“Is your gay boyfriend gonna make me?” he taunted.
“You’re such a moron,” Wendy snapped. “You’re such a moron even other morons don’t want you hanging around.” She glanced meaningfully at Cody, who was bent over throwing up on the grass.
Dennis’s face began to get red. Tommy swallowed hard, but Wendy was pissed off and kept going.
“If you weren’t such a moron that you got held back a year and now you’re bigger than everybody, somebody would kick your butt.”
Dennis got redder and redder. He stepped in closer. “You’re a cunt.”
Wendy stood up on the bench so she was taller than he was. Tommy looked to see if Mr. Alvarez had heard the C word.
Wendy was furious now, her hands clenched into fists. “You’re stupid. You’re stupid and everybody hates you!”
Dennis suddenly grabbed her by the arm and pulled her off the bench. He took the thing in tissue paper and shoved it in her face.
“I’m gonna make you eat it!” he shouted.
The tissue fell away, and Wendy screamed. Dennis pushed her backward into the bench, trying to push the blackened thing into her mouth. Wendy frantically turned her head from side to side, trying to escape the thing.
Tommy lowered a shoulder and ran into Dennis Farman like a human battering ram. But Dennis was in a rage now, and even though he staggered sideways a step he continued trying to shove the black thing into Wendy’s mouth.
Tommy took his fist and used it like a hammer on Dennis’s head. Dennis turned toward him and Tommy clipped him in the mouth, splitting his lip. Blood gushed out.
“You fucking little faggot!” Dennis screamed. He took a wild swing and hit Tommy hard in the face, knocking him off his feet. Dennis’s shoe hit him square in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him.
Tommy tried to curl into a ball. He put his hands over his head to protect himself as Dennis kept kicking him over and over.
Then suddenly his assailant was gone, dragged backward by the scruff of his neck by Mr. Alvarez, who was shouting something Tommy couldn’t understand. Stars spun before his one good eye.
Wendy hit the dirt beside him. “Tommy? Are you okay?”
Tommy was coughing as he fought to sit up. “No,” he croaked.
They both looked over at Dennis, who was in a blind rage, screaming and cursing and hitting and kicking at Mr. Alvarez.
They looked at each other, then they looked at the ground where Dennis had dropped the thing he had been trying to shove into Wendy’s mouth: a human finger, blackened and rotted like a bad banana.
30
The offices of Peter Crane, DDS, were located in a renovated white stucco, Spanish-style building on a bustling, beautiful, tree-lined pedestrian plaza near the college. Shoppers wandered in and out of upscale boutiques and galleries on the three-block stretch. Sidewalk cafes and coffeehouses were busy with a mix of students, adults, and older people. A guitarist playing classical music sat on a bench outside the bookstore.
Nice town, Vince thought, spying an Italian place that advertised Chicago-style pizza. He could smell the olive oil and garlic as if he were swimming in it.
They went inside the dentist’s office and Vince took in the waiting area with its leather chairs and a huge saltwater aquarium built into one wall. Even the magazines on the coffee table were upscale: Town & Country, Architectural Digest, Scientific American. Mendez showed his badge to the elegant African American woman behind the curved wood counter.
She raised her pencil-thin brows. “How may I help you, Detective?”
“Can you tell us if a woman named Karly Vickers had an appointment here last Thursday?”
She flipped back a couple of pages in the appointment book. “Yes. She had a four o’clock cleaning and exam. She arrived at three fifty-five.”
“We’ll need to speak with Dr. Crane and whoever did the cleaning.”
The receptionist led them into an examination room to wait out of sight of patients. Vince helped himself to a seat in the big chair.
“My mother wanted me to be a dentist,” he said, staring up at the mural on the ceiling—a blue sky crowded with plump white clouds. “I’ve got hands the size of catcher’s mitts. Can you imagine having one of these in your mouth?”
A male face loomed over and blocked his view of the clouds. Good-looking guy, midthirties, dark hair, dark eyes.
Vince exited the chair.
“Detective Mendez,” Crane said, shaking hands. “And?”
“Detective Leone,” Vince said.
“Ava said you had some questions about a patient.”
“Karly Vickers,” Mendez said, producing a snapshot from his pocket. Karly hugging her dog. “You saw her Thursday afternoon, late in the day.”
Crane took the photo and stared at it for a moment. “Her hair was different, but yes, I remember her. I gave her a routine exam after her cleaning, and we took a set of X-rays. She needs a couple of crowns, but that’s not a crime,” he said, handing the photograph back. “Can I ask why you’re asking?”
“Miss Vickers is missing,” Vince said. “You may be the last person to have seen her.”
Crane was nonplussed. “Missing? And you think I might know something about that? I looked at her teeth.”
“We’re just trying to retrace her movements that day,” Vince reassured him. “Her appointment here was her last of the day that we know of. Did she happen to say if she was going anywhere after she left here? Perhaps dinner with a friend, anything like that?”
“Oh my God,” Crane said. “First there’s a murder, now there’s a woman missing? Nothing like that ever happens here.”
“It’s disturbing,” Vince agreed.
“Are the two things related?”
“We don’t know yet,” Mendez said.
“Probably not,” Vince added. “You’d be talking about a very rare kind of criminal if the cases were linked. It’s highly unlikely.”
“We’ve already talked about the possibility of a serial killer,” Crane said.
Vince looked at Mendez, who looked a little sheepish. “In theory,” he said.
“After we spoke yesterday, I started thinking,” Crane said. “About a year or so ago—wasn’t there a woman found murdered outside of town? Do you think that murder is connected to this one?”
“I’m not free to speculate,” Mendez said.
“I’m not sure which answer would be worse,” Crane said. “More than one ordinary killer on the loose, or one extraordinary killer on the loose.”
“We’re aiming for C: None of the above,” Vince said.
“The woman in the park,” Crane said, “have you found out who she was?”
“Yes, she’s been identified as Lisa Warwick, a nurse—”
“Lisa Warwick?” he said, shocked. “No.”
“Did you know her?”
“Enough to say hello. She used to work at the Thomas Center. Oh, man, that’s terrible.”
“You do a lot of work for the center?” Vince asked.
“I give a break to their clients and employees,” Crane said. “It’s a good cause. My wife volunteers there as well. She helps with getting donations of clothing for work wardrobes and bringing in successful businesswomen to speak.”
“Had you seen Ms. Warwick recently?” Mendez asked.
“No. I couldn’t say when.”
He leaned back against the counter, crossed his arms, and shook his head. “How did she die?”
“We’re waiting on the full results of the autopsy,” Mendez said. “But it appears she was strangled.”
Crane closed his eyes and rubbed a hand across his forehead as if the revelation had pained him.
“I hope she didn’t suffer,” he said quietly. “She was a nice girl.”