“Mom’s a piece of work,” Mendez said as the teacher came back into the conference room. “Wound a little too tight, huh?”

She frowned, glancing back toward the door. “A little. When I took Tommy home yesterday she was furious he had missed his piano lesson.”

“And what will the neighbors think now?” Mendez asked, settling in his chair. “Her kid fell on a corpse.”

“What would the neighbors think if they knew she was doping him up to make him sleep?”

“A little antihistamine is nothing,” Mendez said. “When I was in a uniform in Bakersfield, I saw mothers get their kids drunk, make them smoke crack—”

“That’s horrible.”

“Makes Mrs. Crane look like the Mother of the Year.”

Anne Navarre rolled her eyes as she turned away from him and walked toward the bank of windows. “She probably already has that plaque on her wall, along with Realtor of the Year, Volunteer of the Year, Chamber of Commerce Person of the Year.”

“Image is everything,” Mendez said.

He was happy to see she sided with the kids, and the kids liked her. There might be a chance they would confide something to her that they might not tell their parents or him. Provided they had anything to tell anyone.

Peter Crane was probably right in assuming the killer had been long gone by the time the kids had come across his handiwork. On the other hand, Vince Leone, one of his instructors at the National Academy and one of the pioneers of criminal profiling at the Bureau, had talked about killers who returned to the crime scene either to relive the experience or to watch the police investigation.

Some of them got an ego boost by watching the cops and believing they were superior to the dumb clods trying to figure it out. Some of them got sexual gratification revisiting the scene. Sick bastards.

“Tell me about Tommy.”

“Tommy?” Anne Navarre turned her back to the windows, leaned back against the credenza, and crossed her arms—but not as tightly as before. A step in the right direction. “He’s very bright, conscientious, quiet, sweet.”

“He has a crush on you.”

She made a little face and shook her head.

“Yes, he does,” Mendez insisted. “He watched you almost the whole time.”

“He watched everyone. That’s what he does. He takes in everything then decides what to do. He probably watched me more because he feels safe with me.”

Mendez chuckled. “Trust me. You might know kids’ heads, but I was a ten-year-old boy once.”

“I suppose I can’t argue with that.”

“Why do you think he didn’t tell us the Farman kid touched the corpse?”

“Fear of retribution. Dennis Farman is a bully.”

A quick knock sounded on the door to the outer office and a uniformed deputy stepped in.

“Farman’s not coming.”

“The hell he’s not,” Mendez said.