“I’m coming to the restaurant,” Franny declared.
“No, you aren’t. You’re going for Chinese.”
“I can’t go for Chinese without you. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Don’t hold back on my account, really.”
“You never answered me,” he said. “Is he hot?”
Hot wasn’t the right word. Honestly, Mendez was hot. Leone was ruggedly handsome, yet distinguished… Anne felt a blush creeping up her neck, much to her consternation. “No.”
“Liar!” Franny exclaimed, laughing, highly amused.
Anne stopped and looked at him. “Why am I speaking to you?”
He kissed her on the cheek. “Because I just took your mind off the fact you have the Marquis de Sade Junior for a pupil. Run along now, Anne Marie. Don’t want to keep your gentleman friend waiting.”
Shaking her head, Anne walked across the plaza to Piazza Fontana, to her non-date.
“It’s not a date,” Vince muttered to himself as he straightened his tie in the men’s room mirror.
What the hell had he been thinking? Anne Navarre probably hadn’t even been born yet when he joined the Bureau. He had to be out of his mind. Maybe he should start taking the antipsychotic drugs, after all.
And asking her in the middle of what had been going on at the school-definitely a sign of brain damage.
It was the bullet’s fault. A hallmark of damage to the frontal lobe of the brain: impulsive behavior.
He was feeling edgy, that end-of-the-day out-of-gas nervousness that usually precipitated a big crash. He had managed a short rest after Mendez dropped him off, and he had dozed under the lights of the tanning machine in the salon, but it hadn’t been enough. He needed about seventeen hours of sleep. At least he had a healthy glow in his face now thanks to a gazillion watts of fluorescent light and his easy-to-tan Italian complexion.
“Maybe you’re just old, Vince,” he muttered.
Then again, he should have been dead. So what the hell? Why shouldn’t he have dinner with a lovely, intelligent twentysomething lady?
He spotted her entering the restaurant as he stepped out of the men’s room. She looked very… determined, he decided, determined to be serious, determined to be taken seriously. She also looked a lot less like an elementary schoolteacher in her body-skimming sweater and stylish skirt. Nice.
“Miss Navarre,” he said with his most charming smile. “You look lovely.”
“Detective-”
“Vince, please. It’s been a long day for both of us. Let’s shelve the formalities, shall we?”
The maitre d’ led them through the restaurant’s interior to a quiet booth in a corner. Miss Navarre raised an eyebrow.
“We don’t want eavesdroppers,” Vince explained. “This isn’t a conversation for public consumption, all things considered.”
He ordered a bottle of pinot grigio and two glasses-not that he would be able to drink it considering the drugs he was on, but he could pretend to while the lovely Anne loosened up a bit. She looked just this side of suspicious.
“Are you allowed to drink on the job?”
Vince grinned. “Darling, life is too short not to drink wine.”
“Okay. Well, I can certainly use it.”
“You’re not used to having your school overrun with detectives?”
“Not before this week.”
“How long have you been a teacher?”
“Five years.” It seemed like that was all she was going to say, but then she hastened to add, “But I had a double major in college, which took an extra year, and then a year of grad school.”
So she wasn’t as close to being jailbait as one might have thought. She had to be twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He wanted to smile at her need to set him straight on that, but he refrained.
“What was your other major?”
“Psychology. I wanted to be a child psychologist, but-” She stopped herself from being so eager. “Life… took a different turn.”
“Funny how that happens.”
Anne looked away, took a deep breath, and sighed. She was embarrassed, he thought. She probably didn’t just go around telling her life story to strangers-or to people she knew, for that matter. He pegged her for the kind of woman who confided in one friend, if she confided in anyone, cautious in the way of an old soul-or a wounded one.
The waiter brought the wine. Vince sampled it and nodded his approval. They ordered their meals, sipped at their glasses.
“Anne,” he said. “I have a confession to make. I don’t work for the sheriff’s office. I’m a special agent with the FBI. For now, it’s better that isn’t common knowledge. My specialty is profiling serial killers.”
She said nothing, but her eyes got wider.
“I don’t know how much you’ve been told by Detective Mendez,” he went on, “but there is reason to believe Lisa Warwick-the woman your students found in the park-was the latest victim in a series of at least three murders.”
“Oh my God.”
“Another woman is missing. So, you can see, it’s imperative that we try to learn as much as we can from every possible avenue.”
“I don’t know what I can do,” she said. “I teach fifth grade.”
“Detective Mendez told me you have a pretty good handle on who your kids are. I saw that for myself this afternoon.”
She laughed without humor. “Oh, yeah. I’m so sharp I had no idea Dennis Farman was having homicidal fantasies.”
“Why would you suspect that?” Vince asked. “How many people would look at a kid in the fifth grade and peg him for a future killer? Nobody. That’s highly aberrant behavior. No normal-thinking person would look for that.”
“And that’s where you come in?”
He gave her half a smile. “Yeah. I’ve been experienced right out of normal thinking. I’ve spent a long time studying murderers and trying to figure out how they got that way and what makes them tick.”
“How do you sleep with that in your head?”
“Great,” he admitted, “as long as I’m medicated.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Because maybe if I’m good enough at what I do, I can prevent some innocent people from dying. Maybe I can spot a kid like Dennis Farman and get the right people to pay attention to him. I’m sure you can relate to that.”
She nodded and looked away, a soft sheen of moisture coming into her eyes.
“I’m sorry you have to get dragged into this world, Anne,” Vince said, genuinely sorry for her. She probably still had ideals, and she probably still believed the world could hold up to them. “I know this is hard for you.”
“I’m afraid the right people aren’t going to pay attention to Dennis,” she said. “Especially not now. He’s being expelled from school. He’ll be running around loose, with no supervision, no guidance. Who’s supposed to police him? His parents work. And even if they were home, they must be terrible parents or he wouldn’t be the way he is.”
Vince sighed. He would have been agreeing with her if he hadn’t wanted to keep her from crying. In fact, if he had been teaching a seminar, using Dennis Farman for an example, he would have said it was probably already too late to save him.
His colleagues back in Quantico would think the same. He had sent them Dennis Farman’s drawing by fax. He would talk to them the next day, but he already knew what they would say. They would say Dennis Farman already had well-established violent, antisocial behavioral tendencies. His artwork already showed sadistic fantasies-sadistic sexual fantasies in a child who had yet to reach puberty. There probably wasn’t going to be any fixing what was wrong with this kid.
But he wasn’t about to say any of that to Anne.
“You’re right in what you told his father,” he said instead. “The boy should have psychiatric counseling.”
“And what army is going to make his father believe that?” she asked. “Frank Farman probably thinks he can beat the bad out of Dennis.”