Jane held out the cookie, her hand trembling a little, not from fear of the dog, but from fear of what may have happened to the owner. Petal the pit bull inched closer, whimpering.
She looked thinner than the last time Jane had seen her, and she had some nasty scratches on her as if she might have gotten into a fight or had been living rough. Locked out of the house, she didn’t have her cushy dog bed or her pink bowl filled with kibble; she didn’t have her person to look out for her.
The dog finally, cautiously, stretched her neck out as far as she possibly could, just touching the cookie with the very tip of her tongue. Two tears tumbled over the rims of Jane’s green eyes and slid down her cheeks.
There’s been a murder . . .
13
“Mom’s a piece of work,” Mendez said as the teacher came back into the conference room. “Wound a little too tight, huh?”
She frowned, glancing back toward the door. “A little. When I took Tommy home yesterday she was furious he had missed his piano lesson.”
“And what will the neighbors think now?” Mendez asked, settling in his chair. “Her kid fell on a corpse.”
“What would the neighbors think if they knew she was doping him up to make him sleep?”
“A little antihistamine is nothing,” Mendez said. “When I was in a uniform in Bakersfield, I saw mothers get their kids drunk, make them smoke crack—”
“That’s horrible.”
“Makes Mrs. Crane look like the Mother of the Year.”
Anne Navarre rolled her eyes as she turned away from him and walked toward the bank of windows. “She probably already has that plaque on her wall, along with Realtor of the Year, Volunteer of the Year, Chamber of Commerce Person of the Year.”
“Image is everything,” Mendez said.
He was happy to see she sided with the kids, and the kids liked her. There might be a chance they would confide something to her that they might not tell their parents or him. Provided they had anything to tell anyone.
Peter Crane was probably right in assuming the killer had been long gone by the time the kids had come across his handiwork. On the other hand, Vince Leone, one of his instructors at the National Academy and one of the pioneers of criminal profiling at the Bureau, had talked about killers who returned to the crime scene either to relive the experience or to watch the police investigation.
Some of them got an ego boost by watching the cops and believing they were superior to the dumb clods trying to figure it out. Some of them got sexual gratification revisiting the scene. Sick bastards.
“Tell me about Tommy.”
“Tommy?” Anne Navarre turned her back to the windows, leaned back against the credenza, and crossed her arms—but not as tightly as before. A step in the right direction. “He’s very bright, conscientious, quiet, sweet.”
“He has a crush on you.”
She made a little face and shook her head.
“Yes, he does,” Mendez insisted. “He watched you almost the whole time.”
“He watched everyone. That’s what he does. He takes in everything then decides what to do. He probably watched me more because he feels safe with me.”
Mendez chuckled. “Trust me. You might know kids’ heads, but I was a ten-year-old boy once.”
“I suppose I can’t argue with that.”
“Why do you think he didn’t tell us the Farman kid touched the corpse?”
“Fear of retribution. Dennis Farman is a bully.”
A quick knock sounded on the door to the outer office and a uniformed deputy stepped in.
“Farman’s not coming.”
“The hell he’s not,” Mendez said.
“He’s not coming. He said he’ll take his kid’s statement himself. He said it was a waste of everybody’s time to come in here and talk to you.”
“The fuck!” Mendez caught himself too late and glanced over at Anne Navarre. “Sorry.”
“I could call Mrs. Farman,” the teacher offered. “Maybe she would come in with Dennis.”
“You’ve got to go now anyway,” the deputy said. “Some woman came into the office to report a missing person. Could be our victim.”
The woman waiting in Sheriff Dixon’s office was in her early forties, tall and slender, and dressed in jeans with dirty knees and a bright green T-shirt with an oversize denim shirt thrown over it and left open. Her long blonde hair was scraped back into a messy ponytail with strands falling loose to frame her pale oval face. She stood in front of the visitor’s chair with her arms wrapped around herself. She looked worried.
Cal Dixon was sitting against the front edge of his desk, head down, speaking quietly to the woman when Mendez walked in.
Dixon looked up. “Tony, I’m glad you made it back. I want you to meet Jane Thomas from the Thomas Center for Women. Ms. Thomas, this is Detective Mendez. He’s my lead investigator on this case.”
Mendez reached out and shook her hand.
“Jane is concerned the murder victim may be someone she knows.”
“One of our clients,” she said. “Karly Vickers. No one has seen or heard from her since last Thursday night.”
“And you just noticed her missing?” Mendez said. “Don’t you do a head count or something?”
Many of the Thomas Center “clients” were at-risk women from abusive situations. From what Mendez had heard, they ran a pretty tight ship for security reasons.
“We had recently moved Karly out of the center into one of our cottages. She was ready to transition to independent living.”
“What makes you think she didn’t take that idea to the next level and just split?”
Jane Thomas shook her head. “No. No. She was excited about starting over. She was a little nervous, but excited about starting her new job. Yesterday was supposed to be her first day.”
“But she didn’t show up,” Mendez said.
“No.”
“The employer is . . . ?”
“Quinn, Morgan and Associates. A law firm that helps us out with family court cases.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“I saw her last week—Thursday morning at the center. I helped her pick out her new work wardrobe. We have our own store in-house, clothing donated from working women here in town, from Santa Barbara, from Los Angeles.
“Thursday was Karly’s makeover day. She had her hair done, her nails, her makeup. I remember her saying she felt like Cinderella.”
“Could she have gone out looking for Prince Charming?” Mendez asked. “She had a new look, new clothes. She was feeling pretty—”
“She’s shy. She was still recovering emotionally from being beaten nearly to death by her boyfriend.”
Mendez dug his notebook and pen out of the patch pocket of his tweed sport coat and started scribbling. “Do you have a name for him?”
“Greg Usher. I have all the information available on him in Karly’s file at my office. He has a record.”
“And he’s walking around loose?”
“The last I heard.”
“Do you have a photograph of Karly?” Dixon asked.
“Not with me.”
“Do you know if he tried to contact her recently?” Mendez asked.
“She would have told us.”
“Maybe she was afraid to.”
She didn’t have an answer for that. She wasn’t sure.
“Does she have a car?”
“Yes, a gold Chevy Nova. 1974 or ’75. I have the license plate number in her file.”
“Where’s the car?” Mendez asked.
“I don’t know. It’s not at the cottage.”
“So she could have gone somewhere on her own.”
“No. She didn’t just leave.”
“You know as well I do, Jane,” Dixon said quietly. “How many of these women go back to their abusers?”
“Not our women.”