Deeper Than the Dead

by Tami Hoag

  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.

  86

  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.

  87

  “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 fa
ce 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.

  88

  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.

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff,” she said. “What is this about?”

  “We need to speak to Peter,” Dixon repeated.

  “What about?”

  “Is he home?”

  “No, he isn’t.” She squinted to look past him at the SWAT commander standing in her driveway. “I want to know what this is about. Has something happened? Is Peter in some kind of trouble?”

  “We have reason to believe he abducted a woman tonight, ma’am,” Mendez said.

  “That’s insane!”

  “Where is he?” Dixon asked.

  Vince hung back, not trusting himself to speak. Renowned for his patience in interrogations, now he would have backed Janet Crane up against a wall and wrung the truth out of her with his bare hands.

  She looked around nervously, as if she were hoping her husband might pop up out of a shrub. “I—I don’t know.”

  Dixon’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean, you don’t know? It’s the middle of the night. Where’s your husband?”

  “He went out,” she said.

  “Out is not a place, Janet,” Dixon said impatiently. “We can step inside and discuss this further, or you can come down to headquarters with us and we can do it there. It’s your choice.”

  She seemed genuinely rattled, stepping back into the front hall of her lovely home, allowing them access. The four of them moved almost as a unit into the house and took positions in a loose semicircle around her.

  “Peter is sometimes restless at night,” she said. “He likes to go for drives.”

  “In the middle of the night,” Dixon said.

  “Are these drives related in any way to his fictitious Friday night card games, Mrs. Crane?” Vince asked. “Say, in your imagination?”

  “I don’t know what you want from me!” she snapped. “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “I don’t think so, ma’am,” Mendez said. “As a licensed real estate agent you have access to a master lock-box key, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that key will open any lock box on any listed piece of property, allowing you access to the keys to those properties. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Do you keep your key here?” Hicks asked.

  “Not as a rule, no,” she said, her attention bouncing from one of them to another to another.

  “But . . . ?” Dixon said.

  “But I had to show some property late in the day today, and—”

  The sheriff held up a hand to cut her off. “Janet. A woman has been abducted. Her life is in jeopardy. We don’t want to hear about your day. Do you have the key? Can you produce the key and show it to us? Now?”

  She went to a drawer in an antique painted cabinet that stood near the front door, looking like she expected to reach in and come out with the key, but that didn’t happen. She dug through the drawer, frowning.

  “Do you have it or not?” Dixon prodded.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “It should be here. I must have left it in my purse.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Vince growled. “Slap the cuffs on her and bring her as an accessory.”

  “You can’t arrest me! I haven’t done anything!”

  “No, you haven’t,” Vince said, stepping toward her. “You know the big thing you haven’t done? You haven’t once asked us who the abducted woman is. Don’t you find that a little strange, Detective Mendez?”

  “Unless she already knows the name,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t know anything about it!” she said. “And I don’t believe you can think Peter would know anything about it, either!”

  “Peter, who’s taking an imaginary drive in the dead of night with your lock-box key in his pocket?” Vince asked, the volume of his voice increasing with every word. “Maybe he’s having an imaginary tea party with Anne Navarre. What do you think, Janet?”

  She had to be thinking she wished he would drop dead before her eyes, but she was so flustered, she seemed not to be able to respond at all.

  “Where’s the boy?” Vince asked the room at large. “Maybe he knows where his father goes when he can’t stand to be in the house with this woman anymore.”

  Janet gasped her outrage and drew breath to fire something back at him.

  “Where’s your son, Janet?” Dixon asked.

  “He’s in bed!”

  Mendez took a couple of steps toward the staircase and called out, “Hey, Tommy!”

  “Don’t shout in my home!” Janet Crane shouted at him. She pushed past him and started up the stairs. “I won’t have you frighten my son.”

  “Hey, Tommy!” Mendez called again.

  Peter Crane’s wife disappeared into the second story of her home. Vince jammed his hands at his waist and paced. Every minute that ticked past . . .

  He knew exactly what Peter Crane had done to his victims. He died inside again and again as he thought of Karly Vickers lying blind, deaf, and mutilated in a hospital bed.

  “Tommy?” Janet Crane’s voice called out. “Tommy? Tommy, answer me!”

  Mendez started up the stairs. Janet ran down to the landing, paper white and breathing hard.

  “He’s gone! My son is gone! Oh my God! My son is missing!”

  89

  He wanted control. He needed a plan. None of this had been a plan. All of it was going wrong.

  He would never have chosen the teacher as a victim. She would fight. She had. Now his nose was broken and his mouth was bleeding. He wouldn’t be able to hide that.

  He hadn’t been able to subdue her in his usual way. The deviation from routine would lead to mistakes. It already had. He needed to get the necklace, first and foremost, but because she had fought him and it had taken so much more effort to control her, he had forgotten about the damn thing.

  Where was it? In her house? Who would find it? He couldn’t know that she hadn’t told someone about it already. But that wouldn’t have mattered if he had recovered it. Now what would he do? He couldn’t go back there.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.
>
  He had been raised to always have a plan, to keep an orderly mind. These principles had been drilled into him, beaten into him, day after day after day. He always had a plan, and he always took his time. And he never made a mistake.

  Everything about this clusterfuck was a mistake: the teacher and the boy.

  The boy.

  What the hell could he do about the boy?

  Everything had been under control. Every component of his life had been in its assigned compartment. Nothing overlapped.

  What the hell would he do about the boy?

  The car was going slowly now. He would stop soon, Anne suspected. Time would run out. She wondered if Vince would have stopped by the house, or if he would have been too exhausted after the ordeal at the sheriff’s office. The difference would be either people looking for her or no one missing her.

  Where would they look? How would they find her?

  Half-buried in the ground?

  She thought about dinner, about the Peter Crane who smiled and laughed with his son. So charming, so easy to be with. She thought of him stopping to come to her rescue when she thought Frank Farman might hurt her. How could he do that, then turn around and do this? How could that man be this monster?

  The car slowed again and turned from a smooth road to a rougher one. He would stop soon. He would try to kill her. He had all the control.

  She needed a plan.

  90

  “I can’t believe you’re asking me these questions, making these allegations when my son is missing!” Janet Crane shouted.

  “The alert has gone out to all personnel—county and state,” Cal Dixon assured her. “And to the media. Everyone will be looking for Peter’s car. Where would Peter go?”

  “Why do you think Peter took Tommy? Why would he take Tommy? That doesn’t make any sense! Peter is a GOOD MAN!”

  Mendez shook his head as he watched the monitor. “Could she really be that ignorant?”