Secrets to the Grave (45 page)

He went downstairs to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee, which he drank too hot, but he needed the jolt of caffeine.

Hiding
.

The word came to him again as he went into his office and turned on the desk light. Settling in his chair, he put his glasses on and started digging through the notes he had made regarding Zander Zahn.

According to the cop in Buffalo, Zahn’s mother had abused the boy in various ways, including
locking him in a closet for days at a time and just leaving
.

He picked up the phone and dialed Mendez, who answered with a mumble.

“Wake up, Junior,” Vince said. “You need to get a search warrant.”

“We searched the house yesterday,” Mendez said. “He wasn’t in it. What makes you think he’s here now?”

They stood outside the gate of Zander Zahn’s property. Fog had rolled in over the mountains from the coast, giving the valley an eerie, otherworldly feeling. It seemed fitting.

A small flock of reporters had followed them out of town but were being kept at bay by deputies. One of the most brilliant mathematical minds in the country was missing and possibly attached to a brutal crime. America was salivating for the story.

“He feels safe hiding,” Vince said.

“Didn’t his mother lock him in a closet?” Hicks asked. “Wouldn’t that do the opposite? Make him claustrophobic?”

“For some people it would,” Vince agreed. “For others, the cage is safer than the world outside the cage. Zahn needs everything to be controlled and orderly. If he’s panicking because he feels out of control, I think he’ll hide, and the smaller the space the better.”

“Oh my God,” Rudy Nasser said. “I’ve found him a couple of times in his office at school under his desk. I never understood why.”

“That’s why,” Vince said. “He was probably feeling overwhelmed. Under the desk was the handiest safe place.

“We’ve got to look anywhere physically possible for him to hide,” Vince said. “And I mean anywhere. Closets, cupboards, inside these refrigerators in the yard. Everywhere.”

Nasser punched in the code for the gate, and the search began. Mendez, Hicks, and two deputies took the house. Vince walked the yard with Rudy Nasser, looking in Zahn’s collection of refrigerators and freezers.

“I always thought Zander’s obsession with that woman would end badly,” Nasser admitted. “But I never saw any of this coming.”

“Why were you so against him being friends with Marissa?”

“When he was around her or talked about her, it was like he went to another dimension. Dreamy and strange—not that Zander isn’t strange anyway. It just seemed unhealthy to me. I try very hard to keep him focused on his work as much as possible. With her, his head turned into a helium balloon and he floated away.”

“You think he was in love with her?”

“Yes, and she should have discouraged him.”

“Have you ever seen a photograph of Zander’s mother?” Vince asked.

“No, why?”

“I’m betting she resembled Marissa, or Marissa resembled her.”

“You think he had a mother thing for her?” Nasser asked, clearly creeped out by the idea.

“Not as in Oedipus,” Vince clarified. “I think in Zander’s mind she might have represented the mother he didn’t have.”

He pulled open the top of a long chest freezer and peered inside. Clean as a whistle.

“I didn’t know Marissa,” he went on, “but by most accounts she was a great mother and a lovely, vivacious person who was open to the world around her. Zander’s mother was a manic-depressive who tormented him for being different and locked him in a closet when she didn’t want to deal with him.”

“I didn’t know about his mother,” Nasser said.

“No. And you, being a healthy young man with an eye for the ladies, looked at Marissa Fordham and saw a sexual being. Zander doesn’t look at the world like that. I think he looked at Marissa and saw the essence of her—the mother, the free spirit, a woman who embraced life and feared nothing.”

“Life terrifies Zander,” Nasser said. “He fears everything—except numbers.”

“Numbers won’t burn you with a cigarette for being odd.”

Mendez called from the front door. “Vince, you need to come see something.”

“Can you top the room of artificial limbs?” Vince asked as they went inside.

“No, but I may be able to explain the room of artificial limbs.”

They went into Zahn’s kitchen and Mendez pointed to a broom closet filled with white trash bags, stuffed with who knew what. He plucked up one of the bags and held it open for Vince to look inside.

Prescription bottles filled the bag. Prescription bottles full of pills. Vince reached in and grabbed up several, holding them at arm’s length and squinting to read the labels.

Antidepressants, medications for panic disorders, a new drug Vince had come across in his recent reading on obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“The crazy bastard’s been hoarding his own medication,” Mendez said. “You might have given him a nudge the other day, but I’d say he already had one foot in the deep end.”

“Oh, man ...” Vince sighed and shook his head.

“This stuff is meant to help him,” Mendez said. “The guy’s a freaking genius. Why wouldn’t he take it?”

“Maybe he didn’t like the side effects. Maybe he didn’t trust his doctor not to poison him. Maybe the OCD just wouldn’t let him.”

Whatever the reason, the result wasn’t good.

With no sign of Zahn on the property, the search disbanded. Vince got back in the car with Mendez, who waited his turn as the others maneuvered their vehicles around and negotiated their way through the gridlock of news trucks and reporters.

“Let’s go back to Marissa’s place,” Vince suggested.

“Why?”

“The continuation of my hunch,” Vince said. “We needed extra bodies to get through Zahn’s place. If he’s over there, better it’s just you and me.”

The crime scene having been fully processed, and the press having moved on to more immediate matters like Gina Kemmer and the missing Zander Zahn, attention had fallen away from Marissa Fordham’s home. A deputy was still stationed at the end of the driveway to chase away the morbidly curious, but Dixon had pulled the sentry that had been stationed under the pepper tree in Fordham’s front yard.

In the setting of fog and dead grass, Marissa Fordham’s house looked like it had been abandoned for a long time. Funny how that happened when people left a place. Suddenly the paint looked dull and chipped, and the windows that had been filled with light looked like gaping black holes. The flowers Marissa had tended dutifully when she was alive were weedy and in need of care.

They went inside the house and stood in the living room silently for a moment, looking around. Very slowly, Mendez turned the knob on the coat closet in the entry, and opened it. No Zahn.

They moved through the house methodically and quietly, checking closets and cupboards, finally coming to Marissa’s bedroom, where the initial attack had taken place and the walls and ceiling had been spattered with cast-off blood from the killer’s knife.

Vince put a finger to his lips and motioned for Mendez to stay back.

“Zander,” he said, moving toward the closet. “Are you in here? It’s me, Vince.”

No reply.

Vince closed his fingers around the old white porcelain doorknob and slowly, slowly turned it.

“I’m going to open the door, Zander,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. I just want to see you and make sure you’re okay.”

He eased the door open inch by inch.

Naked and wild-eyed, Zander Zahn was crouched, coiled like a spring on the floor of the closet, clutching the handle of a very large knife.

Later, Vince would remember thinking
I should have seen it coming
, but in the next instant, as Zander Zahn leapt at him, there was no time to think at all.

72

“He did what?”

Anne felt all her blood drain to her feet. Willa Norwood, her CASA supervisor, stood in her hallway just inside the front door looking ridiculously festive in her colorful African dashiki and kufi hat.

“They think he set fire to the mental health center.”

“Oh my God,” Anne said. “I have to sit down.”

“It happened last night around midnight,” Willa said as they walked through the house, through the family room where Haley was curled up on the couch watching cartoons, and on to the kitchen.

“He set fire to his own wastebasket six months ago,” Anne said. “How could they let him get hold of matches again?”

“I don’t know. Apparently, the fire started in a room they use for storage,” Willa said. “Why it wasn’t locked, I don’t know. But Dennis has been caught messing around in there before.”

“Did someone see him?” Anne motioned to her supervisor to take a seat at the breakfast table, and dropped onto a chair herself.

“Another patient says Dennis came into his room and set fire to his wastebasket. This is really bad, Anne.”

“I know. I’ve been trying to think of somewhere to move him—”

“No,” Willa said.

The expression in the woman’s eyes made Anne’s heart thump in her chest.

“I mean it’s
really
bad. One of the other patients suffered third-degree burns when he tried to move the wastebasket.” She took a deep breath to deliver the worst of the news. “And an oxygen tank went through a wall and killed the woman in the next room.”

“Oh.”

The word came out on a breath that seemed to empty Anne’s lungs entirely, and she sat there, unable to move or speak or think, until her head swam.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. Dennis had killed someone. Intentional or not, he was now the thing he claimed to admire most—a killer. “Where is he? I’ll have to—Maybe Franny can watch Haley—”

“We don’t know where he is, Anne,” Willa said. “He’s gone.”

“Gone? Gone where? He’s a twelve-year-old boy with no money and no home.”

“In all the confusion with the fire and the explosion and dealing with the wounded, nobody saw him leave. He’s missing.”

The hospital had an open campus. Anybody could come or go anytime they wanted. Even patients—unless they were on a locked ward—could walk out of the building and off the property, and occasionally did. Staff usually kept everything under control, but the scene would have been chaotic. Everyone would have been concerned with the fire and the casualties.

Dennis had killed a woman. He would be able to read about himself in the newspaper.

“This is my fault,” Anne said.

Willa reached across the table and put a hand on Anne’s arm. “No, it isn’t. You’ve done more for that child than anyone in his life.”

“I couldn’t get there to see him yesterday. I promised him I would be there and I would bring him something special if he did his writing assignment.”

“That doesn’t give him an excuse to set the hospital on fire.”

“Everybody in his life has let him down. I was trying to be the one person who wouldn’t do that to him.”

She shook her head and swore under breath. Her thoughts tumbled like kaleidoscope pieces. “What do we do now?”

“The sheriff’s office has been notified. They’re looking for him. I don’t think you should do anything.”

“Yeah.” Anne sighed. “I’ve done enough already, haven’t I? The court wanted to send him to a juvenile facility after the first incident. I begged for that not to happen.”

“You were trying to do what you thought was best for the child, Anne. That’s all you can do.”

“He’ll be going there now.”

“There’s no getting around that.”

“No.”

“You did the best you could, girl,” Willa said, patting her hand.

“I know,” Anne said. “I just wish it could have been good enough.”

 

 

Dennis had walked what seemed like most of the night before getting to his old house, careful not to let anybody see him. He was good at that. He used to roam all over town in the night, looking in people’s windows and watching them have sex and stuff. Once he had seen a man fucking a blow-up doll. That had been crazy.

He didn’t know what had happened to his family’s house or any of their stuff. With his mother dead and his father dead and himself stuck wherever the court put him, his stupid half-sisters had gone away to live with some relative who didn’t want anything to do with him.

Ha! They’d be surprised when they saw his picture in the paper.

To his shock, when Dennis had finally gotten to the house, practically everything had been ripped out of it—walls and floors and carpets. A big, huge trash bin was parked in the driveway, and it was full of junk like old drywall and linoleum and a broken toilet.

Dennis decided it didn’t really matter to him that all the Farman stuff was gone. They hadn’t had anything very nice anyway. And most of Dennis’s prized possessions had been in his backpack that the detectives had taken away from him. They had probably divvied up the good stuff, like the pocketknife he had stolen from his father’s dresser, and the cigarette lighter he had taken from his mother’s purse. Probably nobody had wanted the dried-up rattlesnake head.