Free Secrets to the Grave by Tami Hoag Page B

afraid he will?” Anne asked. Tears welled in her eyes. She pressed a hand across her mouth and felt assaulted by her own fear. Anger would follow—anger that she should be made to feel this way, then anger at her own inability to fight the feeling off.
    Kathryn Worth leaned her arms on her desk and sighed. “Because that’s a part of it, Anne. Peter Crane made you a victim, and that doesn’t stop. It doesn’t go away.”
    “Thanks,” Anne said. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”
    “I’m not trying to make you feel worse, Anne. I’m not. But I’ve sat across this desk—and other desks—from a lot of victims. I know how it works.”
    “I hate it,” Anne whispered, her throat tight around a hard lump of despair.
    “I know. I know you do. I’m so sorry,” Worth said. “Are you still seeing your therapist?”
    “Twice a week.”
    “It takes time. My mother always likes to say time heals all wounds.”
    “Your mother is full of shit,” Anne said bluntly.
    Worth nodded. “Yes, she is. The best we can hope for is that the wounds scar over well enough we don’t feel them all the time. And we move on. We have to. Otherwise, the bad guys win.”
    “I know. That’s what Vince says too.”
    “You’ve got your own in-house expert,” Worth pointed out. “You’re ahead of the game.”
    “That’s true,” Anne said, mustering a little smile. “And I’ve been going to a victims’ group at the Thomas Center. It helps.”
    “Watching Peter Crane being sentenced to life without parole will help more.”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Don’t worry about this motion, Anne. I’m not concerned. I just wanted you to hear about it from me instead of seeing it on the evening news.”
    “I appreciate that, Kathryn.”
    “How are things otherwise?”
    “Good. Well ... I’m worried about Dennis Farman,” she admitted. “I don’t know that he’s in the right place. He’s isolated there. He has no one his own age to interact with.”
    Worth spread her hands. “He’s there or he’s in a juvenile facility. Those are the choices. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you he knifed a boy his own age. That’s not exactly healthy interaction.”
    Anne sighed. “I know. And I know there are no boys his own age in the juvenile facility. There simply isn’t a good answer for him. If Child Services could place him somewhere ... in a halfway house or something.”
    “He’s a violent offender, Anne,” Worth said. “If he was eighteen, you wouldn’t be so concerned about finding him anything outside a penitentiary.”
    “That’s the problem, though. He’s not eighteen. He’s a little boy.”
    Worth nodded, thoughtful for a moment as she weighed the pros and cons of what she was about to say.
    “Let me tell you about ‘a little boy’ I dealt with when I was prosecuting sex crimes in Riverside,” she said. “Brent Batson. When I was prosecuting Batson he was twenty-eight. He was a serial rapist. A vicious, brutal monster. I put him away for three consecutive life sentences. He had raped nineteen women that I knew of. He later told a reporter that he had committed at least twice that many crimes.
    “At the time of his first violent offense—a rape—he was twelve years old. He spent all his juvenile life in one program or another with people trying to straighten him out. When he turned eighteen, he celebrated by going out and raping a fourteen-year-old at knifepoint. When he got out of prison for doing that, he celebrated by raping a homeless woman and her ten-year-old daughter.”
    “You’re saying there’s no fixing Dennis Farman,” Anne said.
    “I’m saying the social worker that lost sleep over him when he was twelve will never get that time back,” Worth said. “Justice is a tough business, Anne. You won’t do yourself any favors by caring too much.”
    “I know all that,” Anne said. “Believe me, if Dennis had one person in his life to sit on his side of the courtroom, I’d be out