures we have of Garth. Her face lights up, but she’s trying to hide it even though she’s giving off a tell that a blind man could read.”

“A tell like in poker,” Decker said.

“Yeah. Exactly. After all, we’re in Vegas. Anyway, we press the lady…her name is Carlotta Stretch.” She spelled it out. “We press Carlotta and she admits someone who
looks
like Garth bought a house in the development about six months ago. How amazing is that?”

“Very amazing.”

“Yeah. Exactly. But we got a couple of problems. The guy who bought the house isn’t named Garth Hammerling. His name is Richard Hammer. Scott and I call up our buds Lonnie Silver and Rodney Major and ask them what they think. They’re good guys. They come right down. Carlotta wants to go home, but we keep stalling. So we all confer and we decide that with Carlotta’s ID of Garth, any reasonable person would conclude that Richard Hammer is Garth Hammerling. But we still got a few problems. First, Garth or Richard isn’t in default of anything, and second, we don’t really have anything on Garth Hammerling except that he’s missing under peculiar circumstances.”

“So you don’t have a good reason to enter the property.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“What about imminent danger?”

“That’s what we all came up with. Garth and Mandy went missing roughly at the same time. Mandy nearly died, so Garth may be in trouble. It would be negligent not to check out the house. Silver calls up a judge. He says it’s good enough to get into the house and look around as long as we don’t trash the place. No opening drawers or anything like that. If we see something in open view, we can go for it. Other than that, we’re pretty much hog-tied. It’s about eight when we finally went in.

“Everything seems fine. We do see a couple of pictures of Garth, so we know that we’re in the right place. We’re dying to search the drawers, see if there are any more masked pictures of him and Mandy, but that’s clearly off-limits. We shrugged and figured: that was that.”

“My flight’s starting to board, Margie. I’ve probably got another ten minutes before I have to go onto the airplane.”

“I’ll make it as quick as I can. So we’re weighing our options. Should we put a police car on the house in case Garth comes back? But then we agree that any idiot would make a tail. There’s no place to hide out here. We’re still mulling over ideas when I get a call from Frieda Kowalski. I told you they were bringing Mandy out of her medically induced coma this morning, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. So Frieda calls me up, clearly very upset. She starts telling me stuff while we’re still at the development, trying to plan our next step. Plus we’re under time pressure. Carlotta Stretch wants to lock up and go home.”

“What did Frieda tell you?”

“Okay. Here goes. The doctors started bringing Mandy Kowalski out of the coma at around nine in the morning. By early evening—Frieda told me it was around seven—Mandy regains consciousness enough to open her eyes and recognize her mom. She knows she’s in bad shape. She’s really agitated. Her blood pressure’s sky-high, her heart’s beating a mile a minute, and she’s shaking like she’s in the throes of a seizure. The docs thought that they may have brought her out of her sedation too quickly. Or maybe she was feeling intense pain from her burns. Because according to her mom, she was writhing in agony.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Man, I was relieved that I wasn’t there to see it.” A deep breath over the line. “So Frieda starts asking for pain medication for her daughter, but before they can knock her out again, Mandy starts mumbling words. At first, Frieda couldn’t make out anything distinct, but then Mandy kept repeating herself. Finally, Mom thinks she hears the word ‘dungeon.’”

“Oh God!”

“Yeah, exactly. Frieda had the presence of mind to repeat the word ‘dungeon’ back to her daughter. And that really spikes Mandy’s blood pressure. The girl becomes super agitated and buzzers start going off. The nurse rushes in, and is about to lace her IV with dope, but thank God for Frieda. She stops the nurse. The nurse and Frieda have words. Frieda wants a doctor to administer the sedation. The nurse gets all insulted and walks out in a huff and the doctor is paged.”

“Bravo for Mom.”

“You said it, because before the doctor could get to Mandy’s IV line, Mom managed to make out a few more words: ‘dungeon,’ ‘house’…‘murder.’ Then Mandy starts saying over and over: ‘the girl, the girl, the girl.’”

“Good Lord!”

“Yeah. Exactly. By this time, the doctor has come in and he’s really upset with Frieda. And Frieda is upset with the doctor and the nurse. So everyone is upset with everyone, but finally the doc puts Mandy under, she quiets down, and all is well in Sin City. It’s around seven-thirty by now. Frieda is finally calm enough to think. She decides it would be a good idea to call me up and tell me what Mandy said in her delirium. When I picked her up from the airport, I gave her my card, my cell number, and Scott’s cell number. She decided to give me a buzz.”

“It’s amazing she had the presence of mind to call.”

“Yes, it is, and not a moment too soon. Because all this is going down just as Carlotta’s walking to her car and about to take off. With the words ‘dungeon,’ ‘house,’ ‘murder,’ and ‘the girl,’ we think we have a very good reason for a second look and maybe a more intense search. Scott runs after Carlotta and we catch her just as she’s driving off. Matter of fact, she almost hit him. I can’t tell you how frenetic things were.”

“I can picture it. Marge, I’m boarding the plane now. I’ll have to turn off my cell in a few minutes.”

“I’ll speed it up. We go back into the house and poke around. At this point, we’re trying to find a trapdoor or a dummy wall or some
thing that might indicate a hidden room. We come up empty. We check the garage. Nada. So I’m outside in the back looking around. Now mind you, this isn’t a ritzy development.”

“Got it.”

“All the houses have small properties with low cinder-block walls to divide one house from the next. And you can see into your neighbor’s yard if you look over the wall. I’m peeking into the neighbors’ yards, figuring that maybe Garth saw us coming and was hiding out in one of the houses. It’s like desperation time. Then I happen to notice that the two neighboring properties on either side of Garth’s property have cement slab patios. Garth’s patio is brick. I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why would anyone bother with the upgrade out here?’ Then I take a closer look. It’s a brick patio, but there isn’t any mortar or cement, Pete. It’s just bricks laid into sand and the bricks on the right side aren’t lying so neat.”

“Oh dear.”

“Yeah, you can see where I’m going. Since Mandy mentioned something about a girl, a dungeon, and murder, we start throwing off the bricks. Underneath the patio, dug directly into the ground is a…” A pause. “Like a bomb shelter. It’s made out of cinder blocks with a trapdoor with a padlock on it. Rodney Major shoots it off the metal, we open the trapdoor, and the stench hits us immediately. It’s a fucking cesspool down there—pitch-dark and fetid. Silver has a flashlight. I take it and volunteer to go down first. I’m shaking like Jell-O. You know how I feel about dark, confined places.”

Decker knew too well. Ever since Marge had rescued a group of children from a cult that used tunnels as escape routes, she’s been claustrophobic. “Good job, Dunn.”

“Yeah. A pat on the back for me. Because on top of the dungeon being small and black, it really stinks. At this point sheer adrenaline is guiding me. I jump down…it’s a good eight feet.” A large sigh. “I find the girl, Pete. She’s nude, wrapped up in plastic garbage bags with a ligature around her neck. By my rough calculations—judging by the time Mandy had been in the hospital—she’s been that way for at least two days.”

Marge’s voice had cracked.

“I take her pulse…didn’t feel anything. It was cold down there and she felt cold. But not ice-cold. She’s not moving, though. I assume she’s dead. I mean why should she be alive? Then I shine a light in her eyes. She fucking blinks!”

Decker couldn’t talk. How could he?

“She’s unconscious but alive. I tear the ligature from her neck. We call the paramedics. They get her out and rush her to the hospital. As of right now, she’s in critical condition. We don’t know if she’ll come out of it. But for the time being, she’s still among the living. How do you figure something like that?”

“You don’t. Does Mandy know who she is?”

“Mandy’s still under sedation. We’ll have to wait until it wears off before we can talk to her.”

The airplane door was closing. Decker had about thirty seconds. “You mentioned something about a strong stench. Was there anyone else in there besides the girl?”

“There are two other bodies down there in various stages of decomposition. The coroner’s investigators have pulled out one body so far. It’s bloated and filled with maggots and most of the skin has peeled off. It’s gruesome. And that’s the best of the two.”

“Oh, my word! How long do you think it’ll take before they clean the place out?”

“I don’t know, Pete. They’ve still got a corpse to go. After that, they’ll get to work on the ossuary. The bodies were sitting atop a pile of bones.”

WITH NOTHING TO
obstruct the horizon, the sun rose in its full glory—a hot, gold disk pulsating with light. By seven in the morning, the outside spots that had allowed the investigators to work through the night were shut off, although the lights set up inside the bunker were shining full blast. It took many more hours before all the biological material could be properly removed from the cement grave.

An APB was sent out for Garth Hammerling. North Las Vegas
police also composed flyers and faxed them not only to Las Vegas Metro, but to most of the police departments in the state of Nevada, with emphasis on Reno and the Silver State’s side of Lake Tahoe. NLV police also faxed flyers to the poker clubs in Southern California and the casinos in Atlantic City. Everyone knew they were merely scratching the surface because there were thousands of Indian casinos and offshore gambling establishments throughout the nation. How to approach the situation was as confusing as it was dire. After discussing the matter, the consensus was that Garth wasn’t much of a gambler. What he liked was what went along with gambling: loose women whom he could pick up, seduce, and then murder.

The house in the desert made headlines. The search for Garth Hammerling widened into a nationwide manhunt for a serial killer. Hopefully, he’d be caught before his compulsion to kill again became overwhelming.

By Monday afternoon, exactly one week after from the gruesome discovery of Adrianna Blanc’s body, Mandy started talking, albeit unsteadily. There were so many queries that needed to be asked by so many detectives, it would take days if not weeks before the full story would come out.

Four days after Mandy was pulled out of her medically induced coma, Decker was on an evening Southwest flight headed back into Burbank. At the same time, Marge and Oliver were on I-15, on their way home. The three of them had come away with a story told from Mandy’s perspective. Decker had cobbled together an unbelievable tale: a four-day odyssey of murder and destruction. There were gaps and some things didn’t make sense, but there was a narrative that could be followed from beginning to end. He wrote down the following summary as he flew back home.

TEN DAYS AGO,
at around eight-thirty in the morning, Mandy saw Adrianna slam down the phone at one of the nurses’ stations, and bury her face in her hands. Since she seemed so very upset, Mandy went over to ask her what was wrong. Adrianna began to cry.

Mandy was surprised to see Adrianna still at the hospital because her shift had ended at eight. But she was there, and Mandy, being a good friend, sensed she needed some help. She told Adrianna to wait for her in the hospital cafeteria. She signed out on break, showing up at the cafeteria ten minutes later to talk to her friend.

Adrianna told her that she was furious with Garth, his endless trips that didn’t include her, and his pissy attitude in general. She was breaking it off for good this time. Mandy congratulated her. Adrianna was too good to put up with Garth’s nonsense. But then Adrianna broke down. During their telephone call, Garth had begged her to reconsider. He said he really loved her and would prove it by canceling his trip to Reno and coming down just to talk to her. Adrianna told Mandy that she didn’t know what to do. While she wanted to break up, there was part of her that still loved him. Mandy, who was playing the wise therapist, encouraged her to stay firm in her decision.

Of course, it came out fairly soon into the interview that Mandy had more personal reasons for wanting Adrianna gone. The truth was that Garth had never planned to go with his pals to the mountains. His intentions all along were to come back to L.A. and sneak off with Mandy for a couple of days—just the two of them.