by Tami Hoag
“I can’t go for Chinese without you. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Don’t hold back on my account, really.”
“You never answered me,” he said. “Is he hot?”
Hot wasn’t the right word. Honestly, Mendez was hot. Leone was ruggedly handsome, yet distinguished . . . Anne felt a blush creeping up her neck, much to her consternation. “No.”
“Liar!” Franny exclaimed, laughing, highly amused.
Anne stopped and looked at him. “Why am I speaking to you?”
He kissed her on the cheek. “Because I just took your mind off the fact you have the Marquis de Sade Junior for a pupil. Run along now, Anne Marie. Don’t want to keep your gentleman friend waiting.”
Shaking her head, Anne walked across the plaza to Piazza Fontana, to her non-date.
“It’s not a date,” Vince muttered to himself as he straightened his tie in the men’s room mirror.
What the hell had he been thinking? Anne Navarre probably hadn’t even been born yet when he joined the Bureau. He had to be out of his mind. Maybe he should start taking the antipsychotic drugs, after all.
And asking her in the middle of what had been going on at the school—definitely a sign of brain damage.
It was the bullet’s fault. A hallmark of damage to the frontal lobe of the brain: impulsive behavior.
He was feeling edgy, that end-of-the-day out-of-gas nervousness that usually precipitated a big crash. He had managed a short rest after Mendez dropped him off, and he had dozed under the lights of the tanning machine in the salon, but it hadn’t been enough. He needed about seventeen hours of sleep. At least he had a healthy glow in his face now thanks to a gazillion watts of fluorescent light and his easy-to-tan Italian complexion.
“Maybe you’re just old, Vince,” he muttered.
Then again, he should have been dead. So what the hell? Why shouldn’t he have dinner with a lovely, intelligent twentysomething lady?
He spotted her entering the restaurant as he stepped out of the men’s room. She looked very . . . determined, he decided, determined to be serious, determined to be taken seriously. She also looked a lot less like an elementary schoolteacher in her body-skimming sweater and stylish skirt. Nice.
“Miss Navarre,” he said with his most charming smile. “You look lovely.”
“Detective—”
“Vince, please. It’s been a long day for both of us. Let’s shelve the formalities, shall we?”
The maitre d’ led them through the restaurant’s interior to a quiet booth in a corner. Miss Navarre raised an eyebrow.
“We don’t want eavesdroppers,” Vince explained. “This isn’t a conversation for public consumption, all things considered.”
He ordered a bottle of pinot grigio and two glasses—not that he would be able to drink it considering the drugs he was on, but he could pretend to while the lovely Anne loosened up a bit. She looked just this side of suspicious.
“Are you allowed to drink on the job?”
Vince grinned. “Darling, life is too short not to drink wine.”
“Okay. Well, I can certainly use it.”
“You’re not used to having your school overrun with detectives?”
“Not before this week.”
“How long have you been a teacher?”
“Five years.” It seemed like that was all she was going to say, but then she hastened to add, “But I had a double major in college, which took an extra year, and then a year of grad school.”
So she wasn’t as close to being jailbait as one might have thought. She had to be twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He wanted to smile at her need to set him straight on that, but he refrained.
“What was your other major?”
“Psychology. I wanted to be a child psychologist, but—” She stopped herself from being so eager. “Life . . . took a different turn.”
“Funny how that happens.”
Anne looked away, took a deep breath, and sighed. She was embarrassed, he thought. She probably didn’t just go around telling her life story to strangers—or to people she knew, for that matter. He pegged her for the kind of woman who confided in one friend, if she confided in anyone, cautious in the way of an old soul—or a wounded one.
The waiter brought the wine. Vince sampled it and nodded his approval. They ordered their meals, sipped at their glasses.
“Anne,” he said. “I have a confession to make. I don’t work for the sheriff’s office. I’m a special agent with the FBI. For now, it’s better that isn’t common knowledge. My specialty is profiling serial killers.”
She said nothing, but her eyes got wider.
“I don’t know how much you’ve been told by Detective Mendez,” he went on, “but there is reason to believe Lisa Warwick—the woman your students found in the park—was the latest victim in a series of at least three murders.”
“Oh my God.”
“Another woman is missing. So, you can see, it’s imperative that we try to learn as much as we can from every possible avenue.”
“I don’t know what I can do,” she said. “I teach fifth grade.”
“Detective Mendez told me you have a pretty good handle on who your kids are. I saw that for myself this afternoon.”
She laughed without humor. “Oh, yeah. I’m so sharp I had no idea Dennis Farman was having homicidal fantasies.”
“Why would you suspect that?” Vince asked. “How many people would look at a kid in the fifth grade and peg him for a future killer? Nobody. That’s highly aberrant behavior. No normal-thinking person would look for that.”
“And that’s where you come in?”
He gave her half a smile. “Yeah. I’ve been experienced right out of normal thinking. I’ve spent a long time studying murderers and trying to figure out how they got that way and what makes them tick.”
“How do you sleep with that in your head?”
“Great,” he admitted, “as long as I’m medicated.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Because maybe if I’m good enough at what I do, I can prevent some innocent people from dying. Maybe I can spot a kid like Dennis Farman and get the right people to pay attention to him. I’m sure you can relate to that.”
She nodded and looked away, a soft sheen of moisture coming into her eyes.
“I’m sorry you have to get dragged into this world, Anne,” Vince said, genuinely sorry for her. She probably still had ideals, and she probably still believed the world could hold up to them. “I know this is hard for you.”
“I’m afraid the right people aren’t going to pay attention to Dennis,” she said. “Especially not now. He’s being expelled from school. He’ll be running around loose, with no supervision, no guidance. Who’s supposed to police him? His parents work. And even if they were home, they must be terrible parents or he wouldn’t be the way he is.”
Vince sighed. He would have been agreeing with her if he hadn’t wanted to keep her from crying. In fact, if he had been teaching a seminar, using Dennis Farman for an example, he would have said it was probably already too late to save him.
His colleagues back in Quantico would think the same. He had sent them Dennis Farman’s drawing by fax. He would talk to them the next day, but he already knew what they would say. They would say Dennis Farman already had well-established violent, antisocial behavioral tendencies. His artwork already showed sadistic fantasies—sadistic sexual fantasies in a child who had yet to reach puberty. There probably wasn’t going to be any fixing what was wrong with this kid.
But he wasn’t about to say any of that to Anne.
“You’re right in what you told his father,” he said instead. “The boy should have psychiatric counseling.”
“And what army is going to make his father believe that?” she asked. “Frank Farman probably thinks he can beat the bad out of Dennis.”
The strain of the day’s events was taking a toll on her. Vince reached across the table, put his big hand over h
er small one and gave it a squeeze.
“Don’t give up, Anne. Not yet. You fought for that boy today. You stood up to Mendez and me, you stood up to his dad. He needs someone on his side.”
One crystalline tear slipped over the edge of her lashes and down her cheek as she looked away from him, embarrassed.
“Hey, come on,” Vince cajoled, his voice soft. “No crying. You’ll ruin my reputation as a ladies’ man.”
He won a little smile for that one.
“Are you a ladies’ man?” she asked, visibly relieved for the distraction.
“That all depends on the lady,” he admitted.
Her cheeks bloomed pink and she glanced away, still harboring the little smile. She extricated her hand from under his, wiped the stray tear away and tucked a strand of brown hair behind her ear.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t usually fall apart that easily.”
“I’m betting you never fall apart at all,” he said. “But you don’t usually have a kid bring a severed human finger to your classroom either. I think you can cut yourself some slack.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
Their food arrived. Her caprese salad, his baked ziti. Vince pushed his plate at her.
“Eat,” he ordered. “Have some ziti. My Italian mother’s cure for everything. She would tell you Avete bisogno della vostra resistenza! Ci e niente a voi!
She seemed pleased with his flamboyant Italian. “What does that mean?”
“You need your strength. You’re too skinny. My mother thinks everyone under two hundred pounds is too skinny. Never mind that I can pick her up with one hand.”
“How old is she?”
“Eighty-two. And your mother?”
“Passed away.” She dropped her eyes and picked at a piece of pasta. “A few years ago. Pancreatic cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” Vince said. The different turn Anne Navarre’s life had taken. Her mother died. She left school. “And your father?”
“Will outlive both of us, despite his alleged poor health.”
She didn’t seem especially happy about the prospect.
“You still haven’t told me how I’m supposed to help your investigation,” she said. Back to business.
He stuck a fork in his side of the pasta. “Tell me about Tommy Crane.”
She thought he’d thrown her a curve ball. She looked up at him, suspicious again. “Why would you want to know about Tommy?”
“We have to pursue all possible angles in a case like this,” he said. “Understand?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not saying the investigation is going in one direction or another at this point. We’re still trying to piece together the last day anyone saw Karly Vickers, the missing girl. Miss Vickers had a dentist’s appointment last Thursday. It was her last appointment of the day.”
“With Peter Crane.”
“So far, he’s the last person to have seen her—that we know of.”
“You can’t possibly think he’s involved,” she said. “He’s the nicest man. Tommy adores his father.”
“I didn’t say he was a suspect. He’s not even a person of interest at this point,” Vince explained. “But he is the last person to have seen this young woman. We have to account for his whereabouts that night. I would like to do that as discreetly as possible.”
“I can’t tell you anything about that,” she said. “But I can tell you he seems to be a wonderful father. Now Tommy’s mother, on the other hand ...”
“Difficult?”
“The Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. Ask Detective Mendez.”
“And what’s Tommy like?”
“He loves baseball, he plays the piano, and has a better head for math than I do,” she said with a crooked smile. “He’s smart, thoughtful, quiet. Every mother’s dream.”
“Outgoing?”
“No. Tommy is an observer,” she said, very much in her element talking about her student, analyzing what made him tick. They weren’t so different that way. She wanted to get into their little heads, figure them out. “He stands back and watches what’s happening before he decides on a course of action.”
“He got his butt kicked today.”
“He was coming to the rescue for Wendy—the girl Dennis attacked. And he did that knowing full well Dennis would kick his butt.”
Vince smiled. “Chivalry lives on.”
“That’s the kind of boy he is. And by Tommy’s accounts, that’s the kind of man his father is.”
“Fair enough,” Vince said. “But would you do me a favor? Would you ask Tommy about last Thursday night? Was his dad home or did he go out that night?”
The idea was leaving a bad taste in her mouth. He could see her resistance rising.
“They’re easy questions, and they probably have easy answers,” he said. “I just think it’s better if they come from you. He doesn’t need an FBI agent scaring him, asking him questions about his dad. He trusts you.”
She arched a brow. “So I should manipulate him?”
“I’m not asking you to manipulate him. Ask him a couple of questions for me. That’s all.”
“Why don’t you ask Mrs. Crane?”
“The Queen of Hearts?” he tossed her own description back at her. “Wives have ulterior motives. Kids don’t.”
She thought about it for minute, giving him the I-don’t-quite-trust-you eye. She had a shield like a Spartan warrior, this one, and she might guard herself with it, or she might smack him in the head with it if that seemed the more prudent thing to do.
“I’m not asking you to steal trade secrets,” Vince said, scooping up some ziti. “Just to ask a little boy where his dad was last Thursday night.”
“I guess I could do that,” she said reluctantly.
“What do you know about the Morgan family?” he asked.
“They’re nice people. The dad—Steve—is an attorney. Sara sometimes teaches art classes for the community education program. She’s mostly a stay-at-home mom. They have the one child—Wendy.”
“Good marriage?”
She shrugged. “As far as I know. Don’t tell me Steve Morgan is a suspect.”
“He was a friend of Lisa Warwick. We have to check him out. It’s just routine. You could probably get a feeling from the girl if something was off at home, right?”
“And what do I get for interrogating my students?” she asked, surprising him.
“I’ll talk to your principal,” he offered. “Recommend that he set up some tutoring sessions for Dennis Farman. Maybe the boy could come to school for a couple of hours a day, as long he isn’t allowed in the classroom or on the playground. That way you can maintain some contact with him. How does that sound?”
“I would appreciate your support in that.”
Quid pro quo, Vince thought. Maybe she would find out something useful, or maybe nothing would come of it . . . except another dinner . . . or two . . .
He reached his hand across the table and she met it with hers. Her hand was small and soft, but strong, like a woman who knew what she wanted. He liked that.
“Deal?” he asked.
“Deal.”
He insisted on walking Anne to her car, and she put up little resistance. With a possible serial killer on the loose, it was no time for women to be turning down extra safety measures.
He put her in her sporty little red Volkswagen and leaned down into the open window.
“Lock your doors and don’t stop for anybody,” he instructed.
“Yes, sir.”
“And don’t call me ‘sir.’ You’ll make me think I’m too old.”
“Too old for what?” she asked with that little Mona Lisa half-smile and a sparkle in her eye.
With no thought process involved, he leaned down and kissed her on the lips.
“For that,” he murmured.
Damn bullet.
She didn’t slap him. That was a good first step.
“Thanks for your help, Anne
,” he said.
She was still trying to process the kiss in her analytical little brain.
“Thanks for the ziti,” she said.
He watched her drive away into the night, not quite daring to let his hopes go where they wanted. Then he walked across the street and down the alley to the back of Peter Crane’s office.
Anne poured herself a glass of wine and went to stand on the back porch, just outside the open kitchen door. She thought of Vince’s warning to be careful. There was a killer prowling the streets. But her yard was fenced, and the moon was bright, and she wanted just a few minutes to overthink the evening before she went to bed.
She touched her upper lip, still feeling the brush and tickle of his mustache as he kissed her. She tried to remember the last time she’d been kissed.
Not only did she not have dating life, truth to tell, she was avoiding having a dating life. The men in her social circle weren’t men, they were overgrown frat boys who still played video games. The second ring of her social circle was made up of the parents of her students, most of whom were married, not many happily. From her own perspective as a child, she had seen the ideal of being married with children was not all it was cracked up to be. And so she had never been in a hurry to go there.
But she had to admit there was something about Vince Leone that attracted her, beyond his looks. He was strong, intelligent, knew his mind. He saw something he wanted, and he took it.
Too bad he wouldn’t be sticking around. He would finish his work here and go back to Virginia, to another round of heinous crime.
She couldn’t imagine constantly being immersed in a world of death and evil. Three days of it had been enough for her.
Even as she took a sip of the warm, full-bodied cabernet, she shivered at the idea that evil was not that far away, roaming the streets like a wolf hunting for prey. She thought back to what she had been doing Monday night—grading papers, going over lesson plans, listening to a Phil Collins album—while someone had been torturing and killing Lisa Warwick. She had been sleeping soundly while the killer buried her body in the park, leaving her head aboveground with the idea that someone would see her and be shocked and horrified.
