by Tami Hoag
“Really?” she said, pretending shock. “Who did you call this morning?”
“He’s my attorney.”
“And did you ask him to call your wife and explain to her why your blood is on the driveway and why you’re missing?”
“Maybe I was embarrassed.”
“Maybe you didn’t give a shit,” she said. “I don’t know who you think of anymore, Steve, but it certainly isn’t me and it certainly isn’t Wendy.”
“I love my daughter,” he said vehemently, taking an aggressive step toward her.
The omission of her name from that sentiment cut Sara like a knife. She wouldn’t have believed she had any illusions left about their relationship, but it still hurt.
“Then why do you do these things, Steve?” she asked. “Wendy isn’t stupid. She knows when you don’t come home at night. She knows what that means. An eleven-year-old girl shouldn’t feel compelled to come to her mother and tell her she knows all about affairs, and why does her father have to do that?”
“And I’m sure you haven’t tried to tell her otherwise,” he snapped.
“Why would I? I’m supposed to lie for you? I’m supposed to lie for you and look like a fool to my daughter? I’m not stupid, either. You think I don’t know that you weren’t in Sacramento last weekend? Did you think I wouldn’t check up on you when you’ve done this to me time and time again over the last year and a half?”
“Where do you think I was?” he asked, challenging her.
Sara refused the bait, careful with her answer. “I don’t know where you were.”
“Really, where do you think I was?” It was a taunt more than a question. He moved back and forth in front of her like a shark in a tank. “Do you think I was with Marissa?”
Sara said nothing, but caught herself taking a step back from him.
“You think I was having an affair with her, don’t you?” he said. “That’s why you were suddenly so interested in her, wanting to be friends with her, hanging out with her. Did you think she would just tell you? Did you think she would just turn to you one day and say, ‘Oh, by the way, Sara, I’m fucking your husband’?”
“Stop it,” she said quietly, her voice trembling with anger and something she didn’t want to call fear. He continued his pacing, back and forth, back and forth, inching in on her with each turn. She took another step back toward the bookcase built into the wall behind her. With his battered face he looked monstrous and aggressive.
“That’s what you believe,” he said. “Just like you believed I was having an affair with Lisa Warwick. Why don’t you want to hear it?”
She didn’t say anything. She wanted this conversation to be over and for him to just leave.
“Really, Sara,” he pushed, coming toward her, in her face. She tried to take another step back and couldn’t. Something like satisfaction flashed in his eyes.
“Do you think I was with Marissa?” he asked quietly. “Do you think I was stabbing her forty-seven times and cutting her throat?”
“Stop it!” she said again, staring into his face and not recognizing him. This man was a stranger to her. She didn’t know what he might do.
“Why?” he asked, enjoying her fear. “Am I scaring you? Do you really think I could do that?”
Sara tried to step sideways to get away from him. He grabbed her arm hard and shouted in her face.
“Answer me! Answer me! Do you think I’m a murderer? Do you?”
“STOP IT!! STOP IT!!” Wendy screamed.
Startled, Steve stepped back as Wendy flung herself at him, hitting him with both fists.
“STOP IT! STOP IT! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU!”
“Wendy!” Steve grabbed hold of her and she kicked him and struggled and squirmed.
“Let go of me! I hate you!”
“Don’t say that!”
He dropped down on one knee and tried to gather her close. She swung sideways to evade him, hitting him with her elbow in the bridge of his already broken nose.
Steve fell to the side then came up on his knees, his hands to his face, blood pouring out of his nose, between his fingers and dripping onto the carpet.
Sara caught her daughter as Wendy flung herself against her, sobbing.
“Look what you’ve done,” Sara said as the man who used to be her husband looked up at her with tears in his eyes. “Look what you’ve done to us. Get out. Get out before I call the sheriff’s office.”
And that was end of the fairy tale.
54
The inky black of night paled to charcoal gray. The rain kept coming down.
Even beneath her trash bag garment Gina felt wet and cold to the bone. She had spent the night shaking, drifting in and out of consciousness. Every time she wanted to let go and sink into a deep sleep, Marissa’s voice shouted her awake.
Stay awake, stay alive!
Gina kept one long stick of the discarded lumber in hand to swat at the rats and mice that crept near, smelling her blood, smelling her fear. Though in the dead of night she was no better off than a blind woman with a white cane, feeling around for danger while danger kept just out of reach.
Over and over during the night she had caught herself thinking this couldn’t possibly really be happening. Marissa couldn’t be dead. And she couldn’t have been attacked by someone she had considered a friend. Yes, she had made a threatening remark, but she never would have followed through on it. She had been out of her head with panic. A true friend would have known that. A true friend wouldn’t have shot her and left her for dead because she had said something stupid.
She was so tired. She knew she was in danger of dying from hypothermia. Her body wasn’t making enough energy to try to keep itself warm. With the cold rain coming down, that would only intensify. Dehydration was only making the situation worse.
Her body needed fuel. She hadn’t eaten in—what?—three days now? As enough light filtered down the shaft of the well, she tried to make out some of the garbage that had fallen from the bag she was wearing. She looked for anything that might be edible, something that wouldn’t be moldy or rotten.
Using the stick for a reaching tool, she inched a crumpled potato chip bag toward her, and found a few chips and a mouthful of crumbs. They were stale and soggy, but they were calories, and the salt tasted good. She mentally thanked the unknown teenagers who partied at this desolate spot.
Over the next hour, Gina became more skilled with the stick, snagging a wrapper with three bites of a Snickers bar inside, and a McDonald’s bag with a couple of stray French fries, a packet of ketchup, and a dried crescent of bun from a not-quite-finished hamburger. She ate all of it and prayed it stayed in her stomach.
If I can find enough strength—
You have to, G. You will.
If I can get up—
Get up! Don’t think about it. Get up!
I’m trying!
No, you’re not!
Shut up!
“Shut up!”
The sound of her own voice startled her, making her realize she had drifted off again. She had stopped worrying that she was hallucinating. Whatever dire condition hallucinations indicated, it was better to have company—even if the voice existed only in her mind.
The saltiness of the junk food had made her thirsty. She found a discarded water bottle with half an inch of dirty water in the bottom. Using her T-shirt over the mouth of the bottle, she filtered the water into her own mouth and drank it, grimacing at the taste, and fighting not to gag.
A rat scurried over her feet and disappeared into the empty McDonald’s bag, only its long naked tail sticking out. Gina shrieked and jumped, the pain exploding in her broken ankle and racing up her leg like a wildfire. She swung her stick at the McDonald’s bag and the rat shrieked and jumped and ran backward out of the bag, then leapt onto the thick vine hanging down the wall and disappeared into the crevice where the concrete had broken away.
Gina cursed and screamed—at the rat, at her predicament. But she quickly r
ealized the favor the rat had done her. Adrenaline was pumping through her veins now, bringing energy, dulling pain.
She looked to her right, to the iron rungs cemented into the wall. Her only way out of this hole. She looked up at the doors above her. It had to be twenty-five feet. That didn’t sound like much if the distance was horizontal, but the distance was vertical and more than three times the height of the average household ladder.
Gina had the use of one arm and one leg. Her left arm hung useless at her side. Her right ankle was so badly broken the foot was turned perpendicular to the shinbone.
You have to do it, Gina.
I know.
You have to do it now.
I know. I know! I KNOW!!
Get mad!
I AM!!!
To prove her point, Gina lunged to the right with her upper body, caught hold of one rung, and pulled as hard as she could, a roar of fury and pain and frustration tearing her throat raw.
Her body moved a matter of inches. Her consciousness dimmed. She pulled in a deep breath that burned in her left shoulder and ribs, and pulled again at the rung as hard as she could. She swung her left leg to the side and with the toe of her foot pushed off the wall, shoving herself another few inches closer to the ladder.
She had moved herself a total of two feet. Exhausted, she let go of the rusty iron rung and fell against the filthy wall, banging the side of her head on the next rung down.
She was sweating and weak. All over her body tiny erratic electrical impulses were causing individual muscles to twitch and tick.
And she had twenty-five feet to go ... straight up.
55
Mendez stood in the middle of the road, hands on his hips as he stared at the skid marks. It was still raining enough to be miserable, though the storm system had blown out its worst effort during the night.
“Looks like just one car,” Vince said. “That’s a pretty good skid.”
“She definitely had an accident,” Mendez said. “Nobody doubts that. The question is why.”
“Where’s the vehicle?”
Milo Bordain’s car had been removed from the scene, but the marks where it had sunk into the shoulder of the road remained.
Mendez gave him a sly look. “I’m sure Mrs. Bordain had it moved so some Mexican wouldn’t come along and steal it.”
“Present company excluded,” Vince joked, “who would want to do her harm?”
“That’s the thing. She may be irritating, but that’s not a motive for murder—or for sending mutilated body parts to her in the mail.
“She had dinner with her husband and her son at Barron’s last night. She had a couple of glasses of wine with the meal—”
“How’d she do on the Breathalyzer?”
“She didn’t. She refused the deputy that was first on the scene.”
“Did they take blood at the hospital?”
“We don’t have it yet that I know of,” Mendez said. “She only wants to deal directly with Cal. He can have her. He didn’t say anything last night about a blood-alcohol level.”
“Anyways, we know she had some alcohol in her system,” Vince said.
“Some. She appeared sober—for what that’s worth. Her speech wasn’t slurred. Her eyes weren’t glassy. She was pretty upset, and very adamant about what happened.”
“And the son?” Vince asked.
“Showed up at the ER like a good son. He didn’t act like he’d just tried to run his mother off the road,” Mendez said. “He’s coming in today for an interview regarding Marissa and Gina.”
“I’ll want to watch that.”
Vince looked up and down the tree-lined stretch of road. No homes were visible. On one side of the road was a grove of lemon trees. On the other side of the road shaggy-haired red cattle with big horns grazed along the bank of a large man-made pond.
“That’s Bordain property,” Mendez said. “She told us she raises exotic cattle.”
“This property has to be worth a fortune,” Vince commented. “The way Oak Knoll is growing, there’ll be developments out here within the next ten years.”
“Bruce Bordain made his money in parking lots and strip malls, but the guy is a real estate mogul,” Mendez said. “If there’s money to be made out here, he’ll be first in line.”
“And if the missus doesn’t want to give up the Barbie Dream Ranch ... ?”
“Nobody brutally murders a woman just to be able to cut her breasts off and send them to someone as a scare tactic,” Mendez said.
“No,” Vince agreed. “There would be a lot more to the story. Whoever killed Marissa had it in for Marissa. Period. That murder was all about her. This other business ... I don’t know.”
He checked his watch. “Let’s go. I want to make sure Zahn is okay.”
He hunched his shoulders inside his trench coat as they walked back to the car. Rain ran off the brim of his hat. Who ever said it never rains in Southern California lied. It rained, it poured, and it was damn cold when these storms came in off the Pacific.
“I spent half the night reading up on dissociative disorders,” he said as they got back in the car. “Not surprisingly, there’s overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. I want to make sure that in bringing back the memories of his mother’s murder I didn’t push Zahn into any kind of long-lasting break with reality.”
“You couldn’t have known that would happen, Vince,” Mendez said. “You said yourself: True dissociation is rare.”
“I know, but still, I feel responsible,” he admitted. “I certainly knew going in he’s a fragile individual.”
“Nasser was with him when you left yesterday.”
“Yeah, I know.”
I know, but ..., Vince thought. He hadn’t been able to shake the lingering sense of guilt. He had broken the lock on that small dark box in Zander Zahn’s mind that contained the memories of what had happened to his mother—what he had done to his mother. What if Zahn couldn’t get that box to close again?
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.
“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.