She was beginning to think she would never know “normal” again.
“I’ve called Child Protective Services, but Vince suggested you’re probably more qualified than anyone to try to communicate with him,” Dixon said. “You certainly know him better than anyone here.”
Detective Hicks had called with the names of the two children Dennis had attacked: Cody and Wendy. Cody had been taken to surgery. Anne could only imagine how terrified he must have been. Wendy had no life-threatening wounds. She had been lucky by comparison. But she had already been through an ordeal with Dennis trying to shove a dismembered finger down her throat. Now this.
“I’m not qualified for this,” she said. “I can handle a fight on the playground. But this . . .”
“You’re more qualified than any of the rest of us, Anne,” Vince said. “The boy needs someone to try to reach out to him. At least until his parents get here. He hasn’t said a word to anyone.”
Anne stared at the monitor, at Dennis. He was eleven years old and he had tried to murder two other children. “What if I say the wrong thing? What if I make it worse?”
“He knifed a ten-year-old boy,” Vince said. “How much worse could you make it?”
Anne thought back to Thursday—God, was that all? Two days ago?—to Dennis’s outburst and what she had told him as they sat together, alone in the classroom. She had told him she would be there for him. She knew he had no one else on his side.
“All right.”
She went into the hall with Vince, then took a deep breath and let it out as he opened the door to the interview room for her.
“I’m right out here if you need me,” he whispered.
Anne nodded and went into the room.
Dennis wouldn’t look at her. He stared down at the blank tabletop, drawing patterns on it with his finger. Anne studied him, wondering if she had ever really noticed that his hair was so red, or that his ears sat a little too low on the sides of his head. Someone had taken him out of his bloodstained shirt and jacket and put him in a man’s sheriff’s office T-shirt that swallowed him up.
“Dennis,” she said softly, carefully easing herself down onto the nearest chair as if she was afraid he might spook like a wild pony.
“I know something really bad happened today. I don’t know exactly why.” Her voice was gentle, quiet, the kind of voice she might use to tell a bedtime story or confess an innocent secret to a friend. “I won’t pretend that I understand what you’re going through. I don’t have any idea. I have a feeling you’ve seen things and been through things I wouldn’t want to imagine.”
He lifted his head then and looked at her. A bruise was spreading across his left cheek, blackening the skin beneath his eye. Coagulated blood knit together his swollen lower lip.
“When can I go home?”
The question was stunning. He wasn’t joking. He wasn’t being sarcastic. An hour ago he had stabbed a playmate so seriously the child could die, and Dennis just wanted to go home.
“Dennis, you won’t be going home,” she said. “You hurt somebody really badly.”
“Just Cody,” he said, as if Cody Roache was no more important to him than a toy he had broken.
Anne didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know if this was a hardwired part of Dennis Farman’s psyche or a by-product of the day’s trauma. Could he really care so little about the only boy who had ever tried to be his friend?
“I’m so sorry, Dennis,” she said. “I wish I could have helped you sooner. I wish I had a clue how to help you now, but I don’t. All I can do is sit here with you until someone who knows more than I do can come and try.”
“What’ll happen to me?” he asked.
As horrible as his crime was, Anne felt her heart break for Dennis Farman. She didn’t know if it was a trick of the harsh lighting or the dimensions of the room, but he seemed smaller to her now than he had in her classroom. And she had the strangest, saddest feeling as she sat there watching him that he was getting smaller and smaller before her very eyes, that the light inside him was getting dimmer and dimmer, and before long he would disappear altogether.
“The sheriff is trying to find your mom so she can come and be with you,” she said. “Do you know where she might be?”
He looked up at her for the first time since she had walked in.
“She’s dead,” he said without emotion. Then he looked past her to the glass inset in the door.
Anne turned to see Frank Farman’s face in the window.
“He killed her.”
68
“I thought the rules up here were: authorized personnel and family only,” Mendez said.
Morgan turned and looked at him. “Detective. Jane needed a break. Or, I should say, I made her take a break. She’s down the hall in the family room resting. She made me promise to stand here and come get her if anything changed.”
“Miss Vickers’s family hasn’t arrived yet?” Hicks asked.
“Not yet.” He turned and looked at the girl in the bed again. “It didn’t seem right to just leave her. That doesn’t make sense, does it? I mean, she doesn’t know we’re standing here. She’s not aware of anything at all as far as we know.”
“Or maybe she’s playing it all through her mind,” Mendez suggested. “What happened to her, who did this to her. And if she can just fight her way up through the fog, she’ll tell us everything.”
“What are the odds she’ll remember anything?” Morgan asked. “The doctor said it’ll be a miracle if she survives at all. I wouldn’t hang your hat on getting the story from her.”
“But here’s the thing with my job, Mr. Morgan,” Mendez said. “Even dead victims tell their stories, one way or another. It just takes longer.”
“You always get your man? We’ll all hope so.”
“We’ll have to spell you here, Mr. Morgan,” Hicks said. “You’re needed in the ER.”
They accompanied Steve Morgan to the ER and hung back at the edge of the Morgan family drama. Sara Morgan had arrived to comfort her daughter. The parents managed to hide all but the edge of the tension between them as they let Wendy take center stage and tell her story.
Mendez answered what questions he could as to what would happen to Dennis Farman, though he admitted he had never come across such a young violent offender. He had no idea if there was any precedence to guide the powers of the judicial system on how to deal with him. The only thing he knew with certainty was that Dennis Farman would not be going home that night, or any night soon.
The doctor informed them that Wendy could go home. She had a badly bruised sternum and ribs, but considering what had happened to Cody Roache, she was a lucky girl.
“Will Cody be all right?” Wendy asked.
“He’ll be in the hospital for a few days, but he’ll be all right,” the doctor announced to the relief of everyone. The surgeons had managed to repair the damage to his spleen and stop the internal bleeding. He was a lucky little boy.
“This guy has a damned strange definition of luck,” Hicks commented as they loitered in the hall, waiting for the Morgans to leave. “Luck would have been never running into Dennis Farman in the first place.”
They followed the Morgans out to the parking lot where Steve lifted Wendy out of the obligatory wheelchair and into her mother’s minivan.
“Daddy, are you coming home?” the little girl asked, her cornflower blue eyes as big and hopeful as she could make them.
“I’ll be along soon, honey. Don’t you worry.”
