Secrets to the Grave (44 page)

Anne knew from her own experience over the last year the value of that kind of routine. Now she could put what had been a difficult experience for her to a positive use for Haley. But tonight she would interrupt that routine to potentially draw out the most terrible memory a child could possibly have: the memory of a monster.

Vince rested a hand on her shoulder, reading her emotions perfectly.

“We’ll show them to her together,” he said. “You and me. Okay?”

“Okay,” Anne said. “Let’s get it over with.”

Vince turned to Mendez. “Keep your fingers crossed.”

Mendez took a seat on a bench in the hall to wait.

Vince pressed Anne into the room with a hand on the small of her back. Her heart was thudding in her chest.

“Haley? We’re going to play a little game, sweetie,” she said, feeling like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Haley looked up at her, wide-eyed and innocent. “What kind of game?”

“We’re going to look at some pictures,” Vince said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “I’m going to put them down on the bed, then you’re going to look at them and tell us if you know any of the people in the pictures.”

Haley got on her knees and leaned sideways into Anne, chewing on the tip of her index finger as Vince laid the pictures out.

Anne watched her face carefully, looking for any nuance of expression that might indicate recognition.

Haley reached out a finger. Anne held her breath.

“That’s Zander,” Haley said, pointing at the wide-eyed math genius with his wild cloud of gray hair. She looked up at Vince and crinkled her nose. “Isn’t he weird?”

“He looks kind of funny in this picture, doesn’t he?” Vince said. “Do you know anybody else here?”

Haley studied the pictures one by one. With the exception of Steve Morgan, Anne only knew who they were because Vince had told her. The head of the music department at McAster. An architect. Steve Morgan’s law partner.

Darren Bordain in a photo from a magazine—a shot of him and his mother dressed to the nines at a charity function. He was almost a carbon copy of Milo.

Steve Morgan, handsome, dressed for golf, a wide white grin splitting his features. It was hard for Anne to look at him so happy when she knew he was making Sara and Wendy miserable with his bad behavior. Here he was in a lineup as, at best, a man who cheated on his wife, and at worst a murder suspect.

Haley looked at all of them very carefully. Anne held her breath. Vince was holding his breath and watching the little girl’s reactions as carefully as Anne was.

Finally, Haley looked up and smiled like a pixie. “These are all my daddies!”

She proceeded to point to each face and name them.

“Daddy Mark and Daddy Don and Daddy Bob and Daddy Steve and Daddy Milo and Daddy Darren and Zander.”

“Daddy Zander?” Vince asked.

Haley shook her head. “Just Zander.”

Anne felt limp with relief. As much as the detectives needed a positive ID, she couldn’t help but be glad Haley hadn’t looked at these men and seen the face of the person who had choked and smothered her.

“Do you see Bad Daddy?” Vince asked.

Haley ignored him and turned instead to Anne. “Mommy Anne, will you read me a story?”

“Sure, sweetheart. In a few minutes. You get under the covers and I’ll be back before you know it.”

“You won’t turn the lights off?”

“Nope. I won’t turn the lights off.”

“Bad Daddy comes when the lights are off.”

“Bad Daddy can’t come here,” Anne said, gathering the pictures back up off the bed.

She followed Vince into the hall, pulling Haley’s door only partially closed.

Mendez got to his feet with a look of tense expectation.

Vince shook his head. “No go. It may have been too dark for her to recognize the killer that night. Or she might only relate that person to Bad Daddy if he was dressed all in black.”

“You know, people don’t look the same when they turn on you,” Anne said quietly. “I remember how Peter Crane looked when he was above me, choking me. His eyes went flat and cold, like some kind of beast’s. The angles of his face stood out as if the skin were being pulled tight against the bone. He didn’t look like Tommy’s dad, or everybody’s favorite dentist, or the man who had come to my door just minutes earlier. It was like he was wearing a mask and then he took it off and I saw what he really was.”

Vince slipped his arm around her and drew her closer to him, just to let her feel that he was there and strong and protecting her.

“Haley may not have recognized the man who hurt her,” she said. “Because it wasn’t a man who hurt her, it was a monster.”

Mendez sighed, defeated. “I’d better call my mother and ask her to light a candle for Gina Kemmer then, because she’s the only one left who can ID this guy.”

Good, Anne thought, as she slipped away and went back into Haley’s room. Just relating her own experience in a few brief sentences had brought the terrible image of Peter Crane’s face that night back to her mind with such sharp clarity it was painful. Her heart was beating quick and shallow, and she felt weak both physically and mentally.

If Haley could be spared that ...

“Let’s make up a story tonight,” she said, settling in beside her little charge.

Haley snuggled into her, thumb at the ready. Anne brushed her hair back and kissed her forehead and began.

“Once upon a time there was a land where there were no monsters and no mean people and no bad daddies ...”

 

 

When Haley had drifted off, Anne slipped from the bed and padded downstairs in her stocking feet. The house was quiet except for soft smoky saxophone music drifting out of Vince’s office. He was sitting at his desk with only the desk lamp on, concentrating, peering down through his reading glasses at notes he had made.

He glanced up at her and smiled, took off his glasses and set them aside. He looked tired. Anne tunneled her fingers into his thick hair and smiled back.

“Come to bed, Daddy Vince,” she said.

“Mmmm ...” He pressed his cheek to her breast and sighed. “I am so exhausted, so wiped out, so out of gas ... and I still want you, Mrs. Leone.”

He pulled her face down to his and kissed her, a deep, slow, sexy kiss.

“But ... ,” Anne said as they emerged back into the real world.

“But ... I want to go over these notes one more time. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s an answer in here somewhere and I’m just not seeing it.”

“Maybe you’ve been looking at it too long.”

“Can’t see the forest for the trees? Maybe so. It’s probably hiding right in front of me. I’m just beating myself up over Zahn,” he admitted. “I pushed too hard. I’m afraid I might have triggered something in him he can’t get back from.”

Anne brushed a thumb over the bruise on his cheek where he told her Zander Zahn had struck him. “We can’t know somebody else’s tipping point. Most of the time, we don’t even know our own until it’s too late.

“I looked at those pictures tonight ... ,” she said. “I’m sure not one of those men ever believed they could do what was done to that woman. And yet, one of them probably did.”

Vince nodded, then broke the darkness of the thought.

“How’d you get so smart?” he teased.

“I married well,” Anne said, smiling. “Come upstairs. You can tell me a bedtime story.”

They walked up the stairs hand in hand.

Vince spoke softly. “Once upon a time there was husband who loved his wife ...”

70

Thunder rumbled. In the distance Dennis could see flashes of lightning far away. He loved it when it stormed at night. But the rain had stopped for now, which suited him fine. The fire would burn better without rain.

Dennis felt like he had a thunderstorm inside his brain. Anger rumbled and grumbled then
BANG
! Flashed like lightning. He was so mad he wanted to just run shouting, spinning around, flinging his arms, crashing into things. Then he wanted his hands to turn into knives and he would slash his way through crowds of people and blood would be spurting everywhere. He would spin and turn and cut people in half and cut their heads off.

And at the end of his rampage would be Miss Navarre. And he would stab her and stab her a million times like the guy that killed that lady in the newspaper. He would stick his knives inside of her and down her throat and in her eyes and through her brain. And she would be alive the whole time until he cut her head off.

She didn’t care about him. She didn’t show up again. And nobody told him she wasn’t coming. He had worked so hard to write his report about the murder like she wanted him to. Two whole pages.

Dennis didn’t like to write. It was hard for him. He didn’t always get the letters to go the right way, and he didn’t understand punctuation. He wrote what came in his head, but it didn’t always come out like it did for other people like stupid brainiac Tommy Crane or Wendy Morgan. They did everything right. Dennis did everything wrong.

But he had done his writing assignment for Miss Navarre because she said she would bring him something cool if he finished it. Nobody had ever given Dennis anything special because of something he had accomplished. Mostly because he never accomplished anything. Besides, his dad had always said he was stupid and would never amount to anything, so why should he try?

Miss Navarre probably thought the same thing, and that was why she hadn’t shown up. Why bother? Why should she take time out of her life for him when she could be teaching kids like Tommy and Wendy? Or because she could be fucking the FBI guy, which she probably did all the time because she was a whore.

Dennis was going to show her. He would accomplish BIG things starting tonight.

He dug way under his mattress and started pulling out his stash. He put his money and candy and stuff he wanted to take with him into a plastic bag with a drawstring that someone had thrown in the trash.

He hid the bag under his dirty laundry in the closet, then got out the stuff he needed to start the fire. Fires. He had it all planned out. He knew exactly where to start.

The nurse had gone by half an hour ago. He would have plenty of time now.

Dennis slipped out of his room and looked up and down the dimly lit hall, then darted away from the nurses’ station, going to the empty room at the far end of the hall. The lights from the parking lot glowed in through the window, allowing him to see well enough.

Dennis had snuck into this room and hid several times over the past year. This was the room where the staff dumped extra pieces of equipment—extra wheelchairs, extra poles for IV bags, bed trays, chairs. A couple of green oxygen tanks were shoved way in the corner of the room most difficult to see from the door—and farthest away from the sprinkler in the ceiling.

There was all kinds of stuff to burn in the room—paper towels, old newspapers. Dennis wadded up paper and made a pile on the floor. He tipped one of the oxygen tanks onto it. He had seen this done on a TV show. Oxygen tanks could explode. The idea that he could make something explode just about gave Dennis a hard-on.

This was something he was good at—starting fires. Ever since he was a little kid he had been fascinated with fire. Practically every time he could get his hands on some matches or a lighter he would set something on fire. Maybe just a piece of paper or a pile of leaves. He liked to steal cigarettes and light them and burn bugs and spiders alive with the hot tip.

Maybe Miss Navarre would give him something really special for burning the hospital to the ground, he thought, and had to try really hard not to laugh out loud.

Dennis flicked the lighter and stared at the flame as it licked the air. He took the wadded-up pages of his writing homework and set them ablaze, then tossed them onto the pile of crumpled paper and quickly exited the room.

He made his way back to his own room with two stops to start fires in the wastebaskets in the rooms of other patients who were sleeping. When he got back to his room, he grabbed his plastic bag of stuff and waited by the door.

It seemed to take a long time before the fire alarm went off. Dennis had begun to think all his fires had burned out, and he was going to be really disappointed. But then several things happened at once. The fire alarm went off. Someone started screaming. And the oxygen tanks in the room at the end of the hall exploded.

All of a sudden people came running down the hall past his room. Dennis opened the door and stepped out. Orange flames were coming out of the door at the end of the hall. Nurses were pulling patients out of the rooms nearby. Other patients were wandering into the hall on their own, drooling and confused.

Nasty black smoke came rolling down the hall, stinking with the smell of plastic burning. Right across the hall from Dennis, a man came through the door screaming, his flaming arms raised straight up in the air.

Dennis stared at him, transfixed, then bolted.

In the chaos of people running and screaming, alarms blaring and sprinklers going off, no one noticed a twelve-year-old boy go right out the front door and disappear into the night.

71

Hiding
.

The thought came to him in the hazy gray of predawn.

Hiding in plain sight.

Vince slipped out of bed, pulled on some sweatpants and a T-shirt, and went across the hall. Anne had gone to Haley in the middle of the night when Bad Daddy had paid a visit to the little girl’s dreams.

He looked in on them now and felt a tug at his heart. They were curled up together, sound asleep. They could have easily been mother and daughter with their dark hair and turned-up noses.

As trying as the circumstances were, Haley had seamlessly fitted into their lives as if she belonged there. When he thought about it, Vince had a hard time believing it had been only a few days.