“It’s all right, Zander. You’ve had a terrible shock,” he said quietly. “Someone here can drive you home. We’ll talk more another time.”

“I’m very disturbed,” Zahn said. “I would prefer to walk, thank you. Good-bye.”

They watched him cross the yard on his way to the path he had come on. He walked very quickly, his arms straight down at his sides as if bound to him.

“He’s disturbed,” Vince said.

Mendez rolled his eyes. “I’ll say.”

Chapter 4

4

“How are you doing today, Dennis?”

“I hate this fucking place. Everybody here is a fucking nut job.”

Anne ignored the profanity designed to get a rise out of her. Dennis Farman was a disturbed little boy. He stared at her now as she sat across from him at the white Melamine table in the visitor’s room. He was a slightly odd-looking boy with his shock of red-orange hair and ears set a little too low on his head. His small blue eyes held either anger or emptiness, depending on his mood. Seldom anything in between.

He was twelve now. Anne had met him at the start of the school year in 1985 when she had been teaching fifth grade at Oak Knoll Elementary.

She had known from the first day Dennis would be trouble. She had been forewarned by his fourth-grade teacher. Having been held back in the third grade, Dennis was a little bigger than the rest of the boys in her class, and he had the look of a bully—which he was. But she’d had no idea at the time just how disturbed Dennis Farman was.

“Are you hating anyone in particular today?”

He jutted his chin out at her. “Yeah. You.”

“Why do you hate me?” she asked evenly. “I’m the only person who comes here to see you.”

“You get to leave,” he said, fidgeting on his chair. “I don’t. I have to stay here with the freaks.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Why?” he asked bluntly. “You think I’m a freak.”

“I never said that.”

Anne never considered herself naïve. She had firsthand knowledge that not every child grew up in an ideal environment. But no one had suspected the horror Dennis’s life had been. He had been physically and emotionally abused, and had been made an orphan a year ago by the murder of his mother and the suicide of his father, a deputy sheriff.

Just hours before his father’s suicide, Dennis had stabbed a class-mate, a little boy who had been his only friend. The boy, Cody Roache, had survived. It remained to be seen if Dennis would survive to live any kind of life.

Vince said no. In his experience, children as broken as Dennis Farman were beyond fixing. Anne wanted to hope that wasn’t true.

Maybe she was a little naïve after all.

Hopeful, she preferred to call it.