Secrets to the Grave

by Tami Hoag

  “We need to get a helicopter in the air looking for her car,” Dixon said.

  “You need to be able to go through her house with a fine-tooth comb,” Vince said. “If Gina has the birth certificate—or a copy of it—stashed somewhere, it’s got the killer’s name on it in big black letters.”

  “The ADA wouldn’t give us a search warrant this morning,” Mendez complained. “There’s no evidence of foul play. There’s no evidence Gina Kemmer didn’t just leave of her own free will.”

  “She’s got no family in the area to declare her a missing person?” Dixon asked.

  “Nada. She told us she came up here from LA.”

  “Then we issue a warrant for her arrest as a material witness,” Dixon said. “We’ll get our search warrant that way.”

  “Bill and I talked about the material witness angle last night,” Mendez said. “It’s a little bit thin. What do we say she witnessed?”

  “Get the affidavit started,” Dixon said. “I’ll call the ADA myself.”

  “I’ll get on it,” Hicks volunteered. He hustled out of the room and down the hall to get the paperwork started.

  “Do we have anything yet on the box with the breasts?” Dixon asked.

  “Latent prints says the box is a mess,” Mendez said. “Covered in fingerprints. Prints on top of prints on top of prints. The thing has been handled by who knows how many people.”

  Dixon blew out a sigh, letting his shoulders slump for just a second. “Nobody at that post office is going to remember one person mailing a plain brown box.”

  “It’d be great if they had video surveillance in their lobby.”

  Dixon looked at Mendez like he’d lost his mind. “Video surveillance at the post office? In Lompoc?”

  “Someday it’ll be everywhere,” Mendez said. “Post offices, airports—”

  “Right,” the sheriff scoffed. “For all those post office crime waves.”

  Vince chuckled. “First the mini-marts, next the post office.”

  “I can see it now.” Dixon laughed. “Blitz attacks led by rogue stamp collectors.”

  “I’m telling you,” Mendez insisted, taking the ribbing in stride. “And I’ll come to the nursing home and rub your noses in it when technology takes over law enforcement.”

  “You do that, Tony,” Dixon said. “Right now, we’ve got a case to deal with. Vince, why send the breasts to Milo Bordain?”

  “The obvious reason would be basically putting an exclamation point on the murder. He destroyed Marissa and expressed his disdain for the woman who paid for her to live in this community.”

  “You don’t think Mrs. Bordain is in any danger?”

  “Marissa had to be the primary source of his hatred,” Vince said. “The brutality of the crime was intensely personal. Sending the breasts to Mrs. Bordain was something that happened from a distance, suggesting a certain amount of emotional detachment.”

  “So the answer is no.”

  “Never say never, but it seems unlikely. I know of a case in Spain where a disturbed man murdered a patron of a particular controversial artist because he believed the artist’s works sent satanic messages. He couldn’t get to the artist so he eliminated the artist’s source of support—a well-known figure in the art community,” Vince said. “Marissa Fordham’s work couldn’t be called controversial in any way.”

  “Feminist, though,” Mendez said. “She did the poster for the Thomas Center for Women, celebrating the strength of women’s spirits. That might be considered controversial by some people.”

  “Jane does say they get a certain amount of mail from strict ultra-conservative religious groups,” Dixon said.

  “If this is supposed to be some kind of crusade, then you’d be looking at a very different UNSUB,” Vince said. “That would be someone more apt to want attention to get their point across. I think we would have heard from the killer either directly or through the press if that was the case.”

  “So, we’re no farther along than we were,” Dixon concluded. “Lots of questions, not many answers.”

  “We need to find Gina Kemmer,” Mendez said.

  Detective Hamilton knocked on the door and stuck his head into the office. He was bleary-eyed and one ear was red from keeping the phone pressed to it for too many hours.

  “What have you got, Doug?” Dixon asked.

  “I got Marissa Fordham’s social security number from the bank yesterday,” the detective said. He came into the open doorway and propped himself sideways against the jamb. They were all exhausted. “It belongs to a woman named Melissa Fabriano. I’m running the name for a record, wants, and warrants in California.”

  “So you were right,” Mendez said. “Marissa Fordham didn’t exist before 1981.”

  “It looks that way. We don’t know if Melissa Fabriano exists either, though,” Hamilton said. “Could be another alias.”

  “Only people with things to hide need an alias,” Mendez said. “What about Gina Kemmer?”

  “What about her?”

  “See if she has a record,” Dixon said.

  “Can I sue the department for cauliflower ear?” Hamilton asked.

  “We need computers,” Mendez complained.

  “I need world peace,” Dixon said, pushing to his feet. “And for this case to be solved. If you all can deliver either of those things, get out there and do it.”

  44

  Vince left Mendez to wait for the search warrant for Gina Kemmer’s house. He had given instructions to include photographs on the list of evidence to be searched for.

  He liked the blackmail angle. It was neat and tidy in its own way. Simple cause and effect. Woman blackmails man. Man reaches breaking point, kills woman.

  Why send the breasts to Milo Bordain? The answer that had rolled off his tongue for the sheriff made sense at a glance, but he wasn’t so sure it held up to scrutiny.

  Sending body parts held an element of gamesmanship. It was usually done to intimidate the family of the victim and/or to taunt the police. A metaphoric nose thumbing. That didn’t fit into the neat and tidy blackmail scenario. Why would the perpetrator bother with it? He had a problem—Marissa—and he dealt with it. Why involve Milo Bordain?

  He thought about the photograph on Gina Kemmer’s refrigerator. Gina, Marissa, Mark Foster, and Darren Bordain.

  Mendez and Hicks had said Bordain hadn’t dated Marissa but had joked that he should have because it would have driven his mother crazy.

  Vince only knew Darren Bordain from the television ads for the Bordain Mercedes dealerships. He must have been in his early thirties. Good-looking in a sort of androgynous way—not unlike his mother. In fact, quite like his mother. But where the masculine side of the trait tended to give Milo Bordain a masculine quality, the feminine side of the trait loaned the son a certain elegance to his features.

  Mendez and his team needed to delve a little deeper into that relationship. If Darren Bordain had been involved with Marissa, had fathered her child, had been blackmailed by her, the ironic twist would have been his mother’s attachment to and support of Marissa. If the son resented the mother enough, sending her a box of body parts wouldn’t have been a big stretch.

  People would have a hard time imagining a man like Darren Bordain—the elegant, privileged son of a well-respected family; the man who came into their homes every evening during the local news broadcast to promise them a better life if they would drive a Mercedes—being capable of doing the things that had been done to Marissa Fordham. Just as they had had a hard time with the idea of their handsome, friendly, family-man dentist as a serial killer.

  Even with Peter Crane awaiting trial for the kidnapping and attempted murder of Anne, there were people in town who simply refused to accept the idea of Crane as a murderer.

  Vince knew from long experience that killers hid behind all kinds of masks and came from all walks of life and all socioeconomic groups. Most people didn’t want to believe that their next-door neighbor or their insuranc
e man or day care provider could be a killer. They wanted killers to look like Gordon Sells.

  Gordon Sells, the uneducated owner of a salvage yard outside of town, had been a person of interest in the See-No-Evil cases. He was a rough-looking, dirty person. He had done time for child molestation. The public would have gladly accepted Sells as the perpetrator.

  In fact, human remains had been found on Sells’s property, and Sells had since been charged with homicide on a former missing persons case in another jurisdiction where he had been tried and convicted. But the point was, Peter Crane had been just as guilty of crimes just as terrible, if not worse.

  The face of evil could be handsome just as easily as it could be frightening.

  Vince remembered when Ted Bundy had been sitting in jail in Colorado awaiting trial for the murder of Caryn Campbell, a number of influential political people in his home state of Washington had raised money for his defense.

  Despite the fact that Bundy had already been convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in a Utah penitentiary for the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch—one of the lucky few Bundy victims to survive—and had also been conclusively connected to the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old high school girl, Debby Kent, Bundy’s supporters couldn’t believe the Ted they knew—smart, charming, handsome, articulate; a volunteer on a suicide hotline; and up-and-comer in local conservative politics—could possibly have committed a vicious sexual homicide.

  Now those well-meaning people had to live with the idea that after escaping jail Bundy had probably used the money they had sent him to fund his trip to Florida where he had brutally attacked five female students at Florida State University, killing two, and days later abducted and murdered a twelve-year-old girl.

  Evil made its home wherever it could, wherever the conditions were right, wherever that elusive toxic mix of nature and nurture curdled a soul and warped a mind.

  What had that cocktail done to Zander Zahn? Vince wondered. A family history of mental illness. A known history of physical and psychological abuse by his mother. A brain that was hard-wired in a way that complicated his attempts to relate to other people. What might all those ingredients produce if the conditions were wrong? A flashback? A rage? A memory of betrayal? A need for revenge?

  While Zahn was certainly respected in his field, Vince suspected people would have been happy to peg him as a murderer because he wasn’t like other people. There was something wrong with him. A person like that might do anything.

  Zahn had murdered his mother. He had killed her by stabbing her repeatedly in the abdomen.

  There was no denying that possible connection, Vince conceded. He thought of the photograph Mendez had pulled out of Gina Kemmer’s trash. Marissa Fordham, stabbed in the abdomen so many times the area had been shredded into bloody hash.

  Zahn had idolized Marissa. Perhaps deep in his psyche she had represented the gentle, loving mother he never had. If he had felt she had betrayed him in some way, could that have caused the psychotic break necessary to kill in the manner Marissa had been killed?

  Yes, he thought so.

  A call to Arthur Buckman had confirmed Vince’s suspicion that Zahn would not be teaching. He had taken the rest of the week off due to his extreme grief over the death of his friend. Rudy Nasser had taken over Zahn’s classes.

  Vince drove the scenic route to Zahn’s home by himself. He hadn’t called ahead. He was pretty certain Zahn would have told him not to come, then he would have spent the fifteen minutes it took Vince to get there anyway winding his strange little psyche into knots of anxiety.

  He parked outside the gate and pushed the intercom button on the keypad, hoping Zahn would answer. Nothing happened. He tried again. Again nothing.

  He looked at the stucco privacy wall that must have been about six feet high. Maybe in his heyday he could have gotten over it without a ladder.

  He tried the intercom again. No luck.

  He looked from the wall to his car and back. In his heyday he would have scaled the wall somehow. Now he was older and wiser. He maneuvered the car into place beside the wall, climbed onto the hood, then onto the wall, and lowered himself to the other side.

  “Not bad for an old man, Vince,” he said, dusting off his palms and his clothes.

  He had dressed casually for the day in tan slacks and a black polo shirt. The beauty of working for himself: no dress code but his own. He found people didn’t always want to talk to the suit and tie he had been required to wear in the Bureau. There were times he wanted people as relaxed as possible when he sat down with them so he could more easily steer them where he wanted them to go psychologically.

  He took a moment to just stand there and look around the yard at Zahn’s odd collection of things. Coming from a childhood in poor circumstances, both financially and psychologically, Zahn probably derived security from the ownership of things and more security from the orderly placement of those things. And the way Zahn’s mind worked, he could probably list every single item and would know exactly where each item was.

  What must it be like to live inside a mind like that? Vince wondered. He couldn’t find his car keys half the time.

  He went to Zahn’s front door and pressed the buzzer, pretty sure the professor was watching him from one window or another. The speaker on the intercom clicked, but no one spoke.

  “Zander? It’s Vince. Are you okay in there? I’m worried about you. I came to see how you’re doing.”

  Silence. Then the sound of a deadbolt turning. The door opened a crack and Zahn peered out.

  “Vince. I wasn’t expecting you, Vince. I’m not prepared, Vince.”

  “Hey, Zander, it’s just me,” Vince said with his most disarming grin. “I’m not the queen of England. You don’t need to do anything special for me. I just wanted to make sure you’re all right, see how you’re doing today. I know this is a rough time for you, Zander, and you’re all alone out here.”

  Zahn inched the door open to the width of his narrow face. His green eyes were huge, the pupils dilated almost to the last edge of the irises. He wore black slacks and a black turtleneck that blended into the dark background and made it look as if his head with its cloud of gray hair were floating free of his body.

  “Oh. That’s very kind of you, Vince,” he said in his hushed, breathy voice. “This is a very bad time. I’m terribly upset. Terribly.”

  “I know. You’ve lost your dear friend.”

  “Yes. And Haley. Where is Haley? How is Haley?”

  “Haley is going to be fine,” Vince assured him. “Would you like to visit her?”

  Zahn’s mouth rounded in surprise. “Oh, my. Could that be possible, Vince? Could I see Haley? Could I speak to her?”

  “I can arrange that,” Vince said, trying to see deeper into the house, curious as to what collections were contained within. “Would you like that? I can do that for you.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Zahn said. “Haley is so sweet, so pure, such a perfect child. Small children don’t judge, you know. They haven’t yet been taught to judge or to hate. They simply accept what is. Isn’t that wonderful? Small children are like Zen masters. They accept what is.”

  “I never thought of it that way, Zander. You’re right. Small children are pure of heart. Life hasn’t broken them yet. That comes later, doesn’t it?”

  Zahn frowned as he considered the question. Looking inward, Vince thought.

  “You know, Zander, I’m dying of thirst here. Would it be all right if I came in and got a drink of water?”

  “Come in? Come inside? Come inside my home?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I know you’re a very particular sort of man, and you don’t want people touching your stuff. I get that. But I’m thirsty and I’m not feeling too great to tell you the truth,” Vince said. “You know I had something terrible happen to me. Did you know that?”

  “No. I’m sorry, Vince. I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, well, I got shot about a year and a half ago. Someone tried
to kill me.”

  “Oh my goodness! That’s terrible. How terrible.”

  “Anyhow, I survived, but sometimes I still don’t feel so good. I need to sit down and have a glass of water. Would that be okay? I mean, I think of us as friends now, Zander, going through this whole murder thing together.”

  Zahn looked caught. He didn’t want anyone coming into his sanctuary, but neither was he a man with many—if any—friends.

  Slowly, and with no small amount of anxiety in his expression, he took a step back from the door, then another.

  “Thanks,” Vince said, slipping inside. “Thanks a million.”

  The entry hall was crowded with unopened boxes of Christmas ornaments and decorations of all descriptions—artificial trees and wreaths, balls and tinsel, Santa Claus figures, angel tree toppers. Immediately, Vince took a seat on a bench along a wall to minimize his size and not physically intimidate Zahn in his own home.

  Zahn seemed to hold his breath for a moment, as if he were waiting for something catastrophic to happen now that he had let someone breech his boundary.

  “I’ll get you a drink,” he said at last. “Please wait here, Vince. I’ll bring it here.”

  “No problem.”

  He kept his seat, figuring Zahn might duck back around the corner to make sure. From his vantage point he could see an office crowded with bookshelves that were absolutely packed tight with books. There was a desk, spotless, devoid of clutter.

  One wall was entirely covered in whiteboard where Zahn had scribbled math equations that might as well have been Sanskrit as far as Vince was concerned. He could figure his odds at the racetrack. That was as much math as he cared to keep in his head.

  In the other room he could see from the bench were file cabinets of all descriptions—metal, wood, new, antique—lined up against the walls and in rows across the floor, stacked as high as five feet with no more than two feet between them. Zahn would know exactly what was in each and every one of them.

  “That’s quite a collection you have there, Zander,” he said about the filing cabinets as Zahn returned to the hall with a glass of water. Vince accepted it and took a long drink. “You keep a lot of paper documentation?”