“NO!!!” Tommy screamed at the top of his lungs.
Arms and legs scrambling, he shot backward like a crab to the other side of the car, grabbed the handle, and fell out the door. His feet hit the street and he ran.
He ran for his life. He ran like he was in a nightmare—his legs flying but not seeming to take him anywhere. And that fast, Shadow Man had hold of him, scooping him up off his feet like a bird of prey snatching up a rabbit and carrying it away.
“NOOO!!!” Tommy shouted, and he kicked and he hit.
Shadow Man ran back to his dad’s car, threw him into the backseat, slammed the door, and jumped behind the wheel. The door locks snapped down. He was trapped.
86
Vince turned down Anne’s street, hoping she hadn’t already turned out the lights and gone to bed. He didn’t want to scare her, waking her up, but he wanted to see her. Hell, after this night, he needed to see her, just to have his eyes rest on something beautiful. He’d had his fill of death and dark souls.
If he could have, he would have put off telling her about Peter Crane. It was going to be hard on her to think about Tommy and how hurt the boy would be to lose his father, how shattered he would be to learn his father was a monster. And it would be harder still to think that he would now be left entirely to the care of Janet Crane.
They still had to build their case. They had no forensic evidence at this point. No evidence at all. They had a dead-on profile and a couple of connect-the-dots drawings of stick-figure birds. They had a living victim who could neither see nor hear. They had speculation and conjecture.
Unless Peter Crane made a mistake, they had jack shit. If they lived in an hour-long TV drama, they could have just gone and arrested him based on nothing but their hunches, and none of the women he had killed would really be dead, and none of the lives he had touched would really be ruined. But that wasn’t how a real investigation worked. In real life the hurt counted.
Anne had gone to dinner with Crane and his son. The idea that she had been that close to him made Vince’s stomach clench like a fist.
Light still glowed in the windows of the Navarre living room as Vince pulled into the driveway behind Anne’s Volkswagen. He wondered if she had watched the coverage of what had gone down at the sheriff’s office. He wondered if the media had gotten any of it right.
He went to the front door and knocked lightly at first. Her father was probably sleeping.
No one stirred.
He knocked a little harder, then a little harder as his instincts began to growl.
He tried the knob, and the door opened without protest.
“Anne?” he called. “Anne? It’s Vince.”
In the living room, the television babbled to itself. Anne’s purse lay on the sofa, its contents spilled out on a big leather ottoman. His pulse picked up a beat. He pulled a clean handkerchief from a pocket and gingerly handled her wallet. DL and credit cards. Eighty dollars in cash and a photo of who Vince guessed was her at about five posed with a woman who was unmistakably her mother.
“Anne?” he called again.
He didn’t like that open front door. She wouldn’t have been that careless. They had talked about it.
He checked the old man’s room down the hall—no lights and intermittent snoring. He went upstairs to check out empty bedrooms. Every second that passed, those instincts growled louder and louder.
In the kitchen, her car keys were on the floor, and so was the heavy old teakettle. A fine mist of blood splatter had dried on painted white cabinets.
“No,” he said, denying the scenario even as it automatically played through his head.
She knocked her keys to the floor as she tried to get to the now-open back door. She grabbed the kettle on her way past the stove and used it as a weapon. And, good girl, she whacked him hard enough to make him bleed.
The scene continued on the back porch, where furniture had been shoved out of place during a struggle. More blood on a concrete frog the size of a croquet ball. Whose blood?
He was shaking now. Sweating like a horse. His brain began to throb. His stomach twisted like a rope.
Then his eye caught on something small, something that would have seemed insignificant, no bigger than an inch, a little piece of trash on the floor . . .
A tube of superglue.
87
“STOP! STOP! STOP!!!” Tommy screamed from the backseat.
He stood on the seat, pitching forward, holding on to the headrest with one hand, pounding his other fist against the shoulder and head of Shadow Man behind the wheel of his father’s car.
The man shouted at him. “SIT DOWN!”
“STOP THE CAR!” Tommy shrieked like a girl at the top of his lungs. He swung his fist again and hit Shadow Man’s ear so hard it felt like all his fingers shattered.
Shadow Man turned the wheel hard to the right and hit the brakes. Tommy was thrown clear across the backseat and banged his head against the window so hard he saw stars, and to his horror, he started to cry.
“SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”
The monster loomed over the seat back, his face twisted with rage.
Tommy buried his face in the blanket he had brought with him and sobbed, choking on a terror bigger than anything he had ever known.
“I want my dad!” he cried over and over. “I want my dad!”
Anne struggled against the belt that bound her arms to her sides. Crane had pulled it so tight around her, her hands had gone numb. Her back and ribs hurt like they were on fire, and she felt like she might never get another full breath.
The car had come to an abrupt stop, and she expected the trunk to fly open and Peter Crane to loom over her. Instead she heard him shout at Tommy, and Tommy crying, “I want my dad!”
Anne’s heart broke for him. He had to be terrified at what was happening, at what he had seen. He must have stowed away in the car, thinking he would have some grand adventure with his dad. His dad was a great guy. His dad was a hero.
His dad was a monster. So much so that Tommy couldn’t bring himself to recognize the man he loved in the man behind the wheel of the car.
What would happen to him? Anne wondered now. He had seen his father abduct his teacher—who would shortly be killed. How could Peter Crane deal with him, short of killing him too?
It was Anne’s turn to start to cry.
88
They stormed the Crane home like commandos—Vince, Mendez, Hicks, and Dixon, backed up by a full SWAT unit. There was no chance of Peter Crane having taken Anne there, but the show of force was calculated to strike
