Deeper Than The Dead (50 page)

“I’m sorry, Sheriff,” she said. “What is this about?”

“We need to speak to Peter,” Dixon repeated.

“What about?”

“Is he home?”

“No, he isn’t.” She squinted to look past him at the
SWAT
commander standing in her driveway. “I want to know what this is about. Has something happened? Is Peter in some kind of trouble?”

“We have reason to believe he abducted a woman tonight, ma’am,” Mendez said.

“That’s insane!”

“Where is he?” Dixon asked.

Vince hung back, not trusting himself to speak. Renowned for his patience in interrogations, now he would have backed Janet Crane up against a wall and wrung the truth out of her with his bare hands.

She looked around nervously, as if she were hoping her husband might pop up out of a shrub. “
I—I
don’t know.”

Dixon’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean, you don’t know? It’s the middle of the night. Where’s your husband?”

“He went out,” she said.

“
Out
is not a place, Janet,” Dixon said impatiently. “We can step inside and discuss this further, or you can come down to headquarters with us and we can do it there. It’s your choice.”

She seemed genuinely rattled, stepping back into the front hall of her lovely home, allowing them access. The four of them moved almost as a unit into the house and took positions in a loose semicircle around her.

“Peter is sometimes restless at night,” she said. “He likes to go for drives.”

“In the middle of the night,” Dixon said.

“Are these drives related in any way to his fictitious Friday night card games, Mrs. Crane?” Vince asked. “Say, in your imagination?”

“I don’t know what you want from me!” she snapped. “I’ve told you everything I know.”

“I don’t think so, ma’am,” Mendez said. “As a licensed real estate agent you have access to a master lock-box key, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And that key will open any lock box on any listed piece of property, allowing you access to the keys to those properties. Is that correct?”

“Yes, but—”

“Do you keep your key here?” Hicks asked.

“Not as a rule, no,” she said, her attention bouncing from one of them to another to another.

“But . . . ?” Dixon said.

“But I had to show some property late in the day today, and—”

The sheriff held up a hand to cut her off. “Janet. A woman has been abducted. Her life is in jeopardy. We don’t want to hear about your day. Do you have the key? Can you produce the key and show it to us? Now?”

She went to a drawer in an antique painted cabinet that stood near the front door, looking like she expected to reach in and come out with the key, but that didn’t happen. She dug through the drawer, frowning.

“Do you have it or not?” Dixon prodded.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “It should be here. I must have left it in my purse.”

“Jesus Christ,” Vince growled. “Slap the cuffs on her and bring her as an accessory.”

“You can’t arrest me! I haven’t done anything!”

“No, you haven’t,” Vince said, stepping toward her. “You know the big thing you haven’t done? You haven’t once asked us who the abducted woman is. Don’t you find that a little strange, Detective Mendez?”

“Unless she already knows the name,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know anything about it!” she said. “And I don’t believe you can think Peter would know anything about it, either!”

“Peter, who’s taking an imaginary drive in the dead of night with your lock-box key in his pocket?” Vince asked, the volume of his voice increasing with every word. “Maybe he’s having an imaginary tea party with Anne Navarre. What do you think, Janet?”

She had to be thinking she wished he would drop dead before her eyes, but she was so flustered, she seemed not to be able to respond at all.

“Where’s the boy?” Vince asked the room at large. “Maybe he knows where his father goes when he can’t stand to be in the house with this woman anymore.”

Janet gasped her outrage and drew breath to fire something back at him.

“Where’s your son, Janet?” Dixon asked.

“He’s in bed!”

Mendez took a couple of steps toward the staircase and called out, “Hey, Tommy!”

“Don’t shout in my home!” Janet Crane shouted at him. She pushed past him and started up the stairs. “I won’t have you frighten my son.”

“Hey, Tommy!” Mendez called again.

Peter Crane’s wife disappeared into the second story of her home. Vince jammed his hands at his waist and paced. Every minute that ticked past . . .

He knew exactly what Peter Crane had done to his victims. He died inside again and again as he thought of Karly Vickers lying blind, deaf, and mutilated in a hospital bed.

“Tommy?” Janet Crane’s voice called out. “Tommy? Tommy, answer me!”

Mendez started up the stairs. Janet ran down to the landing, paper white and breathing hard.

“He’s gone! My son is gone! Oh my God! My son is missing!”

He wanted control. He needed a plan. None of this had been a plan. All of it was going wrong.

He would never have chosen the teacher as a victim. She would fight. She had. Now his nose was broken and his mouth was bleeding. He wouldn’t be able to hide that.

He hadn’t been able to subdue her in his usual way. The deviation from routine would lead to mistakes. It already had. He needed to get the necklace, first and foremost, but because she had fought him and it had taken so much more effort to control her, he had forgotten about the damn thing.

Where was it? In her house? Who would find it? He couldn’t know that she hadn’t told someone about it already. But that wouldn’t have mattered if he had recovered it. Now what would he do? He couldn’t go back there.

Fuck, fuck, fuck
.

He had been raised to always have a plan, to keep an orderly mind. These principles had been drilled into him, beaten into him, day after day after day. He always had a plan, and he always took his time. And he never made a mistake.

Everything about this clusterfuck was a mistake: the teacher
and
the boy.

The boy.

What the hell could he do about the boy?

Everything had been under control. Every component of his life had been in its assigned compartment. Nothing overlapped.

What the hell would he do about the boy?

The car was going slowly now. He would stop soon, Anne suspected. Time would run out. She wondered if Vince would have stopped by the house, or if he would have been too exhausted after the ordeal at the sheriff’s office. The difference would be either people looking for her or no one missing her.

Where would they look? How would they find her?

Half-buried in the ground?

She thought about dinner, about the Peter Crane who smiled and laughed with his son. So charming, so easy to be with. She thought of him stopping to come to her rescue when she thought Frank Farman might hurt her. How could he do that, then turn around and do this? How could that man be this monster?

The car slowed again and turned from a smooth road to a rougher one. He would stop soon. He would try to kill her. He had all the control.

She needed a plan.

“I can’t believe you’re asking me these questions, making these allegations when my son is missing!” Janet Crane shouted.

“The alert has gone out to all personnel—county and state,” Cal Dixon assured her. “And to the media. Everyone will be looking for Peter’s car. Where would Peter go?”

“Why do you think Peter took Tommy? Why would he take Tommy? That doesn’t make any sense! Peter is a
GOOD
MAN!”

Mendez shook his head as he watched the monitor. “Could she really be that ignorant?”

Vince watched her, studied her. “People are as ignorant as they want to be. Do you think that woman wants to know that her husband is a monster? Do you think she wants to own that? She’ll go to her grave saying he’s a good man if we don’t prove otherwise beyond all doubt.”

He walked out of the room with a file folder under his arm, went across the hall, and knocked on the door. Dixon came out.

“Let me come in for minute.”

“You think that’s a good idea?” Dixon asked. “Can you keep your cool?”

“I can do what I need to do,” Vince said quietly. “I’m in and out. You stay with her.”

“Okay.”

Vince walked into the room and placed his file folder on the table. Janet Crane glared at him. She was on her feet, arms crossed.

“Please have a seat, Mrs. Crane,” he said, his tone quiet, civil, formal, respectful.

She hesitated.

“Please,” he repeated in the same quiet tone.

Janet Crane sat. Perched might have been a better word—her back straight, her arms still crossed.

“I apologize for my outburst earlier,” he said, taking a seat himself. “I’ve been belligerent and disrespectful to you, and I apologize for that. I let my emotions get the better of me. I’m sure you can appreciate that now, as you have to deal with the emotions of not knowing where your son is.”

She lifted her chin like a queen and looked him in the eye. “I am
choking
on my emotions right now.”

Vince nodded, looking down. “I know. Over my years in the Bureau, I’ve sat with many parents of missing children. It’s a terrible thing to know someone you care about is out of your sight, out of your influence.

“I’m quite fond of Miss Navarre,” he admitted. “I’m very upset that she’s missing—and that your son, Tommy, is missing. 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.”

“Not the Peter you know,” Vince said. “The Peter you know is a fine, upstanding family man. A really nice guy. I’ve met him, spoken with him. Heck of a nice guy.”

“Yes.”

He nodded earnestly, agreeing with her. “Yes. But that’s not who we’re talking about now, Mrs. Crane. We’re not talking about your husband. The man we’re talking about—you don’t know him. You’ve never met him. Your son doesn’t know him.”

She said nothing. The lack of response in and of itself spoke volumes.

“The man we’re talking about did this,” Vince said.

From the file folder he removed a full-body photograph of Lisa Warwick taken at autopsy, which he placed on the table in front of Janet Crane.

She didn’t look away, but every drop of color drained from her face, and her eyes seemed to double in size, the white showing all the way around. Her whole body began to jerk and shake.

“The man who did this,” Vince said in the same calm, measured tone. “
Not
your husband. The man who did this has your son. If you have any idea at all where that man might have gone, please tell Sheriff Dixon. Thank you, and please excuse me, Mrs. Crane.”

Vince walked out of the room with the same calm. He walked down the hall to the men’s room and went in. He just made it into a stall before his legs buckled under him and he vomited until he nearly blacked out.

The man who did those terrible things to Lisa Warwick, and to Julie Paulson, and to Karly Vickers, and to Christ knew how many others—
that
man had absolute control of the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

The boy had finally stopped crying. The loud sobs he had started with had subsided to a constant, almost whispered crying that seemed to go on and on. Finally, silence. Peaceful silence.

He would kill the boy first. That was the kindest thing he could do. He would hold him, comfort him, and suffocate him with the blanket he was lying on.

It would be over quickly. The boy would struggle hardest for the second and third minutes of the suffocation—while his brain was being starved of oxygen and panic set in—but he would quickly lose consciousness, and that would be all. It would be over.

In another part of his mind, in another self, he would be devastated. But there was no other choice to be made.

This meant his own life would now change forever, and he was quite angry about that. He would lose everything he had worked so hard to build. If only everything had simply gone on according to plan. Law enforcement had nothing on him with regards to the other women. Nothing. He knew that because he had made certain of it. Even though he signed his work, they had no concrete forensic evidence linking him to any crime.

A slice of moon cast a smoky glow over the country landscape of tree-studded rolling hills. He turned off the dirt road and into the field, gaining access to the property through the same open gate he had come through before. No one would be watching it. No one would think he would use it again.

Now that the search for the last woman was over, the field had been cleared of the tents that had offered shade and shelter for the volunteers and backgrounds for the TV newspeople. They would all be back here in a day or two, but no one was watching Gordon Sells’s field of junkers tonight.

He pulled the Jaguar in at the end of the back row. He would leave it here with the bodies in it, then hotwire something that could get him to Mexico.

Tommy had stopped crying. The car sat idling, exhaust fumes leaching up into the trunk.

Anne was dizzy and nauseous on fumes and fear and from struggling against her bonds as the car rose and fell over a road she couldn’t see.

She had managed by twisting and squirming to finally get her hands free of the belt Crane had bound her with. Feeling around inside the trunk, she had found a couple of potential weapons. She had to think about how and when to try to use them. She would probably have only one chance. If she tried and failed . . .

Why wasn’t he doing something? Why hadn’t he turned the car off?

Maybe they were in a closed building and this was his plan: to gas them.

Or maybe she wasn’t his priority.

Tommy.

Instantly Anne began to kick and scream and thrash. If he would just open the damn trunk . . .

Tommy pretended to be asleep. He had had lots of practice at that, fooling his parents on a regular basis. Now he would have to fool Shadow Man, who had opened the door and stood staring at him. Tommy could feel the monster’s eyes on him. If he had dared to look, they probably glowed red in the dark night.