Secrets to the Grave

10

Rudy Nasser led the way out of town in his old black BMW 3 Series convertible. The two-lane road wound through beautiful country quilted by four-rail fences and studded with spreading oak trees. They passed horse ranches and vineyards, and a lavender farm that colored the valley floor purple as far back toward the mountains as the eye could see.

“I’m surprised you let him come along,” Mendez said, glancing over at Vince.

“Let’s see that dynamic,” Vince said. “Let’s see how Zahn interacts with someone we can assume he’s comfortable with. He might let his guard down more.”

“In that case, I’m surprised you let me come along. I make the guy nervous.”

“You need to learn patience.”

Mendez rolled his eyes. “I know, I know.”

“You’re like a great fastball pitcher,” Vince said. “But you can’t just throw fastballs for the whole game. You’re going to come up against guys who can belt your best one out of the park. Your arm is going to get tired and you’re not going to get them all over the plate. You need a repertoire. You need a change-up. You need a slider. The occasional spitball.”

This was one reason Mendez had chosen to remain in Oak Knoll, even though Leone had encouraged him to make the move to the Bureau with an eye to eventually becoming a part of the Investigative Support Unit. He wanted to learn from the best. Vince Leone was the best, and Vince Leone was here.

He slowed and turned the department Taurus onto Dyer Canyon Road, and gave it a little gas to catch up to the quicker BMW.

“What do you make of him?” Vince asked.

“Nasser? He’s got it all going on—the smarts, the looks, working his dream job with his hero,” he said, grinning. “Kinda like me.”

Vince laughed.

“He’s a little on the slick side,” Mendez commented. “He’s sure as hell not like any math teacher I ever had.”

“I guess the new math is sexy,” Vince said. “My math teachers all had horn-rimmed glasses and thick ankles.”

Zander Zahn’s home sat behind a high stucco privacy wall. Only the tile roof of the house was visible from where they parked the cars on the shoulder of the road.

“He won’t want you going inside the house,” Nasser explained. “And he won’t like it if you touch anything in the yard.”

He keyed in the gate code and the solid wooden gate rolled back.

Mendez had been about to ask why they didn’t just drive in, but the reason was obvious. Every inch of Zahn’s yard was covered with stuff. Whatever lawn there had been at one time had been removed and replaced with decomposed granite dust, creating a parking lot for all manner of junk—all of it neatly arranged in categories.

Groups of old kitchen chairs. A collection of plant pots organized by size with the smallest in the front row and the largest in the back. Concrete statuary—from gargoyles to lions to replicas of Michelangelo’s David and the Statue of Liberty.

He seemed to have a special affinity for refrigerators, which were lined up front to back, row after row, like a platoon of soldiers; and for chest-style freezers, rectangular box after rectangular box, like so many rusty white coffins.

“I’ll buzz him at the front door,” Nasser went on as they followed the narrow path to the house. “Hopefully, he’ll agree to come out. Better if the two of you stay a good ten feet back.”

He hustled up the steps ahead of them.

Mendez glanced at Leone. “What the fuck?”

“He’s a hoarder,” Vince said, looking over the collections through a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses. “Interesting.”

“It’s part of the obsessive-compulsive disorder?”

“It would seem to be, but there’s a lot of conflicting opinions on the subject. For instance, we’ve already seen that Zahn is a germaphobe, yet hoarding often creates unsanitary conditions. The two seem not to go together, yet here we are.”

“When I was in a uniform in Bakersfield, I had a call-out on a possible missing person,” Mendez said. “A woman reported her elderly mother missing after not hearing from her for several days. She had gone to the mother’s house. No sign of her.

“Me and my partner get there. You can’t believe this place. It was like a landfill inside a building—and smelled like one too. You could hardly walk inside. Every window was blocked. There were mice and rats like something out of a horror movie. Long story short: It took three days and a cadaver dog to find the woman’s body. A pile of stuff had fallen on her and buried her alive.”

Vince looked around at the yard. “At least Dr. Zahn is tidy.”

Contrary to Nasser’s instructions, Vince took the step below him and struck a casual stance with his hands in his pants pockets. The breeze flipped his necktie back over his shoulder.

Zahn’s voice came out of the squawk box on the wall above the doorbell. “Who are you?”

Nasser answered, “It’s me—Rudy.”

“Who’s with you? Someone is with you. Why would you bring someone here? You know not to bring someone here. Why would you do that?”

“They’re detectives, Zander. It’s about Marissa. They need to speak to you.”

No answer.

Vince leaned past a frowning Nasser and pressed the intercom button himself. “It’s Vince Leone, Zander,” he said in a pleasant, casual tone. “We spoke earlier this morning at Marissa’s house. I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve got a couple more questions you might be able to help me with.”

“I don’t think so, Vince,” Zahn said. “I don’t think I can help you. I’m terribly upset by all of this.”

“I know. So is everyone—especially people who loved Marissa. Imagine what it would mean to her if you could help in any small way to find her killer. You’ve been such a good friend to her.”

No sound came out of the box for moment. Mendez looked from Vince to Nasser and back.

“I do have some good news from the hospital,” Vince said. “I went to check on little Haley, and she’s going to be fine.”

Another moment passed then came the sound of locks being turned on the other side of the front door. Zahn emerged wearing what looked to Mendez like black Chinese pajamas and a pair of clogs.

“Haley?” he said, looking up and just to the right of Leone’s head, as if he were seeing a vision in the sky. “Haley is all right? She’s going to be all right?”

“I spoke to her doctor.”

“Oh my God. Oh thank God,” Zahn whispered, wringing his hands absently as he spoke. “Could I see her? Do you think that might be possible—that I could speak to her and see her?”

“You would have to go into the hospital to see her, Zander,” Nasser said.

Zahn looked at him sharply.

His assistant shrugged. “Hospitals are full of sick people.”

“Haley isn’t sick, though,” Zahn pointed out. “She’s injured. She was injured somehow and her heart is broken. She’ll be heartbroken over Marissa. I’m heartbroken.”

“They won’t want her to have visitors yet,” Vince said. “But I’ll let you know as soon as they give the go-ahead, Zander. You’ll be my first call.”

“Thank you, Vince. I will appreciate that because I will want to see her. I—I’m so upset about what happened. Haley will be also.”

“I understand,” Vince said, nodding, then he glanced around. “Is there somewhere we can just sit down for a few minutes, Zander?”

The idea seemed to startle their odd host.

“I don’t want to add to your stress,” Vince assured him. “I’m just thinking we could sit down for a few minutes and chat. You knew Marissa so well. You might have some useful insights you may not even be aware of.

“Do you know what I mean, Zander?” he asked. “Sometimes we know things that may not seem significant until put into another context. I’m sure it’s the same in mathematics. A number is just a number until you assign it a purpose, right?”

Zahn put his head to one side like a quizzical bird, then slowly began to nod, pleased. “That’s a very interesting statement, Vince. I like that. I like that.”

His face took on a wondrous expression that made Mendez think the guy had some kind of psychedelic kaleidoscope hallucination going on in his head.

“So many people think of mathematics as being very static and absolute,” he said. “But that’s so wrong. It’s thinking in the abstract that frees the mind to the greatest of possibilities.”

He spoke with as much passion and clarity as Mendez had heard out of him. His gaze then became acutely focused on Leone, and he took a step closer to him. “We should talk about this, Vince.”

Vince made a comical grimace. “I’m afraid you’re already way ahead of me on the subject, Zander. Math was never my forte.”

“Because you were undoubtedly taught by people trapped in the pedantic world of what I call ‘base academia.’ And by base I mean ‘low’ or ‘common’ as opposed to basic.”

He looked sharply at Nasser again. “Did you hear that, Rudy? Vince’s thought? Contextual mathematics. This is another verbal approach to help us articulate how we want our students to open their minds to our subject. Don’t you agree, Rudy?”

Nasser looked a bit pissed, Mendez thought. Or maybe “jealous” was a better word. His mentor had found favor in someone else. Interesting.

But he covered it well and replied, “It’s brilliant. We should use that in orientation.”

“Brilliant,” Zahn said, tasting the word in his mouth like something buttery and smooth. “And you didn’t think you knew that, did you, Vince?”

“No, I didn’t,” Vince admitted. “See? It’s like I said: You may have some piece of knowledge that—unknown to you—could help Marissa.”

Zahn didn’t seem quite so pleased at having the idea turned around on him, but he couldn’t argue with the logic.

“I have chairs,” he said. But instead of inviting them into the house, he gestured like a bad public speaker at the collection of chrome and vinyl kitchen chairs lined up in five rows of five on his gravel yard.

As Zahn led the way down the path, Mendez leaned toward Vince and muttered, “Do you think he’ll offer us refreshments from one of those refrigerators?”

Leone gave him an elbow.

They sat down in a row like they were going to watch a play. Nasser, Zahn, Vince. Mendez very deliberately picked up an orange chair, pulled it out of line and sat it down facing the others. Zahn looked at him like he was the devil incarnate, but said nothing. Vince watched him, reserving his reaction.

“I’m sorry,” Mendez said, ducking his head contritely. “This is embarrassing, but I’m a little hard of hearing, Dr. Zahn. I had an accident when I was nine. Actually ... my mother struck me in the side of the head. It left me a little deaf. It’s been a problem my whole life.”

Vince arched an eyebrow.

Zahn studied him for a few seconds, letting his story sink in. “I’m so sorry, Tony. It’s difficult to be a child. I was a child once. It was difficult. Haley will find it difficult now. Not for the same reasons, though.”

“I’m not looking for people to feel sorry for me or anything,” Mendez said. “I’ll put the chair back when we’re finished. I just didn’t want you to think I’m trying to intimidate you. That’s not my intent at all.”

Zahn nodded and looked down in his lap. He rubbed his hands together, rubbed his palms against his thighs. His legs were thin as rails.

“Of course, Tony. Of course, Tony,” he muttered.

“Detective Mendez spoke with another of Marissa’s friends,” Vince said, then raised his voice to a low boom. “Isn’t that right, Detective?”

“Yes,” Mendez said, straight-faced. “Sara Morgan.”

“Sara, yes. She doesn’t like me,” Zahn said. “That’s all right. I understand. She’s very sad, I think.”

“Why would you say that, Zander?” he asked, taking Vince’s cue to use Zahn’s name as if they were old acquaintances.

Zahn gazed off into the distance. “Because that’s what I think. I think she’s very sad. It’s in her eyes. She has beautiful eyes. Don’t you think so? Blue like the Aegean Sea. But sad. And frightened. She was frightened of me.”

“Why is that?”

“She thinks I might be dangerous, I think.”

“That’s ridiculous, Zander,” Nasser said.

“Not to her,” Zahn said. “Her perception is her reality. She doesn’t understand who I am. People fear what they don’t understand.”

“You’re world-renowned in your field,” Nasser said.

Zahn nodded, looking away from them. “But not in her context. Isn’t that right, Vince?”

“I suppose so. She doesn’t really know you.”

“I’m just the strange neighbor,” Zahn said. “I am unknown. People fear the unknown. I fear the unknown. What we don’t know can hurt us.”

He began to rock a little on his red vinyl chair, twisting his hands together, rubbing his palms on his thighs.

Nasser still seemed to feel the need to suck up. “Still,” he said, “you would never hurt a woman.”

“Oh, but I would,” Zahn said candidly, looking at his protégé.

Mendez felt every cop instinct in him come to attention. He cut a glance at Vince, who appeared not to react at all. Leone crossed his legs and picked at the crease in his trousers.

“I have,” Zahn said, looking Mendez straight in the eye. “I killed my mother.”