“Don’t piss me off, Detective,” Dixon warned. “The first thing we need to do is find out who this young woman was. She was somebody’s daughter.”

Mendez shut his mouth and reflected on that. Tonight some family was missing a daughter. If they even realized she was gone, they would still have hope she could be found. They would still have the dread of uncertainty. In a day or two or ten-when this corpse was finally identified and given a name-their hope would become despair. The uncertainty would be over, replaced by the stone-cold fact that someone had taken her life away from them, brutally and without mercy.

And that someone was still out there, very probably hunting for his next victim.

6

“Why are we watching this? You know I hate the news at ten o’clock. The only people who think the news should be on at ten live in Kansas and have to be in bed by ten thirty so they can get up at dawn and watch the corn grow.”

Anne ignored her father’s complaining, making her reply with the remote control by turning up the volume. The station was local, the field reporters fresh out of junior college, the news anchor a failed Betty Ford Clinic alum. The lead story was the body in the park.

The reporter’s glasses were crooked, and his sport coat was too big for him, as if he had borrowed it from a larger relative. He stood near the Oakwoods Park sign, squinting against the glare of ill-positioned lights. Without a doubt, this would be the biggest story to date for a kid who usually covered town council and school board meetings.

“The corpse of a dead woman was discovered this afternoon by children playing in Oakwoods Park.”

Anne’s father, a retired English professor, cried out as if he had been wounded.

“Moron!” he shouted. “Could they have found the corpse of a living woman? Idiot!”

“Be quiet!” Anne snapped. “A murder trumps bad grammar.”

“No one said anything about a murder.”

“It was a murder.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.” She hit the volume button again.

“The victim has not been identified. The cause of death is not known yet.”

“Not yet known.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Anne said.

“Fine,” her father said. “Then this jackass can report that my dead corpse has been found killed.”

“We should all be so lucky that he have the opportunity,” Anne muttered under her breath. She hit the volume button again as Sheriff Cal Dixon stepped up to speak with the reporter.

Dixon stated the basic facts. The victim was a woman who appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties. No identification had been found with or near the body. He could not pinpoint how long she had been dead. An autopsy would be performed, and he would have more to say as to the cause of death when the results came back.

Yes, it appeared she had been murdered.

The sheriff stepped away to confer with Frank Farman and a handsome Hispanic man dressed in slacks and sport coat. A detective, Anne assumed.

The news coverage broke for a commercial and an ad for mattresses came on, the salesman screaming at the top of his lungs. If the telephone hadn’t been on the end table directly beside her, Anne would never have heard it ringing. She picked up the receiver and cringed as a woman’s voice shouted out of it.

“Your television is too loud! People are trying to sleep!”

Anne hit the mute button. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Iver. My father is so hard of hearing, you know.”

Her father glared at her even as he called across the room from his recliner. “Sorry, Judith! We were watching the news of that murder. You should keep your windows closed and locked. Would you like me to come over and check around your property for you?”

He would no more have gone out in the night dragging his oxygen tank along to see to the safety of Judith Iver than he would have flown to the moon. Anne held the receiver out away from her.

“Thank you, Dick! You’re so good to me!” Judith Iver shouted. “But I’ve got my nephew staying with me.”

“All right,” her father called out. “Good night, Judith!

“Her nephew,” he said with disgust as Anne hung up the phone. “That rotten hoodlum. He’ll slit her throat one night while she’s dreaming about him amounting to something, the stupid cow.”

The yin and yang of Dick Navarre: charming, handsome old gentleman on the outside; nasty old bastard on the inside. Professor Navarre and Mr. Hyde. And if Anne had described him that way to his casual acquaintances, they would have thought she was mentally disturbed.

She handed the remote to him as she got up.

“I’m going to bed,” she said as she closed the living room window against the night chill and Mrs. Iver. “Did you take your pills?”

He didn’t look at her. “I took them earlier.”

“Oh, really? Even the ones that say ‘take at bedtime’?”

“The human body doesn’t know what time it is.”

“Right. And, I forget, what medical school did you attend in your free time?”

“I don’t need your sarcasm, young lady. I stay up to date on all the latest medical news.”

Anne rolled her eyes as she left the room and went into the kitchen to get his last round of medication for the day. Pills for his heart, for his blood pressure, for edema, for arthritis, for his kidneys, for his arteries.

I stay up to date on all the latest medical news. What crap.

At seventy-nine, her father spent his days with his golf cronies, arguing about politics. If they had been discussing migrant farm workers, he would have claimed he was up to date on all the latest immigration laws.

Anne had never bought into his bullshit. Not when she was five, not when she was twenty-five. She had always seen him for exactly what he was-an egomaniacal, narcissistic ass-and he had always known it and hated her for it.

They didn’t love each other. They didn’t even like each other. And neither made any pretense otherwise, except in public-and then only grudgingly on Anne’s part. Dick, the consummate actor, would have had everyone in town thinking she was the much-adored apple of his eye.

He had been the same way with her mother-putting her on a public pedestal, belittling her in private. But for reasons Anne had never fathomed, no matter how he had betrayed her, her mother had loved him until the day she died, five years and seven months ago.

Marilyn Navarre, forty-six, had succumbed to a short, brutal fight with pancreatic cancer, an irony that enraged Anne still. Her father’s health had been failing for years, yet he had survived a heart attack, two open heart surgeries, and a stroke. He had been wounded in the Korean Conflict and walked away from a multiple-fatality car accident in 1979.

He suffered from congestive heart failure, and half a dozen other conditions that should have killed him, but he was simply too mean to die. His wife, a saint on earth nearly thirty years his junior, hadn’t lived four months after her diagnosis.

Sometimes Anne cursed her mother for that. She did so now as she went upstairs to her bedroom.

How could you do this to me? How could you leave me with him? I still need you.

Her mother had always been her sounding board, her voice of reason, her best friend. She would have told Anne she was being selfish now, but like any abandoned child, Anne didn’t care. Selfishness was the least she deserved.

At her dying mother’s request, she had left grad school and moved back home to care for her father. Instead of earning her doctorate and going to work as a child psychologist, she had taken the job of teaching fifth grade in Oak Knoll Elementary.

And now three of her students had found a murder victim.

The thought hit her as she turned on the bedside lamp. There should have been four.

Wherever Dennis Farman went, Cody Roache was right behind him. Anne had forgotten about him in the chaos and confusion of what had happened. Guilt washed through her now. Poor Cody, always an afterthought. But he had been nowhere to be seen in the park. Maybe he had never been there. Maybe he had gotten a ride home from school.