Tami Hoag - Deeper Than the Dead

Tommy buried his face 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.

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!”

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.