by Tami Hoag
“Have there been other cases the public doesn’t know about?”
“What’s a cereal killer?” Tommy asked.
Miss Navarre looked really annoyed now when she looked at the detective. Detective Mendez turned his attention back toward Tommy.
“Tommy, can you describe to me what you saw, anything unusual you might have noticed at the scene?”
“Well, the dead lady,” Tommy said. Duh.
“Anything else?”
Tommy shrugged again, then tugged down on the sleeves of his striped rugby shirt and rubbed his arm. “The dead lady. And there was a dog. He was guarding her. He was black and white.”
“Did he have a collar?”
Tommy looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember. “Mmmmm. . . maybe . . . I’m not sure.”
“Did you touch anything around the dead lady?”
He shook his head emphatically. “No way.”
“Did anybody else touch anything?”
Tommy looked at the tabletop again, considering the wisdom of ratting out Dennis Farman. It didn’t seem like the thing to do if he wanted to stay in one piece.
“Tommy?”
Miss Navarre. He looked up at her and knew she knew he was stalling. She said a lot with her eyes. He didn’t want to let her down, what with being kind of in love with her and all.
“Uh . . . I didn’t touch anything. And I know Wendy didn’t touch anything.” Maybe if he left it at that . . .
Miss Navarre turned then to his parents. “Will Tommy be staying in school today?”
Tommy looked up at his father, willing him to say he could stay. His mother had talked about a psychiatrist. He had seen psychiatrists on television, and Lori Baylor had gone to one after her mother died of breast cancer. From what Tommy had been able to discern, all they ever did was make people lie down on a couch and talk about their feelings. Tommy had nothing to say on that subject. His feelings were not anybody else’s business.
“Principal Garnett tells us you’ve had some training in child psychology,” Tommy’s father said.
“Yes. Some,” Miss Navarre said. “Wendy Morgan is staying, if that helps in your decision-making.”
Tommy bugged his eyes out at his father. Please, please, please, please. He liked school. School was where he was happiest—except for when he was playing baseball or watching baseball. School was normal. At school he didn’t have to be watching adults and trying to figure out what they were thinking and how it would affect him.
“But you don’t have a degree,” Tommy’s mother said.
“No, I don’t.”
“And the school isn’t going to provide someone who has.”
“It doesn’t look that way.”
“And how will you handle the situation, Miss Navarre?” his mother asked, already expecting an unsatisfactory answer.
“We’ll talk about what happened with the class,” Miss Navarre said. “I think the best thing we can do is be open and honest with the kids.”
“Talking about serial killers?” Tommy’s mother said, giving Miss Navarre her Cold Eye as Tommy called it. “You think that’s appropriate, Miss Navarre?”
“No,” Miss Navarre said, raising her chin a little. “But talking about what happened to their classmates, talking about what’s going to happen next, talking about how a police investigation works, turning a negative experience into an opportunity to learn—all seems very appropriate. Don’t you agree, Mrs. Crane?”
Tommy’s mother sighed impatiently. “I think everyone on the school board is going to get a call about Mr. Garnett’s poor decision not to call in a professional.”
“That’s your prerogative,” Miss Navarre said. “In the meantime, I’ll do the best I can.”
“That’s not exactly reassuring.”
“I want to stay,” Tommy blurted out. Now he got the Cold Eye. It might have been better for him if he had ratted out Dennis Farman and kept his mouth shut about this. Oh well. It was too late now. “Please, Mom.”
His father spoke up then. “Let’s see how it goes. I like your ideas, Miss Navarre. I know you have the kids’ best interest at heart.”
“I do.”
Tommy’s mother stood up abruptly, checking her watch.”Are we finished, Detective?” she asked. “I have an appointment I have to get to.”
Detective Mendez and Miss Navarre looked at Tommy’s mother, a little surprised. Tommy wasn’t surprised. His mother was mad and she was cutting them off, dismissing them. She was done here and on to other, more important things. She didn’t like anything to disrupt her schedule.
Detective Mendez said, “You’re free to go.”
Tommy’s mother turned and walked out. His father put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder and looked down at him. “You’re sure you’re okay with staying, Sport?”
Tommy nodded. He was sure. Especially now. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck with his mother in one of her moods.
His father patted him on the shoulder and stood up.
“Miss Navarre, thank you for your efforts. If there’s anything I can do to help, please call.” He turned to Detective Mendez. “Good luck with your investigation, Detective. It sounds like you might have your work cut out for you, if this guy is what you think he is.”
“They’re never so clever that they don’t get caught eventually,” Mendez said.
“And if they are,” Tommy’s father said, “I guess we never know it, do we?”
He handed his business cards to Mendez and to Miss Navarre, squeezed Tommy’s shoulder one last time, and walked out.
Tommy breathed a sigh and rubbed absently at his arm. “Can we go back to class now, Miss Navarre? I just want everything to be normal.”
“Sure, Tommy,” she said. “Let’s go do something normal.”
Of course, Tommy knew nothing would ever feel quite normal again, but he could certainly pretend.
12
Karly Vickers was living in a cottage owned by the Thomas Center. The center had placed her in a receptionist position at Quinn, Morgan and Associates, a law firm. She would have a sixty-day probationary trial with full pay. If she succeeded in the job, she would then start paying for her own utilities. At the next plateau she would begin paying a small amount of rent to the center, another step toward self-sufficiency. When she was back on her feet entirely, the center would help her find her own living arrangements, and the cottage would welcome a new woman starting a new life.
Jane drove directly to the cottage. She didn’t take the time to phone her assistant. She didn’t even take the time to change out of her gardening clothes.
There’s been a murder . . .
The sense of unease was now like a ball of dough sitting in her stomach.
Karly’s car, an old Chevy Nova she owned herself, was not sitting in the driveway.
She could have gotten cold feet about the job, Jane told herself. Karly, twenty-one, had come to the center from Simi Valley with zero self-esteem, a victim of an abusive boyfriend who had beaten her so severely she had been unrecognizable to her own mother. The boyfriend had vanished, escaping justice, leaving Karly in so many shattered pieces it had taken her a year and a half to come this far in her recovery.
Jane had a photograph of the boyfriend imprinted on her brain. As far as she knew, he was still at large. Could he have somehow found out where Karly was living? Upon entering the program at the center, Karly had signed a contract agreeing to reveal her whereabouts to no one, not even her family. Periodic phone calls to her mother were carefully arranged and monitored. The phone service to her cottage was local usage only.
But Jane knew all too well the things women would do to sabotage themselves. She had seen abused women go back to their abusers over and over. The strength it took to break that cycle was sometimes beyond their reach.
The front door of the cottage was locked, suggesting Karly had left of her own free will. Jane had a set of keys to all of the center’s properties. Surprise inspections were pa
rt of the deal. She let herself in and looked around, careful not to touch anything.
“Karly? Are you home? It’s Jane.”
The place was as neat as a pin. Only small things indicated anyone lived here at all: a jean jacket hung on a peg by the front door; a book on surviving abuse sitting on a table next to the sofa; two pink dog dishes on the kitchen floor. But no sign of Karly or her dog.
The bed was made. The bathroom was spotless. The kitchen was sparkling.
Jane let herself out the back door and into the small fenced yard. The grass needed mowing. A small round metal table and two chairs sat on the tiny concrete patio. A huge geranium Jane had taken from her own garden and potted sat on the table—a housewarming gift Karly had loved.
Gardening was part of her therapy. It was a calming hobby and a chance to tend to something and see a positive result. Nursing plants to full flourishing health was also a metaphor for the women’s own lives. They should care for themselves, tend to their own needs, with the goal of coming into their own full potential.
The newly opened geranium flowers were a vibrant, cheerful red, but the plant needed deadheading and the leaves were starting to brown and curl. The soil was dry and hard to the touch. The plant hadn’t been watered in days.
Out of habit, Jane picked up the watering can from the table and went to the faucet at the side of the cottage near a small potting shed.
Her mind was spinning. Over and over, she kept hearing her assistant’s voice: There’s been a murder . . .
A low rumble sounded behind her as she bent to turn the faucet on. A warning growl. Jane turned slowly toward the potting shed. The door of the shed was ajar.
“Petal?” she asked. “Is that you?”
Her answer was another low growl.
“Petal?”
She took a half step toward the shed, trying to peer inside. The slim mest sliver of sunlight penetrated the dark interior. At the base of that line of light, she could see one white paw, then the tip of a black nose.
“Petal? It’s me, your auntie Jane. You’re okay. Come out and get a cookie, sweetheart. Come on.”
Inch by inch more of the dog became visible. She crawled along on her belly until Jane could see her face. “Forlorn” was the only word to describe the look.
There’s been a murder . . .
Jane crouched down and fished a dog cookie out of the patch pocket of her denim gardening shirt.
“Come on, sweetheart,” she whispered, tears rising in her eyes.
Karly would never have abandoned Petal. If there had been a family emergency, she would have called Jane to look after the dog. Even if she had gone somewhere she shouldn’t have, she would have gotten word to somebody to take care of Petal.
Of all the dogs in the county animal shelter, Karly had chosen a thin, beaten-down female pit bull, saying they would understand each other. The dog had been the best therapy the girl could ever have had.
Jane held out the cookie, her hand trembling a little, not from fear of the dog, but from fear of what may have happened to the owner. Petal the pit bull inched closer, whimpering.
She looked thinner than the last time Jane had seen her, and she had some nasty scratches on her as if she might have gotten into a fight or had been living rough. Locked out of the house, she didn’t have her cushy dog bed or her pink bowl filled with kibble; she didn’t have her person to look out for her.
The dog finally, cautiously, stretched her neck out as far as she possibly could, just touching the cookie with the very tip of her tongue. Two tears tumbled over the rims of Jane’s green eyes and slid down her cheeks.
There’s been a murder . . .
13
“Mom’s a piece of work,” Mendez said as the teacher came back into the conference room. “Wound a little too tight, huh?”
She frowned, glancing back toward the door. “A little. When I took Tommy home yesterday she was furious he had missed his piano lesson.”
“And what will the neighbors think now?” Mendez asked, settling in his chair. “Her kid fell on a corpse.”
“What would the neighbors think if they knew she was doping him up to make him sleep?”
“A little antihistamine is nothing,” Mendez said. “When I was in a uniform in Bakersfield, I saw mothers get their kids drunk, make them smoke crack—”
“That’s horrible.”
“Makes Mrs. Crane look like the Mother of the Year.”
Anne Navarre rolled her eyes as she turned away from him and walked toward the bank of windows. “She probably already has that plaque on her wall, along with Realtor of the Year, Volunteer of the Year, Chamber of Commerce Person of the Year.”
“Image is everything,” Mendez said.
He was happy to see she sided with the kids, and the kids liked her. There might be a chance they would confide something to her that they might not tell their parents or him. Provided they had anything to tell anyone.
Peter Crane was probably right in assuming the killer had been long gone by the time the kids had come across his handiwork. On the other hand, Vince Leone, one of his instructors at the National Academy and one of the pioneers of criminal profiling at the Bureau, had talked about killers who returned to the crime scene either to relive the experience or to watch the police investigation.
Some of them got an ego boost by watching the cops and believing they were superior to the dumb clods trying to figure it out. Some of them got sexual gratification revisiting the scene. Sick bastards.
“Tell me about Tommy.”
“Tommy?” Anne Navarre turned her back to the windows, leaned back against the credenza, and crossed her arms—but not as tightly as before. A step in the right direction. “He’s very bright, conscientious, quiet, sweet.”
“He has a crush on you.”
She made a little face and shook her head.
“Yes, he does,” Mendez insisted. “He watched you almost the whole time.”
“He watched everyone. That’s what he does. He takes in everything then decides what to do. He probably watched me more because he feels safe with me.”
Mendez chuckled. “Trust me. You might know kids’ heads, but I was a ten-year-old boy once.”
“I suppose I can’t argue with that.”
“Why do you think he didn’t tell us the Farman kid touched the corpse?”
“Fear of retribution. Dennis Farman is a bully.”
A quick knock sounded on the door to the outer office and a uniformed deputy stepped in.
“Farman’s not coming.”
“The hell he’s not,” Mendez said.
“He’s not coming. He said he’ll take his kid’s statement himself. He said it was a waste of everybody’s time to come in here and talk to you.”
“The fuck!” Mendez caught himself too late and glanced over at Anne Navarre. “Sorry.”
“I could call Mrs. Farman,” the teacher offered. “Maybe she would come in with Dennis.”
“You’ve got to go now anyway,” the deputy said. “Some woman came into the office to report a missing person. Could be our victim.”
The woman waiting in Sheriff Dixon’s office was in her early forties, tall and slender, and dressed in jeans with dirty knees and a bright green T-shirt with an oversize denim shirt thrown over it and left open. Her long blonde hair was scraped back into a messy ponytail with strands falling loose to frame her pale oval face. She stood in front of the visitor’s chair with her arms wrapped around herself. She looked worried.
Cal Dixon was sitting against the front edge of his desk, head down, speaking quietly to the woman when Mendez walked in.
Dixon looked up. “Tony, I’m glad you made it back. I want you to meet Jane Thomas from the Thomas Center for Women. Ms. Thomas, this is Detective Mendez. He’s my lead investigator on this case.”
Mendez reached out and shook her hand.
“Jane is concerned the murder victim may be someone she knows.”
“One of our clients
,” she said. “Karly Vickers. No one has seen or heard from her since last Thursday night.”
“And you just noticed her missing?” Mendez said. “Don’t you do a head count or something?”
Many of the Thomas Center “clients” were at-risk women from abusive situations. From what Mendez had heard, they ran a pretty tight ship for security reasons.
“We had recently moved Karly out of the center into one of our cottages. She was ready to transition to independent living.”
“What makes you think she didn’t take that idea to the next level and just split?”
Jane Thomas shook her head. “No. No. She was excited about starting over. She was a little nervous, but excited about starting her new job. Yesterday was supposed to be her first day.”
“But she didn’t show up,” Mendez said.
“No.”
“The employer is . . . ?”
“Quinn, Morgan and Associates. A law firm that helps us out with family court cases.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“I saw her last week—Thursday morning at the center. I helped her pick out her new work wardrobe. We have our own store in-house, clothing donated from working women here in town, from Santa Barbara, from Los Angeles.
“Thursday was Karly’s makeover day. She had her hair done, her nails, her makeup. I remember her saying she felt like Cinderella.”
“Could she have gone out looking for Prince Charming?” Mendez asked. “She had a new look, new clothes. She was feeling pretty—”
“She’s shy. She was still recovering emotionally from being beaten nearly to death by her boyfriend.”
Mendez dug his notebook and pen out of the patch pocket of his tweed sport coat and started scribbling. “Do you have a name for him?”
“Greg Usher. I have all the information available on him in Karly’s file at my office. He has a record.”
“And he’s walking around loose?”
“The last I heard.”
“Do you have a photograph of Karly?” Dixon asked.
“Not with me.”
“Do you know if he tried to contact her recently?” Mendez asked.