Tami Hoag - Deeper Than the Dead

“Oh! I almost forgot!”

He dug a hand in the pocket of his jacket and came up with a small, gift-wrapped box, which he presented to Anne.

“That’s for you.”

Anne bent down next to him and accepted the gift with a soft smile. “Thank you, Tommy. How sweet of you! You didn’t have to bring me a present. Should I open it now?”

“No!” he said, blushing furiously. “Not until you get home.”

“Okay.” Anne leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Thank you. I’ll see you Monday.”

She tucked the little box in her purse and walked down the plaza thinking maybe there was hope for humanity after all.

“How do you usually spend your Saturday nights, Vince?” Hicks asked.

They were in the war room, a couple of boxes of decimated pizza spread out on the table in between stacks of files and reports. Dixon had remained at the hospital as Karly Vickers’s mother had finally arrived.

“Oh, well, Saturday nights I usually take the Concorde to Paris for dinner, then pop over to Monte Carlo for a little gambling.”

“Our tax dollars at work,” Mendez said.

“Seriously.”

“Seriously?” Vince thought back over the last year. Most of his Saturday nights had been spent in bed, recuperating. And before that? “Pretty much the same thing we’re doing here.”

“That’s grim, man.”

“I don’t have a wife. I don’t have a life. I’m the perfect man for the job. How about you, Detective Hicks?”

“The second Saturday of the month is jackpot calf roping at the rodeo grounds. I’m usually winning me some money right about now.”

“How about you, Tony?” Vince asked.

“Nothing special.”

“Sign that man up for the FBI.”

“Watch out, old man,” Mendez teased. “I’ll take your job.”

“You’re welcome to it, junior. I’ve done my time. I’m about ready to move on.”

“You? Quit the Bureau? No way, man. You’re a freaking legend.”

“I’ll trade places with you. I’ll move here and live the good life. You head east and take up the mantle.”

“If it was that easy…”

“You’d have to pay some dues, but hell, you’re young-as you keep reminding me.”

As if to punctuate the fact, his brain began to throb. He was about done in for the day, and odds were the pizza wasn’t going to taste as good the second time around. He dug in his jacket pocket for the pill bottle.

Antinausea. Antiseizure. Antipain.

He tossed them back and washed them down with cold coffee.

“You pop those things like breath mints,” Mendez said. “What are they?”

“Breath mints.”

“Bullshit.”

“Better living through chemistry,” Vince said, shrugging off the topic of his health. “What have you found out about the traffic stops?”

“If Frank got a dollar for every ticket he wrote, he’d be driving a new Cadillac every year,” Hamilton said. “But we all knew that.”

“Complaints filed against him?”

“A few.”

“By women?”

“Most of them.”

“Allegations of inappropriate conduct?”

“Several,” the detective said, flipping through Farman’s personnel file. “‘He’s rude, he’s condescending, he’s a bully, he’s a chauvinist, he’s a sexist, he made me feel uncomfortable, he made a remark about my ass.’”

“He likes to push women around,” Vince said. “Any sign of Mrs. Farman yet?”

“No. We called everyone in her address book. No one has seen or heard from her.”

“Wouldn’t that be a hell of a deal, if Frank turned out to be See-No-Evil?” Hamilton said.

“If Frank was See-No-Evil,” Vince said, “the last thing I would expect him to do would be to kill his wife. This killer is getting off on the fact that no one suspects him.”

“What about his need for publicity?” Mendez asked.

“He’s getting plenty. ‘Investigators Baffled in Oak Knoll Murders.’ ‘Serial Killer Stumps Sheriff’s Department.’” He held his hands up to frame the imaginary headlines.

“Meanwhile, he’s walking around like the guy next door,” Vince said. “He’s probably bringing up the case to his neighbors, talking about it over coffee with business associates. He’s loving it. Everybody looks at him and sees the perfect citizen, the perfect husband, the perfect family man, whatever. He’s not going to kill his wife.”

“Maybe he just lost control,” Mendez ventured. “Bundy’s killings at the Chi Omega house in Tallahassee, Florida, at the end of his career. He lost it. Took a stupid amount of risk. Killed in a frenzy. Kemper’s last victim, the motivation for all of his murders: his mother. He killed her symbolically over and over, until he finally did it for real.”

“Then why hasn’t anybody found Sharon Farman?” Vince asked. “If your theory holds, he should have planted her right out in front of the building. His last grand gesture. Ed Kemper’s mother was a ball-busting man hater who ragged on him so incessantly that his final act of revenge was to shove her larynx down the garbage disposal.

“Now, I haven’t met Mrs. Farman,” he said, “but let me take a shot in the dark here, based on what I know of her husband.

“She’s on the small side. The looks are showing age because she’s a nervous sort. Smokes-maybe secretly. Drinks-but definitely on the sly. Everything is neat and tidy: The house is neat and tidy, she’s neat and tidy, she has a neat and tidy job working for a neat and tidy man in a position of authority. She needs to know her place, and she’s happy to stay in it.

“How am I doing so far?” he asked.

“You’re a fucking freak, man,” Hamilton said.

“Women like Sharon Farman get beaten to death by their bully asshole husbands every day of the week,” Vince said. “But they aren’t the women that drive men out of their homes to kill other women.”

“Janet Crane is,” Mendez said.

“She sure as hell could drive me to homicide,” Vince said. “What do you know about Peter Crane tonight that you didn’t know this afternoon?”

“I spoke to a cop in Ventura about Dr. Crane’s lady friend,” Hicks said. “She’s known for her special talents.”

“S and M?” Mendez guessed.

“Yep.”

“But I don’t think See-No-Evil would be paying for rough sex,” he said.

Vince arched a brow. “Why not?”

“Because it wouldn’t excite him anymore. Maybe playing pretend was fine for a while, but now he’s had a taste of the real thing. He doesn’t want fake fear when he can have the real deal. It’s not enough to pretend to strangle a woman now that he’s choked the life out of a couple.”

“Good theory. Very good,” Vince said, pleased with his protégé. “Let’s go back to something Crane said this afternoon when you were interviewing him.”

Mendez went to the TV/VCR and put in the tape of the Crane interview. Vince grabbed the remote and skipped through most of it.

Crane: “… a married man.”

Mendez: “He should have thought about that before he unzipped his pants.”

Crane: “I’m really not comfortable talking about this.”

Mendez: “You said Steve is a complicated guy. In what way? He’s your friend, man. Tell me about him.”

Crane: “I just meant that Steve is very driven. He’s passionate about the work he does for the center. Steve comes from a tough background-single mom, not much money, desperate times-”

“You need to know more about that,” Vince said, hitting the Pause button. “Desperate times and a single mom could add up to something.”

“His motivation for working for the rights of disadvantaged women,” Hamilton said.

“Or his unhealthy attraction to disadvantaged women,” Vince said. “For every good man drawn to the priesthood, there’s a pedophile two confessionals down. Dig into Morgan’s background-and Crane’s.”