Secrets to the Grave (35 page)

Gina had the use of one arm and one leg. Her left arm hung useless at her side. Her right ankle was so badly broken the foot was turned perpendicular to the shinbone.

To prove her point, Gina lunged to the right with her upper body, caught hold of one rung, and pulled as hard as she could, a roar of fury and pain and frustration tearing her throat raw.

Her body moved a matter of inches. Her consciousness dimmed. She pulled in a deep breath that burned in her left shoulder and ribs, and pulled again at the rung as hard as she could. She swung her left leg to the side and with the toe of her foot pushed off the wall, shoving herself another few inches closer to the ladder.

She had moved herself a total of two feet. Exhausted, she let go of the rusty iron rung and fell against the filthy wall, banging the side of her head on the next rung down.

She was sweating and weak. All over her body tiny erratic electrical impulses were causing individual muscles to twitch and tick.

And she had twenty-five feet to go ... straight up.

55

Mendez stood in the middle of the road, hands on his hips as he stared at the skid marks. It was still raining enough to be miserable, though the storm system had blown out its worst effort during the night.

“Looks like just one car,” Vince said. “That’s a pretty good skid.”

“She definitely had an accident,” Mendez said. “Nobody doubts that. The question is why.”

“Where’s the vehicle?”

Milo Bordain’s car had been removed from the scene, but the marks where it had sunk into the shoulder of the road remained.

Mendez gave him a sly look. “I’m sure Mrs. Bordain had it moved so some Mexican wouldn’t come along and steal it.”

“Present company excluded,” Vince joked, “who would want to do her harm?”

“That’s the thing. She may be irritating, but that’s not a motive for murder—or for sending mutilated body parts to her in the mail.

“She had dinner with her husband and her son at Barron’s last night. She had a couple of glasses of wine with the meal—”

“How’d she do on the Breathalyzer?”

“She didn’t. She refused the deputy that was first on the scene.”

“Did they take blood at the hospital?”

“We don’t have it yet that I know of,” Mendez said. “She only wants to deal directly with Cal. He can have her. He didn’t say anything last night about a blood-alcohol level.”

“Anyways, we know she had some alcohol in her system,” Vince said.

“Some. She appeared sober—for what that’s worth. Her speech wasn’t slurred. Her eyes weren’t glassy. She was pretty upset, and very adamant about what happened.”

“And the son?” Vince asked.

“Showed up at the ER like a good son. He didn’t act like he’d just tried to run his mother off the road,” Mendez said. “He’s coming in today for an interview regarding Marissa and Gina.”

“I’ll want to watch that.”

Vince looked up and down the tree-lined stretch of road. No homes were visible. On one side of the road was a grove of lemon trees. On the other side of the road shaggy-haired red cattle with big horns grazed along the bank of a large man-made pond.

“That’s Bordain property,” Mendez said. “She told us she raises exotic cattle.”

“This property has to be worth a fortune,” Vince commented. “The way Oak Knoll is growing, there’ll be developments out here within the next ten years.”

“Bruce Bordain made his money in parking lots and strip malls, but the guy is a real estate mogul,” Mendez said. “If there’s money to be made out here, he’ll be first in line.”

“And if the missus doesn’t want to give up the Barbie Dream Ranch ... ?”

“Nobody brutally murders a woman just to be able to cut her breasts off and send them to someone as a scare tactic,” Mendez said.

“No,” Vince agreed. “There would be a lot more to the story. Whoever killed Marissa had it in for Marissa. Period. That murder was all about her. This other business ... I don’t know.”

He checked his watch. “Let’s go. I want to make sure Zahn is okay.”

He hunched his shoulders inside his trench coat as they walked back to the car. Rain ran off the brim of his hat. Who ever said it never rains in Southern California lied. It rained, it poured, and it was damn cold when these storms came in off the Pacific.

“I spent half the night reading up on dissociative disorders,” he said as they got back in the car. “Not surprisingly, there’s overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. I want to make sure that in bringing back the memories of his mother’s murder I didn’t push Zahn into any kind of long-lasting break with reality.”

“You couldn’t have known that would happen, Vince,” Mendez said. “You said yourself: True dissociation is rare.”

“I know, but still, I feel responsible,” he admitted. “I certainly knew going in he’s a fragile individual.”

“Nasser was with him when you left yesterday.”

“Yeah, I know.”

I know, but
..., Vince thought. He hadn’t been able to shake the lingering sense of guilt. He had broken the lock on that small dark box in Zander Zahn’s mind that contained the memories of what had happened to his mother—what he had done to his mother. What if Zahn couldn’t get that box to close again?

On the other hand, perhaps it had been Marissa who had unwittingly opened that box and had paid a terrible price for doing it.

“Besides, Zahn brought up the subject of his mother’s murder in the first place,” Mendez said as he started the car. “He can’t be that sensitive about it.”

“It’s one thing to use the words ‘I killed my mother’ and something else to pull up those memories in Technicolor,” Vince said.

Rudy Nasser met them at Zahn’s gate. He was dressed for a hurricane in a black storm jacket with the hood pulled up over his head.

“How was he after I left yesterday?” Vince asked as they walked up the narrow gravel path toward the house.

“He seemed fine.”

“He wasn’t agitated?”

“No, why?” Nasser asked with a suspicious look. “What did you do to him?”

“I talked to him about his mother.”

“He didn’t really kill her, did he?”

“He doesn’t have a record for it,” Vince hedged. It wasn’t his place to tell Zander Zahn’s story. If Zahn wanted Nasser to know, he would tell the story himself.

“The conversation stirred up some bad memories for him,” he said. “I feel bad that he was upset.”

Nasser pressed the buzzer at Zahn’s door. “You’re not used to dealing with him. It’s difficult for most people to have any kind of a conversation with him. His mind plays by a different set of rules.”

He rang the buzzer again, frowned and pushed back the sleeve of his raincoat to check his watch.

“Maybe he’s sleeping in,” Vince suggested.

Nasser shook his head. “He’s an extreme creature of habit. He gets up at three A.M. every day to meditate.”

And then he would take his hike over the hills to Marissa Fordham’s house, Vince remembered. Every day.

“He meditates, then he takes his walk,” Nasser said. “He should have been back by now.”

“He walks around in the rain?” Mendez asked.

“The walk is ritual,” Nasser explained. “Rain, shine, whatever.”

“You have a key,” Vince said, his nerves itching. “Use it.”

Nasser let them in and called out for Zander Zahn. The house was silent.

Nasser called again.

The silence seemed to press in on Vince’s eardrums.

“Where’s his bedroom?” he asked.

“Upstairs on the left.”

They went up the staircase, made narrow by foot-high stacks of
National Geographic
magazines. Nasser knocked on Zahn’s closed bedroom door.

“Zander? It’s Rudy.”

Not even the air stirred.

Vince turned the knob and opened the door.

In contrast to the rest of the house, Zahn’s bedroom was nearly empty. He seemed to have chosen the smallest bedroom for himself. The only furniture was the bed—neatly made—a dresser with nothing sitting on it, a nightstand with a lamp, and a chair. Three of the walls were bare. On the fourth was a huge collage of photographs of Marissa and Haley Fordham.

The photos dated back to when Haley was just an infant with impossibly huge brown eyes and a mouth like a tiny rosebud. Casual snapshots of Marissa and Haley were mixed with faded pictures cut from newspapers and magazines featuring Marissa and her art. Marissa and Gina at a picnic. Haley on the beach. Toddler Haley offering Zahn a flower. Zahn looking uncertain how to respond to such a spontaneous gesture.

Vince had seen a few shrines in his day—shrines built by sexually obsessed stalkers. Zahn’s collection of photos was not that. Marissa and Haley had been his adopted family. There was nothing sexual or sinister about it.

He went into the small spotless bathroom but did not find Zander Zahn hanging from the shower curtain rod.

The three men split up then, each going through a different part of the house searching for its owner.

“He’s not here,” Mendez said as they met up in the foyer. “But you need to see something.”

He led the way down a hall crowded with coatracks to a room at the back of the house. The room was lined with shelves and crowded with tables, and every available inch of space on those shelves and tables, and every bit of wall space, was occupied by prosthetic human body parts.

There were arms with hooks for hands, arms with plastic hands; whole legs, lower legs; hands, feet, and women’s breasts.

One entire bookcase was filled with prosthetic female breasts of every size and description.

“Try to tell me this isn’t creepy,” Mendez said.

Vince looked around the room at all the spare body parts, wondering where Zahn had come by them and why he had felt compelled to bring them home.

“Look on the bright side, kid,” he said. “At least they’re not real.”

56

“He owns a car, which Nasser says he rarely drives,” Mendez said. “The car is sitting in the garage. There was no sign of Zahn in the house.”

They sat in the break room where a television monitor was showing Detective Trammell interviewing Bob Copetti, a local architect who had gone out with Marissa Fordham from time to time. The sound was turned down to a mumble. Copetti’s alibi for the night of Marissa’s murder had checked out.

“Anything to suggest foul play?” Dixon asked.

“No.”

“He couldn’t have gone somewhere with a friend?”

“He doesn’t have friends.”

“He goes for a walk in the hills every morning,” Vince said, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Something could have happened to him on a trail.”

“It’s pouring rain,” Dixon pointed out.

“Every day, no exceptions. He’s an obsessive-compulsive creature of habit,” Vince said, stirring a mega-dose of cream into his drink. “The fact that he isn’t where he’s supposed to be is a major red flag.”

“Do you think he could have Gina Kemmer stashed somewhere?” Dixon asked.

“That seems unlikely to me,” he said, taking a seat across the table from the sheriff. “He had a close connection to Marissa. There’s a possibility he could have snapped and killed her while in a dissociative state. If Gina had been there at the scene, he might have gone after her in a continuation of the same episode, but he wouldn’t have gone after her later. I would make book on that.

“If Zander Zahn is a killer, the murder was spontaneous and situational,” he said, “and there’d be a better than even chance he doesn’t remember the crime at all. He wouldn’t consciously go looking to commit another murder.”

“I’m not sure then what it is we’re supposed to do, Vince.”

“I’m concerned for Zahn’s mental state. He went over the edge yesterday. Now he’s missing. I don’t know that he wouldn’t hurt himself.”

“And you feel responsible for that.”

“Yeah, I do,” he confessed.

Dixon nodded. “If there’s a chance he’s lost in the hills out there, then we send out the Search and Rescue team.”

“Do you still have the chopper up looking for Gina Kemmer’s car?” Mendez asked.

“They’ll go back up when the weather subsides. The radar shows there should be a break around noon.”

“Is that thing equipped with a thermographic camera?” Vince asked.

Mendez had read about thermographic technology. The military already had it. Thermal-imaging cameras could read the infrared radiation emitted by all objects, making warmer objects—such as humans—stand out against cooler backgrounds—like the ground. For law enforcement it would mean being able to locate a human on the ground in circumstances where the person may not be visible to the naked eye—at night for instance.

Dixon barked a laugh. “Are you high? You spent too many years working for the federal government.”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“That would eat a big chunk out of my budget for a year!” Dixon said. “I’m excited we’re getting a fax machine. I’ve got a Search and Rescue team with a German shepherd. That’s the best I can do.”

Vince held up his hands in surrender. “I get it.”

The sheriff took a swig of his coffee. “What’s going on with our littlest witness?”

“The memories are there,” Vince said. “She’s having nightmares. But she hasn’t named a name. She talks about the bad monster and Bad Daddy. Bad Daddy was chasing Mommy. Bad Daddy hurt Mommy. The trouble is she asks every man she sees if he’s the daddy. Because she doesn’t have a father in her life, she’s preoccupied with the idea.”

“What if we put together a photo array of the men her mother dated?” Mendez suggested. “Maybe she’ll react to one of them.”

Dixon nodded. “It’s definitely worth a try.”