Dennis didn’t like to write. It was hard for him. He didn’t always get the letters to go the right way, and he didn’t understand punctuation. He wrote what came in his head, but it didn’t always come out like it did for other people like stupid brainiac Tommy Crane or Wendy Morgan. They did everything right. Dennis did everything wrong.
But he had done his writing assignment for Miss Navarre because she said she would bring him something cool if he finished it. Nobody had ever given Dennis anything special because of something he had accomplished. Mostly because he never accomplished anything. Besides, his dad had always said he was stupid and would never amount to anything, so why should he try?
Miss Navarre probably thought the same thing, and that was why she hadn’t shown up. Why bother? Why should she take time out of her life for him when she could be teaching kids like Tommy and Wendy? Or because she could be fucking the FBI guy, which she probably did all the time because she was a whore.
Dennis was going to show her. He would accomplish BIG things starting tonight.
He dug way under his mattress and started pulling out his stash. He put his money and candy and stuff he wanted to take with him into a plastic bag with a drawstring that someone had thrown in the trash.
He hid the bag under his dirty laundry in the closet, then got out the stuff he needed to start the fire. Fires. He had it all planned out. He knew exactly where to start.
The nurse had gone by half an hour ago. He would have plenty of time now.
Dennis slipped out of his room and looked up and down the dimly lit hall, then darted away from the nurses’ station, going to the empty room at the far end of the hall. The lights from the parking lot glowed in through the window, allowing him to see well enough.
Dennis had snuck into this room and hid several times over the past year. This was the room where the staff dumped extra pieces of equipment—extra wheelchairs, extra poles for IV bags, bed trays, chairs. A couple of green oxygen tanks were shoved way in the corner of the room most difficult to see from the door—and farthest away from the sprinkler in the ceiling.
There was all kinds of stuff to burn in the room—paper towels, old newspapers. Dennis wadded up paper and made a pile on the floor. He tipped one of the oxygen tanks onto it. He had seen this done on a TV show. Oxygen tanks could explode. The idea that he could make something explode just about gave Dennis a hard-on.
This was something he was good at—starting fires. Ever since he was a little kid he had been fascinated with fire. Practically every time he could get his hands on some matches or a lighter he would set something on fire. Maybe just a piece of paper or a pile of leaves. He liked to steal cigarettes and light them and burn bugs and spiders alive with the hot tip.
Maybe Miss Navarre would give him something really special for burning the hospital to the ground, he thought, and had to try really hard not to laugh out loud.
Dennis flicked the lighter and stared at the flame as it licked the air. He took the wadded-up pages of his writing homework and set them ablaze, then tossed them onto the pile of crumpled paper and quickly exited the room.
He made his way back to his own room with two stops to start fires in the wastebaskets in the rooms of other patients who were sleeping. When he got back to his room, he grabbed his plastic bag of stuff and waited by the door.
It seemed to take a long time before the fire alarm went off. Dennis had begun to think all his fires had burned out, and he was going to be really disappointed. But then several things happened at once. The fire alarm went off. Someone started screaming. And the oxygen tanks in the room at the end of the hall exploded.
All of a sudden people came running down the hall past his room. Dennis opened the door and stepped out. Orange flames were coming out of the door at the end of the hall. Nurses were pulling patients out of the rooms nearby. Other patients were wandering into the hall on their own, drooling and confused.
Nasty black smoke came rolling down the hall, stinking with the smell of plastic burning. Right across the hall from Dennis, a man came through the door screaming, his flaming arms raised straight up in the air.
Dennis stared at him, transfixed, then bolted.
In the chaos of people running and screaming, alarms blaring and sprinklers going off, no one noticed a twelve-year-old boy go right out the front door and disappear into the night.
71
Hiding.
The thought came to him in the hazy gray of predawn.
Hiding in plain sight.
Vince slipped out of bed, pulled on some sweatpants and a T-shirt, and went across the hall. Anne had gone to Haley in the middle of the night when Bad Daddy had paid a visit to the little girl’s dreams.
He looked in on them now and felt a tug at his heart. They were curled up together, sound asleep. They could have easily been mother and daughter with their dark hair and turned-up noses.
As trying as the circumstances were, Haley had seamlessly fitted into their lives as if she belonged there. When he thought about it, Vince had a hard time believing it had been only a few days.
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.”