Free Deeper Than The Dead by Tami Hoag

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.
    “He’s not coming. He said he’ll take his kid’s statement himself. He said it was a waste of everybody’s time to come in here and talk to you.”
    “The fuck!” Mendez caught himself too late and glanced over at Anne Navarre. “Sorry.”
    “I could call Mrs. Farman,” the teacher offered. “Maybe she would come in with Dennis.”
    “You’ve got to go now anyway,” the deputy said. “Some woman came into the office to report a missing person. Could be our victim.”
    The woman waiting in Sheriff Dixon’s office was in her early forties, tall and slender, and dressed in jeans with dirty knees and a bright green T-shirt with an oversize denim shirt thrown over it and left open. Her long blonde hair was scraped back into a messy ponytail with strands falling loose to frame her pale oval face. She stood in front of the visitor’s chair with her arms wrapped around herself. She looked worried.
    Cal Dixon was sitting against the front edge of his desk, head down, speaking quietly to the woman when Mendez walked in.
    Dixon looked up. “Tony, I’m glad you made it back. I want you to meet Jane Thomas from the Thomas Center for Women. Ms. Thomas, this is Detective Mendez. He’s my lead investigator on this case.”
    Mendez reached out and shook her hand.
    “Jane is concerned the murder victim may be someone she knows.”
    “One of our clients,” she said. “Karly Vickers. No one has seen or heard from her since last Thursday night.”
    “And you just noticed her missing?” Mendez said. “Don’t you do a head count or something?”
    Many of the Thomas Center “clients” were at-risk women from abusive situations. From what Mendez had heard, they ran a pretty tight ship for security reasons.
    “We had recently moved Karly out of the center into one of our cottages. She was ready to transition to independent living.”
    “What makes you think she didn’t take that idea to the next level and just split?”
    Jane Thomas shook her head. “No. No. She was excited about starting over. She