by Tami Hoag
“Did he seem upset?”
“Well, yeah, but . . . He’s a ten-year-old boy. I thought he was upset about having the accident. He gets picked on a lot, you know.”
That was true. In the jungle that was childhood, Cody Roache was well down in the pecking order. Children could be cruel, their meaner instincts yet to be padded over by the layers of subterfuge, dishonesty, and social niceties adults accumulated over the years. And the kids who were a little different, a little slower, not as hip, took the brunt of it.
Cody was small and homely and a little odd. He didn’t really have friends, Anne had observed. He had Dennis Farman, but that relationship was symbiotic, born out of necessity. None of the kids liked Dennis because he was a bully. He had teamed up with Cody to have a sidekick who looked up to him because of his toughness, and Cody had made friends with Dennis because it was safer for him to be for Dennis Farman than against him.
“He was sick all night,” his mother said. “And still this morning. He stayed in bed all day. I can’t get him to eat anything.”
“Would it be all right with you if I spoke with Cody?” she asked. “I’ve had some training . . .”
She felt like a fraud saying it. She was no more a child psychologist than the man in the moon. But for the time being, she was the closest thing these kids had.
Renee Roache led the way down the short hall to a bedroom with Star Wars stickers all over the door, knocked once, and cracked the door open.
“Cody? You have a visitor. Miss Navarre is here.”
Not a sound came from inside the room.
Renee opened the door and went in. Anne followed. The room held the musky gym shoes smell of ten-year-old boys—a combination of sweat and dirt and less-than-meticulous hygiene. The room was dark, the shade pulled down on the single window. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. Slowly she began to make out a small lump in the twin bed that was pushed up against the wall in one corner of the tiny room.
Cody’s mother sat down on the edge of the bed, turned on the lamp, and peeled the blankets back, exposing the boy’s head. He played dead, squeezing his eyes shut a little too hard.
“Cody, why didn’t you tell me what happened yesterday?” his mother asked.
“Nothing happened,” he said.
One eye cracked open. His mother handed him his glasses, newly taped together with adhesive tape. He sat up and put them on, blinking at the light.
“Hi, Cody,” Anne said softly. “I was worried about you today. How are you feeling?”
He rubbed his nose and scrunched his shoulders up around his ears, then pulled his knees up to his chest and bound them there tightly with his arms.
“Your mom tells me you’ve been really sick.”
She could see the little wheels spinning in his head, wondering just what she knew, what he should reveal, what he should admit to.
“I know what happened in the park yesterday,” Anne said. “I talked to Wendy and Tommy.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Cody?” his mother asked again, her tone edged with hurt.
Cody looked at her, looked at Anne, looked down and scratched his shin through his red pajamas.
“Mrs. Roache,” Anne said. “Would it be all right if Cody and I spoke alone for a few minutes?”
Renee Roache looked uncertain, but she got up and left the room just the same. Anne sat down on the edge of the bed, near the foot, not wanting to crowd the boy.
“That must have been pretty scary finding that body like that. What a terrible thing to see. I think I would have run away if I had come across that like you did. I would have run straight home.”
She could see him relax the slightest bit. If she said she would have run away, then maybe it wasn’t so bad or embarrassing that he had run away.
“I ran away,” he confessed in a small voice.
“I don’t blame you. I think I would have gotten sick. I think a lot of people would have.”
“Did Tommy get sick?”
“He was pretty upset.”
He thought about that for a minute. “I bet Dennis didn’t get sick.”
“I don’t know,” Anne said, her mind going to the things Wendy had said, that Dennis had touched the dead woman. She thought about what she had seen in the woods—Frank Farman allowing his son to scamper around the crime scene like it was a playground, taking it all in with great interest. “You don’t think so?”
Cody shook his head, his gaze sliding away from her, his mouth turning down at the corners. It wasn’t the expression that would have accompanied hero worship, which she might have expected. It didn’t say Dennis is tough, Dennis doesn’t get scared, I wish I could be like Dennis.
“Why do you think that, Cody?”
He gave half a shrug.
She let it go for the moment. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me about what happened yesterday?”
He was thinking about it. He looked down at his bare feet, then pushed his glasses up on his nose.
“We talked about it in class this morning,” Anne said. “We talked about how sometimes bad things happen, really bad things. And that’s hard to understand—why one person would do something so terrible to another person.”
“ ’Cause they’re crazy,” Cody said.
“Sometimes. And when we hear about this scary, terrible stuff it makes us all feel like the world isn’t a safe place. You know what I mean?”
Cody nodded slowly. The fat terrier nosed its way into the room, jumped on the bed, sniffed the boy up and down, then went to the foot of the bed, and turned around five times before curling into a ball.
“Is that how you feel?” Anne asked. “Like if you go back out in the world something like that might happen to you?”
He thought about that one for a long time and chose not to answer her, which was an answer in itself. She couldn’t blame him. He had caught a glimpse of the worst thing one human being could do to another. Like ripples in a pond, that violence touched everyone who heard of it. Every woman in Oak Knoll would be locking her doors and windows tonight. How could Anne possibly convince a ten-year-old kid that violence couldn’t touch him?
And why would he trust her anyway? She barely knew him. If she had to admit it, she knew him less than she knew Tommy or Wendy. He wasn’t a good or enthusiastic student. The only attention he drew to himself was when he got caught up in Dennis Farman’s disruptive vortex. She felt guilty for not knowing him better, and wondered how many other kids she was seeing only in the periphery of her vision.
“That chicken smells really good,” she said, pushing to her feet. “Think you’ll eat some dinner?”
Once again he didn’t answer her. She felt his mind was still on the last question she had asked him, that he was still wrestling with something, but she couldn’t pull it out of him. He had to want to give it to her.
“If you decide you want to talk about it,” she said, “don’t be afraid to come to me, Cody. Or tell your mom. You don’t have to keep all those feelings bottled up inside you.”
Anne turned for the door, took a step, then another. Then Cody Roache said something that ran a chill straight through her.
“Dennis said there were bodies buried in the woods.”
Anne turned back around slowly.
“What do you mean, Cody? He said that yesterday? After you found the body?”
Cody Roache was as white as a sheet, his dark eyes huge behind the too-big lenses of his taped-together glasses.
“Before that,” he said in a tiny voice.
Anne came back to the bed and sat down. “I don’t understand. When did he tell you this?”
“A while ago. We were in the woods playing commandos and he told me there were dead bodies buried there.”
If he had told her this two days ago, Anne would have written it off as something Dennis would say just for shock effect. But as it turned out, there had been a body buried in the woods.
Maybe Dennis had been there on his own some ot
her time and had seen something happening. From the corner of her eye she could see Cody staring at her intently, waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t know what to say.
“Do you think Dennis killed that lady?” he whispered.
“No,” she said. “No, of course not. What exactly did he tell you, Cody? Did he tell you he had seen a body?”
“He said there were bodies buried there and they were rotting in the ground and we were running over the top of them and stepping on them. And then there was that lady!”
She needed to call Detective Mendez. If there was a chance Dennis had seen something . . . She wondered if Dennis had told his father . . . and if Frank Farman had passed that information on to Mendez.
“I’m scared,” Cody said.
Anne looked at him sitting there curled into a ball in his red pajamas, his dark hair standing up in tufts.
“What are you scared of, Cody?”
He swallowed hard. “Dennis.”
“Dennis didn’t kill that lady.”
“How do you know?”
Because Dennis was an eleven-year-old boy and certainly not capable of doing what had been done. But Anne said none of that to Cody. Instead, she gave him the pat answer adults always give children when they don’t want or know how to tell them the truth.
“Because. I just know,” she said. She took a deep breath and let it out, trying to decide what to do next.
“Thank you, Cody,” she said, standing up. “You did the right thing telling me this.”
Cody didn’t look so sure about that. “Don’t tell Dennis I said it.”
“Don’t worry about Dennis,” Anne said. “Feel better. I would like to see you back in school tomorrow.”
She spent another few minutes with Renee Roache discussing what had happened and the fact that Detective Mendez would probably want to speak to Cody. Then she left the Roache home and the smell of chicken roasting, to go in search of Dennis Farman.
17
The Farmans lived not far from the Roaches in a two-story house painted battleship gray. Everything about the exterior was neat and tidy, squared off and symmetrical. No frills. Very military, she thought.
One of the Farman daughters answered the door. Both girls were in junior high school, enough older than Dennis that they probably did all they could to deny his existence. Anne couldn’t imagine anything more annoying to teenage girls than little brothers.
There was no sign or sound of Dennis as she waited in the hall for Sharon Farman to materialize. She looked at the family photos on the wall, noting that even as a toddler Dennis had looked like trouble.
Dennis said there were bodies buried in the woods.
Sharon Farman came into the hall, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She appeared to be still dressed from work in a skirt and blouse with long sleeves puffed at the shoulder and a ruffled stand-up collar. She had the kind of looks that had probably been quite pretty in high school, but were now worn down by years of smoking cigarettes, raising children, and the disappointment of being married to an asshole.
“Mrs. Farman,” Anne said. “I’m so sorry to interrupt your dinner—”
“We haven’t eaten yet,” Sharon Farman said shortly. “We’re waiting for my husband. Why are you here?”
“I wanted to check on Dennis.”
“Check on Dennis?” she said, as if that was the most absurd notion she had ever heard. “Why would you check on Dennis? You’ve just spent the entire day with him. I’d think that would be more than enough of him.”
“Dennis wasn’t in class today,” Anne said. “I assumed you kept him home.”
Sharon Farman looked incredulous and exasperated at the same time. “That little shit! His father took him to school this morning.”
“Hmmmm,” was all Anne could think to say. She’d never heard a parent refer to their child as a little shit, no matter how true it might have been. “Is he here now?”
The woman looked up the staircase and screamed, “DENNIS! Get down here!”
At the same time, the front door opened and Frank Farman walked in. His wife went right to him.
“Dennis wasn’t in school today,” she said. “Did you drop him off?”
“I got a call,” Farman said as he took off his giant cop belt hung with all manner of weapons and handcuffs. He hung it on the coatrack beside the door. “I told him to walk to school.”
Sharon Farman rolled her eyes, turned on her heel, and headed back to the kitchen where one of the daughters was yelling, “Mom, it’s burning!”
Anne turned to look at Frank Farman.
“I’m Anne Navarre. Your son’s teacher,” she said, annoyed. She had met him several times and he had yet to recognize her. She was of no importance to him whatsoever. She imagined no woman was.
“You came here to tell us Dennis wasn’t in school?” he asked. “You couldn’t pick up a telephone?”
“Actually, I came to see how Dennis is doing after what happened yesterday—”
“He’s fine.”
“I thought he might be upset—”
“He’s not.”
“Has Dennis talked to you about what happened?”
“The kids were playing and they found a dead body. What else is there to talk about? He’s a kid, for Christ’s sake.”
“Before this happened he told one of the other kids there were bodies buried in the woods,” Anne said. “I wondered if he might have seen something before—”
“Look, Miss Navarre, I’m the sheriff’s deputy, you’re the teacher. I do my job. Why don’t you stick to yours?”
Anne pressed her lips together to keep the words she wanted to say from spilling out.
“I’ll deal with Dennis,” he said, turning to the hall table to go through his mail.
She took a step toward the door then turned back. “If Dennis has an unexplained absence tomorrow, he’ll be on probation. If he has three unexcused absences, he’ll be expelled for a week.”
“Oh, he’ll be there,” he guaranteed.
Farman looked at an envelope promising he may already have won a million dollars.
Anger flushed through Anne. “Mr. Farman, could I please have your undivided attention for two minutes?”
He set his mail aside and looked at her with an impatient sigh.
“Does it not bother you at all that your son claimed to know there were bodies buried in the park before anyone actually found a body there?”
“Miss Navarre,” he said. “Dennis is a boy. Boys make up stories. I’m not concerned that Dennis saw bodies in the park before because there were no bodies. Believe me, if Dennis had seen a dead body before yesterday, he would have told me because that would be a very big deal to him.
“If you believe everything kids say, you’re either crazy or unbelievably gullible,” he said.
Anne wanted to kick him in the shin. In the span of a few sentences he had managed to make her feel both stupid and furious. She wanted a brilliant, scathing comeback line, but nothing came.
“Go home, Miss Navarre,” Frank Farman said. “And don’t read so many mystery novels.”
Anne left the Farman house and stormed back to her car—now blocked in the driveway by Frank Farman’s cruiser.
Condescending ass. “There, there, little lady, don’t worry, you’re just an imbecile.”
With no regard for possible consequences, she got in her Volkswagen, turned around on Farman’s neat lawn, and drove down over the curb to the street.
She needed to speak to Detective Mendez.
18
“Hamilton and Hicks are getting copies of employee records from the Thomas Center,” Mendez said, glancing at Dixon sitting in the passenger’s seat. “I reached out to a guy I know on the job in Simi Valley. He’s going to find out what he can on the missing girl’s ex-boyfriend.”
“Good.”
“This will be a hell of a lot faster when we can all get computers.”
“Dream on, Detective. We’
re lucky we have ink pens that write. There’s no leeway in the budget for toys.”
Mendez let it go. The wave of the future would have to crash over Oak Knoll eventually, but it wouldn’t happen in time for this case.
“I spoke to Lisa Warwick’s supervisor at Mercy,” he said. “She said Lisa was quiet, did a good job, but didn’t call attention to herself.”
“Was she seeing someone?”
“The supervisor didn’t know. But I found a coworker who says Warwick had hinted there might be a man in her life, but she was pretty tight-lipped about it. The coworker had a hunch the guy might have been married, but she’s got nothing to back it up.”
“When was the last time anyone from the hospital saw her?”
“About ten days ago.”
“And no one reported her missing?”
“She had scheduled time off. She said she was going on a trip to the wine country.”
“Check that out. Find out where she had reservations and if she was going alone or if it was supposed to be some kind of romantic getaway.”
Mendez checked the rearview mirror, signaled, and slowly changed lanes in the choking LA traffic, leaving the 405 freeway for the Howard Hughes Parkway.
He had thought about moving to LA once he had made detective in Bakersfield. He could have gone to LAPD with the goal of one day making the prestigious Robbery/Homicide Unit that worked out of LAPD headquarters downtown in the Parker Center. But it had seemed a better plan to become a big fish in a smaller pond and put in some solid years, then move on to the big pond of LA with an already established reputation as a detective.
When he had the opportunity to go to Oak Knoll and work under Cal Dixon, he had jumped at the chance. Dixon had a solid rep with the LA County Sheriff’s office; he had contacts. With this job, Mendez knew he could stand out. If Dixon liked him, this job could provide him a shortcut to bigger things.
So far that plan had worked very well.