Deeper Than the Dead

83

“You’re going to have a scar,” Vince said.

“Just one?” Mendez asked.

“The ladies will find that one sexy,” he said, pointing to the angry red line that creased the detective’s cheek. “The ones they can’t see . . .”

He shrugged and sat down on the stone bench beside Mendez, and leaned his forearms on his thighs.

They sat outside, neither of them noticing the damp chill of the night air. It smelled like lavender and rosemary with a hint of the ocean that stretched beyond the small mountains to the west. It didn’t smell like gunpowder or death.

The media had given up for the night, Dixon shutting them down and sending them on their way. What had happened inside the sheriff’s office might have made for compelling news, but it was also a family tragedy, and enough was enough for one night.

The paramedics had come and gone. Mendez had refused the ride to the hospital. Once he had showered the blood and brain and bone fragments off, a little cut on the cheek didn’t seem like anything to lose time over. He could have just as easily been as dead as Frank Farman.

“You want to share some of that pharmacy you’re carrying around on you?” he asked.

Vince dug the pill bottle out of his jacket pocket and shook a few into his hand.

“I recommend the long white one,” he said. “Unless you’re thinking about having a seizure. Then I’d go for the pink one.”

Mendez arched a brow. “A seizure?”

“The bullet went in right here,” Vince said, pointing just beneath his right cheekbone where an odd smooth shiny patch of new skin smaller than a dime marked the spot. People rarely noticed the scar for what it was. The mustache he had grown since Mendez had last seen him was a far more noticeable feature.

“Bullet?”

“Do I need to call the paramedics back here?” Vince asked. “You’re repeating me.”

“What bullet?”

“If only I’d seen it coming,” he said wistfully. “I could have turned my head a little, maybe got a nice razor line like you. Or maybe ended up with an eye patch. My ex-wife used to have a thing for pirates in the romance novels.”

“What happened?”

“The Reader’s Digest version: a junkie mugger with a cheap .22. That’s the thing about those small caliber handguns—what goes into the vic doesn’t always come out.”

“You’re walking around with a head full of lead?” Mendez said, incredulous.

“Explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

“Actually, yeah.”

“I’m officially on a medical leave.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Uh . . . because I don’t want anyone to know,” Vince said. “Call me paranoid, but I think people treat a guy different when they know he’s got a bullet in his head.”

“You should be dead.”

“Yeah. But I’m not,” he said with a shadow of the big white grin. “Life’s a funny old dog. Don’t take it for granted, kid.”

They were quiet for moment. A couple of county cruisers rolled past them into the back parking lot. Just another night at the SO now. The show was over.

“You really are going to quit, aren’t you?”

Vince nodded. “If I didn’t know it when I came out here, I know it now. I know it tonight.

“You don’t want to end up like old Frank, kid; just a hanger for a uniform,” he said. “Nothing means anything to you except the job. It’s who you are. It’s what you are. Been there, done that, time to go.

“Love what you do. Don’t get me wrong. Have passion for it. But don’t make it your only mistress.”

“What will you do?”

“I want to do some teaching, some consulting, a little recruiting for old time’s sake,” he said. “But I really want the wife and the life. And at the end of the day, I want a soft place to put my bullet-riddled head that isn’t a cheap pillow at a Holiday Inn. Time for a young hotshot like yourself to move in and for me to move on.”

“You think I could make it to Behavioral Sciences?”

“You’d have to put in some field time, but yeah. You’ve got a good head for it, Tony. I’d like to see you think about it, anyway.”

“I will.”

“You poaching my best detective, Vince?” Cal Dixon said, wandering over to take the last spot on the bench. Like Mendez, he had showered and changed clothes in the locker room, trading the uniform with Frank Farman’s blood on it for jeans and a sweater.

Vince spread his hands. “What can I say? I’m a son of a bitch. I want him to be all he can be.”

“I’ll let it slide,” Dixon said. “You saved my ass tonight.”

“You did your part. I’m just a loudmouth. The nuns used to kick my ass for running my mouth like that,” Vince said. He let a beat pass, then changed his tone. “I’m sorry about Frank.”

Dixon shook his head. “You think you know a guy . . .”

“You did,” Vince said. “Once. People change. Life changes them.”

“I just couldn’t see him doing the things that were done to those women.”

“Farman didn’t kill those women,” Vince said.

The men on either side of him sat up straight in shock, and said, “What?”

“Farman killed his wife. He wasn’t See-No-Evil.”

“But it all fits,” Mendez argued.

“Almost. But not quite.”

“But Vince, I saw what he did to his wife. She looked just like the others—”

“And why wouldn’t she?” he asked. “Frank knew the details of those cases.”

“You think he just pulled a copycat?” Dixon asked.

“My story of Frank Farman goes like this,” Vince said. “Last night Frank got drunk, he got mean, he beat his wife. Not for the first time, but this time it went wrong, and she died. But Frank’s a smart guy when he sobers up in the light of day. He knows he’s got a lot to lose. He figures he can make his wife’s death look like the other murders. Hang it on a real bad guy. It was an accident, anyhow, and he’ll never do another bad thing in his life, so why should he go to prison?

“He can’t go to prison, he’s Frank Farman, Chief Deputy. Four more years working up to his twenty, and he’s got a boatload of commendations. He should be sheriff one day, damn it. He’s worked his ass off for it.

“So he does a copycat job after the fact—glues her eyes and mouth shut, cuts her up. She’s dead already. It’s not like he’s hurting her.

“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.