Tami Hoag - Secrets to the Grave

She had never asked him to describe what it had felt like to plunge a knife into the stomach of his only friend. “Have you done your homework?” she asked.

“Why should I?” he challenged. “What are you gonna do to me if I don’t? Put me in jail? Put me in the loony bin?”

“I’m not going to do anything to you. But you would be helping yourself if you did it. Do you want to repeat the fifth grade when you get out of here?”

She had taken it upon herself to tutor him. No one else was interested in the job.

“I’m never getting out of here,” he said. “Or I’ll go to prison. Prison might be cool.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because there’s killers in there.”

Anne sat for a moment with her chin in her hand. This was like a chess game. How did she know she was making the right move? She felt way out of her league.

“You think killers are cool?” she asked. “Why?”

Now there was something like excitement in his eyes. Anne’s stomach twisted.

“Because,” he said, “if they don’t like somebody, they just kill them. Then they never have to see them again.”

What should she say to that? That killing is wrong? Who would he like to kill? She tried never to take the bait with him, thinking he mostly said these things for the shock value. What if she was wrong? For a moment she felt like she was drowning.

Dennis was watching her from the corner of his eye as he turned and sat sideways on his chair.

“I would kill Tommy Crane,” he said.

Anne didn’t react. It was no surprise. In fact, it was nothing he hadn’t said before.

“I know you don’t like Tommy,” she said. “You think he has a perfect life, but he doesn’t, Dennis. His father is going to go to prison.”

“Yeah. He’s a killer. That’s so cool.”

So was yours, Anne was tempted to say. What would he do? Would he react? Would that crack the hard shell? Would he break down and cry?

Tommy Crane had been the object of Dennis’s jealousy and bullying. Outwardly, Tommy had appeared to have the perfect family. His father was a well-respected dentist with an office on Oak Knoll’s trendy—and expensive—pedestrian plaza. His mother was a real estate agent. They had lived in a beautiful home, in a beautiful neighborhood. But Tommy’s life had not been beautiful.

Tommy’s father was sitting in jail awaiting trial, suspected of being the See-No-Evil killer, though he had yet to be charged with any of the murders. He would first stand trial for assault and the attempted murder ... of Anne Navarre Leone.

“Tommy doesn’t live here anymore,” was all she said.

She rose from her plastic chair, grabbing her purse.

“I have to step outside for a minute,” she said. “When I come back in, I want to see your math homework. If you haven’t done it, you’re going to sit here until you do.”

The boy looked up at her, a little bit shocked by her sudden steely attitude.

“I’m trying to help you, Dennis,” she said. “You need to do your part.”

5

Anne walked out of the room and down the hall, past a man in his pajamas talking to the fire alarm. She walked past the nurses’ station without exchanging glances with the staff she had come to know well. She needed to be alone, even if only in her head. The too-familiar pressure was building in her chest. She couldn’t get a good breath. She remembered the feeling of a hand around her throat.

She buzzed herself out the security door.

The day was sunny and quickly turning hot. Another day in paradise. Anne had grown up in Oak Knoll, far enough north and west of Los Angeles to escape the city’s uglier vices. Most of the time. She had left to attend UCLA, despite the fact that her father had been a professor at the highly respected private college in Oak Knoll—or, perhaps, because of it. She hadn’t planned on coming back, but life had had other plans for her.

She sat down on a concrete bench along the front of the building and rested her head in her hands as the emotions rocked through her. Post-traumatic stress syndrome: Not just for war veterans. Victims of violent crime suffered the same way.

The memories flashed strobelike through her mind: hands around her throat, choking her; fists punching her; feet kicking her, breaking her ribs, collapsing a lung.

Even a year after her abduction and attempted murder, the first and strongest feeling that assaulted her when she thought of what had happened was fear. Raw, primal fear. Then anger—rage, in fact. Then a profound sense of loss.

Her therapist told her to let the emotion come like a wave and wash over her, not to fight against it. The sooner she accepted the feelings, the sooner she could let go of them.

Easier said than done. The fear of drowning in that wave was strong; the sense of losing control, overwhelming; the swell of anger for what she had lost, crushing.

She tried again to take a deep breath. She felt like there were bands of steel tight around her chest.

“Hey, beautiful,” a deep, familiar voice said. A big hand brushed over her hair and rested on her shoulder. She leaned into him as he sat down next to her, turned her face toward him, her head instinctively finding the perfect spot against his shoulder.

“You look a lot like my wife,” he said softly, wrapping his arms around her. “Only my wife is always happy. I make sure of it.”

Her breath hitched in her throat as she looked up at him. “H-how did you know I n-needed you?”

He brushed a tear from her cheek with his thumb. “Well, I like to think you need me every minute of every day,” he said, his dark eyes shining.

Anne sniffed and managed a little smile. “I do.”

He leaned down and kissed her softly on the lips.

To people who didn’t know them, Anne supposed they seemed an unlikely couple. Vince, forty-nine, more than a little world-wise and world-weary, a man who had dedicated his life to understanding evil. And Anne herself, twenty-nine, a former fifth-grade teacher who had dedicated her life to understanding children.

Yet they made perfect sense to her. Even as a child, Anne had been mature beyond her years. She had never been interested in young men. Vince was mature, strong, full of integrity, a man who knew his own mind. A man who had no interest in wasting his second chance at life.

“Tough morning with the demon child?” he asked.

“Don’t say I told you so.”

Vince shook his head. “I know you have to try. I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it.”

“Thank you.”

“You want to talk about it?”

She shook her head. “Same old, same old. Dennis said something ... I just needed a moment. I’ll be fine.”

He brushed her dark hair back. “Tough cookie.”

“When I have to be.”

“The point is, you don’t have to be.”

“I know,” she acknowledged and deftly changed the subject. “What did Tony call you out on so early?”

“A homicide,” he said, getting what Anne called his cop eyes—an expression that gave away nothing.

“I know that,” she said with a hint of irritation. “Was it something bad?”

Stupid question. Nobody called Vince Leone for a bar brawl that ended with one idiot breaking the skull of another idiot. He got calls in the middle of night from detectives in Budapest, FBI agents in New York, law enforcement agencies all over the world, to consult on only the most grisly, psychologically twisted cases. If Tony Mendez called before dawn, he had a big reason.

“Do you know a woman named Marissa Fordham?”

“No,” Anne said, “but the name is familiar.”

“She was an artist.”

Anne thought about it. “Oh, right. She did a poster for the Thomas Center last year. It was gorgeous.”