He lifted his head then and looked at her. A bruise was spreading across his left cheek, blackening the skin beneath his eye. Coagulated blood knit together his swollen lower lip.

“When can I go home?”

The question was stunning. He wasn’t joking. He wasn’t being sarcastic. An hour ago he had stabbed a playmate so seriously the child could die, and Dennis just wanted to go home.

“Dennis, you won’t be going home,” she said. “You hurt somebody really badly.”

“Just Cody,” he said, as if Cody Roache was no more important to him than a toy he had broken.

Anne didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know if this was a hardwired part of Dennis Farman’s psyche or a by-product of the day’s trauma. Could he really care so little about the only boy who had ever tried to be his friend?

“I’m so sorry, Dennis,” she said. “I wish I could have helped you sooner. I wish I had a clue how to help you now, but I don’t. All I can do is sit here with you until someone who knows more than I do can come and try.”

“What’ll happen to me?” he asked.

As horrible as his crime was, Anne felt her heart break for Dennis Farman. She didn’t know if it was a trick of the harsh lighting or the dimensions of the room, but he seemed smaller to her now than he had in her classroom. And she had the strangest, saddest feeling as she sat there watching him that he was getting smaller and smaller before her very eyes, that the light inside him was getting dimmer and dimmer, and before long he would disappear altogether.

“The sheriff is trying to find your mom so she can come and be with you,” she said. “Do you know where she might be?”

He looked up at her for the first time since she had walked in.

“She’s dead,” he said without emotion. Then he looked past her to the glass inset in the door.

Anne turned to see Frank Farman’s face in the window.

“He killed her.”

Chapter 68

68

“I thought the rules up here were: authorized personnel and family only,” Mendez said.

Morgan turned and looked at him. “Detective. Jane needed a break. Or, I should say, I made her take a break. She’s down the hall in the family room resting. She made me promise to stand here and come get her if anything changed.”

“Miss Vickers’s family hasn’t arrived yet?” Hicks asked.

“Not yet.” He turned and looked at the girl in the bed again. “It didn’t seem right to just leave her. That doesn’t make sense, does it? I mean, she doesn’t know we’re standing here. She’s not aware of anything at all as far as we know.”