by Tami Hoag
“Signature?” Frank Farman said. “Where’s his signature? Maybe he left his address and phone number too.”
Sheriff’s Detective Tony Mendez clenched his jaw for a beat. Farman, chief deputy, was old-school and resented the hell out of him for being one of the new faces of law enforcement—young, college educated, a minority, eager to embrace all the new technology the future promised.
“Why don’t we consult a crystal ball?” Farman suggested. “No need for any legwork at all.”
“That’s enough, Frank.”
Cal Dixon, fifty-three, fit, silver-haired, uniform starched and pressed, had been county sheriff for three years. He had a long solid career with the LA County Sheriff’s Department before he had moved north to the quieter setting of Oak Knoll. He had campaigned for the office on a promise of progressive change. Tony Mendez was an example of his promise in practice.
Mendez was thirty-six, smart, dedicated, and ambitious. He had jumped at the chance to attend the FBI’s National Academy, an eleven-week course for senior and accomplished law enforcement personnel—not only from around the United States, but from around the world. Classes ranged from sex crimes to hostage negotiations to criminal psychology. Attendees went away not only with an advanced education, but with valuable contacts as well.
Dixon had seen sending Mendez as an investment that would pay off for his department in more ways than one. Mendez was happy to prove him right.
“MO is how he did it,” Mendez said. “The signature is his own thing, something extra he does for his own reasons.”
He pointed at the head of the dead woman as deputies and crime scene investigators worked around her, searching for anything that might resemble evidence. “Eyes glued shut. Mouth glued shut. See no evil, speak no evil. He didn’t have to do that to kill her. That’s what gets him off.”
“That’s all very interesting,” Farman said. “But how does that help us catch the bad guy?”
He wasn’t being sarcastic. Mendez knew there were still plenty of cops who doubted the usefulness of criminal profiling. Mendez had studied enough cases to feel differently.
They stood in Oakwoods Park. The sun was gone. There was a crisp chill in the October air. The area around the shallow grave was illuminated by bright portable work lamps. The stark light made the scene seem all the more surreal and macabre.
The body hadn’t been buried there for long. Maybe a day at the most. If the corpse had been there for very long, it would have sustained more damage from animals and insects. If not for the gash on her cheek and the ants crawling on her face, the young woman would have looked like she was sleeping peacefully—undoubtedly a far cry from the reality of her death, Mendez thought.
He believed they would find she had been strangled, tortured, and sexually assaulted. Just like the two victims who had come before her.
He had worked the first homicide—Julie Paulson—eighteen months ago, still unsolved. The victim had been found at a campground five miles out of town, eyes and lips glued shut. There had been multiple ligature marks on her wrists and ankles, some older than others, indicating she had been held somewhere over a period of time.
Nine months later he had spoken with the detectives in the next county when their vic had been discovered. He had looked at the photographs of that corpse—a body that had suffered considerably from the elements before being found by hikers, just off a popular trail. The mouth had been more or less gone, along with one eye. The other eye had been glued shut. The hyoid bone in the neck been fractured, indicating strangulation.
“Neither of the others was buried,” Dixon pointed out. “Let alone displayed like this one.”
Their victim’s head was entirely above ground, propped up on a stone the size of a loaf of bread. Staged for maximum shock value. This was something new: the body left in a very public park, off the beaten path, but definitely in a place where it would be found.
“It’s risky,” Mendez said. “Maybe he wants attention. I think we’ve got a serial killer on our hands.”
Dixon took a step toward him, scowling. “I don’t want to hear those words coming out of your mouth again outside my office.”
“But this vic makes three. I can reach out to Quantico now.”
“Yeah, that’s what we need,” Farman said. “Some Feeb strutting around like the cock of the walk. Who the hell cares if this creep wet his pants when he was ten? What good is that? They’ll send some hotshot who just wants to be on the news to tell the world he’s a genius and we’re a bunch of stupid hicks.”
Dixon glanced over his shoulder at the crowd still gathered on the other side of the crime scene tape. “Nobody says shit about this crime possibly being connected to any other. Nobody says anything about the eyes and mouth being glued shut. Nobody mentions the letters F-B-I.”
Mendez felt the word “but” lodge in his throat like a chicken bone.
“I’m sending the body to LA County,” Dixon announced, his stark blue eyes on the victim. “We need a coroner who isn’t an undertaker by day.”
“They’ve got bodies stacked on top of each other down there,” Farman said.
“I can reach out to some people. We can get priority.”
“Sheriff, if this guy has killed three, he’ll kill four, five, six,” Mendez said, keeping his voice down. “How many women did Bundy kill? He confessed to thirty. Some people think the number was closer to a hundred. Do we have to wait for some more women to die before—”
“Don’t piss me off, Detective,” Dixon warned. “The first thing we need to do is find out who this young woman was. She was somebody’s daughter.”
Mendez shut his mouth and reflected on that. Tonight some family was missing a daughter. If they even realized she was gone, they would still have hope she could be found. They would still have the dread of uncertainty. In a day or two or ten—when this corpse was finally identified and given a name—their hope would become despair. The uncertainty would be over, replaced by the stone-cold fact that someone had taken her life away from them, brutally and without mercy.
And that someone was still out there, very probably hunting for his next victim.
6
“Why are we watching this? You know I hate the news at ten o’clock. The only people who think the news should be on at ten live in Kansas and have to be in bed by ten thirty so they can get up at dawn and watch the corn grow.”
Anne ignored her father’s complaining, making her reply with the remote control by turning up the volume. The station was local, the field reporters fresh out of junior college, the news anchor a failed Betty Ford Clinic alum. The lead story was the body in the park.
The reporter’s glasses were crooked, and his sport coat was too big for him, as if he had borrowed it from a larger relative. He stood near the Oakwoods Park sign, squinting against the glare of ill-positioned lights. Without a doubt, this would be the biggest story to date for a kid who usually covered town council and school board meetings.
“The corpse of a dead woman was discovered this afternoon by children playing in Oakwoods Park.”
Anne’s father, a retired English professor, cried out as if he had been wounded.
“Moron!” he shouted. “Could they have found the corpse of a living woman? Idiot!”
“Be quiet!” Anne snapped. “A murder trumps bad grammar.”
“No one said anything about a murder.”
“It was a murder.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.” She hit the volume button again.
“The victim has not been identified. The cause of death is not known yet.”
“Not yet known.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Anne said.
“Fine,” her father said. “Then this jackass can report that my dead corpse has been found killed.”
“We should all be so lucky that he have the opportunity,” Anne muttered under her breath. She hit the volume button again as Sheriff Cal Dixon stepped up to
speak with the reporter.
Dixon stated the basic facts. The victim was a woman who appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties. No identification had been found with or near the body. He could not pinpoint how long she had been dead. An autopsy would be performed, and he would have more to say as to the cause of death when the results came back.
Yes, it appeared she had been murdered.
The sheriff stepped away to confer with Frank Farman and a handsome Hispanic man dressed in slacks and sport coat. A detective, Anne assumed.
The news coverage broke for a commercial and an ad for mattresses came on, the salesman screaming at the top of his lungs. If the telephone hadn’t been on the end table directly beside her, Anne would never have heard it ringing. She picked up the receiver and cringed as a woman’s voice shouted out of it.
“Your television is too loud! People are trying to sleep!”
Anne hit the mute button. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Iver. My father is so hard of hearing, you know.”
Her father glared at her even as he called across the room from his recliner. “Sorry, Judith! We were watching the news of that murder. You should keep your windows closed and locked. Would you like me to come over and check around your property for you?”
He would no more have gone out in the night dragging his oxygen tank along to see to the safety of Judith Iver than he would have flown to the moon. Anne held the receiver out away from her.
“Thank you, Dick! You’re so good to me!” Judith Iver shouted. “But I’ve got my nephew staying with me.”
“All right,” her father called out. “Good night, Judith!
“Her nephew,” he said with disgust as Anne hung up the phone. “That rotten hoodlum. He’ll slit her throat one night while she’s dreaming about him amounting to something, the stupid cow.”
The yin and yang of Dick Navarre: charming, handsome old gentleman on the outside; nasty old bastard on the inside. Professor Navarre and Mr. Hyde. And if Anne had described him that way to his casual acquaintances, they would have thought she was mentally disturbed.
She handed the remote to him as she got up.
“I’m going to bed,” she said as she closed the living room window against the night chill and Mrs. Iver. “Did you take your pills?”
He didn’t look at her. “I took them earlier.”
“Oh, really? Even the ones that say ‘take at bedtime’?”
“The human body doesn’t know what time it is.”
“Right. And, I forget, what medical school did you attend in your free time?”
“I don’t need your sarcasm, young lady. I stay up to date on all the latest medical news.”
Anne rolled her eyes as she left the room and went into the kitchen to get his last round of medication for the day. Pills for his heart, for his blood pressure, for edema, for arthritis, for his kidneys, for his arteries.
I stay up to date on all the latest medical news. What crap.
At seventy-nine, her father spent his days with his golf cronies, arguing about politics. If they had been discussing migrant farm workers, he would have claimed he was up to date on all the latest immigration laws.
Anne had never bought into his bullshit. Not when she was five, not when she was twenty-five. She had always seen him for exactly what he was—an egomaniacal, narcissistic ass—and he had always known it and hated her for it.
They didn’t love each other. They didn’t even like each other. And neither made any pretense otherwise, except in public—and then only grudgingly on Anne’s part. Dick, the consummate actor, would have had everyone in town thinking she was the much-adored apple of his eye.
He had been the same way with her mother—putting her on a public pedestal, belittling her in private. But for reasons Anne had never fathomed, no matter how he had betrayed her, her mother had loved him until the day she died, five years and seven months ago.
Marilyn Navarre, forty-six, had succumbed to a short, brutal fight with pancreatic cancer, an irony that enraged Anne still. Her father’s health had been failing for years, yet he had survived a heart attack, two open heart surgeries, and a stroke. He had been wounded in the Korean Conflict and walked away from a multiple-fatality car accident in 1979.
He suffered from congestive heart failure, and half a dozen other conditions that should have killed him, but he was simply too mean to die. His wife, a saint on earth nearly thirty years his junior, hadn’t lived four months after her diagnosis.
Sometimes Anne cursed her mother for that. She did so now as she went upstairs to her bedroom.
How could you do this to me? How could you leave me with him? I still need you.
Her mother had always been her sounding board, her voice of reason, her best friend. She would have told Anne she was being selfish now, but like any abandoned child, Anne didn’t care. Selfishness was the least she deserved.
At her dying mother’s request, she had left grad school and moved back home to care for her father. Instead of earning her doctorate and going to work as a child psychologist, she had taken the job of teaching fifth grade in Oak Knoll Elementary.
And now three of her students had found a murder victim.
The thought hit her as she turned on the bedside lamp. There should have been four.
Wherever Dennis Farman went, Cody Roache was right behind him. Anne had forgotten about him in the chaos and confusion of what had happened. Guilt washed through her now. Poor Cody, always an afterthought. But he had been nowhere to be seen in the park. Maybe he had never been there. Maybe he had gotten a ride home from school.
The children should all have been in bed by now, asleep and dreaming. Would they close their eyes and see the face of the dead woman?
Anne went to her window and looked out at the night and the lights in the windows of other homes. What would she see if she could look in the window of the Farman home? Frank Farman would still be at the scene of the crime with the sheriff. Would his wife be listening to Dennis’s excited account of what had happened?
Sharon Farman had struck Anne as being overworked and overwhelmed by life. She had a job, she had children, she had Frank Farman for a husband. Judging by Dennis’s disruptive behavior at school, Anne guessed his mother did her best to ignore him in the hopes that he would simply grow up and go away.
She could easily picture Wendy Morgan and her mother, Sara, tucked together in bed with the bedside lights on. The Morgans appeared to have the kind of loving, well-adjusted family seen only on television. Wendy’s mother taught art for the community education program. Her father, Steve, was an attorney who donated his free time to helping underprivileged families in the courts.
Anne’s inner child envied Wendy her home life. Her own childhood had been lonely, standing on the outside of her parents’ relationship, watching the dysfunction unfold.
As warm and loving as her mother had been with her, Anne had always known that her place in her mother’s life was second to her father’s. Even now. Even in death her mother had chosen the needs of her husband over the needs of her child. Her mother would have been horrified to realize it, but then, she never had, and Anne would never have pointed it out to her.
Anne had been a quiet child, a watcher. She had taken in everything that had gone on around her, processed it, and kept her conclusions to herself.
She recognized those same qualities in Tommy Crane. He tended to stand back a little from those around him, taking in their moods and actions, reacting accordingly. Of the children to find the body, he was the most sensitive and would be the one most affected by what he had seen. Yet he would be the least apt to talk about it.
If she could have seen inside the Crane home, would Tommy be watching and listening as his mother spent the evening on the phone arranging for him to see doctors and therapists? Would his father be the one listening to the story of Tommy’s trauma, offering comfort and reassurance? Or would Tommy have gone off to bed on schedule, no trouble to anyone, left to deal with
his bottled-up feelings by himself?
Anne’s heart ached as she stared out at the night, watching the lights in the windows of other houses go out one by one. A long day was over, but for Tommy and Wendy and Dennis, an even longer ordeal had just begun.
7
Tommy sat alone at the top of the steps, listening. He was supposed to be in bed. He had taken a bath, like he did every other night of his life. He had put on his pajamas and brushed his teeth with his father supervising. His mother had given him his allergy medicine to help him sleep. He had pretended to take it.
He didn’t want to sleep. If he went to sleep, he was pretty sure he would see the dead lady, and he was pretty sure that in his dream she would open her eyes and talk to him. Or maybe she would open her mouth and snakes would come out. Or worms. Or rats. He didn’t know if he would ever want to sleep again.
But he didn’t dare to go downstairs either. First of all, his mom would freak out because it was twenty-seven minutes past his bedtime. It wasn’t a good thing to mess up the schedule. Second, because she was yelling—about him.
What was she supposed to do? What was she supposed to say when someone asked her about what happened? People would think she should have picked him up from school. They would think she was a bad mother.
His dad told her to calm down, that she was being ridiculous.
Tommy cringed. Bad move on Dad’s part. He should have known better. His mother’s voice went really high. He couldn’t see her from where he sat in the shadows on the stairs, but he knew the face she would be wearing. Her eyes would be bugging out and her face would be red, and there would be a big vein standing out on her forehead like a lightning bolt.
Tears filled Tommy’s eyes and he pressed himself against the wall and wrapped his arms around himself and pretended his dad was holding him tight and telling him everything would be all right, and that he didn’t have to be afraid. That was what he wanted to have happen. But it wouldn’t.
