Deeper Than the Dead

that?”

“I don’t know where she went. I admit I had too much to drink at dinner. I was an ass. Later I passed out. When I woke up this morning, she was gone.”

“Does she have a friend, a sister, or someone nearby?”

Farman shook his head, but to himself, as if he was having an internal conversation, considering and discarding answers. “I don’t know her friends.”

“Do you have kids besides Dennis?”

“Sharon’s two girls from her first marriage. They’re staying with friends or something. They’re teenagers. I don’t try to keep track of them.”

“You can see here, Frank, where this gets sticky,” Vince said reasonably. “Nobody knows where Sharon is, and your son is saying she’s dead and you killed her. If you weren’t in a uniform, what do you think would happen about now?”

“If I was smart, I would ask for a lawyer,” he said quietly.

“Is that what you want to do? You know what happens then, Frank. Everything goes totally by the book. You know the book inside and out. The lines of communication shut down. Or you can let your people go to your house, have a look around, see that everything is fine. You dig up the phone numbers of Sharon’s friends and family, and she’s contacted and everything is good.

“You shut it down now, you know where everyone’s head goes. You had too much to drink, you were pissed off about Dixon taking you off the team. You got into it with the missus, she said the wrong thing, you lost your temper. One thing led to another, things got out of hand, you panicked . . .”

Farman took a big breath, heaved a big sigh, put his face in his hands for a moment.

Come on, come on . . . Vince could feel he was on the edge of saying something. The moment hung there, getting heavier and heavier. And then it was gone.

“Dixon wants to search my house, fine,” he said, though he clearly was pissed off at the idea. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Vince nodded. “Okay.”

“But he has to do it himself. I don’t want Mendez in my house again.”

“Fair enough.”

“I want to see my son now.”

“You know that’s not going to happen until your wife shows up.”

“Then I’ll go,” Farman said, standing up. “I’ve got to get the boy a lawyer.”

Vince nodded and rose from his chair. “This is a tough situation, Frank. I’m sorry.”

Maybe the guy was a dick. Maybe he was worse than a dick. That didn’t make what was going on with his son any less a tragedy. If the man had any humanity at all, that had to hurt.

Farman nodded and walked out into the hall where Anne had just stepped out of the room next door.

“You put that in his head, didn’t you?” Farman said to her.

Anne stood right up to him. “Yes, because you wrote me a ticket for driving on your lawn, I got your son to stab another child and then accuse you of murder.”

“I told you before to mind your own business,” Farman growled, stabbing a finger at her.

“Your son is my business, and somebody should have stepped in a long time ago and done something. Now look what’s happening to him.”

“That’s not my fault,” Farman argued.

“He can’t be your son without you taking responsibility,” she said fiercely. “He didn’t turn out this way by accident.”

“You fucking little bitch,” Farman said quietly, backing her into the wall.

Adrenaline surging, Vince stepped in between them, put his hands on Farman’s shoulders and shoved him back against the opposite wall hard enough that he banged the back of his head.

“I was nice to you in there, Frank,” he said, pointing toward the interview room as he advanced on the deputy. “You give this lady a hard time, I’m not gonna be nice. I’m gonna kick your ass up between your ears. You should leave now before that happens.”

“Leave?” Anne said, incredulous, as Farman stalked off. “Isn’t he under arrest?”

“They don’t have anything to hold him on besides the say-so of a mentally disturbed eleven-year-old child,” Vince said. “We don’t know Sharon Farman is dead, or even missing. Did Child Protective Services get here?”

“Yes, they’re in with Dennis now,” she said and sighed. “He wants to know when he can go home.”

She wanted to cry for the boy, Vince could see. He walked her down the hall and they went out the end door to the side yard. They stood in the shade on the far side of an oak tree and he put his arms around her and just held her—and she just stood there and let him hold her, slipping her arms around his waist as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

“I’m proud of you,” he said quietly.

“Proud of me? For what?” she asked, slipping out of his embrace as easily as she had slipped into it.

“You’re a tough little mouse, standing up to Farman like that.”

She frowned. “Look at all the damage he’s done. Dennis is never going to have a normal life, is he? Whether he’s in prison or not. He’s never going to get over this, is he?”

Vince shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, honey. I wish I could say different, but in my experience . . . He’s broken, and there’s probably no fixing him.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” she asked. “Throw him away? I don’t like that answer.”

“I know, but I don’t have a better one.” He reached a hand out to her and she took it without hesitation. “Maybe someday you could be one of the people who figures that out.”

“Someone has to try,” she said stubbornly.

“I know. I mean it. You’re great with your kids. You’re passionate about figuring them out and helping them. Not that teaching isn’t an important job, it is. But you could be making an even bigger impact on kids that need serious help.”

“I just want to do the best I can for them,” she said.

Vince leaned down and kissed her softly.

“You are one incredible lady, Anne,” he said, settling for those words instead of the ones that sat on the tip of his tongue—I’m falling in love with you.

He was forty-eight with a bullet in his head, falling in love on the third day of knowing Anne Navarre. That sounded a little crazy, even to him. But it was true . . . and he was going with it.

70

“I did complain to Cal about it,” Jane Thomas said, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “I felt that the women from the center were being stopped with inordinate frequency. He told me I was imagining things.”

“What did you say to that?” Mendez asked.

“I told him he needed to go look up the records and then he could accuse me of having a persecution complex, not before.”

“When was this?” Hicks asked as they left the family waiting room and started back down the hall toward the ICU.

“Oh, we revisit this subject every eight or nine months,” she said. “He claims the numbers are normal, and that maybe I have an inordinate number of bad drivers among my clients.”

“Have your clients complained about any one deputy in particular?” Mendez asked.

“There are two or three regular offenders. Ask your boss.”

“Did any of the women complain about the deputy that stopped them being inappropriate in any way?”

Thomas looked at him sharply. “Are you thinking one of your own people . . . ?”

“No, ma’am,” Hicks said. “We’re just following up on a remark someone made in passing.”

She frowned and started moving slowly toward the door. “I want to go back and check on Karly.”

All three of them went to stand outside Karly Vickers’s room, looking in at her through the glass. Nothing had