up from the arm of the sofa he had been sitting on and started to pace, arms crossed over his chest—which told Mendez he wasn’t comfortable with the subject.
“Did Jane bring this up to you?” Dixon asked.
“Actually, Steve Morgan brought it up,” Hicks said.
“Don’t you think Jane would have been the first person to say something about it if she felt it was significant?” Dixon said.
“Except that she trusts you. She trusts your judgment,” Mendez said.
Dixon glared at him. “And you don’t?”
“Don’t jump on me, boss. I’m doing the job you hired me to do.”
“A couple of the deputies seem to have a written a lot of stops on women from the center,” he conceded. “But they’re deputies who write a lot of tickets across the board. The numbers didn’t bother me. And I’m sure as hell not going to tell them to treat Thomas Center clients any differently from the rest of the population.”
“I just want to know one thing,” Mendez said, dreading asking the question, already knowing the answer. “Is one of those deputies Frank?”
Dixon sighed heavily. “Yes. Of course. Frank leads the league in traffic citations—and in complaints from the people he’s written up. That’s hardly news.”
“I want to see his file,” Mendez said.
“I’ve reviewed his file.”
“Yeah, well, I want to see it.”
“You think I’m trying to protect him?”
“I think you and Frank go way back, and it’s not appropriate or fair to you to make a call on him. Sir.”
He half expected Dixon to blow a gasket. His boss was a by-the-book kind of guy, and he had toed that line so far with Frank Farman, but friendship and history could make that line blur, even with men like Cal Dixon.
But Dixon held his temper. He stopped his pacing, staring down at the gray industrial-grade carpet on the floor.
“Frank’s wife is missing,” he said quietly. “His son is saying Frank killed her.”
Mendez felt all the blood in his body free-fall to his feet. Hicks got up from the arm on the other end of the sofa and said, “What?”
Dixon filled them in on what had transpired that afternoon while they had been at the hospital with Wendy Morgan and Cody Roache.
“Where is he now?” Mendez asked.
“Home,” Dixon said. “We don’t know that Sharon is dead or even missing. I’ve got Trammell and Hamilton calling her friends and relatives. Frank claims she left on her own. And the boy is less than reliable. I don’t even know if he has a firm grasp on reality. He seems almost catatonic for the most part.”
“Except the part where he said his father killed his mother,” Mendez said.
“Frank let me have a look around his house. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.”
“Or he wouldn’t have consented,” Mendez pointed out.
“It’s a catch-twenty-two,” Dixon conceded. “And you know damn well I wouldn’t cut him any slack on a charge like this. We simply have nothing to indicate a crime has been committed. We’ve got nothing to hold him on.”
Mendez put his hands on his head and turned around in a circle. “What a fucking mess.”
Vince approached Karly Vickers’s room with the same kind of quiet respect he would have used in church. Jane Thomas sat beside the girl’s bed, holding her hand, the gold necklace laced through fingers entwined.
“She’s lucky to have you on her side,” he said softly.
“I don’t know how she’s going to make it through this,” Thomas confessed. “She’d been through so much before she ever came to the center.”
“She wants to live,” Vince said. “Or she wouldn’t be here now. She’ll find a way to make it, and you’ll find a way to help her.”
Tears glittered in her green eyes as she looked up at him as if he might actually have an answer. “Why does it have to be so hard?”
“I don’t know. I only know my part, and that’s helping find the animal who did this to her. Can you help me with that?”
Jane Thomas helped him catalog the wounds Karly Vickers’s tormentor had carved into her, and Vince left her with a promise to do everything in his power to bring a madman to justice.
And he walked out of the room and away from the ICU thinking the same thing she had asked him:
73
When Anne saw Tommy waiting outside the pizza place it was all she could do not to break into a big smile. He had dressed up in what had to be his best outfit: smart gray pants with a buttondown shirt and a navy blue sweater under his open Dodgers jacket. If he’d worn a tie he would have looked like a miniature prep school candidate. Only the black eye Dennis Farman had given him spoiled the image.
“You look very nice tonight, Tommy.”
“Thank you. So do you, Miss Navarre,” he said, terribly serious.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
He had run out of things to say. He sighed and tried not to fidget. Anne looked up at his father, handsome and relaxed, a pleasant smile curving his mouth. “Dr. Crane, I want to thank you for making this possible.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “I appreciate your concern for setting the record straight. Why don’t we go inside? The smell of that pizza is too much to resist.”
They went into the restaurant and found a booth. The place was booming with Saturday night customers— college kids, families, teenagers traveling in packs. Video games bleeped and growled in their own alcove at the rear of the place. Tommy was wide-eyed, taking it all in.
“We don’t get to come here very often, do we, Tommy?” Peter Crane said.
Tommy shook his head.
“Tommy’s mom is a member of the food police,” Crane explained. “All healthy, all the time.”
“And as a dentist, you must agree with that,” Anne said.
“I don’t think the occasional pizza is such a bad thing. Tommy and I sneak in some fun stuff every once in a while, don’t we, Sport?”
Tongue-tied, Tommy nodded.
“What do you like on your pizza, Tommy?” Anne asked.
“Cheese.”
“Me too. What about pepperoni?”
The shy smile tucked up one corner of his mouth as he nodded again.
“What about Brussels sprouts?”
“No!” he said emphatically, shaking his head so hard his whole body swung from side to side.
Anne laughed. “All right. No Brussels sprouts.”
A waitress came and took their order for pizza with no Brussels sprouts. When she had gone, Anne looked across the table at Tommy, growing serious.
“Tommy, after seeing your mom last night, I just want to make sure you don’t have the wrong idea about something,” she began. “When I asked you those questions I never meant for you to think that your father might be involved in what happened, or that I might think that. Do you understand?”
“I guess,” he said in a tone of voice that was less than convincing.
