“Home,” Dixon said. “We don’t know that Sharon is dead or even missing. I’ve got Trammell and Hamilton calling her friends and relatives. Frank claims she left on her own. And the boy is less than reliable. I don’t even know if he has a firm grasp on reality. He seems almost catatonic for the most part.”

“Except the part where he said his father killed his mother,” Mendez said.

“Frank let me have a look around his house. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.”

“Or he wouldn’t have consented,” Mendez pointed out.

“It’s a catch-twenty-two,” Dixon conceded. “And you know damn well I wouldn’t cut him any slack on a charge like this. We simply have nothing to indicate a crime has been committed. We’ve got nothing to hold him on.”

Mendez put his hands on his head and turned around in a circle. “What a fucking mess.”

Vince approached Karly Vickers’s room with the same kind of quiet respect he would have used in church. Jane Thomas sat beside the girl’s bed, holding her hand, the gold necklace laced through fingers entwined.

“She’s lucky to have you on her side,” he said softly.

“I don’t know how she’s going to make it through this,” Thomas confessed. “She’d been through so much before she ever came to the center.”

“She wants to live,” Vince said. “Or she wouldn’t be here now. She’ll find a way to make it, and you’ll find a way to help her.”

Tears glittered in her green eyes as she looked up at him as if he might actually have an answer. “Why does it have to be so hard?”

“I don’t know. I only know my part, and that’s helping find the animal who did this to her. Can you help me with that?”

Jane Thomas helped him catalog the wounds Karly Vickers’s tormentor had carved into her, and Vince left her with a promise to do everything in his power to bring a madman to justice.

And he walked out of the room and away from the ICU thinking the same thing she had asked him: Why does it have to be so hard?

Chapter 73

73

When Anne saw Tommy waiting outside the pizza place it was all she could do not to break into a big smile. He had dressed up in what had to be his best outfit: smart gray pants with a buttondown shirt and a navy blue sweater under his open Dodgers jacket. If he’d worn a tie he would have looked like a miniature prep school candidate. Only the black eye Dennis Farman had given him spoiled the image.

“You look very nice tonight, Tommy.”

“Thank you. So do you, Miss Navarre,” he said, terribly serious.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”