Secrets to the Grave

by Tami Hoag

  Anne had no argument with Benton’s choice. She found Kathryn Worth to be smart and tough, and by no means intimidated by Peter Crane’s big-name defense attorneys.

  She entered Worth’s office on the second floor of the county courts building and settled into the now-familiar ancient leather chair opposite the desk. As were many of Oak Knoll’s prominent buildings, the main county courts building had been constructed in the 1930s and was a gem of Spanish style with a twist of Art Nouveau thrown into the décor. The courtrooms and offices were full of heavy oak furniture in the Stickley mission style. The hallways boasted original Malibu-tile wainscoting and hand-painted borders. It was the kind of solid, substantial place that made a person believe Lady Justice was on his side.

  Kathryn Worth smiled at her as she pulled off her oversize reading glasses. “Anne. How are you?”

  “Fine, I hope,” Anne said. “I guess it depends on what you have to tell me.”

  Worth made a little shrug, trying to minimize the significance of what she was about to say. “They’ve filed a motion to try to exclude some evidence. They’ll lose, of course.”

  Anne sat up a little straighter. Her heart beat a little harder. “What evidence?”

  “The tube of superglue.”

  “On what grounds?” she demanded.

  “They’re claiming it was planted.”

  “He was going to put it in my eyes!” Anne said, the upset quickly building a head of steam inside her.

  She flashed on the image as if it were a scene from a movie: Peter Crane looming over her, holding her down with a knee on her chest, his left hand pressing down on her throat, choking her. He fished for something with his right hand in his jacket pocket and came out with a small tube. The glue.

  All of his victims had had their eyes and mouths glued shut.

  “I saw it!” she exclaimed. “I knocked it out of his hand!”

  “I know. And you’ll testify to that.”

  “Not if they get it thrown out!”

  “Anne, calm down,” the ADA said quietly. “There’s no way they’ll get it thrown out.”

  “There must be some reason they think they can.”

  “Michael Harrison thinks he could part the Red Sea if he needed to. It’s hubris. He’s full of shit. It’s just another tactic to delay the inevitable.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “You’re not telling me everything.”

  Worth scowled. “You would have made a hell of a prosecutor yourself,” she muttered. “There are no useable fingerprints on the tube. I can’t explain why. Because the tube is small. Because one of the CSIs smudged it when they collected it. Who knows? It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me,” Anne said. She was beginning to feel sick to her stomach.

  “Anne, you need to keep your eye on the big picture here. There is not a jury in Southern California that is going to acquit Peter Crane of kidnapping and trying to kill you. There’s no way. The glue isn’t even relevant. It’s not important.”

  “It links him to the murders of Julie Paulson and Lisa Warwick. And to the attempted murder of Karly Vickers.”

  “He’s not going on trial for those murders. He’s going on trial for what he did to you. And there is no way he’s getting out of it.”

  “Then why am I so afraid he will?” Anne asked. Tears welled in her eyes. She pressed a hand across her mouth and felt assaulted by her own fear. Anger would follow—anger that she should be made to feel this way, then anger at her own inability to fight the feeling off.

  Kathryn Worth leaned her arms on her desk and sighed. “Because that’s a part of it, Anne. Peter Crane made you a victim, and that doesn’t stop. It doesn’t go away.”

  “Thanks,” Anne said. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”

  “I’m not trying to make you feel worse, Anne. I’m not. But I’ve sat across this desk—and other desks—from a lot of victims. I know how it works.”

  “I hate it,” Anne whispered, her throat tight around a hard lump of despair.

  “I know. I know you do. I’m so sorry,” Worth said. “Are you still seeing your therapist?”

  “Twice a week.”

  “It takes time. My mother always likes to say time heals all wounds.”

  “Your mother is full of shit,” Anne said bluntly.

  Worth nodded. “Yes, she is. The best we can hope for is that the wounds scar over well enough we don’t feel them all the time. And we move on. We have to. Otherwise, the bad guys win.”

  “I know. That’s what Vince says too.”

  “You’ve got your own in-house expert,” Worth pointed out. “You’re ahead of the game.”

  “That’s true,” Anne said, mustering a little smile. “And I’ve been going to a victims’ group at the Thomas Center. It helps.”

  “Watching Peter Crane being sentenced to life without parole will help more.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Don’t worry about this motion, Anne. I’m not concerned. I just wanted you to hear about it from me instead of seeing it on the evening news.”

  “I appreciate that, Kathryn.”

  “How are things otherwise?”

  “Good. Well ... I’m worried about Dennis Farman,” she admitted. “I don’t know that he’s in the right place. He’s isolated there. He has no one his own age to interact with.”

  Worth spread her hands. “He’s there or he’s in a juvenile facility. Those are the choices. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you he knifed a boy his own age. That’s not exactly healthy interaction.”

  Anne sighed. “I know. And I know there are no boys his own age in the juvenile facility. There simply isn’t a good answer for him. If Child Services could place him somewhere ... in a halfway house or something.”

  “He’s a violent offender, Anne,” Worth said. “If he was eighteen, you wouldn’t be so concerned about finding him anything outside a penitentiary.”

  “That’s the problem, though. He’s not eighteen. He’s a little boy.”

  Worth nodded, thoughtful for a moment as she weighed the pros and cons of what she was about to say.

  “Let me tell you about ‘a little boy’ I dealt with when I was prosecuting sex crimes in Riverside,” she said. “Brent Batson. When I was prosecuting Batson he was twenty-eight. He was a serial rapist. A vicious, brutal monster. I put him away for three consecutive life sentences. He had raped nineteen women that I knew of. He later told a reporter that he had committed at least twice that many crimes.

  “At the time of his first violent offense—a rape—he was twelve years old. He spent all his juvenile life in one program or another with people trying to straighten him out. When he turned eighteen, he celebrated by going out and raping a fourteen-year-old at knifepoint. When he got out of prison for doing that, he celebrated by raping a homeless woman and her ten-year-old daughter.”

  “You’re saying there’s no fixing Dennis Farman,” Anne said.

  “I’m saying the social worker that lost sleep over him when he was twelve will never get that time back,” Worth said. “Justice is a tough business, Anne. You won’t do yourself any favors by caring too much.”

  “I know all that,” Anne said. “Believe me, if Dennis had one person in his life to sit on his side of the courtroom, I’d be out of there.”

  “You got him an attorney,” Worth pointed out.

  “I’m his advocate. And I just can’t stand the idea of being twelve and having absolutely no one give a damn about me. Imagine having your whole life stretching out ahead of you, and it’s just a long empty road.”

  “Anne, you need to learn the difference between sympathy and empathy,” Worth said. “One makes you a humanitarian. The other will make you miserable.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Anne said, rising from her chair, giving the ADA a sheepish smile. “I don’t know how successful I’ll be adhering to it, but I’ll remember it.”

  13

 
“That’s fucking bizarre, man,” Bill Hicks said. “He killed his own mother.”

  “He says he killed her,” Mendez said. “Why would somebody just blurt that out to a couple of cops? I don’t care if the guy is some kind of mathematical genius. He’s a fucking wack job.”

  “What did Vince have to say about it?”

  Leone had gone on to the college to have another conversation with Arthur Buckman, one the college president was not likely to enjoy. Mendez had grabbed Hicks in the parking lot at the SO. They were on their way to the Thomas Center for Women to speak to Jane Thomas, who was probably not going to be happy to see them, either.

  “He thinks it’s probably true.”

  “Does he think Zahn killed Marissa Fordham?”

  “He’s not leaning that way. He thinks the murder was too messy. Zahn is a freak about touching other people. This killer had to have been covered in blood.”

  “That many stab wounds, killing in a frenzy like that,” Hicks said. “It would be a safe bet the killer would have cut himself at some point. A bloody knife is slippery.”

  “He could have worn gloves.”

  “He didn’t bring a weapon to the scene, but he brought gloves?” Hicks arched an eyebrow, dubious.

  “If he knew the vic, had been to her house, he would know she had knives there. No need to bring his own,” Mendez pointed out.

  “What are the odds we get blood evidence on the perp out of that mess in the house?”

  “Slim to none. We’ll send the knife to BFS.”

  “How about to the FBI?”

  The state Bureau of Forensic Sciences lab was good. The Bureau was the best—although it would take weeks to get results.

  “If the boss says we can, why not?” Mendez said. “And if we get lucky and get seminal fluid off the body or off the sheets, maybe they get DNA.”

  Hicks made a face. “What’s it good for? A bunch of scientific mumbojumbo and mathematical statistics to put a jury to sleep? That is if a prosecutor can ever get it admitted. It hasn’t happened yet.”

  “You wait and see,” Mendez said as he slowed the car and turned into the Thomas Center parking area. “Once the gurus get all the bugs worked out, DNA will be the thing.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  The Thomas Center for Women had originally been built in the twenties as a private Catholic girls’ school, and operated as such into the sixties. Modeled on the style of the old Spanish missions that dotted the length of California, the white stucco buildings and connecting arch-ways formed a large central courtyard. A huge stone fountain gurgled at the center. Beautiful small gardens lined the stone pathways that radiated out from the fountain. Roses the color of fresh salmon were still in bloom. Mexican heather created ribbons of purple beneath them.

  Inside the large administration building, the hall was wide and gracious, painted a warm, welcoming ochre yellow. The old Mexican pavers on the floor had been polished to a soft sheen.

  The center was a place for women to reinvent themselves. Women from all walks of life who needed and deserved a second chance were welcome here. Homeless women, battered women, women with drug histories and even police records went through the program, which offered shelter, assistance with health care, psychological and job counseling.

  It was a remarkable place with a remarkable woman at the head of it.

  Mendez and Hicks went to the front desk and asked for Jane Thomas.

  She emerged from her office with a look of concern marring her brow. In her early forties, she was a tall and elegant woman. She wore a black-and-white-printed dress that wrapped around her slender frame. Her blond hair had been slicked back into a simple ponytail.

  “Detectives,” she said, shaking the hand of Hicks and then Mendez. “I would say it’s a pleasure to see you again, but I think you’ll understand if I reserve judgment.”

  She had lost a former employee, Lisa Warwick, to the See-No-Evil killer, and had all but lost a client, Karly Vickers. Vickers had survived her ordeal, but had been left deaf and blind.

  “We hardly ever show up with good news,” Mendez said.

  “And today is no different.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Thomas sighed, resigned. “Let’s go into my office.”

  “How is Ms. Vickers doing?” Hicks asked as they went into the spacious office that looked out on the courtyard garden.

  “She’s got a long road ahead of her, and it’s all uphill. I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head as she took her seat behind the desk. “She’s had two surgeries now to try to repair the damage to her inner ears, without much success. She’ll never see again. She can talk to us, but all we can do is answer her by writing on the palm of her hand with a finger.

  “She’s extremely depressed, and who can blame her? She can’t even testify against the man who kidnapped and tortured her—if he ever goes on trial for those crimes—because she can’t identify him. She asked us if we knew who he was. Either she never saw him, or he drugged her and she can’t remember, or she was too traumatized to remember.”

  “It’s frustrating for us too,” Mendez said. “We still have no idea where he held the women. If we could find a location and link it to Peter Crane, we’d be in business.”

  “He’ll go away for a long time for what he did to Anne Leone,” Hicks said. “That’s something anyway. I don’t see how he gets out for twenty-five years. Maybe more.”

  “I hope so,” Jane Thomas said. “But I don’t think you gentlemen have come here to talk about Peter Crane, have you?”

  “No, ma’am,” Mendez said.

  “Cal came by earlier and told me about Marissa. I don’t even know what to say. How can something like that happen? It’s a nightmare.”

  “Did you know Ms. Fordham well?” Hicks asked.

  “I’ve known Marissa socially since she moved here. Her daughter was just a baby then. She did that remarkable poster for us,” she said, pointing to a two-feet-by-three-feet framed print on one wall of her office.

  The poster depicted the Thomas Center logo—a stylized woman with her arms raised in victory—against a rich backdrop of magenta and purple, lavender and pink.

  “We’ve raised a lot of money selling the prints,” she said.

  “Were you friends?” Mendez asked.

  “We were friendly. Milo Bordain, who sponsors her, is also a big supporter of the center. We would see each other at dinners and so on. I have a couple of Marissa’s paintings at my house. She did some wonderful work in the plein air style.”

  “Do you know anything about her private life?” Mendez asked.

  “Not really. She volunteered some time here as a guest teacher in our art therapy program. She came to fund-raisers. I saw her at gallery parties.”

  “You didn’t know her daughter’s father?”

  “No. I never heard her speak of him.”

  “Did you ever see her in the company of a man?”

  “At functions from time to time. I saw her with Mark Foster a couple of times. I saw her with Don Quinn a couple of times.”

  “Don Quinn from Quinn, Morgan?” Mendez asked. Quinn, Morgan and Associates was a local law firm that did a lot of pro bono work for the center. The Morgan of Quinn, Morgan was Steve Morgan, Sara Morgan’s husband.

  “Who is Mark Foster?” Hicks asked, taking notes.

  “Mark Foster is the head of the music department at McAster,” she said. “But I didn’t get the impression Marissa was serious about anyone. They looked like casual dates. You know, Guest Plus One. She was fun. She liked to laugh. She was a very devoted mother.

  “Milo would be able to help you more than I can,” she said. She flipped through her Rolodex for Bordain’s address and jotted it down on a piece of paper, then handed it across the desk. “She’ll be devastated. Marissa was like the daughter she never had.”

  Mendez took the piece of paper and tucked it inside his little notebook as he rose from his chair.
“We’ll speak to her. Thank you for your time.”

  As they started toward the door, Jane Thomas asked, “Marissa’s daughter—have you heard anything? Will she be all right?”

  She held up a hand before Mendez could draw a breath to answer. “What am I thinking? She witnessed her mother’s murder. What could be all right after that?”

  14

  Don Quinn was a good-looking guy in his late fifties—tan, a mane of silver hair, chiseled features, wide white smile. He could have been an actor on one of the prime-time soaps. He could have been the roving guest star who appeared one night as a deadly doctor on Murder, She Wrote, and as an oil tycoon days later on Dynasty.

  Here in Oak Knoll he played the role of senior partner of a successful law firm.

  The John Forsythe smile dropped away when Mendez told him why they were in his office.

  “Oh my God,” he said, sinking down into his leather executive’s desk chair. He aged suddenly as the tan seemingly drained from his face.

  “We understand you sometimes saw Ms. Fordham socially,” Hicks began.

  Quinn didn’t respond for several moments as he tried to absorb the shock of the news.

  “No offense intended, Mr. Quinn,” Mendez said, “but you seem considerably older than Ms. Fordham.”

  Though he clearly didn’t want anyone to think of him as “older,” Mendez thought. The man was in great shape, dressed in a black T-shirt under his tan sport coat. Probably the only reason he didn’t dye his hair was that it made such a striking contrast to his tan.

  Quinn shook off whatever memories had been playing through his mind. “Marissa and I have gone out a few times. Not lately. She was a lovely young woman. Interesting, vivacious. Is there some reason I shouldn’t have enjoyed her company?”

  “Your wife, maybe?” Mendez said, shooting a pointed look to a framed family photo on the bookshelves behind Don Quinn. Quinn, Mrs. Quinn—a slightly plump woman his own age, and two good-looking kids—a boy and a girl in their late teens or early twenties. The trendy Quinns posed on a sandy beach, all of them in khaki pants and French blue turtlenecks.