“Yes,” Anne said. “And Dennis will have to pay for what he’s done. But at the same time, I hope someone can help him understand why he did it.”
“’Cause his brain doesn’t work right,” Tommy said matter-of factly as the waitress brought their drinks.
He was bored with the subject now, having stated unequivocally the root of the problem. He took a big gulp of his Pepsi and looked up at his father.
“Dad, can I go play Pac-man until the pizza comes? Please?”
“Sure,” his father said, digging quarters out of his pocket. “Excuse yourself from the table.”
“Excuse me, please, Miss Navarre.”
“Have fun,” Anne said, watching him dash for the arcade machines. “You have a very special little man there, Dr. Crane.”
“He’s a good boy. I’ll thank my lucky stars today especially, after hearing about what the Farman boy did. It’s difficult to imagine a child that young having that much rage inside him.”
“I don’t think Dennis has had the best childhood,” Anne said. “We really can’t know what goes on in someone else’s family.”
“No,” Crane agreed. “Every family has its secrets, and those secrets can run deep—deeper than lies, deeper than death. And they impact every member of that family in ways we can’t know.”
“True enough,” Anne said, thinking of her own family secrets. Her father’s philandering and callous treatment of her mother had left lasting scars on her, though certainly no one outside the Navarre household knew anything other than what a model family they had appeared to be.
“I worry a little about Tommy,” Crane admitted. “His mother can be a very negative influence on him. I do my best to counterbalance that aspect of my wife’s personality. But will it still have an impact on Tommy? Probably. Will it drive him to knife a playmate? I don’t think so, but with all this talk about serial killers this past week, you can’t help but wonder what drives someone to do that.”
“Hopefully the killer will be caught soon, and we won’t have to think about it at all,” Anne said, steering the conversation on to activities coming up on the school calendar for Tommy and his classmates, including a field trip to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, which Tommy had seemed especially excited about.
She felt relieved to have set things straight with Tommy. One burden off her shoulders. She tried not to think about Dennis Farman, who was spending the night on a cot in the same interview room where she had seen him that afternoon. Instead, she tried to enjoy the pizza and the company.
As they left the restaurant and said their good-byes, Tommy’s eyes suddenly got big.
“Oh! I almost forgot!”
He dug a hand in the pocket of his jacket and came up with a small, gift-wrapped box, which he presented to Anne.
“That’s for you.”
Anne bent down next to him and accepted the gift with a soft smile. “Thank you, Tommy. How sweet of you! You didn’t have to bring me a present. Should I open it now?”
“No!” he said, blushing furiously. “Not until you get home.”
“Okay.” Anne leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Thank you. I’ll see you Monday.”
She tucked the little box in her purse and walked down the plaza thinking maybe there was hope for humanity after all.
74
“How do you usually spend your Saturday nights, Vince?” Hicks asked.
They were in the war room, a couple of boxes of decimated pizza spread out on the table in between stacks of files and reports. Dixon had remained at the hospital as Karly Vickers’s mother had finally arrived.
“Oh, well, Saturday nights I usually take the Concorde to Paris for dinner, then pop over to Monte Carlo for a little gambling.”
“Our tax dollars at work,” Mendez said.
“Seriously.”
“Seriously?” Vince thought back over the last year. Most of his Saturday nights had been spent in bed, recuperating. And before that? “Pretty much the same thing we’re doing here.”
“That’s grim, man.”
“I don’t have a wife. I don’t have a life. I’m the perfect man for the job. How about you, Detective Hicks?”
“The second Saturday of the month is jackpot calf roping at the rodeo grounds. I’m usually winning me some money right about now.”
“How about you, Tony?” Vince asked.
“Nothing special.”
“Sign that man up for the FBI.”
“Watch out, old man,” Mendez teased. “I’ll take your job.”
“You’re welcome to it, junior. I’ve done my time. I’m about ready to move on.”
“You? Quit the Bureau? No way, man. You’re a freaking legend.”
“I’ll trade places with you. I’ll move here and live the good life. You head east and take up the mantle.”
“If it was that easy . . .”
“You’d have to pay some dues, but hell, you’re young—as you keep reminding me.”
As if to punctuate the fact, his brain began to throb. He was about done in for the day, and odds were the pizza wasn’t going to taste as good the second time around. He dug in his jacket pocket for the pill bottle.
Antinausea. Antiseizure. Antipain.
He tossed them back and washed them down with cold coffee.
“You pop those things like breath mints,” Mendez said. “What are they?”
“Breath mints.”
“Bullshit.”
“Better living through chemistry,” Vince said, shrugging off the topic of his health. “What have you found out about the traffic stops?”
“If Frank got a dollar for every ticket he wrote, he’d be driving a new Cadillac every year,” Hamilton said. “But we all knew that.”
“Complaints filed against him?”
“A few.”
“By women?”
“Most of them.”
“Allegations of inappropriate conduct?”
“Several,” the detective said, flipping through Farman’s personnel file. “‘He’s rude, he’s condescending, he’s a bully, he’s a chauvinist, he’s a sexist, he made me feel uncomfortable, he made a remark about my ass.’”
“He likes to push women around,” Vince said. “Any sign of Mrs. Farman yet?”
“No. We called everyone in her address book. No one has seen or heard from her.”
“Wouldn’t that be a hell of a deal, if Frank turned out to be See-No-Evil?” Hamilton said.
“If Frank was See-No-Evil,” Vince said, “the last thing I would expect him to do would be to kill his wife. This killer is getting off on the fact that no one suspects him.”
“What about his need for publicity?” Mendez asked.
“He’s getting plenty. ‘Investigators Baffled in Oak Knoll Murders.’ ‘Serial Killer Stumps Sheriff’s Department.’” He held his hands up to frame the imaginary headlines.
“Meanwhile, he’s walking around like the guy next door,” Vince said. “He’s probably bringing up the case to his neighbors, talking about it over coffee with business associates. He’s loving it. Everybody looks at him and sees the perfect citizen, the perfect husband, the perfect family man, whatever. He’s not going to kill his wife.”
“Maybe he just lost control,” Mendez ventured. “Bundy’s killings at the Chi Omega house in Tallahassee, Florida, at the end of his career. He lost it. Took a stupid amount of risk. Killed in a frenzy. Kemper’s last victim, the motivation for all of his murders: his mother. He killed her symbolically over and over, until he finally did it for real.”
“Then why hasn’t anybody found Sharon Farman?” Vince asked. “If your theory holds, he should have planted her right out in front of the building. His last grand gesture. Ed Kemper’s mother was a ball-busting man hater who ragged on him so incessantly that his final act of revenge was to shove her larynx down the garbage disposal.