Secrets to the Grave ok-2

by Tami Hoag

The big sliding door that led into Marissa Fordham’s barn/studio stood open by a couple of feet. The space had been converted to a large work area at one end, and a gallery at the other. The morning sun poured in through a wall of windows, bathing everything in buttery yellow light.

  “Oh, no,” Sara Morgan said, as they stepped inside. “No, no, no ...”

  It should have been a beautiful space. It probably had been a beautiful space filled with Marissa Fordham’s extraordinary art—all of which had been torn and ruined, slashed and broken. Paintings, sculpture—all of it now nothing but debris, the detritus of a murderer’s rage.

  Sara Morgan put her hands to her face and started to cry, mourning not only the loss of the woman she had known, but the loss of the beauty Marissa Fordham’s soul had expressed in her art. She slipped inside the door, careful not to step on anything, and squatted down and reached out toward a small impressionistic painting cut almost in two. A small dark-haired child in a field of yellow flowers.

  Mendez gently put his hand on her shoulder. “Please don’t touch anything, ma’am. This is a crime scene now.”

  7

  “I don’t understand why someone would do that. Any of it,” Sara Morgan said quietly. She sounded defeated, worn-out.

  Mendez walked with her away from the barn as the crime-scene team moved in. There were more photographs to be taken, more fingerprints to search for. She went to an old rickety-looking park bench situated under an oak tree and stared at it.

  “Can we sit?” she asked. “Is this a crime scene too?”

  “It’s all right. Have a seat.”

  The bench under the tree seemed a small, untouched oasis between the carnage in the house and the carnage in the barn. An old washtub had been planted with fuchsia, and delicate purple lobelia spilled over the sides. A folk art fairy suspended from a branch smiled as she reached a magic wand over the wild growth.

  Sara Morgan reached out and touched the sparkling gold end of the wand, no doubt wishing for a transformation of the day and the terrible things that it had brought with it.

  Do over.

  “I’m sorry you’re going to be dragged into this for a while,” Mendez said, taking the opposite end of the bench. He sat with his forearms on his thighs, feeling the hours press down on him as the last blast of caffeine subsided.

  Sara Morgan said nothing. She sat looking down at her bandaged hands in her lap. Blood had begun to seep through the gauze.

  “Can you tell me who some of her friends were?” he asked. “People we should talk to?”

  “The Acorn Gallery sells a lot of her work. The people there would know her well.” She continued to look down into her cupped hands as if she could see visions there, pictures of Marissa Fordham and the people she knew.

  “She has this weird neighbor,” she said. “He’s seriously creepy. A couple of times he just showed up while I was here working with Marissa. She would say hello to him and he would just hang around, looking at her. He never had much to say. He would just hang out for a while, and then he would leave.”

  “Did Ms. Fordham seem afraid of him?”

  “No. I was afraid of him,” she admitted. “That’s strange—don’t you think? That he would just—just—loiter like that, like some kind of—I don’t know—pervert or something.”

  “But it didn’t bother Marissa?”

  “No. When I would say something about it, she would just shrug it off. ‘That’s just Zander,’ she would say. ‘He’s harmless,’ she would say. ‘He’s odd, but he’s a friend,’ she would say.”

  She looked at him hard, looking for an answer he couldn’t give her. “What if he wasn’t harmless?”

  “We’ve already spoken with Mr. Zahn,” he said.

  She sat up a little at that. “And? Didn’t you think he was weird?”

  “Do you know any of her other friends?”

  “That’s really annoying, you know,” she snapped, brushing a rope of unruly waves back behind one ear. “You never answer a question.”

  He conceded with a hint of a sheepish smile tipping up one side of his mustache. “Goes with the job. Sorry.”

  Sara Morgan sighed. “She worked with Jane Thomas, designing the fund-raising poster for the women’s center. Gina Kemmer. Gina owns Girl—it’s a boutique on Via Verde near the college. I don’t really know her more than to say hello, but I’ve seen them together a lot. And she has a patron—patroness. Milo Bordain supports her work. Bruce Bordain’s wife.”

  Mendez jotted the names down in his notebook. Bruce Bordain, the parking lot king of Southern California, was a big shot not only in Oak Knoll, but all the way south to Los Angeles. He had made his money first buying up and managing parking lots, then expanding into the construction of multimillion-dollar, multilevel parking structures. He owned some high-end car dealerships just for fun, and sat on the boards of McAster College and Mercy General and who knew what else.

  His wife was a well-known patron of the arts, instrumental in the organization of the prestigious Oak Knoll Festival of Music, which took place every summer, drawing renowned classical musicians from all over the world.

  “And you never knew her to have a boyfriend?” Mendez asked. “An ex-boyfriend? A lover?”

  Sara Morgan stared down at the blood soaking through the gauze around her hand. “No.”

  “She must have had,” he pressed. “She had a child. She never talked about the girl’s father?”

  “Not to me.”

  “You never asked?”

  “It’s none of my business. I don’t pry into people’s lives.

  “Can I go home now?” she asked softly.

  “Are you all right to drive?” he asked. “I can have a deputy take you home or follow you home.”

  “No,” she said, getting up from the bench. “No offense, Detective Mendez, but I’ve had more than I ever wanted to do with your office already.”

  He let her walk herself back to her car, but he watched her the whole way.

  8

  “The little girl hasn’t regained consciousness,” Vince announced as he took a seat in what they so aptly called the “war room.”

  This was the room where Cal Dixon gathered his six full-time detectives to plan their strategy for a major investigation. They had spent a lot of time in this room in the last year. The walls and whiteboards were still covered with photos and information regarding the See-No-Evil cases, which were still being actively worked in preparation for the upcoming trial of Peter Crane.

  Dixon was lucky; most larger departments didn’t have the luxury of forming their own task force for a murder investigation. Because the crime rate in his jurisdiction was relatively low, Dixon could pull all of his investigators together to tackle a high-profile case as one unit. And Dixon, himself a homicide detective for years with LA County, could turn his administrative duties over to his second in command and spearhead the investigation.

  “She was admitted with severe dehydration and hypothermia,” Vince went on. “I can confirm she was strangled manually—at least partially.”

  “What do you mean—partially?” Dixon asked as he organized some papers on the podium.

  “The kid is tiny. Any adult could easily have crushed her larynx entirely. But that didn’t happen. She also has damage to the insides of her lips where her teeth cut into the flesh, which suggests suffocation. Could be your UNSUB started to choke her and didn’t have the stomach for it, then switched to pressing something over her face. Luckily, he only thought he finished the job.”

  “Sick bastard,” Dixon growled, frowning darkly. “I’m glad to have you in on this with us, Vince. I’m talking with the budget director this afternoon to see about cutting you a consulting fee.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Cal. I’m doing fine. What I make consulting makes my salary from the Bureau look like minimum wage. I don’t need your money. You guys are always on my priority list, you know that.”

  Vince had grown to think of Dixon and his people as
extended family. He may have initially come to Oak Knoll to work a case, but he had found a home here, a second life, and Anne. Whatever Cal Dixon needed, Vince was happy to oblige.

  “I appreciate that,” Dixon said.

  Mendez took a seat next to Vince. “The attack on Marissa Fordham was over the top. Out-of-control rage. It seems strange to me that didn’t just spill over to include the child. It’s like he killed the mother, then flipped a switch on the rage.”

  “He killed the woman with a lot of personal fury,” Vince said. “The child was unfortunate collateral damage.”

  “He had to kill her because she was a witness,” Hicks said. “It didn’t mean the same thing to him.”

  “He must have believed the kid could ID him,” Dixon said. “The question is, will she ever be able to?”

  “So far her brain activity appears to be normal,” Vince said. “But there are a lot of factors that could weigh against us. That kind of trauma, that young a child—a kid might block that out for the rest of their life just out of self-preservation.”

  “If she comes around, do you think Anne might be able to help us with her?” Mendez asked.

  Vince’s instinctive reaction was to say no. Not because he didn’t think his wife was capable of helping. Quite the opposite was true. Anne had a gift with kids. He had encouraged her to go back to school to finish her degree in child psychology. But his first instinct was to protect her. She had been through enough. He didn’t want her pulled into another murder investigation.

  “Isn’t that the job of Child Protective Services?”

  “This seems out of their league,” Mendez said.

  This was a mostly rural county with a lower-than-average crime rate. Oak Knoll, with a population of roughly twenty thousand (not counting college students), was the Big Town. Crime here routinely consisted of small-time drug deals, burglary, the odd assault, a murder now and again.

  There was no Oak Knoll Police Department. The city contracted with the sheriff’s office for their needs. There was no dedicated homicide division within the SO, but a group of detectives who worked all manner of crimes. County Child Protective Services had no psychologist on staff. They had a small administrative group, two full-time social workers, and a number of volunteers. Anne was one of only two court-appointed special advocates for children in the county.

  All of these things would change as more people were enticed north out of the LA sprawl. But for now life in the Oak Knoll environs remained more or less idyllic.

  “Technically it’s their call,” Dixon said. “I’ve spoken with the director. The protocol would be to try to find a relative. In the absence of a relative, the child would be put into foster care.”

  “How many people are going to want to bring the only living witness to a violent murder into their home?” Detective Trammell asked.

  “Is there any sign of family anywhere?” Mendez asked.

  “Not so far,” Dixon said. “We didn’t find an address book in the house. We didn’t find a birth certificate for the child or a social security card for the woman. I want you to start checking around the local banks to see if Marissa Fordham had a safe deposit box somewhere.”

  “We get the birth certificate, we get the name of the father, we get our number one suspect,” Mendez said.

  “That might be why you haven’t found a birth certificate,” Vince suggested. “The neighbor, who was allegedly a close friend, doesn’t know who the girl’s father is.”

  “Can you see a woman—or anyone—confiding in that guy?” Hicks asked. “There is one strange dude.”

  “Bill and I walked up that trail Zahn took home,” Mendez said. “That’s a hike. I find it hard to imagine anybody just strolling over that hill before dawn to say hey.”

  “I want to know more about this guy,” Dixon said. “Who is he? What does he do for a living? Just what kind of a relationship did he have with Marissa Fordham?”

  “What’s his name?” Detective Hamilton asked.

  “Alexander—aka Zander—Zahn. Z-A-H-N,” Mendez said.

  “He’s some kind of genius,” Trammell said. “He teaches at the college. Math or physics or philosophy or something.”

  Everyone turned and looked at him with suspicion.

  “How the hell do you know that?” Mendez asked.

  Trammell was the kind of guy who could spout sports stats and belch the national anthem. No one would have looked to him for information on physics or philosophy.

  Trammell spread his hands. “What? My kid goes there.”

  “You been robbing banks in your spare time?” Hicks asked.

  “He’s a smart kid. He got a scholarship.”

  “Must take after his mother,” Detective Campbell suggested.

  They all laughed. Their first good laugh of the day. As serious as their business was, it was important to loosen things up when an opportunity presented itself, no matter how small. Otherwise, the gravity of the job would pull them all into a black hole.

  “Fuck you guys,” Trammell said with good humor.

  Dixon steered them back on topic. “Let’s get back to Zahn.”

  “Sara Morgan said Ms. Fordham was perfectly comfortable having him around,” Mendez said.

  “Sara—Wendy’s mother?” Vince asked.

  “Yeah. She’s an artist too. Marissa Fordham was teaching her some technique for painting on silk, whatever that means. She showed up this morning for her lesson.”

  Vince cocked half a smile. “My uncle Bobo from the South Side used to have a silk tie with a painting of Wrigley Field on it. If that’s coming back, I’ve got an inside track. Put your orders in now, fellas.”

  They all chuckled.

  “Let’s get one for Trammell,” Hamilton suggested. “With a picture of Einstein on it.”

  “Anyway,” Mendez said, “Sara said Zahn would sometimes just show up and hang around. He gave her the creeps, but Ms. Fordham didn’t seem bothered at all.”

  “She was comfortable with him,” Vince said.

  “Apparently.”

  “I’d like to see him in his natural environment,” Vince said. “I’m curious. And I think he definitely knows more than he told us this morning. I’ll take Junior here,” he said to Dixon, hooking a thumb in the direction of Mendez. “He makes the guy nervous.”

  “I hear his dates have the same reaction,” Trammell said.

  “If he didn’t always have to read them their rights ... ,” Hicks said.

  “I thought it was the handcuffs,” Mendez joked.

  Dixon cleared his throat. “And do we have any names of friends to start checking out?”

  Mendez read off the short list he had gotten from Sara Morgan.

  “No boyfriends?” Vince questioned.

  “Not that Mrs. Morgan knew of.”

  “But they were friends.”

  Mendez shrugged. “She said they never talked about it.”

  “I’ve never known a woman who could stop herself from blabbing on and on about what guy she’s sleeping with,” Trammell said.

  “Unless the guy she’s seeing belongs to someone else,” Vince suggested.

  “A married lover?” Dixon said. “Always a possibility—and a motive. Let’s talk to the other women on that list and see what we can come up with. It’s tough to keep a secret in a town this size—especially a juicy one.

  “I know most of you are already working other cases,” he went on, consulting his notes, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. “But I need all of you on this initially. The press is going to have a field day with a gruesome murder in Oak Knoll practically on the anniversary of the See-No-Evil cases. I want to clear this one before they can get up a head of steam.”

  “We’ve got a vic with forty stab wounds, her breasts missing, and a knife sticking out of her vagina,” Mendez said. “Somehow, I don’t think they’re going to let this one go.”

  Dixon turned to Vince. “What are your impressions so far, Vince?”


  Vince shrugged. “Obviously, it’s a sexual homicide, but what’s it about? Rage, yes. Rage over what? She done him wrong? She must have done him way wrong.

  “Taking the breasts sometimes suggests a kind of envy,” he said. “Breasts are symbolic of a woman’s beauty, her power.”

  “Take her breasts, take her power,” Mendez said.

  “Right. And sometimes removing body parts is about possession, possessing the victim by keeping a part of them.”

  “Like Ed Gein.”

  “Like Ed Gein.”

  The notorious 1950s Butcher of Plainfield. The Wisconsin man had made lampshades and chair seats out of the skin of his victims, and bowls out of their skulls, to name but a few of his atrocities.

  “Only Ed not only wanted to keep his female victims with him,” Vince said. “He wanted to be them. He made himself a ‘woman suit’ out of the skin and parts of corpses.”

  “Man, that’s disgusting,” Hicks said.

  “You think that’s disgusting. I can tell you about a couple of cannibals and what possessing their victims meant to them.”

  “Maybe after lunch,” someone suggested sarcastically.

  “Sometimes the body parts can be strictly a trophy,” Vince went on. “We’ll hope to God that’s not the case, because that would suggest he’s a hunter, and hunters don’t stop hunting.”

  “Jesus, that’s all we need,” Dixon said. “Another serial killer. One was more than enough.”

  “The odds of you having another serial killer on your hands are about as long as they can get,” Vince said. “We’re talking about an extremely rare animal, no matter how many of them appear every week on television.

  “In my opinion, the attack on Marissa Fordham was personal. That many stab wounds is personal. But that butcher knife looks to have belonged to the victim, which makes this seem more like a crime of opportunity, of the moment. Someone got angry, grabbed that knife and used it. I think the knife protruding from the vagina is the killer making a personal statement about the victim.”

  “Don’t fuck her, she’s dangerous?” Trammell asked.