by Tami Hoag
“Leave?” Anne said, incredulous, as Farman stalked off. “Isn’t he under arrest?”
“They don’t have anything to hold him on besides the say-so of a mentally disturbed eleven-year-old child,” Vince said. “We don’t know Sharon Farman is dead, or even missing. Did Child Protective Services get here?”
“Yes, they’re in with Dennis now,” she said and sighed. “He wants to know when he can go home.”
She wanted to cry for the boy, Vince could see. He walked her down the hall and they went out the end door to the side yard. They stood in the shade on the far side of an oak tree and he put his arms around her and just held her—and she just stood there and let him hold her, slipping her arms around his waist as if that was the most natural thing in the world.
“I’m proud of you,” he said quietly.
“Proud of me? For what?” she asked, slipping out of his embrace as easily as she had slipped into it.
“You’re a tough little mouse, standing up to Farman like that.”
She frowned. “Look at all the damage he’s done. Dennis is never going to have a normal life, is he? Whether he’s in prison or not. He’s never going to get over this, is he?”
Vince shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, honey. I wish I could say different, but in my experience . . . He’s broken, and there’s probably no fixing him.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” she asked. “Throw him away? I don’t like that answer.”
“I know, but I don’t have a better one.” He reached a hand out to her and she took it without hesitation. “Maybe someday you could be one of the people who figures that out.”
“Someone has to try,” she said stubbornly.
“I know. I mean it. You’re great with your kids. You’re passionate about figuring them out and helping them. Not that teaching isn’t an important job, it is. But you could be making an even bigger impact on kids that need serious help.”
“I just want to do the best I can for them,” she said.
Vince leaned down and kissed her softly.
“You are one incredible lady, Anne,” he said, settling for those words instead of the ones that sat on the tip of his tongue—I’m falling in love with you.
He was forty-eight with a bullet in his head, falling in love on the third day of knowing Anne Navarre. That sounded a little crazy, even to him. But it was true . . . and he was going with it.
70
“I did complain to Cal about it,” Jane Thomas said, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “I felt that the women from the center were being stopped with inordinate frequency. He told me I was imagining things.”
“What did you say to that?” Mendez asked.
“I told him he needed to go look up the records and then he could accuse me of having a persecution complex, not before.”
“When was this?” Hicks asked as they left the family waiting room and started back down the hall toward the ICU.
“Oh, we revisit this subject every eight or nine months,” she said. “He claims the numbers are normal, and that maybe I have an inordinate number of bad drivers among my clients.”
“Have your clients complained about any one deputy in particular?” Mendez asked.
“There are two or three regular offenders. Ask your boss.”
“Did any of the women complain about the deputy that stopped them being inappropriate in any way?”
Thomas looked at him sharply. “Are you thinking one of your own people . . . ?”
“No, ma’am,” Hicks said. “We’re just following up on a remark someone made in passing.”
She frowned and started moving slowly toward the door. “I want to go back and check on Karly.”
All three of them went to stand outside Karly Vickers’s room, looking in at her through the glass. Nothing had changed. The young woman lay on the bed with tubes and wires attaching her to machines and bags of fluids and blood. She looked as thin and pale as an apparition, like a vision that might fade away to nothing in the blink of an eye.
“The doctor told me she probably won’t be able to see or hear,” Thomas said quietly. “Can you imagine how alone she must have felt? How terrifying that must have been never to know if that monster was there with her or not, never to know what he was going to do next.”
She shivered and sipped her coffee to ward off the inner chill. In her left hand Mendez noticed she held the gold necklace she had asked for that morning. She rubbed the figure of the woman between her thumb and forefinger the same absent way he had often seen his mother rub at her rosary beads, a gesture that offered a certain amount of comfort or perhaps hope.
“Her mother should be here soon,” she said, glancing at her watch. “She had to wait for a friend who could drive her up here. What am I going to tell her? Your daughter came to me for help, and this is what happened?”
“You can’t blame yourself, ma’am,” Hicks said. “You saved her life today.”
“I hope so,” she murmured.
A nurse went into the room to check the monitors and make notes. When she put her hand on Karly Vickers’s arm to check her IV, all hell broke loose.
The comatose woman came alive violently, arms and legs thrashing. Monitors went wild. The nurse shrieked and jumped back.
Jane Thomas ran into the room, calling out to Karly Vickers, forgetting her voice would fall literally on deaf ears.
Staff came running. A doctor called out for a sedative.
Panic, Mendez thought as he watched. Karly Vickers had come out of her coma and entered a state of panic. She couldn’t know where she was. She couldn’t see who was touching her. She couldn’t hear them tell her she would be all right, that she was safe.
The thing that finally seemed to calm her was Jane Thomas pressing the gold necklace into her hand, closing her fingers over the figure of the woman with her arms raised in victory.
71
The Dodgers lost that day 4-2 to the St. Louis Cardinals in game three of the National League Championship series. For some reason that would stick with Tommy for the rest of his life as being his clearest memories of that day.
Bob Welch was the losing pitcher. Danny Cox got the win and Ken Dayley got the save. St. Louis second baseman Tommy Herr hit the only home run of the game in the bottom of the second inning.
None of it seemed that important at the time, however. The Dodgers were still up in the series two games to one, and Tommy had a date—sort of. His father had told him a secret while they watched the game: that they were going to see Miss Navarre while Tommy’s mother was at one of her endless meetings.
This was highly exciting news because Miss Navarre had sought out his father and asked him especially if she could meet with Tommy to talk about the things that had been happening. She was worried he might have gotten some wrong ideas. And it wasn’t even a school night. Miss Navarre was making a special effort to see him on the weekend. Tommy hadn’t felt that special since he won the fourth-grade science fair.
He waited until his mother was well into her preparations for her meeting before he quickly took a bath and got dressed in his good gray pants and a shirt and sweater. This was a special occasion. Miss Navarre was taking time out of her weekend for him, the least he could do was look his best.
He even had a present for her, although he wasn’t sure he would be brave enough to give it to her.
He had thought and thought about what had happened the day before, and he had decided the fault was with his mother, not with Miss Navarre. His mom had twisted Miss Navarre’s intentions into something bad because that was how his mother’s mind worked.
Miss Navarre didn’t think his dad was a serial killer or else she wouldn’t have even talked to his father today. Therefore, everything his mother had done the night before—yelling at Miss Navarre in public—had been bad and wrong.
She deserved a special present as an apology. And it made sense that it should come from his mother—sort of.
He put it in a little squ
are box like a ring would come in, and wrapped it himself with a piece of colored paper he found in a kitchen drawer where his mother kept greeting cards and stuff like that.
He hid it in his coat pocket so his mother wouldn’t see it before she left, on account of she would have been REALLY mad at him. It wouldn’t matter to her that it was something she had thrown out herself. She had decided Miss Navarre was her enemy, and if he didn’t think the same thing, then HE was the enemy too.
Nobody knew how complicated his life was because of his mother. Although, he thought Miss Navarre would understand if he told her.
He watched from the upstairs hall window as his mother drove away for her dinner meeting. A few minutes later his father called up the stairs.
“Hey, Sport, are you ready to go?”
And a million butterflies took flight in Tommy’s stomach.
72
“They had to restrain and sedate her,” Mendez said. “She was so combative there was a chance of her disconnecting the respirator. She has too much swelling in her throat from the strangulation. The doctor doesn’t think she would get enough oxygen on her own.”
“Jesus,” Dixon whispered, shaking his head. “Restraints. I’m sure Jane was happy about that.”
“No, but she got it. She and the girl’s mother are going to take turns sitting with her. They aren’t going to risk her waking up alone or with a stranger again.”
“I guess we should just be relieved she’s out of the coma,” Dixon said. “But how the hell are we supposed to get answers from her if she can’t hear the questions?”
Mendez shrugged.
They had taken over a corner of the family waiting area down the hall from the ICU—Mendez and Hicks, Dixon and Vince.
“So she’s out right now?” Vince asked.
“Yes.”
“I want to take a quick look at her, if that’s possible. I want to see if she has the same pattern of cutting wounds as Lisa Warwick. If the pattern is consistent, then it means something specific to the offender. If we can figure out what it means, it could lead us somewhere.”
“Have at it,” Dixon said. “If you can get past guard dog Jane.”
Leone left the room. Mendez wanted to follow him, to pick his brain as he gathered details from looking at the victim, but there was still an issue to discuss with Dixon.
“Why didn’t you tell us Miss Thomas had complained to you about her clients being stopped for traffic violations?” he asked.
Dixon looked at him, taken a little off guard by the question, as if the subject was something he filed away long ago.
“There was nothing to it,” he said.
“She told us she’s had this discussion with you on more than one occasion. How is that not significant to us?”
“If I thought there was anything to it, I would have said so, Detective,” he said, getting irritated. But he got up from the arm of the sofa he had been sitting on and started to pace, arms crossed over his chest—which told Mendez he wasn’t comfortable with the subject.
“Did Jane bring this up to you?” Dixon asked.
“Actually, Steve Morgan brought it up,” Hicks said.
“Don’t you think Jane would have been the first person to say something about it if she felt it was significant?” Dixon said.
“Except that she trusts you. She trusts your judgment,” Mendez said.
Dixon glared at him. “And you don’t?”
“Don’t jump on me, boss. I’m doing the job you hired me to do.”
“A couple of the deputies seem to have a written a lot of stops on women from the center,” he conceded. “But they’re deputies who write a lot of tickets across the board. The numbers didn’t bother me. And I’m sure as hell not going to tell them to treat Thomas Center clients any differently from the rest of the population.”
“I just want to know one thing,” Mendez said, dreading asking the question, already knowing the answer. “Is one of those deputies Frank?”
Dixon sighed heavily. “Yes. Of course. Frank leads the league in traffic citations—and in complaints from the people he’s written up. That’s hardly news.”
“I want to see his file,” Mendez said.
“I’ve reviewed his file.”
“Yeah, well, I want to see it.”
“You think I’m trying to protect him?”
“I think you and Frank go way back, and it’s not appropriate or fair to you to make a call on him. Sir.”
He half expected Dixon to blow a gasket. His boss was a by-the-book kind of guy, and he had toed that line so far with Frank Farman, but friendship and history could make that line blur, even with men like Cal Dixon.
But Dixon held his temper. He stopped his pacing, staring down at the gray industrial-grade carpet on the floor.
“Frank’s wife is missing,” he said quietly. “His son is saying Frank killed her.”
Mendez felt all the blood in his body free-fall to his feet. Hicks got up from the arm on the other end of the sofa and said, “What?”
Dixon filled them in on what had transpired that afternoon while they had been at the hospital with Wendy Morgan and Cody Roache.
“Where is he now?” Mendez asked.
“Home,” Dixon said. “We don’t know that Sharon is dead or even missing. I’ve got Trammell and Hamilton calling her friends and relatives. Frank claims she left on her own. And the boy is less than reliable. I don’t even know if he has a firm grasp on reality. He seems almost catatonic for the most part.”
“Except the part where he said his father killed his mother,” Mendez said.
“Frank let me have a look around his house. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.”
“Or he wouldn’t have consented,” Mendez pointed out.
“It’s a catch-twenty-two,” Dixon conceded. “And you know damn well I wouldn’t cut him any slack on a charge like this. We simply have nothing to indicate a crime has been committed. We’ve got nothing to hold him on.”
Mendez put his hands on his head and turned around in a circle. “What a fucking mess.”
Vince approached Karly Vickers’s room with the same kind of quiet respect he would have used in church. Jane Thomas sat beside the girl’s bed, holding her hand, the gold necklace laced through fingers entwined.
“She’s lucky to have you on her side,” he said softly.
“I don’t know how she’s going to make it through this,” Thomas confessed. “She’d been through so much before she ever came to the center.”
“She wants to live,” Vince said. “Or she wouldn’t be here now. She’ll find a way to make it, and you’ll find a way to help her.”
Tears glittered in her green eyes as she looked up at him as if he might actually have an answer. “Why does it have to be so hard?”
“I don’t know. I only know my part, and that’s helping find the animal who did this to her. Can you help me with that?”
Jane Thomas helped him catalog the wounds Karly Vickers’s tormentor had carved into her, and Vince left her with a promise to do everything in his power to bring a madman to justice.
And he walked out of the room and away from the ICU thinking the same thing she had asked him: Why does it have to be so hard?
73
When Anne saw Tommy waiting outside the pizza place it was all she could do not to break into a big smile. He had dressed up in what had to be his best outfit: smart gray pants with a buttondown shirt and a navy blue sweater under his open Dodgers jacket. If he’d worn a tie he would have looked like a miniature prep school candidate. Only the black eye Dennis Farman had given him spoiled the image.
“You look very nice tonight, Tommy.”
“Thank you. So do you, Miss Navarre,” he said, terribly serious.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
He had run out of things to say. He sighed and tried not to fidget. Anne looked up at his father, handsome and relaxed, a pleasant smile curving his mouth. “Dr
. Crane, I want to thank you for making this possible.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “I appreciate your concern for setting the record straight. Why don’t we go inside? The smell of that pizza is too much to resist.”
They went into the restaurant and found a booth. The place was booming with Saturday night customers—college kids, families, teenagers traveling in packs. Video games bleeped and growled in their own alcove at the rear of the place. Tommy was wide-eyed, taking it all in.
“We don’t get to come here very often, do we, Tommy?” Peter Crane said.
Tommy shook his head.
“Tommy’s mom is a member of the food police,” Crane explained. “All healthy, all the time.”
“And as a dentist, you must agree with that,” Anne said.
“I don’t think the occasional pizza is such a bad thing. Tommy and I sneak in some fun stuff every once in a while, don’t we, Sport?”
Tongue-tied, Tommy nodded.
“What do you like on your pizza, Tommy?” Anne asked.
“Cheese.”
“Me too. What about pepperoni?”
The shy smile tucked up one corner of his mouth as he nodded again.
“What about Brussels sprouts?”
“No!” he said emphatically, shaking his head so hard his whole body swung from side to side.
Anne laughed. “All right. No Brussels sprouts.”
A waitress came and took their order for pizza with no Brussels sprouts. When she had gone, Anne looked across the table at Tommy, growing serious.
“Tommy, after seeing your mom last night, I just want to make sure you don’t have the wrong idea about something,” she began. “When I asked you those questions I never meant for you to think that your father might be involved in what happened, or that I might think that. Do you understand?”
“I guess,” he said in a tone of voice that was less than convincing.
