“He’s right, you know,” Vince said as Crane’s car disappeared down the alley. “Karly Vickers could be out there somewhere with the clock ticking down on her life right this minute—if she’s not already dead. She’s probably wondering if anyone is looking for her, if anyone has even noticed she’s missing.”

“Lisa Warwick went missing on a Friday,” Mendez said. “She was found dead eleven days later. Karly Vickers went missing last Thursday. Let’s hope our killer sticks to a schedule.”

Vince gave him a sober look. “I wouldn’t bet a life on it.”

Chapter 31

31

Mendez stared down at the decayed human finger lying in the dirt near the end of the bench on the third-base line. Flies buzzed around it and crawled on it. The thing was so rotten, the skin had split and started coming off.

He glanced sideways at Vince, who had taken a seat on the bench. They had picked up the call as soon as they made it back to the car from Crane’s office. Go to Oak Knoll Elementary immediately. It seemed like an unlikely place for crime. And the crime didn’t seem like anything to call the cops over—one kid beat up another kid in gym class.

A severed human finger, Vince conceded, made all the difference. He shook a couple of pills out of a small white bottle and tossed them back.

“You all right?” Mendez asked.

“Headache,” he said. Like someone-had-put-an-axe-through-his-head headache.

“What do you make of this?”

“Your vic’s missing an index finger. There’s an index finger. We don’t need Sherlock Holmes for this one.”

Hicks bent over the finger too. He shooed the flies off it. They were back on it in two seconds. “Man, that’s gross. The Farman kid must have picked it up at the scene Tuesday night.”

“The girl told me he touched the body,” Mendez said. “She didn’t say he broke off a finger and stuck it in his pocket.”

“Bag the finger and let’s go talk to the boy,” Vince said, pushing himself to his feet. “I can’t wait to hear what he has to say for himself.”

They convened in the conference room. Dennis was sitting in a chair, sullen, his lip split, his clothes dirty. He hadn’t spoken a word since he’d been dragged indoors by Mr. Alvarez. The gym teacher told Anne it had taken a good ten minutes for him to calm down out on the baseball diamond.

“He just kept swinging and fighting, spewing out the filthiest language I ever heard,” he said. “It was like he was possessed or something. I had all I could do to hang on to him.”

That in itself was frightening, Anne thought. Dennis was bigger than the rest of her students, but he was still a little boy. Paco Alvarez was built like a fireplug with massive arms.