Deeper Than The Dead (3 page)

Through one window Anne could see Janet Crane in a fuchsia suit, pacing, speaking into a portable phone.

Tommy got out of the car and lingered by the door. Anne reached out her hand to him, and he took it. He hung on a little too tightly as they went up the sidewalk together.

The door flew open before they made it to the front steps. Janet Crane’s eyes were a little too wide, the white showing all around the pupils.

“Where have you been?” she demanded, her fierce look on Tommy. “I have been out of my mind trying to find you! You knew you had a piano lesson—”

“Mrs. Crane—,” Anne started.

“Don’t you have any consideration for Mr. England’s time? For
my
time?”

“Mrs. Crane,” Anne said more firmly. “Didn’t you get my message?”

Janet Crane looked at her as if she had only just appeared. “Message? What message? I haven’t listened to the messages. I’ve been trying to find my son.”

“Could we step inside, please?” Anne asked.

Tommy’s mother took a deliberate breath and calmed herself. “Of course. I’m so sorry. Please come in, Miss Navarre.”

Tommy still clung to Anne’s hand as they went into the foyer. His eyes were on the Mexican tile floor. No warm hugs from Mom. No concern for his welfare. Concern for the piano teacher.

Anne leaned down beside him. “Tommy, why don’t you go wash up while I talk to your mom?”

He went across the hall and disappeared into a powder room with wildly colored parrots splashed across the yellow wallpaper.

“I’m sorry,” Janet Crane said. “I’ve been out of my mind with worry. It isn’t like Tommy to miss a piano lesson. He’s always very punctual.”

As Anne was sure his mother was, as well. Punctual, buttoned up in her fuchsia suit with the big shoulder pads and crisp peplum. Her dark hair was bobbed, puffed up, and spritzed hard. The word “brittle” came to mind. The parent-teacher conference persona had cracked a little under the stress . . . of her son missing a piano lesson.

Anne went through the story of the kids finding the body in the park, Tommy having actually fallen directly on the grave.

Janet Crane’s eyes showed a lot of white again. “Oh my God!”

She turned abruptly and walked into a
Better Homes and Gardens
living room, the heels of her pink pumps click-clacking on the tile. She perched herself on the edge of a sofa cushion. Her eyes darted around the room as if looking for help.

“I think Tommy is a little in shock,” Anne said. “He’s hardly said anything since it happened.”

“
I-I-I
don’t know what to do,” his mother announced. “Should I call a doctor?”

“He doesn’t seem to be physically injured, but you may want to get him some counseling.”

“Why didn’t someone call me?” she asked, trying to work up some indignation. She seemed more comfortable with anger than with concern. “Why didn’t Principal Garnett call? Why isn’t he here?”

“Mr. Garnett was out today.”

Tommy came to the doorway. His face and arms were clean, showing off the scrapes and scratches that had resulted from his tumble. He had wet and combed his brown hair as neatly as he could considering a couple of cowlicks. But his clothes were still dirty, and there was a tear in the knee of his jeans. Anne wondered if he would be allowed to sit on the furniture.

“Tommy!” his mother said, going to him. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea what happened.”

Anne watched her touch her son hesitantly, as if she were afraid of catching something from him as she examined his wounds.

Through the front window Anne watched a sleek, dark Jaguar pull into the drive beside her little red Volkswagen. Peter Crane got out and walked toward the house.

He was a handsome man, medium height, lean, well-dressed in dark slacks, a shirt and tie. He called out cheerfully as he came in the front door.

Sara Morgan hadn’t managed to catch him at the office, Anne thought.

Tommy turned abruptly away from his mother and went to his dad, hugging him around the waist. Peter Crane looked a little confused. His wife went into the foyer and told him what had happened.

Anne watched the shock cross his face.

“It was a terrible thing to see,” she said, moving into the doorway.

“Miss Navarre brought Tommy home,” Janet Crane said.

“You were there?” he asked.

“I went to the park as soon as I heard what had happened.”

“Oh my God,” he said.

“I’m going to go call Mr. England,” his wife said. “To let him know why Tommy didn’t make it to his lesson.”

She walked away and disappeared into the interior of the home, heels clacking.

“Things like this don’t happen here,” he said.

Anne had been born and raised in Oak Knoll, a town of twenty thousand (twenty-three when the college kids were in residence). It was a civilized, upscale town nearly two hours removed from Los Angeles. Home to a prestigious private college, the population tended to consist of well-educated professional people, academics, artists. Crime here ran along the lines of small-time drug deals, petty theft, and vandalism, not murder, not women buried in the park.

“Do they know who the woman is? Do they know what happened to her?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Anne said. “I don’t know what to think.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Well, thank you, Miss Navarre, for bringing Tommy home. We appreciate your dedication to the kids.”

“If I can help in any way, please don’t hesitate to call,” Anne said. “You have my number.”

She leaned down to Tommy’s level. “That goes for you, too, Tommy. You can call me anytime if you need to talk about what happened. Try to get some rest tonight.”

Her mother’s cure for everything: rest. Bad day at school? Get some rest. Dumped by a boyfriend? Get some rest. Dying of cancer? Get some rest.

In all her life Anne had to say rest had never solved anything. It was just something to say when there was nothing adequate to take its place, something to do when unconsciousness was the best option available.

As she backed out of the driveway and turned for home, she hoped Tommy would have better luck with the concept than she ever had.

“This is the third victim in two years.”

“It’s the second.”

“In our jurisdiction. The second vic was in the next county, but it’s the same perp. Same MO, same signature.”

“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.

“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.