“He’s keeping his cool at this point. He’s got to do what he’s got to do. It’s business now. He figures he’ll plant her someplace once it gets dark. Only Frank’s day goes from bad to worse, to worse still.
“His kid tries to kill someone, then fingers him for killing his wife. He never counted on that. The people he respects most—yourself, Sheriff—are already looking at him sideways on account of him writing up the Vickers girl, and the business with the finger. Above anything else that’s happened to Frank, he can’t take that: tarnish on his image. He’s all about the image.
“So now he’s starting to fray around the edges. He’s not a killer by nature, so that’s weighing on him. He can’t stand people thinking he’s a bad cop, he’s a bad father. He goes home. He starts drinking. Then Child Protective Services pays a visit because Anne Navarre called them yesterday and reported him for possible abuse. More tarnish on the armor.
“Life’s all bad now for Frank. The wheels are coming off the tracks and he can’t stop the train. In his mind he’s done everything right—except for accidentally killing the missus—and he wants someone to take the blame.”
“Me,” Dixon said.
“You,” Vince said. “You should have trusted him. You should have taken him at his word. You took him off the task force. That’s when things started going wrong. Must be your fault. And here we are.”
Dixon looked at him. “You have all of that going on in your head?”
“All that and a bullet,” Mendez said.
“Frank wasn’t the bogeyman,” Vince said. “He was a guy that was wound too tight and he blew apart. Plain and simple. And I’ll bet I can prove it,” he said, pushing to his feet. “Where did you send Mrs. Farman’s body?”
The bodies had been taken to Orrison Funeral Home: both Farmans, Mr. and Mrs. Vince figured it was a safe bet the funeral home had never had a more macabre tableau laid out in their embalming room.
Sharon Farman’s body bag was opened, and Vince steeled himself against the violence that had been done to her both before and after her death.
“I only want you to look at the cutting wounds,” Vince said. “Look at the placement of the wounds, the length, the depth, the way the edges look.”
He had brought along his Polaroids from the Lisa Warwick autopsy. Also his drawing of the placement of Lisa Warwick’s wounds, and the sketch he had made earlier that evening of Karly Vickers’s identical wounds. Each mark was precisely placed, precisely sized.
Now he made a sketch of Sharon Farman’s wounds on the simple human outline on another one of his forms. When he had finished, he laid out everything on a clean stainless steel embalming table, placing the drawings side by side by side.
None of them spoke as they studied the sketches: two exact matches, one sloppy forgery. The cutting wounds on Sharon Farman varied in length and depth. The placement didn’t match the other victims. The wounds appeared random rather than deliberate.
“Frank Farman didn’t kill those women,” Vince said. “These cuts made on Warwick and Vickers mean something specific to the perpetrator. He makes them where and how he makes them for a reason. Sharon Farman is just hacked up.”
Mendez continued to stare at the sketches, seeing something more than what Vince had seen after staring at them for hours on end. He had looked for some kind of message in the placement of the wounds, in the length of the wounds, in the depth of the wounds. They meant something to their killer, but he still wasn’t sure what.
Mendez bummed a pen off his boss and connected the wounds one to the next, to the next. First on the drawing of Lisa Warwick, then on Karly Vickers.
It took some imagination, but the pattern was there: long legs, long neck, long head . . . and two wings.
“It’s a bird,” Dixon said.
The rush of realization went through Vince, but he let Mendez say it.
“It’s a crane.”
Peter Crane.
84
“Dr. Crane,” Anne said, surprised to see him, but not that surprised. She had just been thinking about him. She had spent the evening with him. It wasn’t so strange he would show up at her door, she rationalized.
He smiled sheepishly. “Anne, I’m so sorry to bother you.”
“No, no, not a problem.”
Her mother had raised her to welcome guests, to be courteous. Of course she stepped back from the door, and allowed him to come in. Why wouldn’t she? He had been her hero earlier in the evening.
“Can I offer you something to drink?” Hostess with the most-est. That had been her mother’s role.
“No, thank you,” he said. “I don’t want to interrupt your evening more than I already have. What a lovely home you have. Is it original?”
Charming, disarming. Half the women in town would have killed to have him in their foyers.
“Nineteen thirty-three,” she said. “Renovated, of course.”
“But very true to the architecture,” he said, looking around, taking in the Craftsman detail . . . and seeing that she was alone.
“What can I do for you, Dr. Crane?”
Again the self-deprecating smile. Very Tom Selleck without the mustache. “This is a little awkward, but it’s about the gift Tommy gave you.”
“Oh?” The necklace she had tucked in her pants pocket before she opened the door. The necklace only graduates of the Thomas Center program owned.
Peter Crane had been the last person to see Karly Vickers before she disappeared.
“Have you, by any chance, opened it?”
Something was not quite right. Anne couldn’t have put her finger on it. She couldn’t have described the feeling in a way that wouldn’t have sounded silly.
Without exactly knowing why, she opened her mouth and lied. “No, not yet. I haven’t. Is there a problem?”
He stepped a little farther into the house, very casually taking it all in.
“I’m afraid I have to ask for it back,” he said, perfectly apologetic, and yet goose bumps chased down her arms. “Tommy . . . misunderstood . . .”
“No, really, you don’t have to explain,” Anne said, her heart tripping over itself. “I left the box in the kitchen. I’ll just go get it.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said, his gaze sliding to the right, toward the living room, where the contents of her purse lay scattered on the big leather ottoman in the middle of the room . . .
“Not a problem.”
. . . with the small box and scraps of wrapping paper strewn over the pile . . .
“I’ll just go get it,” Anne said.
Her heart was beating like a drum in her chest as she turned and walked toward the kitchen. She would go through the swinging door and just keep on going. Her car keys were on the kitchen counter by the phone. She would pick them up and be out the back door. Her car was parked in the driveway.
Even with the alarms sounding in her head, there was still a part of her that told her she was overreacting, that she was just spooked by everything that had happened that evening . . .
She remembered what Vince had said to her about trusting those instincts.
Her step quickened just slightly as she pushed open the heavy, swinging door.
One word exploded in her brain: RUN.
