I'd be a bit slow to just believe a witness like Lewis, wondering if she didn't gleefully help do the crime. Really messed up. And why would she be either taken along or not killed too. The houses in "Mammoth" look like abandoned wrecks in the first place, maybe rent for $200 a month. The only person I've known who lived in a place like that was, he said, an ex-con who had smuggled drugs across the Gulf of Mexico for some organized outfit. He told me people like him.... little guys helping out.... are systematically turned over every year or so... meaning the drug organization kills them on a sort of schedule to reduce risk of anyone knowing too much. He got away. I had him work for me for a summer because he could fix tractors and junk. I figured I couldn't be sure whether he felt safer in jail or in an abandoned shack in the rabbit brush nobody even could know was there. I know he made some caches in the tall sage where he kept his guns, just so if his shack ever got searched by authorities he wouldn't face a weapons charge. Point being, he was hiding out from his former employers more than the cops.
I told him a story about a judge I knew who was as corrupt as hell, and I really shouldn't have been surprised when he offered to "hurt" him for me.
Looks to me like that's the kind of society the perv and his accessory ran with.