Secrets to the Grave (31 page)

Dixon stuck a finger at him. “You will have absolutely nothing to do with it. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I mean it.”

“Yes, sir. I know, sir.”

“Stay away from his house. Stay away from his family.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I paid a visit to Zander Zahn this afternoon,” Vince said, taking the spotlight off Mendez.

Mendez thanked him mentally. He had been waiting to hear Dixon say “stay away from his wife,” sure he would have looked guilty, despite the fact that he had not crossed a line with Sara Morgan. A part of him had certainly wanted to.

“He wasn’t happy that I knew about his mother’s death,” Vince went on. “I pressed him a little. He flipped out on me. Total meltdown.”

He proceeded to tell the story, complete with an explanation of a dissociative state, and how Zahn could have killed Marissa Fordham and have no conscious memory of it.

“That sounds like something a defense attorney would come up with,” Trammell said.

“They’ll certainly latch on to it if they can,” Vince said. “But true dissociation is rare. It’s a mind’s way of reacting to overwhelming psychological trauma.”

“Like having stabbed your own mother to death,” Hamilton said.

“More like a reaction to whatever his mother did to him to precipitate the murder. Say she burned the soles of his feet with a cigarette. His mind goes into a dissociative state to escape the abuse. While he’s in the dissociative state, he kills her. When he comes out of it, he may not remember a thing.”

“The mind is trying to protect itself by repressing the memories,” Mendez said.

“Right.”

“So he could have been capable of killing Marissa Fordham,” Dixon said.

“Based on what we know now and what I saw this afternoon, yes.”

“It looked like a crazy person did it because a crazy person did do it,” Campbell said.

“I asked Haley if she was ever afraid of Zahn,” Vince said.

“She’s talking?” Dixon asked.

“When she feels like it. But she ignores questions that might take her back to what happened. Either consciously or subconsciously she doesn’t want to get near those feelings.”

“What did she say about Zahn?” Mendez asked.

One corner of Vince’s mouth quirked upward. “That he’s weird.”

“Sharp kid,” Mendez said, laughing. “But why would Zahn ransack the house? He can’t be Haley’s father. You have to actually touch a woman to get her pregnant.”

“How would you know?” Campbell asked.

“Shut up.”

“And why would he send the breasts to Milo Bordain?” Hicks asked. “That box was postmarked Monday. The murder took place Sunday night. He would have been out of that dissociative state by Monday, wouldn’t he?”

“Not necessarily,” Vince said. “I admit the breasts in the box don’t seem to fit, but they don’t seem to fit any scenario we’ve had so far other than Darren Bordain.”

“Maybe that’s exactly
why
they were sent,” Dixon suggested. “Because it doesn’t make any sense. While we’re running around in little circles trying to connect that dot, someone is getting away with murder.”

50

Two bad things came at once: darkness and rain.

Gina had finally managed to get her back up against the wall, passing out from the pain and the effort at the end of the process. The rain hitting her face brought her back to reality.

There is no soft autumn rain in Southern California. The rain comes with a vengeance, an angry payback from Mother Nature for months of cloudless skies. The rickety doors far above Gina’s head were meager protection from the storm.

She needed something to cover herself to keep from getting soaked. The temperature had dropped. She was cold and, she supposed, in shock—although she didn’t exactly know what that meant. Biology had never been her strong suit.

What she did know was that she was sitting in the midst of a garbage heap with garbage bags all around her. Most of them had been torn by the rats that were now beginning to emerge from below and from holes in the walls. Too dark to see now, Gina could hear the rustling, the intermittent squeaks. Her skin was crawling and fear was like a writhing thing in her throat and stomach.

Fighting tears, she felt around on her right side and got hold of a plastic bag with her good hand. It was only partially full of garbage, but stinking enough to make her gag, and it seemed to take forever to work one of the tears open enough to empty it.

She screamed as mice fell from it with the trash. It seemed like dozens of them raining down, screeching, and running, scrambling over her body, her arms, her legs, her chest.

Hysterical, she dropped the bag and swatted at them with her good hand, sure they were going inside her clothes and tangling in her hair. Her body jerked and twisted, setting off explosions of pain. The sounds of rodents squealing and scurrying seemed amplified in the confined space of the well, echoing up the shaft and filling her ears, filling her head.

I’m going crazy,
she thought, whimpering.

Gina felt around and grabbed the empty bag. Holding her breath against the stench, she put the thing over her head and did her best to arrange it around her shoulders.

She tipped her head back and opened her mouth, catching the raindrops, the first clean drink she had had in more than twenty-four hours.

Had anybody missed her yet? Had the girls at the boutique tried to call her? When they only got her machine again and again, had they gone to her house in search of her? They wouldn’t have found anything wrong. No one had broken into her home. Her car was gone. She had left of her own accord.

How had her life come to this? She wasn’t a bad person. She and Marissa had only set out to do a good thing. Maybe Marissa’s method had been questionable, but she had her reasons. And her only motive had been Haley. That they had both benefitted had been incidental to that goal—to provide for Haley.

How could such a noble motive come to such a bad end?

How did she know if any of this was real at all? Gina wondered. Maybe she really was losing her mind. Could she be hallucinating? How would she know the difference?

51

She had been watching television the night it happened. Not for entertainment, but for the live news coverage of a hostage standoff at the sheriff’s office. Dennis Farman’s father had a gun to the head of Cal Dixon. Vince was trying to talk him down. The situation that had begun with violence had ended in violence.

At the time that news had come, Anne had no way of knowing if Vince had survived. She had busied herself opening a small gift Tommy Crane had given to her earlier that night—a necklace. A necklace that could only have come from a murder victim.

And then Peter Crane was there, at her home, seeming fine, polite, apologetic. So sorry. A misunderstanding. He needed that necklace back. There had been a mistake. It belonged to his wife.

Anne had told him that was no problem. She understood completely. She just had to go into the kitchen to get it—a lie—thinking she would go straight out the back door and run for her life.

She never made it to the door. Peter Crane had her by the hair—

Gasping for air, her heart pounding out of her chest, Anne sat bolt upright in bed. For a moment she didn’t know where she was and panic grabbed her by the throat. She was soaking wet with sweat.

There was a light on in the far corner of the room. Just a soft amber glow to chase away the dark and the bogeymen that came with it.

She was in her own home. She was safe. This was the guest room she had chosen for Haley. She was safe. Haley was safe, sound asleep.

You’re safe. We’re safe. Everything is fine
. She repeated those words again and again and again in her mind.

What she wanted was to have her husband’s arms around her, so strong, so warm, and to have his voice whispering those words to her as he held her and rocked her. But Vince had gone back to the sheriff’s office for a meeting with the detectives. She hadn’t even gotten to feed him. He had ordered pizza for the guys.

She looked at the clock on the nightstand. It wasn’t quite ten thirty. Not late. Vince would be home soon—if he wasn’t already. He never disturbed her if she was already sleeping when he came home—specifically so as not to frighten her.

Even though Vince hadn’t been there, Anne and Haley had the cozy evening she had thought of earlier in the day. After bath time, with Haley in her Rainbow Brite pajamas, they had snuggled together under the covers of Haley’s bed and listened to the rain while Anne read to her.

After Haley was asleep, Anne had done some reading of her own, searching her psychology books for anything she could find on children as witnesses to violent crime—she found nothing—and children and traumatic memories—she found practically nothing. She had finally turned out her reading light and fallen asleep with the books spread around her on her side of the double bed.

She got up now, plucking at her sweat-damp T-shirt. The rush of adrenaline had ebbed, leaving her with the familiar and hated feeling of weakness. Leaving the bedroom door open, she went across the hall to change.

Vince was on their bed in gray sweatpants and a black T-shirt, propped up reading. He looked up from his book, his glasses perched on his nose. The television was mumbling to itself in the armoire that housed it.

Anne went into her closet and put on a fresh FBI T-shirt, then went to the bed and crawled up beside him, tucking her head into his shoulder and wrapping an arm across his broad chest.

“Hey, precious,” he whispered, kissing the top of her head.

He set his book aside and wrapped his arms around her. Anne knew he could feel the residual tremors going through her as the adrenaline ebbed out of her system.

“Did you have a bad dream?” he asked quietly.

Anne nodded. “I’m okay. I’m okay now.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

Tears stung her eyes. “I hate it.”

“I know, baby.”

“It never goes away.”

He didn’t tell her that it would eventually, because he knew it wouldn’t, and she knew it wouldn’t. The best she could hope for was that the incidents would lessen over time. She wanted to wish her nightmares on Peter Crane, locked in a cell in the county jail. The irony was that her nightmares would be his wet dreams.

Vince stroked her back and kissed her forehead.

“What are you reading about?” Anne asked.

“Dissociation disorder. What were you reading about?” he asked. “I stuck my head in and saw you were asleep. Must not have been a thriller.”

“Children as victims and witnesses.”

“We’re some exciting couple,” he joked.

Anne found a smile. “Earlier I was reading about a princess who wanted to become a fairy.”

“Oh, I’ve read that one. A real page-turner,” he said. “How was your evening?”

“Good. We missed you.”

“Mmmmm ... good ... How’s Haley?”

“She asked when is her mommy coming.”

“What did you tell her?”

“The same thing I told her before—that her mommy was hurt very badly and can’t come for her,” Anne said. “I want to spare her that awful truth, but at the same time I hate that I’m lying to her. She’s going to continue to have this building expectation and excitement that Mommy is coming back. I feel almost cruel.”

“That’s a tough call,” Vince said. “You’re the expert on kids, not me, but I don’t think kids appreciate being lied to any more than we do.”

Anne looked up at him. “What about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?”

“That’s different. By the time they’re old enough to figure that out, they get it. You can’t wait until the age of reason to tell Haley her mother is dead.”

“I know. And I know that at Haley’s age, death is a pretty abstract concept. She isn’t liable to understand that death is final. It usually takes time for it to sink in and become real for the little ones. I suppose you could say the news is less traumatic for them in an immediate way. That’s a blessing. But she’s been through so much trauma already ...”

“Has she talked at all about what happened?”

“Has she named the killer?” Anne said. “No. Maybe she’ll get really lucky and never remember any of it.”

No sooner had she said it, a piercing scream came from the room across the hall.

Anne bolted.

Haley was sitting up in bed, screaming like she had been the first time Anne had seen her in the hospital. Caught in the grip of a private terror, unable to break free of it or even see past it.

“Haley!” Anne said, sitting on the bed, gently taking hold of the little girl by her fragile shoulders. “Haley, it’s me, Anne. You’re okay, sweetheart. You’re safe.”

“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” Haley called, then again came the blood-curdling screams.

So much for my wish
, Anne thought.

“Haley, you’re safe, honey,” Anne said and called herself a liar. She knew there was no such thing as being safe from the nightmares. Those would come again and again.

She drew the child to her and held her close. She felt the bed dip beneath Vince’s weight as he sat down behind her. He wrapped them both in his arms and held them, his head bent, his cheek pressed to Anne’s.