Deeper Than the Dead

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?

Oh Jesus God, no.

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.