Secrets to the Grave

by Tami Hoag

  And at the end of his rampage would be Miss Navarre. And he would stab her and stab her a million times like the guy that killed that lady in the newspaper. He would stick his knives inside of her and down her throat and in her eyes and through her brain. And she would be alive the whole time until he cut her head off.

  She didn’t care about him. She didn’t show up again. And nobody told him she wasn’t coming. He had worked so hard to write his report about the murder like she wanted him to. Two whole pages.

  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.”

  “Why were you so against him being friends with Marissa?”

  “When he was around her or talked about her, it was like he went to another dimension. Dreamy and strange—not that Zander isn’t strange anyway. It just seemed unhealthy to me. I try very hard to keep him focused on his work as much as possible. With her, his head turned into a helium balloon and he floated away.”

  “You think he was in love with her?”

  “Yes, and she should have discouraged him.”

  “Have you ever seen a photograph of Zander’s mother?” Vince asked.

  “No, why?”

  “I’m betting she resembled Marissa, or Marissa resembled her.”

  “You think he had a mother thing for her?” Nasser asked, clearly creeped out by the idea.

  “Not as in Oedipus,” Vince clarified. “I think in Zander’s mind she might have represented the mother he didn’t have.”

  He pulled open the top of a long chest freezer and peered inside. Clean as a whistle.

  “I didn’t know Marissa,” he went on, “but by most accounts she was a great mother and a lovely, vivacious person who was open to the world around her. Zander’s mother was a manic-depressive who tormented him for being different and locked him in a closet when she didn’t want to deal with him.”

  “I didn’t know about his mother,” Nasser said.

  “No. And you, being a healthy young man with an eye for the ladies, looked at Marissa Fordham and saw a sexual being. Zander doesn’t look at the world like that. I think he looked at Marissa and saw the essence of her—the mother, the free spirit, a woman who embraced life and feared nothing.”

  “Life terrifies Zander,” Nasser said. “He fears everything—except numbers.”

  “Numbers won’t burn you with a cigarette for being odd.”

  Mendez called from the front door. “Vince, you need to come see something.”

  “Can you top the room of artificial limbs?” Vince asked as they went inside.

  “No, but I may be able to explain the room of artificial limbs.”

  They went into Zahn’s kitchen and Mendez pointed to a broom closet filled with white trash bags, stuffed with who knew what. He plucked up one of the bags and held it open for Vince to look inside.

  Prescription bottles filled the bag. Prescription bottles full of pills. Vince reached in and grabbed up several, holding them at arm’s length and squinting to read the labels.

  Antidepressants, medications for panic disorders, a new drug Vince had come across in his recent reading on obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  “The crazy bastard’s been hoarding his own medication,” Mendez said. “You might have given him a nudge the other day, but I’d say he already had one foot in the deep end.”

  “Oh, man ...” Vince sighed and shook his head.

  “This stuff is meant to help him,” Mendez said. “The guy’s a freaking genius. Why wouldn’t he take it?”

  “Maybe he didn’t like the side effects. Maybe he didn’t trust his doctor not to poison him. Maybe the OCD just wouldn’t let him.”

  Whatever the reason, the result wasn’t good.

  With no sign of Zahn on the property, the search disbanded. Vince got back in the car with Mendez, who waited his turn as the others maneuvered their vehicles around and negotiated their way through the gridlock of news trucks and reporters.

  “Let’s go back to Marissa’s place,” Vince suggested.

  “Why?”

  “The continuation of my hunch,” Vince said. “We needed extra bodies to get through Zahn’s place. If he’s over there, better it’s just you and me.”

  The crime scene having been fully processed, and the press having moved on to more immediate matters like Gina Kemmer and the missing Zander Zahn, attention had fallen away from Marissa Fordham’s home. A deputy was still stationed at the end of the driveway to chase away the morbidly curious, but Dixon had pulled the sentry that had been stationed under the pepper tree in Fordham’s front yard.

  In the setting of fog and dead grass, Marissa Fordham’s house looked like it had been abandoned for a long time. Funny how that happened when people left a place. Suddenly the paint looked dull and chipped, and the windows that had been filled with light looked like gaping black holes. The flowers Marissa had tended dutifully when she was alive were weedy and in need of care.

  They went inside the house and stood in the living room silently for a moment, looking around. Very slowly, Mendez turned the knob on the coat closet in the entry, and opened it. No Zahn.

  They moved through the house methodically and quietly, checking closets and cupboards, finally coming to Marissa’s bedroom, where the initial attack had taken place and the walls and ceiling had been spattered with cast-off blood from the killer’s knife.

  Vince put a finger to his lips and motioned for Mendez to stay back.

  “Zander,” he said, moving toward the closet. “Are you in here? It’s me, Vince.”

  No reply.

  Vince closed his fingers around the old white porcelain doorknob and slowly, slowly turned it.

  “I’m going to open the door, Zander,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. I just want to see you and make sure you’re okay.”

  He eased the door open inch by inch.

  Naked and wild-eyed, Zander Zahn was crouched, coiled like a spring on the floor of the closet, clutching the handle of a very large knife.

  Later, Vince would remember thinking I should have seen it coming, but in the next instant, as Zander Zahn leapt at him, there was no time to think at all.

  72

  “He did what?”

  Anne felt all her blood drain to her feet. Willa Norwood, her CASA supervisor, stood in her hallway just inside the front door looking ridiculously festive in her colorful African dashiki and kufi hat.

  “They think he set fire to the mental health center.”

  “Oh my God,” Anne said. “I have to sit down.”

  “It happened last night around midnight,” Willa said as they walked through the house, through the family room where Haley was curled up on the couch watching cartoons, and on to the kitchen.

  “He set fire to his own wastebasket six months ago,” Anne said. “How could they let him get hold of matches again?”

  “I don’t know. Apparently, the fire started in a room they use for storage,” Willa said. “Why it wasn’t locked, I don’t know. But Dennis has been caught messing around in there before.”

  “Did someone see him?” Anne motioned to her supervisor to take a seat at the breakfast table, and dropped onto a chair herself.

  “Another patient says Dennis came into his room and set fire to his wastebasket. This is really bad, Anne.”

  “I know. I’ve been trying to think of somewhere to move him—”

  “No,” Willa said.

  The expression in the woman’s eyes made Anne’s heart thump in her chest.

  “I mean it’s really bad. One of the other patients suffered third-degree burns when he tried to move the wastebasket.” She took a deep breath to deliver the worst of the news. “And an oxygen tank went through a wall and killed the woman in the next room.”

  “Oh.”

  The word came out on a breath that seemed to empty Anne’s lungs entirely, and she sat there, unable to move or speak or think, until her head swam.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered. Dennis had killed someone. Intentional or not, he was now the thing he claimed to admire most—a killer. “Where is he? I’ll have to—Maybe Franny can watch Haley—”

  “We don’t know where he is, Anne,” Willa said. “He’s gone.”

  “Gone? Gone where? He’s a twelve-year-old boy with no money and no home.”

  “In all the confusion with the fire and the explosion and dealing with the wounded, nobody saw him leave. He’s missing.”

  The hospital had an open campus. Anybody could come or go anytime they wanted. Even patients—unless they were on a locked ward—could wa
lk out of the building and off the property, and occasionally did. Staff usually kept everything under control, but the scene would have been chaotic. Everyone would have been concerned with the fire and the casualties.

  Dennis had killed a woman. He would be able to read about himself in the newspaper.

  “This is my fault,” Anne said.

  Willa reached across the table and put a hand on Anne’s arm. “No, it isn’t. You’ve done more for that child than anyone in his life.”

  “I couldn’t get there to see him yesterday. I promised him I would be there and I would bring him something special if he did his writing assignment.”

  “That doesn’t give him an excuse to set the hospital on fire.”

  “Everybody in his life has let him down. I was trying to be the one person who wouldn’t do that to him.”

  She shook her head and swore under breath. Her thoughts tumbled like kaleidoscope pieces. “What do we do now?”

  “The sheriff’s office has been notified. They’re looking for him. I don’t think you should do anything.”

  “Yeah.” Anne sighed. “I’ve done enough already, haven’t I? The court wanted to send him to a juvenile facility after the first incident. I begged for that not to happen.”

  “You were trying to do what you thought was best for the child, Anne. That’s all you can do.”

  “He’ll be going there now.”

  “There’s no getting around that.”

  “No.”

  “You did the best you could, girl,” Willa said, patting her hand.

  “I know,” Anne said. “I just wish it could have been good enough.”

  Dennis had walked what seemed like most of the night before getting to his old house, careful not to let anybody see him. He was good at that. He used to roam all over town in the night, looking in people’s windows and watching them have sex and stuff. Once he had seen a man fucking a blow-up doll. That had been crazy.