Deeper Than The Dead (48 page)

She gathered the necklace into one hand and walked around with it in her fist, as if she thought it might speak to her somehow.

She would have to ask Tommy. Or maybe she would bring it up to his father. There would be an answer.

Sooner rather than later, she thought, as the doorbell rang, and she opened the door to Peter Crane.

“You’re going to have a scar,” Vince said.

“Just one?” Mendez asked.

“The ladies will find that one sexy,” he said, pointing to the angry red line that creased the detective’s cheek. “The ones they can’t see . . .”

He shrugged and sat down on the stone bench beside Mendez, and leaned his forearms on his thighs.

They sat outside, neither of them noticing the damp chill of the night air. It smelled like lavender and rosemary with a hint of the ocean that stretched beyond the small mountains to the west. It didn’t smell like gunpowder or death.

The media had given up for the night, Dixon shutting them down and sending them on their way. What had happened inside the sheriff’s office might have made for compelling news, but it was also a family tragedy, and enough was enough for one night.

The paramedics had come and gone. Mendez had refused the ride to the hospital. Once he had showered the blood and brain and bone fragments off, a little cut on the cheek didn’t seem like anything to lose time over. He could have just as easily been as dead as Frank Farman.

“You want to share some of that pharmacy you’re carrying around on you?” he asked.

Vince dug the pill bottle out of his jacket pocket and shook a few into his hand.

“I recommend the long white one,” he said. “Unless you’re thinking about having a seizure. Then I’d go for the pink one.”

Mendez arched a brow. “A seizure?”

“The bullet went in right here,” Vince said, pointing just beneath his right cheekbone where an odd smooth shiny patch of new skin smaller than a dime marked the spot. People rarely noticed the scar for what it was. The mustache he had grown since Mendez had last seen him was a far more noticeable feature.

“Bullet?”

“Do I need to call the paramedics back here?” Vince asked. “You’re repeating me.”

“What bullet?”

“If only I’d seen it coming,” he said wistfully. “I could have turned my head a little, maybe got a nice razor line like you. Or maybe ended up with an eye patch. My ex-wife used to have a thing for pirates in the romance novels.”

“What happened?”

“The
Reader’s Digest
version: a junkie mugger with a cheap .22. That’s the thing about those small caliber handguns—what goes into the vic doesn’t always come out.”

“You’re walking around with a head full of lead?” Mendez said, incredulous.

“Explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

“Actually, yeah.”

“I’m officially on a medical leave.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Uh . . . because I don’t want anyone to know,” Vince said. “Call me paranoid, but I think people treat a guy different when they know he’s got a bullet in his head.”

“You should be dead.”

“Yeah. But I’m not,” he said with a shadow of the big white grin. “Life’s a funny old dog. Don’t take it for granted, kid.”

They were quiet for moment. A couple of county cruisers rolled past them into the back parking lot. Just another night at the SO now. The show was over.

“You really are going to quit, aren’t you?”

Vince nodded. “If I didn’t know it when I came out here, I know it now. I know it tonight.

“You don’t want to end up like old Frank, kid; just a hanger for a uniform,” he said. “Nothing means anything to you except the job. It’s who you are. It’s what you are. Been there, done that, time to go.

“Love what you do. Don’t get me wrong. Have passion for it. But don’t make it your only mistress.”

“What will you do?”

“I want to do some teaching, some consulting, a little recruiting for old time’s sake,” he said. “But I really want the wife and the life. And at the end of the day, I want a soft place to put my bullet-riddled head that isn’t a cheap pillow at a Holiday Inn. Time for a young hotshot like yourself to move in and for me to move on.”

“You think I could make it to Behavioral Sciences?”

“You’d have to put in some field time, but yeah. You’ve got a good head for it, Tony. I’d like to see you think about it, anyway.”

“I will.”

“You poaching my best detective, Vince?” Cal Dixon said, wandering over to take the last spot on the bench. Like Mendez, he had showered and changed clothes in the locker room, trading the uniform with Frank Farman’s blood on it for jeans and a sweater.

Vince spread his hands. “What can I say? I’m a son of a bitch. I want him to be all he can be.”

“I’ll let it slide,” Dixon said. “You saved my ass tonight.”

“You did your part. I’m just a loudmouth. The nuns used to kick my ass for running my mouth like that,” Vince said. He let a beat pass, then changed his tone. “I’m sorry about Frank.”

Dixon shook his head. “You think you know a guy . . .”

“You did,” Vince said. “Once. People change. Life changes them.”

“I just couldn’t see him doing the things that were done to those women.”

“Farman didn’t kill those women,” Vince said.

The men on either side of him sat up straight in shock, and said, “What?”

“Farman killed his wife. He wasn’t See-No-Evil.”

“But it all fits,” Mendez argued.

“Almost. But not quite.”

“But Vince, I saw what he did to his wife. She looked just like the others—”

“And why wouldn’t she?” he asked. “Frank knew the details of those cases.”

“You think he just pulled a copycat?” Dixon asked.

“My story of Frank Farman goes like this,” Vince said. “Last night Frank got drunk, he got mean, he beat his wife. Not for the first time, but this time it went wrong, and she died. But Frank’s a smart guy when he sobers up in the light of day. He knows he’s got a lot to lose. He figures he can make his wife’s death look like the other murders. Hang it on a real bad guy. It was an accident, anyhow, and he’ll never do another bad thing in his life, so why should he go to prison?

“He
can’t
go to prison, he’s Frank Farman, Chief Deputy. Four more years working up to his twenty, and he’s got a boatload of commendations. He should be sheriff one day, damn it. He’s worked his ass off for it.

“So he does a copycat job after the fact—glues her eyes and mouth shut, cuts her up. She’s dead already. It’s not like he’s hurting her.

“He’s keeping his cool at this point. He’s got to do what he’s got to do. It’s business now. He figures he’ll plant her someplace once it gets dark. Only Frank’s day goes from bad to worse, to worse still.

“His kid tries to kill someone, then fingers him for killing his wife. He never counted on that. The people he respects most—yourself, Sheriff—are already looking at him sideways on account of him writing up the Vickers girl, and the business with the finger. Above anything else that’s happened to Frank, he can’t take that: tarnish on his image. He’s all about the image.

“So now he’s starting to fray around the edges. He’s not a killer by nature, so that’s weighing on him. He can’t stand people thinking he’s a bad cop, he’s a bad father. He goes home. He starts drinking. Then Child Protective Services pays a visit because Anne Navarre called them yesterday and reported him for possible abuse. More tarnish on the armor.

“Life’s all bad now for Frank. The wheels are coming off the tracks and he can’t stop the train. In his mind he’s done everything right—except for accidentally killing the missus—and he wants someone to take the blame.”

“Me,” Dixon said.

“You,” Vince said. “You should have trusted him. You should have taken him at his word. You took him off the task force. That’s when things started going wrong. Must be your fault. And here we are.”

Dixon looked at him. “You have all of that going on in your head?”

“All that and a bullet,” Mendez said.

“Frank wasn’t the bogeyman,” Vince said. “He was a guy that was wound too tight and he blew apart. Plain and simple. And I’ll bet I can prove it,” he said, pushing to his feet. “Where did you send Mrs. Farman’s body?”

The bodies had been taken to Orrison Funeral Home: both Farmans, Mr. and Mrs. Vince figured it was a safe bet the funeral home had never had a more macabre tableau laid out in their embalming room.

Sharon Farman’s body bag was opened, and Vince steeled himself against the violence that had been done to her both before and after her death.

“I only want you to look at the cutting wounds,” Vince said. “Look at the placement of the wounds, the length, the depth, the way the edges look.”

He had brought along his Polaroids from the Lisa Warwick autopsy. Also his drawing of the placement of Lisa Warwick’s wounds, and the sketch he had made earlier that evening of Karly Vickers’s identical wounds. Each mark was precisely placed, precisely sized.

Now he made a sketch of Sharon Farman’s wounds on the simple human outline on another one of his forms. When he had finished, he laid out everything on a clean stainless steel embalming table, placing the drawings side by side by side.

None of them spoke as they studied the sketches: two exact matches, one sloppy forgery. The cutting wounds on Sharon Farman varied in length and depth. The placement didn’t match the other victims. The wounds appeared random rather than deliberate.

“Frank Farman didn’t kill those women,” Vince said. “These cuts made on Warwick and Vickers mean something specific to the perpetrator. He makes them where and how he makes them for a reason. Sharon Farman is just hacked up.”

Mendez continued to stare at the sketches, seeing something more than what Vince had seen after staring at them for hours on end. He had looked for some kind of message in the placement of the wounds, in the length of the wounds, in the depth of the wounds. They meant something to their killer, but he still wasn’t sure what.

Mendez bummed a pen off his boss and connected the wounds one to the next, to the next. First on the drawing of Lisa Warwick, then on Karly Vickers.

It took some imagination, but the pattern was there: long legs, long neck, long head . . . and two wings.

“It’s a bird,” Dixon said.

The rush of realization went through Vince, but he let Mendez say it.

“It’s a crane.”

Peter Crane.

“Dr. Crane,” Anne said, surprised to see him, but not that surprised. She had just been thinking about him. She had spent the evening with him. It wasn’t so strange he would show up at her door, she rationalized.

He smiled sheepishly. “Anne, I’m so sorry to bother you.”

“No, no, not a problem.”

Her mother had raised her to welcome guests, to be courteous. Of course she stepped back from the door, and allowed him to come in. Why wouldn’t she? He had been her hero earlier in the evening.

“Can I offer you something to drink?” Hostess with the most-est. That had been her mother’s role.

“No, thank you,” he said. “I don’t want to interrupt your evening more than I already have. What a lovely home you have. Is it original?”

Charming, disarming. Half the women in town would have killed to have him in their foyers.

“Nineteen thirty-three,” she said. “Renovated, of course.”

“But very true to the architecture,” he said, looking around, taking in the Craftsman detail . . . and seeing that she was alone.

“What can I do for you, Dr. Crane?”

Again the self-deprecating smile. Very Tom Selleck without the mustache. “This is a little awkward, but it’s about the gift Tommy gave you.”

“Oh?” The necklace she had tucked in her pants pocket before she opened the door. The necklace only graduates of the Thomas Center program owned.

Peter Crane had been the last person to see Karly Vickers before she disappeared.

“You can’t possibly think he’s involved,” she said to Vince. “He’s the nicest man.”

“Have you, by any chance, opened it?”

Something was not quite right. Anne couldn’t have put her finger on it. She couldn’t have described the feeling in a way that wouldn’t have sounded silly.

Without exactly knowing why, she opened her mouth and lied. “No, not yet. I haven’t. Is there a problem?”

He stepped a little farther into the house, very casually taking it all in.

“I’m afraid I have to ask for it back,” he said, perfectly apologetic, and yet goose bumps chased down her arms. “Tommy . . . misunderstood . . .”

“No, really, you don’t have to explain,” Anne said, her heart tripping over itself. “I left the box in the kitchen. I’ll just go get it.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said, his gaze sliding to the right, toward the living room, where the contents of her purse lay scattered on the big leather ottoman in the middle of the room . . .

“Not a problem.”

. . . with the small box and scraps of wrapping paper strewn over the pile . . .

“I’ll just go get it,” Anne said.

Her heart was beating like a drum in her chest as she turned and walked toward the kitchen. She would go through the swinging door and just keep on going. Her car keys were on the kitchen counter by the phone. She would pick them up and be out the back door. Her car was parked in the driveway.

Even with the alarms sounding in her head, there was still a part of her that told her she was overreacting, that she was just spooked by everything that had happened that evening . . .

She remembered what Vince had said to her about trusting those instincts.

Her step quickened just slightly as she pushed open the heavy, swinging door.

One word exploded in her brain:
RUN
.

Even as she bolted, he was charging through the door, slamming it back against the wall as he closed the distance between them.

Anne tried to grab for her car keys, her hand just brushing them, sending them skittering down the counter and onto the floor.

Peter Crane swatted at her with one hand, trying to catch hold of her shoulder. Anne dodged away, already reaching for the back door, for the deadbolt. She had locked it to keep intruders out, not to trap herself in.