Tami Hoag - Secrets to the Grave

Vince arched an eyebrow.

Zahn studied him for a few seconds, letting his story sink in. “I’m so sorry, Tony. It’s difficult to be a child. I was a child once. It was difficult. Haley will find it difficult now. Not for the same reasons, though.”

“I’m not looking for people to feel sorry for me or anything,” Mendez said. “I’ll put the chair back when we’re finished. I just didn’t want you to think I’m trying to intimidate you. That’s not my intent at all.”

Zahn nodded and looked down in his lap. He rubbed his hands together, rubbed his palms against his thighs. His legs were thin as rails.

“Of course, Tony. Of course, Tony,” he muttered.

“Detective Mendez spoke with another of Marissa’s friends,” Vince said, then raised his voice to a low boom. “Isn’t that right, Detective?”

“Yes,” Mendez said, straight-faced. “Sara Morgan.”

“Sara, yes. She doesn’t like me,” Zahn said. “That’s all right. I understand. She’s very sad, I think.”

“Why would you say that, Zander?” he asked, taking Vince’s cue to use Zahn’s name as if they were old acquaintances.

Zahn gazed off into the distance. “Because that’s what I think. I think she’s very sad. It’s in her eyes. She has beautiful eyes. Don’t you think so? Blue like the Aegean Sea. But sad. And frightened. She was frightened of me.”

“Why is that?”

“She thinks I might be dangerous, I think.”

“That’s ridiculous, Zander,” Nasser said.

“Not to her,” Zahn said. “Her perception is her reality. She doesn’t understand who I am. People fear what they don’t understand.”

“You’re world-renowned in your field,” Nasser said.

Zahn nodded, looking away from them. “But not in her context . Isn’t that right, Vince?”

“I suppose so. She doesn’t really know you.”

“I’m just the strange neighbor,” Zahn said. “I am un known. People fear the unknown. I fear the unknown. What we don’t know can hurt us.”

He began to rock a little on his red vinyl chair, twisting his hands together, rubbing his palms on his thighs.

Nasser still seemed to feel the need to suck up. “Still,” he said, “you would never hurt a woman.”

“Oh, but I would,” Zahn said candidly, looking at his protégé.

Mendez felt every cop instinct in him come to attention. He cut a glance at Vince, who appeared not to react at all. Leone crossed his legs and picked at the crease in his trousers.

“I have,” Zahn said, looking Mendez straight in the eye. “I killed my mother.”

11

No one moved, no one breathed

Rudy Nasser looked stunned, completely at a loss for words.

Zander Zahn sat wringing his hands and rubbing his palms against his thighs.

Blood , Mendez thought. He’s trying to wipe the blood off his hands.

He had to have been a boy at the time, Mendez reasoned—a juvenile at most. Otherwise he would be doing life somewhere. He sure as hell wouldn’t be teaching at McAster College in Oak Knoll, California. He wouldn’t be a world-renowned anything. Mendez wondered if Arthur Buckman knew.

“It’s difficult to be a child.” Zahn repeated exactly what he had said moments before, after he had considered Mendez’s cock-and-bull story about being rendered deaf by a blow from his mother. “I was a child once. It was difficult.”

“Your mother abused you, Zander?” It was more of a statement than a question from Leone.

“I’m finished telling that story now, Vince,” Zahn said calmly. “It’s not a story I like to tell.”

Then why had he told them at all? Mendez wanted to ask. He wanted to pounce on the opportunity and press for more answers. But Leone was watching him from behind the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses, and Zahn was starting to rock on his chair as memories and old emotions churned inside him. Now was not the time to push.

“I’m sure those memories are upsetting,” Mendez said quietly. Patiently . “I know they are. That had to make it all the more shocking for you to find Marissa the way you did,” he said. “All that blood.”

“Terrible, terrible,” Zahn murmured, rocking, looking off to the side as he rubbed his hands. “So much blood. So much blood.”

Mendez wondered which scene he was replaying in his head: the murder of his mother or of Marissa Fordham. What had been the manner of his mother’s death? Had he used a knife? Could he have had some kind of mental break or flashback and gone after Marissa Fordham, somehow relating her to his mother, or maybe confusing the two women?

“Did you touch Marissa’s body?”

“No, no, no.” Zahn wagged his head. “I couldn’t. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t.”

If that was true, that explained why he hadn’t realized the little girl was still alive. He hadn’t touched her, hadn’t tried to find a pulse. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the blood.

Rudy Nasser stirred at last, his brain racing to catch up to the moment and rescue his mentor.

“This is starting to sound a lot like an interrogation,” he said. “Zander, I think you shouldn’t say any more until you talk to an attorney.”

“Why would he need an attorney?” Vince asked. “We don’t consider Zander a suspect.”

Nasser stood up, ready to give them the bum’s rush out the front gate. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Leone didn’t move. He was sitting a little sideways on his green vinyl chair, leaning against one arm on the chair back. He was a big man and took up a big space, and didn’t look like anyone was going to move him until he was good and ready.

“Is that what you want, Zander?” he asked. “Do you want us to leave? Or do you want to help us find who killed Marissa?”

“He doesn’t know who killed the woman,” Nasser said, getting his back up. “Why aren’t you out talking to people who had a reason to kill her? Why aren’t you out talking to her boyfriends?”

“You know who they are?” Mendez asked, poising pen against paper.

Nasser backtracked, looking away. “Well ... I ...”

“You don’t know,” Mendez said, his patience slipping away. “You’re just shooting your mouth off.”

“She didn’t buy that place with the proceeds of her art,” Nasser came back. “Someone was footing the bills.”

“But you don’t know who.”

Nasser didn’t answer.

“Mr. Nasser,” Vince said calmly. “If you have something useful to contribute here, then you should say so. If all you want is to cast aspersions on a woman who can’t defend herself in order to distract us, then you should shut up.”

“She wasn’t like that,” Zahn said, rocking himself harder. “She wasn’t like that.”

Nasser closed his eyes. “Zander, for God’s sake. She had a child. Who was the father? Where is he?”

“You don’t know. You don’t know her. You don’t know anything.”

“You know she wasn’t a saint.”

Zahn came to his feet suddenly and shoved Nasser backward with all his might, shouting, “YOU DON’T KNOW HER!”

Taken by surprise, Nasser staggered backward, tripped himself, and sat down hard on the crushed stone.

Zahn shook his hands as if they were wet, horrified that he had touched another living being.

“Oh my God. Oh my God,” he muttered. “I’m so sorry. So sorry. I have to go now. I have to go. It’s time to go.”

He turned and ran back to the house as he had run away from Marissa Fordham’s house that morning, with his arms straight down at his sides.

Mendez and Vince both got up from their chairs. Mendez glanced from the professor to his protégé struggling to his feet, and back at Leone. “If I had a kid at that college, I’d be asking for my money back.”