Tami Hoag - Deeper Than the Dead

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.

“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.