Deadly Vows Read online

  The tree also meant water was to be found in this place—at least enough to support this tree—and water also meant bacteria, which would speed her decomposition. He knew that process had started almost the second she had died but he needed her to decompose as quickly as possible, and since he knew that the desert was infamous for mummifying bodies, he had to make sure there was moisture near so she would rot instead of being preserved by the dry heat and moisture-leeching sand. He knew that in the best circumstances, it could take a year or so for natural decomposition to get rid of most of the flesh, so he needed a place that wasn’t frequented by people who might get curious and start digging around and find her before he could be sure she would no longer be identifiable.

  He didn’t have to worry about her fingerprints; he had taken care of that by removing the tips of her fingers and discarding them. If someone actually did manage to find her, they wouldn’t be able to just look at her face and tell who she was, either. He had thwarted facial recognition by...obscuring her features. He still gritted his teeth when he thought about that. And speaking of teeth, no one was going to identify her through dental records, either—though it had been a grisly and tougher-than-expected job—he had taken care of that, too. Other than DNA, there would be no way to identify her after nature had taken its toll, and he couldn’t imagine any reason DNA would be able to do the job either.

  She had no entries in any DNA databases, as far as he knew, but he wasn’t taking any chances that she’d be found and her body identified by the fledgling science. With her body decomposed and other identifying marks removed, it would become nearly impossible to tie these remains to the beautiful and vibrant woman who had borne him two sons. Underneath the happy-go-lucky exterior there had been a woman who steadfastly refused to submit to her husband’s authority. She had relentlessly and selfishly sought to advance her own agenda, go to college, find the right career and not just an unfulfilling job, no matter how that strained the rest of the family.

  It wasn’t like he didn’t want her to have a career, but women who focused on their careers usually did so to the detriment of their children. That she would be willing to let her children suffer so she could gain her financial independence from the family was unthinkable to him. Her career had been decided anyway: at least for now, she was supposed to be a mom, not a sign language interpreter—a foolish vocation if ever he had heard of one—and certainly not a Hollywood makeup artist. Pie in the sky, that’s what that was. But she had been willing to cast caution to the wind, no matter how it burdened the family financially, no matter how much pressure it put on his other wife to take care of the kids while she was off pursuing her selfish agenda.

  No, he couldn’t have it. It had been enough. She would not be allowed to tear the family apart by leaving, and she would not be allowed to continue making the family miserable by complaining about it every day. This had been the only way out. After all, if she divorced him, he stood to lose more than she could imagine: he would become just another failed husband who hadn’t had the spirituality necessary to hold multiple wives and thus those who now sought him regularly for advice would turn their backs on him the same way traditional Christianity—and even his own mother—had done when they found out he was a polygamist. Joy had no right to force him to face that kind of rejection again. She was selfish, impetuous, petulant. No, this had been the only way things could pan out. At least this way, he could maintain she had simply allowed her fleshly desires to overcome her. No one needed to know he had killed her. It had to be done.

  Slowly, methodically, he unloaded her body from the back of the SUV he had rented for the trip, careful not to leave any evidence in the vehicle, the plastic construction sheeting doing its job as he had planned, keeping her fluids from seeping into the plastic container he had shoved her body into. She was a lot heavier now than he remembered her being. Now he understood where the saying “dead weight” had originated. He had lifted her before, when she was alive, and her thin body had never been a strain. But now it was a struggle every step of the way. She was unwieldy. Every bit of her seemed to flop out at the most inconvenient times, and it was nearly impossible to get a good grip without her body starting to slip somewhere else.

  TV shows and movies that portrayed people easily disposing of bodies were lies, plain and simple, he decided. This was hard work and he hadn’t even gotten to the step he had assumed would be the hard part. He realized he was panting and sweat was pouring off of him. He heard himself grunt and groan as he tried to move her body bit-by-bit into position so he could build a tomb around her.

  After he had laboriously placed her under the tree, he removed the plastic sheeting so the elements would have full access to her. He had mentally debated that part for quite some time on the drive out here. Would the plastic help or hinder her decomposition? He didn’t know, and he didn’t like that he didn’t know. It was a hole in his research for this work. The plastic could work like a greenhouse, trapping in moisture and heat, speeding the work of the bacteria and parasites that were surely already gathering in and on her to turn her back into the dust from which she came. On the other hand, the plastic could work like a plastic bag, keeping out the essential microorganisms. It frustrated him that he hadn’t figured this out before coming out here. It was unlike him to leave questions unanswered.

  Finally, he had decided: without plastic sheeting, he might not get the “greenhouse” effect that would amplify her decomposition, but he could be certain he would get bacteria and parasites, so he would go with what he knew for sure: bodies decomposed when exposed to air. So he had removed the sheeting, storing it in the plastic tub for later disposal, plastic sheeting and tubs being far easier to get rid of than corpses.

  Now, with her body laying exposed to the elements, he began searching the nearby desert for suitable stones. He had to make the tomb porous so the weather could get through and speed the decomposition, but solid enough to prevent animals from tearing it down. And the tomb couldn’t look haphazard, either. It had to be purposeful. If someone did stumble across this place, he wanted the tomb to look uniform, careful—maybe even some ancient Indian burial site. If he could successfully make it look like that, people would tend to avoid such a structure, he knew, superstition commanding them to leave it be lest they incur the wrath of the venerable Indian spirits or ghosts or whatever it was people feared about Indian graveyards. The public’s susceptibility to such silly superstition worked to his advantage and he would do his best to make sure this place evoked those fears.

  Every plan had multiple layers. This one started with the hope that no one would ever find this place, but if they did, maybe they would avoid it out of laughable, superstitious fright. And of course, if neither of those plans worked out, he hoped that the place would remain hidden long enough that even when they found a body and identified it as human, they wouldn’t be able to tell who that human had been or where she had come from. As long as she was anonymous, he could say Joy had just run off. People could have all the suspicions they wanted to have, but if no one ever found her here or identified her, he would never be forced to face trial for her death—a death she had brought on herself, though he was under no illusions that any jury would see it that way.

  His body began to protest against the exertion as he stacked stones first around the perimeter of her body and then on top of each other and her, forming a geometric pile of stones over her. There were dozens of the stones—maybe hundreds—and they were getting heavier by the minute. It didn’t help that he was having to walk some distance with each one, back and forth, fetching the stones, then dragging, carrying or driving them to her body.

  As the tomb began to take shape, I believe Sean started to worry about how conspicuous it would appear to any passers-by. This was clearly no accidental rock formation. Anyone who got close enough would immediately know this structure was manmade. It was a dilemma he had thought out in advance. It was entirely possible that there was no place in the desert
where such a thing would forever go unnoticed, so he had decided that if anyone got close enough, the tomb must appear to be conspicuous, not hidden, so that anyone finding it would assume it was legitimate, possibly even ancient—and thus not to be disturbed.

  It was part of an entire “hiding in plain sight” idea he had seen on a forensics show on TV. Sometimes the best camouflage was none at all. If you couldn’t keep a thing hidden, make it look like your idea had been to display it all along. So he had made sure all the stones matched. This couldn’t look like a rush job, like someone was trying to hide a body. No, it had to look like it had been constructed out of ritual, out of superstition. If anyone found it, they had to believe it had been a community effort.

  He paused and looked all around. Not a road in sight. Nothing but desert sand and brush as far as the eye could see. Even the tire tracks from the SUV were starting to fade. He had planned to be out here until the sun began to descend down the west side of the sky, and he would use it to navigate back to the road. Way out here, it was unlikely anyone would just stumble upon the grave, he thought. Maybe it was wasted effort to make it look purposeful. But it was too late to turn back now. Besides, he couldn’t load her back up into the SUV. He was running out of time and energy. It had to be here. He would just have to suck it up and make this place perfect. There could be no mistakes.

  As he gathered and stacked stone upon stone, I believe Sean’s mind began to wander as his hands seemed to perform their complicated task on their own. There would be questions. He knew he would have to give plausible explanations at the very least. I believe it was another thing he had been thinking about for weeks. How could he explain the disappearance of someone who had been so important and prominent in his life?

  The long drive back to San Diego would give him plenty of time to work out the details of his cover story. For now, the tomb was complete.

  He stood up, hands on his back, stretching as he inspected the nearly finished structure, squinting as the sun pounded down on him. This hadn’t been his first plan. Initially, he had wanted to rent a boat and take her out past the Bay of San Diego, down toward Tijuana—where sewage in the water kept most people from swimming and fishing—and bundle her up with a set of weights, dropping her to the bottom of the ocean to become food for fish, her body literally disintegrating with each bite, until it was no longer identifiable.

  But 9/11 had been just two years ago and that meant Homeland Security had the borders locked down tight—even the rarely-traversed border on the Western Seaboard. Security officials certainly would notice a thin guy in a rented boat with a suspicious-looking bundle beside him. He would almost certainly have gotten caught if he had tried it. So the desert, plan B despite all its downsides—specifically, the greatly increased chances of her body being found—had to do. He had also thought about trying to buy hydrochloric acid to dissolve the body, but that would be both suspicious and messy, and he wasn’t sure he could even contain the acid, nor was he certain he could adequately clean up the mess it would leave behind. Luminol—the chemical police used to reveal where blood had been cleaned from a crime scene—would still have been able to detect the previous presence of blood, even after the acid had done its job.

  So here he was, executing plan B in the desert, placing the last few stones on the tomb. It would work. His mind was starting to follow tangents now because of exhaustion. He had known that would happen, which is why he had planned in advance so meticulously. He had known beforehand that he would begin questioning his plan, finding phantom holes in it, doubting whether it would really keep the police at bay, which is why he had been so careful to lay everything out before he killed her. Now, he would just have to trust that his plan would keep her hidden until it was too late to identify her. The plan had to work.

  Sighing, he packed up and got ready to start the long drive back to San Diego. He briefly considered praying over the tomb, but he wasn’t feeling very spiritual at the moment. Out here in the desert, the engaging and sometimes flamboyant preacher was nothing more than a dirty, sweaty guy who was extremely tired. There were no crowds to shout “amen” as he delivered a clever take on a scripture with a flair and a smile. No women to fawn over his piercing blue eyes and biting sense of humor. No spiritual acolytes to fall in line behind his deep Bible knowledge and incisive delivery.

  Out here, there was just him, the dirt, the exhaustion and what was left of Joy, the woman he had loved so much he had forced his wife to let him marry her too.

  Unceremoniously, Sean climbed back into the rented SUV.

  Chapter 15

  CALCULATED COVER-UP

  Before the murder, when Sean assembled his “murder kit,” the similarities between his plan and our conversation were striking: gear to keep blood evidence to a minimum; something to eliminate fingerprint and dental identification; somewhere to dispose of the body where no one would find it. Sean knew forensic evidence was often found in cars, so he rented a vehicle. He knew blood could never be left behind, just like our fictional killer did. Though Sean left blood at the murder scene, it was precious little.

  When his first wife arrived home the night after Sean killed Joy, he explained to her that he and Joy had argued and ultimately broken up, he had driven around for hours to deal with his grief and, oh, by the way, Joy had cut herself during the argument. He asked his first wife to clean up the blood, because he was too tired.

  The thing was, when she went to clean up the blood out of the bathroom and Joy’s bedroom, there wasn’t very much, certainly not enough to set off any alarm bells in her mind. Sean had been careful when he was brutally stabbing Joy more than a dozen times. This was no crime of passion, no argument gone wrong. He had planned it out, set up the bathroom and bedroom as his “kill rooms”—just as we had plotted for our fictional killer to do—and executed Joy Risker in cold blood. The lack of blood was later confirmed by police using Luminol; there was so very little. It looked more like a shaving accident than a homicide.

  The control Sean had over his first wife was absolute. If people didn’t understand that fact by the very nature of the way their relationship had ended up—with Sean taking on another spouse seemingly at will, to ever-decreasing objections by his first wife —then they certainly would when they learned that she didn’t question anything when Sean told her that Joy had cut herself and asked his first wife to clean up the mess.

  She went to the bathroom, found the tiny specks of blood and removed them.

  And that was the end of that.

  But it wasn’t the end of anything for Sean. His work was just beginning. Almost immediately, Joy’s friends started asking questions. But they weren’t asking Joy, because she wasn’t answering her phone. And she wasn’t answering her e-mails—at least not yet.

  As of September 19, all the online banter, the jokes, the debates, the posts, the...Joy...ceased, like a spigot had been shut off. End of conversation. Sean still posted once or twice on my blog and a few times on the discussion board, but Joy stopped cold. At the time, I thought nothing of it. We all had busy lives and though Sean had confided to me that he would probably be forced to divorce Joy sooner or later, it didn’t even enter my mind that something might be amiss; I was busy too, so I never thought something was wrong when they went silent.

  Joy had been a more frequent commenter than Sean, who had a full-time job at the book company. When Sean didn’t comment regularly, it seemed par for the course; when Joy stopped posting, it wasn’t strange enough to raise red flags but it certainly became more noticeable the longer her silence persisted.

  In fact, though I had noticed that the two weren’t commenting anymore, I only asked about it off-handedly when I called Sean on October 2 to wish him a happy thirty-sixth birthday.

  He sounded tired.

  “What’s up with Joy?” I asked some time into the conversation. “She quit posting on the blog.”

  There was a long pause, then a sigh and then Sean Goff rendered me speechless with
a completely unexpected announcement.

  “Joy’s gone, man,” he said in a pained voice. “I didn’t tell you before, because I was embarrassed.”

  “What?” I was incredulous. “When did this happen?”

  “A couple of weeks ago,” he said, his voice raspy and cracking. “Apparently, she’s been talking with an old boyfriend and they met up and she ran off with him to drive around the East Coast or around Europe or something. I’m not really sure where they went.”

  There was a moment or two of silence as I soaked in what he had said. At first it didn’t process. I hadn’t expected Joy to leave Sean. She had sounded so happy when she was inviting me to his birthday party. I knew he might have been planning to leave her, but I had no inkling that the opposite might be true. I guessed that I hadn’t known Joy as well as I thought I had, since it seemed completely out of character for her to hide something like that so well. When planning Sean’s birthday party, she seemed sincerely dedicated to making sure it all came off perfectly, but then she had just left Sean? Clearly, if that was the case, she had already been thinking about leaving him the last time I had talked to her, which meant she had to have been faking her enthusiasm for his party.

  Also, she never had struck me as the kind of person to pull up roots and leave on a whim. It was jarring to hear and it took me awhile to get my head around what he had just said.

  “Dude, I’m sorry,” I said, finally. “Are you okay?”

  I also asked him how his first wife was handling it.

  Despite his more recent protestations, I believe that Sean loved Joy—maybe even more than he loved his first wife. Joy had been his public wife, the one he went out on the town with while his first wife stayed home and cared for the trio’s three boys. It was Joy who Sean talked about almost constantly, Joy who showed up in happy-couple pictures, Joy who people had begun to think of when they thought of Sean’s wife. Those who didn’t know about his polygamy simply assumed Sean and Joy were a normal married couple. They often knew nothing about his first wife.