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.”