Deeper Than The Dead (49 page)

He caught a handful of her hair and yanked her back toward him. Anne swung backward with an elbow, connecting with some ribs, earning a guttural sound from deep in his belly. She jabbed him again, got loose, grabbed the tea kettle off the stove, turned and hit him with it upside the head as hard as she could.

Crane’s head snapped to the left, blood spraying from his nose onto the white cabinetry.

Anne lunged for the back door, turned the lock, pulled it open, tried to throw herself through it. Instead the tremendous force of his body hit her from behind and she went down onto the porch floor, face-first, her arms trapped at her sides as he tackled her.

The air left her lungs in a painful gust. Stars burst before her eyes. But she kept her legs moving, kicking, trying to push herself out from under him. Squirming, twisting, she gained an inch, got one arm free, grabbed for whatever she could.

Her fingers closed on a small concrete relic, a painted green frog a little bigger than her fist. Her other arm came free. She pulled herself out from under him, twisted over.

In that split second she saw his face, she knew what it was. Even in the dim yellow light of the back porch she recognized the thing that wasn’t quite right. His eyes—as flat and cold as coins. His face was no longer handsome. It was the face of a monster.

She slammed him in the jaw with the frog.

He punched her full in the mouth, and her consciousness dimmed.

He held her down with a knee on her chest, his left hand pressing down on her throat, choking her. He fished for something with his right hand in his jacket pocket and came out with a small tube.

The glue.

Anne doubled her efforts, thrashing, scratching, snapping her head from side to side to keep from letting him get it into her eyes. She slapped the tube of glue from his hand and heard it land away from them on the porch floor.

His knee slipped from her chest. Her knee came up and connected with his groin. His body contracted in on itself, and Anne rolled out from under him.

She half ran, half fell down the porch steps, hit the lawn on all fours and kept scrambling. If she could get around the corner of the house—If she could make it to the neighbor’s—If someone would drive by—

“Fucking bitch!”

The words were harsh and hot on the back of her neck as Crane caught her and slammed her into the side of the house. She tried to scream, and couldn’t, the sound catching dry and raw in her throat. He punched her in the stomach and she doubled over.

Somewhere in the dim reaches in the back of her mind, she was aware they were right below her father’s bedroom window. If she could just make a sound—If he could hear her enough to wake up—

But she couldn’t and he didn’t.

And then it was too late.

Tommy pulled the blanket off his head, sat up, and looked around with no idea where he was. It had taken no more than ten minutes to get there, but he didn’t know what direction they had headed once they left his block.

He had traded his pajamas for sweatpants and a sweatshirt. And he wore socks and his purple snowboarding hat from their winter vacation in Aspen because it was cold. And while his parents were still arguing, he took a blanket and crept downstairs and out of the house. He crawled into the backseat of his father’s car and made a nest for himself on the floor, and covered himself up.

It hadn’t been long before his father had gotten into the car and started driving.

Once the car stopped, Tommy waited and counted to one hundred after his dad got out of the car before he even thought about sitting up.

The car was parked on a side street in an older neighborhood with a lot of trees. It was very quiet and very dark.

He hadn’t thought about getting afraid. He hadn’t thought about what he would do when his dad got out of the car. Somehow he hadn’t thought of anything beyond tagging along. Tommy didn’t want to be left behind again to deal with his mother in the aftermath of another fight. He and his dad were partners, buddies, heroes together. They had saved Miss Navarre. Who knew what else they might accomplish?

If only his dad would come back to the car.

Suddenly a dark figure emerged from behind a wall of oleander that seemed to glow silver in the moonlight. Fear shot through Tommy as the figure advanced toward the car. A tall, menacing, shadow figure, carrying something . . . a bundle of something . . .

Tommy’s heart was in his throat. He crouched low, pulling the dark blanket over his head, only his eyes exposed as he peered out at the apparition coming toward him. He could hear his pulse in his ears as the Shadow Man drew closer.

He wished his dad would come back. What if the Shadow Man tried to steal the car? With him in it?!

The doors were locked, he reminded himself. But what if Shadow Man had attacked his dad and got the keys? Tommy would have to save the day. But he was just a kid, and kids weren’t meant to be heroes all by themselves.

The black lace curtain of unconsciousness began to recede from Anne’s vision. He must have choked her. She thought she could still feel his hand around her windpipe even though he was carrying her.

As consciousness rushed back into her, adrenaline followed like a torrent of water from a burst dam. Her body jumped in his arms as if she had been shocked back to life, and automatically, Anne started to fight with what she could. He had somehow bound her hands to her sides, but her legs still worked and she started kicking.

Like a stunned fish coming to on the shore, she flopped and twisted, and Crane, taken by surprise, couldn’t hold her. Anne plunged from his hold, unable to break her fall, landing hard on one shoulder. Tucking herself into a ball as she hit the ground, she tried to roll up onto her knees. And from her knees, she tried to gain her feet.

Crane drove his knee into the middle of her back, and she went face-first hard into the back passenger door of his car. Her head bounced off the window and the black lace reappeared at the edges of her eyesight. Eyes stared back at her from the other side of the glass—wide, terrified eyes.

Tommy
.

The recognition was swift and brief. The look of shock on the boy’s face was absolute and terrible.

Then Crane grabbed her up by one hand in her hair and one on the belt he had tightened around her, and he dumped her into the trunk of his car and closed the lid as if she were nothing more important than a bag of golf clubs.

Tommy felt like a bomb had gone off in his chest. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t move. He didn’t know what to do. His stomach hurt. He thought he might be sick.

Shadow Man had Miss Navarre! He put her in the trunk!

Then there was the monster’s bloody face staring in at him—eyes dark and hard, mouth open, showing its fangs. They stared at each other for what seemed like an hour.

“Tommy!”

The Shadow Man knew his name! He pulled the car door open and reached in with talon-tipped hands.

“Tommy!”

“NO!!!” Tommy screamed at the top of his lungs.

Arms and legs scrambling, he shot backward like a crab to the other side of the car, grabbed the handle, and fell out the door. His feet hit the street and he ran.

He ran for his life. He ran like he was in a nightmare—his legs flying but not seeming to take him anywhere. And that fast, Shadow Man had hold of him, scooping him up off his feet like a bird of prey snatching up a rabbit and carrying it away.

“NOOO!!!” Tommy shouted, and he kicked and he hit.

Shadow Man ran back to his dad’s car, threw him into the backseat, slammed the door, and jumped behind the wheel. The door locks snapped down. He was trapped.

Vince turned down Anne’s street, hoping she hadn’t already turned out the lights and gone to bed. He didn’t want to scare her, waking her up, but he wanted to see her. Hell, after this night, he needed to see her, just to have his eyes rest on something beautiful. He’d had his fill of death and dark souls.

If he could have, he would have put off telling her about Peter Crane. It was going to be hard on her to think about Tommy and how hurt the boy would be to lose his father, how shattered he would be to learn his father was a monster. And it would be harder still to think that he would now be left entirely to the care of Janet Crane.

They still had to build their case. They had no forensic evidence at this point. No evidence at all. They had a dead-on profile and a couple of connect-the-dots drawings of stick-figure birds. They had a living victim who could neither see nor hear. They had speculation and conjecture.

Unless Peter Crane made a mistake, they had jack shit. If they lived in an hour-long TV drama, they could have just gone and arrested him based on nothing but their hunches, and none of the women he had killed would really be dead, and none of the lives he had touched would really be ruined. But that wasn’t how a real investigation worked. In real life the hurt counted.

Anne had gone to dinner with Crane and his son. The idea that she had been that close to him made Vince’s stomach clench like a fist.

Light still glowed in the windows of the Navarre living room as Vince pulled into the driveway behind Anne’s Volkswagen. He wondered if she had watched the coverage of what had gone down at the sheriff’s office. He wondered if the media had gotten any of it right.

He went to the front door and knocked lightly at first. Her father was probably sleeping.

No one stirred.

He knocked a little harder, then a little harder as his instincts began to growl.

He tried the knob, and the door opened without protest.

“Anne?” he called. “Anne? It’s Vince.”

In the living room, the television babbled to itself. Anne’s purse lay on the sofa, its contents spilled out on a big leather ottoman. His pulse picked up a beat. He pulled a clean handkerchief from a pocket and gingerly handled her wallet. DL and credit cards. Eighty dollars in cash and a photo of who Vince guessed was her at about five posed with a woman who was unmistakably her mother.

“Anne?” he called again.

He didn’t like that open front door. She wouldn’t have been that careless. They had talked about it.

He checked the old man’s room down the hall—no lights and intermittent snoring. He went upstairs to check out empty bedrooms. Every second that passed, those instincts growled louder and louder.

In the kitchen, her car keys were on the floor, and so was the heavy old teakettle. A fine mist of blood splatter had dried on painted white cabinets.

“No,” he said, denying the scenario even as it automatically played through his head.

She knocked her keys to the floor as she tried to get to the now-open back door. She grabbed the kettle on her way past the stove and used it as a weapon. And, good girl, she whacked him hard enough to make him bleed.

The scene continued on the back porch, where furniture had been shoved out of place during a struggle. More blood on a concrete frog the size of a croquet ball. Whose blood?

Oh Jesus God, no
.

He was shaking now. Sweating like a horse. His brain began to throb. His stomach twisted like a rope.

Then his eye caught on something small, something that would have seemed insignificant, no bigger than an inch, a little piece of trash on the floor . . .

A tube of superglue.

“STOP! STOP! STOP!!!” Tommy screamed from the backseat.

He stood on the seat, pitching forward, holding on to the headrest with one hand, pounding his other fist against the shoulder and head of Shadow Man behind the wheel of his father’s car.

The man shouted at him. “
SIT
DOWN!”

“
STOP
THE
CAR!” Tommy shrieked like a girl at the top of his lungs. He swung his fist again and hit Shadow Man’s ear so hard it felt like all his fingers shattered.

Shadow Man turned the wheel hard to the right and hit the brakes. Tommy was thrown clear across the backseat and banged his head against the window so hard he saw stars, and to his horror, he started to cry.

“
SHUT
UP!
SHUT
UP!”

The monster loomed over the seat back, his face twisted with rage.

Tommy buried his face in the blanket he had brought with him and sobbed, choking on a terror bigger than anything he had ever known.

“I want my dad!” he cried over and over. “I want my dad!”

Anne struggled against the belt that bound her arms to her sides. Crane had pulled it so tight around her, her hands had gone numb. Her back and ribs hurt like they were on fire, and she felt like she might never get another full breath.

The car had come to an abrupt stop, and she expected the trunk to fly open and Peter Crane to loom over her. Instead she heard him shout at Tommy, and Tommy crying, “I want my dad!”

Anne’s heart broke for him. He had to be terrified at what was happening, at what he had seen. He must have stowed away in the car, thinking he would have some grand adventure with his dad. His dad was a great guy. His dad was a hero.

His dad was a monster. So much so that Tommy couldn’t bring himself to recognize the man he loved in the man behind the wheel of the car.

What would happen to him? Anne wondered now. He had seen his father abduct his teacher—who would shortly be killed. How could Peter Crane deal with him, short of killing him too?

It was Anne’s turn to start to cry.

They stormed the Crane home like commandos—Vince, Mendez, Hicks, and Dixon, backed up by a full
SWAT
unit. There was no chance of Peter Crane having taken Anne there, but the show of force was calculated to strike shock and fear into Janet Crane and rock her back on her heels before she knew what was happening.

Dixon took the fore as Peter Crane’s wife opened the front door.

“Mrs. Crane, we need to speak with your husband,” he said without preamble. “Can you please get him for us?”

Janet Crane had clearly been asleep. Though she was in a smart red velour tracksuit, her makeup was smudged on the right side, making her look a little drunk. She blinked at Dixon as she tried to gather her wits about her.