Deeper Than The Dead (52 page)

Vince doubted the young woman would have much to tell them at any rate. He didn’t believe for a minute Peter Crane had made the mistake of leaving a victim alive. Karly Vickers was his masterpiece, his living tribute to his own criminal cunning and brilliance. She was Peter Crane saying,
Look how much smarter I am than the cops. I give them a victim back and they still don’t know who I am.

Crane might have given her back, but he would have damn well made sure she wouldn’t be able to tell them anything.

It was chilling to think how long Crane might have gone on with his killing career. And just as chilling to imagine how long it had gone on to that point. His crimes were too sophisticated, his fantasies too finely honed for the three victims they knew of to have been his first.

The Bureau was thoroughly involved at that point, Vince being officially assigned to pursue the case and investigate Peter Crane’s past. It would be his last case as an agent. And while he had had an illustrious career, he was focused on what would come: his life with Anne.

Dixon had given him a desk in the war room. He sat now reviewing videotape, playing the interview forward, rewinding, replaying.

Mendez came in with lunch.

“Jane Thomas had Karly Vickers taken out on the hospital lawn in a wheelchair this morning so she could pet her dog. That’s going to be the first seeing-eye pit bull in history,” he said, putting the bags down on the table. He nodded at the television. “Why are you looking at that?”

“Come sit down.”

It was Dixon’s interview of Janet Crane the night her husband had abducted Anne. Vince watched, fascinated, as Peter Crane’s wife led Cal Dixon around in circles.

She had collapsed in hysterical tears after Vince had left the room that night, supposedly driven to panic by the idea of her son in the hands of a madman. Dixon had offered her comfort, coffee, to call a doctor. She had refused all, preferring to carry on intermittently.

Dixon had continued with the interview. They needed answers from her. Where did Peter like to go? Was there a particular place he might feel safe to hide? Were there vacant properties she knew of that he could get into using her key? Places that were hidden, out of the way, forgotten?

Around and around they went. Dixon got nothing. Janet Crane got attention.

It probably wasn’t even conscious on her part. That was just how she operated and had since childhood, Vince suspected.

She couldn’t believe this was happening to her.

To her
. Not to her son, not to Anne, not to any of the other lives her husband had wrecked and ruined.

“What a bitch,” Mendez said.

“What a case study,” Vince corrected him. “She’s a textbook narcissist. Everything in her world revolves around her. The rest of us are just actors in her play.”

He paused the tape, rewound it again, found the bit he wanted Mendez to watch: the point in the interview when he had laid out Lisa Warwick’s autopsy photo in front of Janet Crane.

Mendez said nothing.

Vince rewound and replayed.

He turned to his protégé and said, “She doesn’t look away. She doesn’t look away, and she doesn’t become hysterical for a full two minutes.”

“She’s in shock,” Mendez offered.

“She’s enjoying it.”

Mendez looked at him like he was crazy. “No way.”

Vince rewound the tape and played it again, and again. He wound it back to an earlier point in the interview.

“. . . your son, Tommy, is missing,” he said. “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.”

“‘Peter would never hurt Tommy.’ She doesn’t say Peter would never hurt anybody. She doesn’t say he wouldn’t hurt Anne,” Mendez said, frowning. “And when we went to their house that night and told her her husband had abducted a woman, she never asked who.”

“Either she knew, or she didn’t care,” Vince said. “Or both.

“Janet Crane volunteers at the Thomas Center. She knows the staff wears the silver necklace. She knows only the graduates wear the gold necklace. The boy gave the necklace to Anne. He had to have found it in their house.”

“If Janet Crane knew that necklace was there . . . ,” Mendez started.

“She had to have known where it came from,” Vince said.

“Jesus,” Mendez muttered, staring at the video monitor, watching Janet Crane play Cal Dixon like a concert violin. “I spoke to her this morning. I’m trying to get her to bring Tommy in to speak with us.”

“She’ll never let it happen,” Vince said.

“She told me she was taking him today to see a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. She should see if she can get a two-for-one discount.

“Do you really think she knew all along?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Vince said, shutting off the monitor. “And even if I said yes, what I think and what I can prove are two very different things.”

Days passed Tommy in a kind of a blur, his mind turning reality just slightly out of focus. He felt numb, and that seemed like a good thing. He didn’t go to school. He didn’t go anywhere. He didn’t leave his mother’s side. She needed him now.

The day they left Oak Knoll, his mother told Detective Mendez she was taking him to a child psychiatrist in Los Angeles. But when they got to Highway 101, she turned the car north instead of south, and just kept driving.

They traveled all that night and all the next day, leaving behind everything and everyone Tommy ever knew. He hadn’t seen it coming, but he wasn’t surprised either. Nothing his mother did surprised him.

She couldn’t be married to a notorious killer. Nor could Tommy be the son of one. And never in a million years would she have allowed him to testify in court to what he had seen that terrible night he and Miss Navarre had been taken away.

What would he have told them, anyway? That a Shadow Man had come and taken away the one person who mattered most to him—his father.

When darkness fell that first day on the road, Tommy sat looking out the back window at the stars, imagining each of them was someone he knew in Oak Knoll, growing farther and farther away until they were only the tiniest points of light. The last two he counted before he fell asleep were Wendy and Miss Navarre.

Now they stood on the deck of a ferryboat floating away from their newest city as the setting sun splashed gold across the faces of the skyscrapers.

His mother had cut her hair and dyed it blonde, and looked nothing like his mother had his whole life. It was as if an actress in a movie were talking to him, pretending to be his mother. He wished that were so, then felt guilty for thinking it.

She had dyed his hair too, so when he looked in the mirror, a stranger looked back at him.

The Crane family had ceased to exist.

They had new names now to go with their new life.

His mother went to the back railing of the ferry and took a small metal box from her purse. The last tie to the past, she said. She stood there for a moment, looking at the water, her eyes far away from where they were. Finally, she opened the lid of the box revealing the tangle of jewelry inside. In one smooth motion she threw it into the sound, the chains and bracelets fluttering like gold and silver ribbons as they fell to disappear into the deep blue.

“We’re free,” she whispered.

And Tommy looked up at the purple twilight sky and watched the smallest star go dark.

Tami Hoag’s novels have appeared on national bestseller lists regularly since the publication of her first book in 1988. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages worldwide. She lives in Los Angeles and Palm Beach County, Florida.