Deeper Than The Dead (45 page)

“Oh, well, Saturday nights I usually take the Concorde to Paris for dinner, then pop over to Monte Carlo for a little gambling.”

“Our tax dollars at work,” Mendez said.

“Seriously.”

“Seriously?” Vince thought back over the last year. Most of his Saturday nights had been spent in bed, recuperating. And before that? “Pretty much the same thing we’re doing here.”

“That’s grim, man.”

“I don’t have a wife. I don’t have a life. I’m the perfect man for the job. How about you, Detective Hicks?”

“The second Saturday of the month is jackpot calf roping at the rodeo grounds. I’m usually winning me some money right about now.”

“How about you, Tony?” Vince asked.

“Nothing special.”

“Sign that man up for the
FBI
.”

“Watch out, old man,” Mendez teased. “I’ll take your job.”

“You’re welcome to it, junior. I’ve done my time. I’m about ready to move on.”

“You? Quit the Bureau? No way, man. You’re a freaking legend.”

“I’ll trade places with you. I’ll move here and live the good life. You head east and take up the mantle.”

“If it was that easy . . .”

“You’d have to pay some dues, but hell, you’re young—as you keep reminding me.”

As if to punctuate the fact, his brain began to throb. He was about done in for the day, and odds were the pizza wasn’t going to taste as good the second time around. He dug in his jacket pocket for the pill bottle.

Antinausea. Antiseizure. Antipain.

He tossed them back and washed them down with cold coffee.

“You pop those things like breath mints,” Mendez said. “What are they?”

“Breath mints.”

“Bullshit.”

“Better living through chemistry,” Vince said, shrugging off the topic of his health. “What have you found out about the traffic stops?”

“If Frank got a dollar for every ticket he wrote, he’d be driving a new Cadillac every year,” Hamilton said. “But we all knew that.”

“Complaints filed against him?”

“A few.”

“By women?”

“Most of them.”

“Allegations of inappropriate conduct?”

“Several,” the detective said, flipping through Farman’s personnel file. “‘He’s rude, he’s condescending, he’s a bully, he’s a chauvinist, he’s a sexist, he made me feel uncomfortable, he made a remark about my ass.’”

“He likes to push women around,” Vince said. “Any sign of Mrs. Farman yet?”

“No. We called everyone in her address book. No one has seen or heard from her.”

“Wouldn’t that be a hell of a deal, if Frank turned out to be See-No-Evil?” Hamilton said.

“If Frank was See-No-Evil,” Vince said, “the last thing I would expect him to do would be to kill his wife. This killer is getting off on the fact that no one suspects him.”

“What about his need for publicity?” Mendez asked.

“He’s getting plenty. ‘Investigators Baffled in Oak Knoll Murders.’ ‘Serial Killer Stumps Sheriff’s Department.’” He held his hands up to frame the imaginary headlines.

“Meanwhile, he’s walking around like the guy next door,” Vince said. “He’s probably bringing up the case to his neighbors, talking about it over coffee with business associates. He’s loving it. Everybody looks at him and sees the perfect citizen, the perfect husband, the perfect family man, whatever. He’s not going to kill his wife.”

“Maybe he just lost control,” Mendez ventured. “Bundy’s killings at the Chi Omega house in Tallahassee, Florida, at the end of his career. He lost it. Took a stupid amount of risk. Killed in a frenzy. Kemper’s last victim, the motivation for all of his murders: his mother. He killed her symbolically over and over, until he finally did it for real.”

“Then why hasn’t anybody found Sharon Farman?” Vince asked. “If your theory holds, he should have planted her right out in front of the building. His last grand gesture. Ed Kemper’s mother was a ball-busting man hater who ragged on him so incessantly that his final act of revenge was to shove her larynx down the garbage disposal.

“Now, I haven’t met Mrs. Farman,” he said, “but let me take a shot in the dark here, based on what I know of her husband.

“She’s on the small side. The looks are showing age because she’s a nervous sort. Smokes—maybe secretly. Drinks—but definitely on the sly. Everything is neat and tidy: The house is neat and tidy, she’s neat and tidy, she has a neat and tidy job working for a neat and tidy man in a position of authority. She needs to know her place, and she’s happy to stay in it.

“How am I doing so far?” he asked.

“You’re a fucking freak, man,” Hamilton said.

“Women like Sharon Farman get beaten to death by their bully asshole husbands every day of the week,” Vince said. “But they aren’t the women that drive men out of their homes to kill other women.”

“Janet Crane is,” Mendez said.

“She sure as hell could drive me to homicide,” Vince said. “What do you know about Peter Crane tonight that you didn’t know this afternoon?”

“I spoke to a cop in Ventura about Dr. Crane’s lady friend,” Hicks said. “She’s known for her special talents.”

“S and M?” Mendez guessed.

“Yep.”

“But I don’t think See-No-Evil would be paying for rough sex,” he said.

Vince arched a brow. “Why not?”

“Because it wouldn’t excite him anymore. Maybe playing pretend was fine for a while, but now he’s had a taste of the real thing. He doesn’t want fake fear when he can have the real deal. It’s not enough to pretend to strangle a woman now that he’s choked the life out of a couple.”

“Good theory. Very good,” Vince said, pleased with his protégé. “Let’s go back to something Crane said this afternoon when you were interviewing him.”

Mendez went to the TV/
VCR
and put in the tape of the Crane interview. Vince grabbed the remote and skipped through most of it.

Crane: “. . . a married man.”

Mendez: “He should have thought about that before he unzipped his pants.”

Crane: “I’m really not comfortable talking about this.”

Mendez: “You said Steve is a complicated guy. In what way? He’s your friend, man. Tell me about him.”

Crane: “I just meant that Steve is very driven. He’s passionate about the work he does for the center. Steve comes from a tough background—single mom, not much money, desperate times—”

“You need to know more about that,” Vince said, hitting the Pause button. “Desperate times and a single mom could add up to something.”

“His motivation for working for the rights of disadvantaged women,” Hamilton said.

“Or his unhealthy attraction to disadvantaged women,” Vince said. “For every good man drawn to the priesthood, there’s a pedophile two confessionals down. Dig into Morgan’s background—and Crane’s.”

Typical for a beautiful autumn Saturday night, the plaza and the streets branching off it were full of people dining, socializing, listening to music. Anne let her mind wander as she walked to her car in one of the public lots. She allowed herself the girlish luxury of wondering about the man she was attracted to. Where was he? What was he doing? Was he thinking about her?

She chided herself for being foolish. The man she was attracted to was hunting a serial killer, not sitting around daydreaming about her.

But maybe later.

She thought back to the afternoon when they had had a few moments together alone.

“How are you feeling about last night?” he asked.

She felt the blush that swept across her cheeks.

“It’s a little late to be shy,” he said, chuckling. “Regrets?”

“No,” she said without hesitation. “I haven’t quite figured that out, but no.”

“Good.”

She still hadn’t quite figured it out. But maybe there was nothing
to
figure out. Maybe she was just a grown woman enjoying the attention of a man. Maybe she didn’t need a reason or an agenda. And if she was supposed to be wondering where it would go . . . she wasn’t.

She pulled out of the parking lot and headed down Sycamore.

He had said he would probably be working late, but if it wasn’t too late when he hung it up, could he stop by?

Yes. Especially after the day she had had, yes. She was so tired. Tired in her soul from the things she had seen this past week. No one would ever have accused her of being Pollyanna, but she had certainly started out the week with a much sunnier opinion of the world than she had five days later. She felt like her optimism had been dragged down a gravel road behind a truck.

It would have felt very good to slip into Vince’s embrace and let him tell her it would all be fine, that he would take care of her. Definitely politically incorrect for a young, single, career-minded woman to think, but there it was. She had been strong a long time. Someone else could be strong on her behalf every once in a while.

She turned onto Via Colinas and noticed the car behind her turn as well. She turned on Rojas. It turned again.

Her heart picked up a beat. She was no longer downtown. She was on quiet residential streets. People were inside their homes, watching television—just as they would be on her block when she pulled into her driveway and had to walk to her door alone.

She could drive straight to the sheriff’s office, she thought, uneasy. As soon as the thought crossed her mind, red and blue lights came on behind her.

Groaning, she pulled over. She had probably forgotten to signal at one of those turns. That was what she got for letting her mind wander—her second traffic citation in a week.

She rolled her window down and reached for her purse.

“License, registration, and proof of insurance.”

The voice came from behind a ball of blinding white light and sent an instant burst of fear through her.

Frank Farman.

Tommy felt very satisfied with himself as he and his dad cut through the dental office to their car parked in back. He felt very grown up having had a dinner meeting, like his mother was always having.

“That was fun, huh, Sport?” his dad asked.

“Yep.”

“And you understand what Miss Navarre was saying about asking you those questions, right? She didn’t mean anything bad by it.”

Tommy nodded his head, but reserved comment. He understood that Miss Navarre hadn’t meant anything bad, but he was still mad at Detective Mendez and the
FBI
man for what they had said to his mom the night before. They sounded like they meant every word of what they said, and what they said was that they thought his father might be a killer. It was their job to be suspicious, but it still made Tommy mad. This was probably one of those things he would automatically understand when he got older—or that’s what grown-ups would tell him, at least.

“That was very nice of you to give Miss Navarre a gift,” his father said. “What was it?”

“A necklace.”

His father glanced over at him in the glow of the dashboard lights. “Where did you get a necklace? You never left the house today.”

Tommy made a face as he contemplated his confession. “Mom threw it away. She had one of her fits this morning and she threw it away. But it was pretty, and I figured she kind of owed Miss Navarre on account of she yelled at her in public last night, so it made sense to me to give the necklace to Miss Navarre. So I did.”

His father stared ahead at the road. “Your mother threw away a necklace?”

“She’s always throwing stuff away. She shouldn’t have nice things if she doesn’t take better care of them,” Tommy said.

Now he was feeling a little guilty about it, though. He knew he shouldn’t get mad at his mother for things she did when she was upset. She couldn’t help herself when she got that way. He was supposed to feel badly for her, not give her stuff away.

“Did I do something bad?” he asked.

“No, son. You meant well,” his father said.

“It’s the thought that counts,” Tommy said. That was another thing adults always said that never quite made sense to him. But it sounded good.

Anne handed her papers and license out the window to Frank Farman.

“What are the charges, Deputy?”

“I ask the questions here,” he said. “But then that’s always your problem, isn’t it, Miss Navarre? You never know when to keep your mouth shut.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not against the law.”

“Get out of the car,” Farman ordered.

“No.” Her response was automatic.

Farman yanked open the Volkswagen’s door. “Get out of the car. Your careless driving and belligerent attitude are leading me to believe you might be intoxicated. You can get out of the vehicle or I can remove you from the vehicle and place you under arrest.”

Then he would put her in the back of his squad car and . . . what? She would never be seen again? The scene was fresh in her mind: Dennis saying, “He killed her,” and Anne turning to see Frank Farman’s face in the window.

Shaking inside, she got out of the car. Farman shined his flashlight in her eyes.

“You called Child Protective Services on me,” he said. “You filed a report.”

“It doesn’t mean much now,” Anne said, “in view of what happened today.”

“That goes in my record,” he said. “You embarrassed me and put something in my record that could affect my chances at promotion.”

Anne didn’t know what to say.
Are you delusional?
seemed a poor choice. His wife was missing. His son had attempted murder. He was worried about a notation on his record impacting his career prospects.

“You embarrassed me,” he said. “Now I embarrass you. Stand with your arms straight out at your sides. How will a
DUI
charge go over at school, Miss Navarre?”

“I’m not intoxicated.”

“Touch the tip of your nose with your left finger.”

As she did, he reached out and shoved her sideways so hard she stumbled.

“That doesn’t look good,” Farman said. “Putting one foot directly in front the other, I want you to walk in a straight line away from me.”

“You’ve had your fun, Deputy,” Anne said, attempting to maintain some kind of control over the situation. “You won’t get a positive breathalyzer test from me. If you set out to frighten me, you’ve succeeded.”