Secrets to the Grave (6 page)

“Isn’t that the job of Child Protective Services?”

“This seems out of their league,” Mendez said.

This was a mostly rural county with a lower-than-average crime rate. Oak Knoll, with a population of roughly twenty thousand (not counting college students), was the Big Town. Crime here routinely consisted of small-time drug deals, burglary, the odd assault, a murder now and again.

There was no Oak Knoll Police Department. The city contracted with the sheriff’s office for their needs. There was no dedicated homicide division within the SO, but a group of detectives who worked all manner of crimes. County Child Protective Services had no psychologist on staff. They had a small administrative group, two full-time social workers, and a number of volunteers. Anne was one of only two court-appointed special advocates for children in the county.

All of these things would change as more people were enticed north out of the LA sprawl. But for now life in the Oak Knoll environs remained more or less idyllic.

“Technically it’s their call,” Dixon said. “I’ve spoken with the director. The protocol would be to try to find a relative. In the absence of a relative, the child would be put into foster care.”

“How many people are going to want to bring the only living witness to a violent murder into their home?” Detective Trammell asked.

“Is there any sign of family anywhere?” Mendez asked.

“Not so far,” Dixon said. “We didn’t find an address book in the house. We didn’t find a birth certificate for the child or a social security card for the woman. I want you to start checking around the local banks to see if Marissa Fordham had a safe deposit box somewhere.”

“We get the birth certificate, we get the name of the father, we get our number one suspect,” Mendez said.

“That might be why you haven’t found a birth certificate,” Vince suggested. “The neighbor, who was allegedly a close friend, doesn’t know who the girl’s father is.”

“Can you see a woman—or
anyone
—confiding in that guy?” Hicks asked. “There is one strange dude.”

“Bill and I walked up that trail Zahn took home,” Mendez said. “That’s a hike. I find it hard to imagine anybody just strolling over that hill before dawn to say hey.”

“I want to know more about this guy,” Dixon said. “Who is he? What does he do for a living? Just what kind of a relationship did he have with Marissa Fordham?”

“What’s his name?” Detective Hamilton asked.

“Alexander—aka Zander—Zahn. Z-A-H-N,” Mendez said.

“He’s some kind of genius,” Trammell said. “He teaches at the college. Math or physics or philosophy or something.”

Everyone turned and looked at him with suspicion.

“How the hell do you know that?” Mendez asked.

Trammell was the kind of guy who could spout sports stats and belch the national anthem. No one would have looked to him for information on physics or philosophy.

Trammell spread his hands. “What? My kid goes there.”

“You been robbing banks in your spare time?” Hicks asked.

“He’s a smart kid. He got a scholarship.”

“Must take after his mother,” Detective Campbell suggested.

They all laughed. Their first good laugh of the day. As serious as their business was, it was important to loosen things up when an opportunity presented itself, no matter how small. Otherwise, the gravity of the job would pull them all into a black hole.

“Fuck you guys,” Trammell said with good humor.

Dixon steered them back on topic. “Let’s get back to Zahn.”

“Sara Morgan said Ms. Fordham was perfectly comfortable having him around,” Mendez said.

“Sara—Wendy’s mother?” Vince asked.

“Yeah. She’s an artist too. Marissa Fordham was teaching her some technique for painting on silk, whatever that means. She showed up this morning for her lesson.”

Vince cocked half a smile. “My uncle Bobo from the South Side used to have a silk tie with a painting of Wrigley Field on it. If that’s coming back, I’ve got an inside track. Put your orders in now, fellas.”

They all chuckled.

“Let’s get one for Trammell,” Hamilton suggested. “With a picture of Einstein on it.”

“Anyway,” Mendez said, “Sara said Zahn would sometimes just show up and hang around. He gave her the creeps, but Ms. Fordham didn’t seem bothered at all.”

“She was comfortable with him,” Vince said.

“Apparently.”

“I’d like to see him in his natural environment,” Vince said. “I’m curious. And I think he definitely knows more than he told us this morning. I’ll take Junior here,” he said to Dixon, hooking a thumb in the direction of Mendez. “He makes the guy nervous.”

“I hear his dates have the same reaction,” Trammell said.

“If he didn’t always have to read them their rights ... ,” Hicks said.

“I thought it was the handcuffs,” Mendez joked.

Dixon cleared his throat. “And do we have any names of friends to start checking out?”

Mendez read off the short list he had gotten from Sara Morgan.

“No boyfriends?” Vince questioned.

“Not that Mrs. Morgan knew of.”

“But they were friends.”

Mendez shrugged. “She said they never talked about it.”

“I’ve never known a woman who could stop herself from blabbing on and on about what guy she’s sleeping with,” Trammell said.

“Unless the guy she’s seeing belongs to someone else,” Vince suggested.

“A married lover?” Dixon said. “Always a possibility—and a motive. Let’s talk to the other women on that list and see what we can come up with. It’s tough to keep a secret in a town this size—especially a juicy one.

“I know most of you are already working other cases,” he went on, consulting his notes, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. “But I need all of you on this initially. The press is going to have a field day with a gruesome murder in Oak Knoll practically on the anniversary of the See-No-Evil cases. I want to clear this one before they can get up a head of steam.”

“We’ve got a vic with forty stab wounds, her breasts missing, and a knife sticking out of her vagina,” Mendez said. “Somehow, I don’t think they’re going to let this one go.”

Dixon turned to Vince. “What are your impressions so far, Vince?”

Vince shrugged. “Obviously, it’s a sexual homicide, but what’s it about? Rage, yes. Rage over what? She done him wrong? She must have done him
way
wrong.

“Taking the breasts sometimes suggests a kind of envy,” he said. “Breasts are symbolic of a woman’s beauty, her power.”

“Take her breasts, take her power,” Mendez said.

“Right. And sometimes removing body parts is about possession, possessing the victim by keeping a part of them.”

“Like Ed Gein.”

“Like Ed Gein.”

The notorious 1950s Butcher of Plainfield. The Wisconsin man had made lampshades and chair seats out of the skin of his victims, and bowls out of their skulls, to name but a few of his atrocities.

“Only Ed not only wanted to keep his female victims with him,” Vince said. “He wanted to
be
them. He made himself a ‘woman suit’ out of the skin and parts of corpses.”

“Man, that’s disgusting,” Hicks said.

“You think that’s disgusting. I can tell you about a couple of cannibals and what possessing their victims meant to them.”

“Maybe after lunch,” someone suggested sarcastically.

“Sometimes the body parts can be strictly a trophy,” Vince went on. “We’ll hope to God that’s not the case, because that would suggest he’s a hunter, and hunters don’t stop hunting.”

“Jesus, that’s all we need,” Dixon said. “Another serial killer. One was more than enough.”

“The odds of you having another serial killer on your hands are about as long as they can get,” Vince said. “We’re talking about an extremely rare animal, no matter how many of them appear every week on television.

“In my opinion, the attack on Marissa Fordham was personal. That many stab wounds is personal. But that butcher knife looks to have belonged to the victim, which makes this seem more like a crime of opportunity, of the moment. Someone got angry, grabbed that knife and used it. I think the knife protruding from the vagina is the killer making a personal statement about the victim.”

“Don’t fuck her, she’s dangerous?” Trammell asked.

“Exactly.”

“All right,” Dixon said. “Let’s get out there and find out who felt the need to send that message.”

9

“How is Mrs. Morgan?” Vince asked as they climbed into the car.

Mendez looked over at him as he stuck the key in the ignition. “Not happy to see me. I can tell you that.”

“She went through a lot last year,” Vince said. “Anne gets together with her and Wendy every so often. She really wants to maintain that contact with the kids. Wendy has had some trouble coping. She’s withdrawn a bit. It’s a sad thing.”

“Is the husband still in the picture?”

“As far as I know.”

“I don’t get that.” Mendez shook his head. “The guy cheated on her with a woman who ended up dead, lied about it, withheld information from a murder investigation. He’s a Class-A prick and she stays with him. What’s wrong with women? She’s a beautiful, talented lady. She deserves better.”

“He’s the father of her child,” Vince said. “I’m sure Wendy loves her dad. Given the choice, kids want their parents to stay together. Tension in a marriage is a scary thing for a child, but not as scary as losing one of the two most important people in their life.”

“You were married before. How did your kids take it?”

Vince made a face. “I was an absentee father most of their lives. My girls already knew what it was like to live without me. Their day-to-day didn’t change all that much when I moved out.”

“You regret that.”

“Hell, yeah. They’re my daughters. I love them. I blew it. My ex-wife is a great gal, but she got tired of being a single parent and eventually she found herself another partner. I picked my career over my family.”

“But think of everything you’ve done in your career, man. You were a fucking pioneer. The Behavioral Sciences Unit wouldn’t have evolved in the same way without you. Think of the cases you’ve helped solve, the killers you’ve helped put behind bars. That’s worth a lot.”

“It is. I don’t discount that,” Vince said. “I’ve made important contributions to the larger world. Unfortunately, those contributions cost me a big price. They cost me my marriage. I missed watching my daughters grow up. But we make our choices and we live with the good and the bad of them. I just know I’m not making the same mistakes twice, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” Mendez groused with good nature, “rub my nose in it, why don’t you?”

Vince grinned. He had beaten his protégé to the punch where Anne was concerned—a fact that never ceased to please him. “You snooze you lose, Junior. But don’t take it too hard. Maybe we’ll name our first-born after you.”

“Asshole.”

“Ha!”

Their first stop was the administration building at McAster College. The school’s campus was beautiful, impeccably maintained, shaded with huge old oak trees. Established in the 1920s, many of the buildings were original, a mix of traditional ivy-covered brick and Spanish Revival stucco.

The administration building would have looked just as at home on the campus of Princeton. Wide front steps led to a grand set of doors.

“What do you think that says?” Mendez pointed up to the inscription carved in stone above the doors.

“If I had absorbed any of the Latin the nuns tried to pound into me in school, I could tell you.”

“I think it says, If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

They took the elevator to the third floor and walked down the hall to the president’s office. Vince had met McAster’s president, Arthur Buckman, nearly a year ago, after the press had finally gotten wind of Vince’s role in the See-No-Evil cases. He had been swamped with requests for interviews and speaking engagements.

Still an agent at the time, he had to route all requests through the Bureau. The FBI was not keen on agents grandstanding or freelancing. Most of the requests had been denied. Vince had personally asked several people to hold off, pending his retirement. Arthur Buckman had been one of those.

“Vince!” Buckman greeted him, coming out of his office. A transplanted New Yorker, he was a vertically challenged, balding doughboy in wire-rimmed glasses and a three-piece suit. Always smiling. As the head of one of the top private colleges in the country, he had a lot to smile about.

Vince pumped his hand. “Art. This is Detective Mendez with the sheriff’s office. Tony, Arthur Buckman.”

Buckman motioned them into an impressive, wood-paneled corner office that boasted a view of the McAster quad, busy now with students crisscrossing from class to class. “You shouldn’t be surprised to hear your lectures are already full, Vince. Our psych department is thrilled.”

“I’ll do my best to live up to expectations,” Vince said, taking a seat. The scent of lemon furniture polish went up his nostrils and seemed to stab into the backs of his eyes. Damn bullet.

“What can I do for you gentlemen?” Buckman asked.

“Just a little background on a faculty member,” Vince said.

For the first time the president lost his smile. “Has something happened?”

“Alexander Zahn,” Mendez said, digging his notebook out of the inside breast pocket of his sport coat.

“Dr. Zahn? Has something happened to him?”

“No, no,” Vince assured him, sitting back, squaring an ankle over a knee. The picture of relaxation. “He reported a crime against a neighbor of his this morning. We just want to get a feel for who he is. Someone told us he teaches here.”

“Yes. Periodically,” Buckman said.

Mendez glanced up at him. “He’s not on the faculty?”

The president squinted behind his glasses, pained somehow. “It’s ... complicated . . .”