by Tami Hoag
Anne peeked into the bag, suspicious. She reached in with the hand not burdened by an IV catheter and plucked out a scrap of black silk and lace.
“Some people give flowers or candy. My friend gives lingerie.”
“Nothing says ‘Get well’ like a negligee,” Franny said.
“Always makes me feel better,” Vince confessed.
“See?”
Anne would have rolled her eyes if they hadn’t hurt so much.
Franny leaned down and found a square inch of cheek to kiss without causing her pain. “I’m going to let you rest,” he said, then gave Vince a big comic wink.
“He’s something,” Vince said, chuckling, as Franny made his exit.
Anne managed to arch a brow at the negligee. “Yeah, the two of you.”
“Seriously, now,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
She felt no need to try to be brave or analytical with him. The tears came high in her eyes as the emotions flooded through her, leaving her trembling. “I’ve never been so afraid in my life.”
Vince eased a hip onto the bed so he could put his arms around her.
“You should have seen me,” he murmured. “When I knew that bastard had you . . .”
“Will you just hold me for a while?” Anne asked him in a small voice.
“I’ll hold you all night long,” he murmured, stroking her hair.
“I don’t think they’ll let you stay past nine.”
“Let them try to get me out of here,” he said. “God hasn’t made a nurse mean enough to get me away from you. And that’s saying something.”
He kissed her forehead, and she felt herself let go some of the tension still trembling through her.
“I mean it, Anne,” he said quietly. “I’m not going anywhere. I might be a big dumb lummox from Chicago, but I know the real deal when I see it. I love you. I want to spend my life with you. Is that all right with you? Or is there a restraining order in my future?”
Anne smiled and shook her head. He was right. After looking death in the face, all of life’s other choices became so much simpler and cleaner.
Vince leaned down and kissed her lips, and she had never felt more safe or loved in her life.
94
In the days that followed, properties Peter Crane might have accessed using his wife’s lock-box key were searched, but no madman’s lair was discovered. Wherever Crane had tortured and killed his victims remained a mystery—along with any physical evidence that might have tied him to the crimes.
Karly Vickers had begun to recover from her ordeal. She had been taken off the ventilator and was breathing on her own, but communication with her was difficult. While she could speak a few words at a time in a hoarse whisper, she could neither see nor hear. She had not indicated that she knew the identity of her attacker.
Doctors had expressed hope of repairing some of the damage to her ears and possibly giving her back at least partial hearing. While that was good news, it was a long shot, and would be a long time coming.
Vince doubted the young woman would have much to tell them at any rate. He didn’t believe for a minute Peter Crane had made the mistake of leaving a victim alive. Karly Vickers was his masterpiece, his living tribute to his own criminal cunning and brilliance. She was Peter Crane saying, Look how much smarter I am than the cops. I give them a victim back and they still don’t know who I am.
Crane might have given her back, but he would have damn well made sure she wouldn’t be able to tell them anything.
It was chilling to think how long Crane might have gone on with his killing career. And just as chilling to imagine how long it had gone on to that point. His crimes were too sophisticated, his fantasies too finely honed for the three victims they knew of to have been his first.
The Bureau was thoroughly involved at that point, Vince being officially assigned to pursue the case and investigate Peter Crane’s past. It would be his last case as an agent. And while he had had an illustrious career, he was focused on what would come: his life with Anne.
Dixon had given him a desk in the war room. He sat now reviewing videotape, playing the interview forward, rewinding, replaying.
Mendez came in with lunch.
“Jane Thomas had Karly Vickers taken out on the hospital lawn in a wheelchair this morning so she could pet her dog. That’s going to be the first seeing-eye pit bull in history,” he said, putting the bags down on the table. He nodded at the television. “Why are you looking at that?”
“Come sit down.”
It was Dixon’s interview of Janet Crane the night her husband had abducted Anne. Vince watched, fascinated, as Peter Crane’s wife led Cal Dixon around in circles.
She had collapsed in hysterical tears after Vince had left the room that night, supposedly driven to panic by the idea of her son in the hands of a madman. Dixon had offered her comfort, coffee, to call a doctor. She had refused all, preferring to carry on intermittently.
Dixon had continued with the interview. They needed answers from her. Where did Peter like to go? Was there a particular place he might feel safe to hide? Were there vacant properties she knew of that he could get into using her key? Places that were hidden, out of the way, forgotten?
Around and around they went. Dixon got nothing. Janet Crane got attention.
It probably wasn’t even conscious on her part. That was just how she operated and had since childhood, Vince suspected.
She couldn’t believe this was happening to her.
To her. Not to her son, not to Anne, not to any of the other lives her husband had wrecked and ruined.
“What a bitch,” Mendez said.
“What a case study,” Vince corrected him. “She’s a textbook narcissist. Everything in her world revolves around her. The rest of us are just actors in her play.”
He paused the tape, rewound it again, found the bit he wanted Mendez to watch: the point in the interview when he had laid out Lisa Warwick’s autopsy photo in front of Janet Crane.
Mendez said nothing.
Vince rewound and replayed.
He turned to his protégé and said, “She doesn’t look away. She doesn’t look away, and she doesn’t become hysterical for a full two minutes.”
“She’s in shock,” Mendez offered.
“She’s enjoying it.”
Mendez looked at him like he was crazy. “No way.”
Vince rewound the tape and played it again, and again. He wound it back to an earlier point in the interview.
“. . . your son, Tommy, is missing,” he said. “I believe that they are both probably with your husband, and that they are both in grave danger.”
“Peter would never hurt Tommy,” she said, lifting a forefinger for emphasis. “Never.”
“‘Peter would never hurt Tommy.’ She doesn’t say Peter would never hurt anybody. She doesn’t say he wouldn’t hurt Anne,” Mendez said, frowning. “And when we went to their house that night and told her her husband had abducted a woman, she never asked who.”
“Either she knew, or she didn’t care,” Vince said. “Or both.
“Janet Crane volunteers at the Thomas Center. She knows the staff wears the silver necklace. She knows only the graduates wear the gold necklace. The boy gave the necklace to Anne. He had to have found it in their house.”
“If Janet Crane knew that necklace was there . . . ,” Mendez started.
“She had to have known where it came from,” Vince said.
“Jesus,” Mendez muttered, staring at the video monitor, watching Janet Crane play Cal Dixon like a concert violin. “I spoke to her this morning. I’m trying to get her to bring Tommy in to speak with us.”
“She’ll never let it happen,” Vince said.
“She told me she was taking him today to see a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. She should see if she can get a two-for-one discount.
“Do you really think she knew all along?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Vince said, shutting off the monitor. “And even if
I said yes, what I think and what I can prove are two very different things.”
95
Days passed Tommy in a kind of a blur, his mind turning reality just slightly out of focus. He felt numb, and that seemed like a good thing. He didn’t go to school. He didn’t go anywhere. He didn’t leave his mother’s side. She needed him now.
The day they left Oak Knoll, his mother told Detective Mendez she was taking him to a child psychiatrist in Los Angeles. But when they got to Highway 101, she turned the car north instead of south, and just kept driving.
They traveled all that night and all the next day, leaving behind everything and everyone Tommy ever knew. He hadn’t seen it coming, but he wasn’t surprised either. Nothing his mother did surprised him.
She couldn’t be married to a notorious killer. Nor could Tommy be the son of one. And never in a million years would she have allowed him to testify in court to what he had seen that terrible night he and Miss Navarre had been taken away.
What would he have told them, anyway? That a Shadow Man had come and taken away the one person who mattered most to him—his father.
When darkness fell that first day on the road, Tommy sat looking out the back window at the stars, imagining each of them was someone he knew in Oak Knoll, growing farther and farther away until they were only the tiniest points of light. The last two he counted before he fell asleep were Wendy and Miss Navarre.
Now they stood on the deck of a ferryboat floating away from their newest city as the setting sun splashed gold across the faces of the skyscrapers.
His mother had cut her hair and dyed it blonde, and looked nothing like his mother had his whole life. It was as if an actress in a movie were talking to him, pretending to be his mother. He wished that were so, then felt guilty for thinking it.
She had dyed his hair too, so when he looked in the mirror, a stranger looked back at him.
The Crane family had ceased to exist.
They had new names now to go with their new life.
His mother went to the back railing of the ferry and took a small metal box from her purse. The last tie to the past, she said. She stood there for a moment, looking at the water, her eyes far away from where they were. Finally, she opened the lid of the box revealing the tangle of jewelry inside. In one smooth motion she threw it into the sound, the chains and bracelets fluttering like gold and silver ribbons as they fell to disappear into the deep blue.
“We’re free,” she whispered.
And Tommy looked up at the purple twilight sky and watched the smallest star go dark.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tami Hoag’s novels have appeared on national bestseller lists regularly since the publication of her first book in 1988. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages worldwide. She lives in Los Angeles and Palm Beach County, Florida.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
