Tami Hoag: Secrets to the Grave

Zahn looked away. “No,” he said, but Vince thought he didn’t mean it.

“Marissa was an artist?” Vince asked.

“Oh, yes. You didn’t know her? She was quite well-known. I’m surprised you didn’t know of her.”

“I’m new to the area,” Vince explained.

Zahn nodded. “Quite well-known. She was.”

“What do you do for a living, Zander?”

He seemed to think about his answer before saying, “I’m an artist as well. My life is my art.”

“You like the early morning light too,” Vince said, smiling like an old friend.

“Yes. I also meditate. I meditate very early. And then I come to see Marissa and Haley. We drink mimosas. Not Haley, of course,” he hastened to add. “Marissa is an excellent mother.”

“But this morning no mimosas,” Vince said. “Tell us your story, Zander. How you came here, what you saw along the way.”

“My story,” Zahn said, rolling the concept around in his labyrinth mind. He liked it. “I meditated until five twenty-three and then I walked here.”

“Where do you live?” Mendez asked.

“Over the hill. Off Dyer Canyon Road.”

“That’s a long walk.”

“I enjoy walking.”

“Did you see anything out of the ordinary as you approached the house?” Mendez asked.

“Not at all. It was quite dark.”

“What happened when you got here?”

“I went to the kitchen door. It was open, as always. I called out to Marissa. There was no coffee on. I couldn’t smell the coffee, but something else ... And then I saw them.”

Zahn stood up so abruptly they all startled.

“I’m finished telling my story now. I can’t tell this story,” he said, agitated, rubbing his palms hard against his thighs, as if trying to wipe off something greasy. “I’ll be leaving now. I have to go. This is very disturbing. I’m so disturbed by this.”

Vince rose slowly from his chair and put a hand out toward Zahn, as if to steady him, but very careful not to touch him.

“It’s all right, Zander. You’ve had a terrible shock,” he said quietly. “Someone here can drive you home. We’ll talk more another time.”

“I’m very disturbed,” Zahn said. “I would prefer to walk, thank you. Good-bye.”

They watched him cross the yard on his way to the path he had come on. He walked very quickly, his arms straight down at his sides as if bound to him.

“He’s disturbed,” Vince said.

Mendez rolled his eyes. “I’ll say.”

4

“How are you doing today, Dennis?”

“I hate this fucking place. Everybody here is a fucking nut job.”

Anne ignored the profanity designed to get a rise out of her. Dennis Farman was a disturbed little boy. He stared at her now as she sat across from him at the white Melamine table in the visitor’s room. He was a slightly odd-looking boy with his shock of red-orange hair and ears set a little too low on his head. His small blue eyes held either anger or emptiness, depending on his mood. Seldom anything in between.

He was twelve now. Anne had met him at the start of the school year in 1985 when she had been teaching fifth grade at Oak Knoll Elementary.

She had known from the first day Dennis would be trouble. She had been forewarned by his fourth-grade teacher. Having been held back in the third grade, Dennis was a little bigger than the rest of the boys in her class, and he had the look of a bully—which he was. But she’d had no idea at the time just how disturbed Dennis Farman was.

“Are you hating anyone in particular today?”

He jutted his chin out at her. “Yeah. You.”

“Why do you hate me?” she asked evenly. “I’m the only person who comes here to see you.”

“You get to leave,” he said, fidgeting on his chair. “I don’t. I have to stay here with the freaks.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Why?” he asked bluntly. “You think I’m a freak.”

“I never said that.”

Anne never considered herself naïve. She had firsthand knowledge that not every child grew up in an ideal environment. But no one had suspected the horror Dennis’s life had been. He had been physically and emotionally abused, and had been made an orphan a year ago by the murder of his mother and the suicide of his father, a deputy sheriff.

Just hours before his father’s suicide, Dennis had stabbed a class-mate, a little boy who had been his only friend. The boy, Cody Roache, had survived. It remained to be seen if Dennis would survive to live any kind of life.

Vince said no. In his experience, children as broken as Dennis Farman were beyond fixing. Anne wanted to hope that wasn’t true.

Maybe she was a little naïve after all.

Hopeful, she preferred to call it.

The judicial system didn’t know what to do with Dennis. He was considered to be too young to go to a juvenile facility, let alone prison, even though he was guilty of assault at the very least, and a case could certainly have been made for attempted murder. He had no relatives willing to take responsibility for him. No families in the foster care system would take him.

The temporary solution had been to house him in the county mental hospital. Partly her fault, Anne thought. She had been the one fighting to keep him out of the juvenile system by arguing that he was sick and needed help.

She had quit teaching to finish her degree in child psychology in part because of Dennis Farman. She had taken the training course to become a court-appointed special advocate for children specifically because of Dennis. Someone had to act as his voice in the court system and try to explain to him what was going on.

Troubled as he was, guilty as he was, he was still a little boy lost with no one in his corner. Anne had stood up and taken the job.

It wasn’t that she wanted the job. It wasn’t that she held any affection for Dennis Farman, personally. He was inherently unlikeable. The crime he had committed was shocking and terrible. It wasn’t even that she believed he could be salvaged or saved. She simply couldn’t stand by and watch a child be cut adrift for the rest of his life.

Vince wasn’t particularly happy about it. He worried she would only be disappointed at the futility of her battle and would, in the end, be heartbroken. Since her husband was one of the world’s leading experts on the criminal mind, it was difficult to argue with him on the subject. Anne had known only one homicidal child.

There was no doubt Dennis exhibited classic signs of being a sociopath with no ability to empathize with others. He was filled with rage at the rough hand life had dealt him. Anne suspected he had attacked Cody to make someone else hurt as much as he did. And to further complicate and twist his profile, Dennis had been harboring dark, sexually tinted fantasies for a long time—especially troubling in a child so young.

“You think I’m a freak. I know you do. Everybody does. Everybody hates me.”

“I don’t hate you, Dennis. Nobody hates you. Everybody hates what you did to Cody.”

He scowled and looked down at the table, pretending to draw on it with his thumb. Anne wondered what he was imagining. She would never forget the day she had discovered Dennis’s notebook masterpiece depicting naked women with knives in their chests. It was the first time she had ever really understood the concept of a person’s blood running cold.

“He didn’t die,” Dennis said. “What’s the big deal?”

“How would you feel if he had died?”

He shrugged with a nonchalance that would have been stunning if they had never had this conversation before. “Why did you do it, Dennis?” she asked.

Dennis rolled his eyes. “You keep asking me that. I keep telling you: just because. I just wanted to see what it felt like.”