“You talked a lawyer out of filing charges?” Trammell said. “You’re the man, boss.”
“He admitted to hitting you first,” Dixon said to Mendez.
“So he’s a cheat but not always a liar,” Mendez said. “Good to know he has something going for him. We should still bring him in to talk.”
Dixon stuck a finger at him. “You will have absolutely nothing to do with it. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I mean it.”
“Yes, sir. I know, sir.”
“Stay away from his house. Stay away from his family.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I paid a visit to Zander Zahn this afternoon,” Vince said, taking the spotlight off Mendez.
Mendez thanked him mentally. He had been waiting to hear Dixon say “stay away from his wife,” sure he would have looked guilty, despite the fact that he had not crossed a line with Sara Morgan. A part of him had certainly wanted to.
“He wasn’t happy that I knew about his mother’s death,” Vince went on. “I pressed him a little. He flipped out on me. Total meltdown.”
He proceeded to tell the story, complete with an explanation of a dissociative state, and how Zahn could have killed Marissa Fordham and have no conscious memory of it.
“That sounds like something a defense attorney would come up with,” Trammell said.
“They’ll certainly latch on to it if they can,” Vince said. “But true dissociation is rare. It’s a mind’s way of reacting to overwhelming psychological trauma.”
“Like having stabbed your own mother to death,” Hamilton said.
“More like a reaction to whatever his mother did to him to precipitate the murder. Say she burned the soles of his feet with a cigarette. His mind goes into a dissociative state to escape the abuse. While he’s in the dissociative state, he kills her. When he comes out of it, he may not remember a thing.”
“The mind is trying to protect itself by repressing the memories,” Mendez said.
“Right.”
“So he could have been capable of killing Marissa Fordham,” Dixon said.
“Based on what we know now and what I saw this afternoon, yes.”
“It looked like a crazy person did it because a crazy person did do it,” Campbell said.
“I asked Haley if she was ever afraid of Zahn,” Vince said.
“She’s talking?” Dixon asked.
“When she feels like it. But she ignores questions that might take her back to what happened. Either consciously or subconsciously she doesn’t want to get near those feelings.”
“What did she say about Zahn?” Mendez asked.
One corner of Vince’s mouth quirked upward. “That he’s weird.”
“Sharp kid,” Mendez said, laughing. “But why would Zahn ransack the house? He can’t be Haley’s father. You have to actually touch a woman to get her pregnant.”
“How would you know?” Campbell asked.
“Shut up.”
“And why would he send the breasts to Milo Bordain?” Hicks asked. “That box was postmarked Monday. The murder took place Sunday night. He would have been out of that dissociative state by Monday, wouldn’t he?”
“Not necessarily,” Vince said. “I admit the breasts in the box don’t seem to fit, but they don’t seem to fit any scenario we’ve had so far other than Darren Bordain.”
“Maybe that’s exactly
50
Two bad things came at once: darkness and rain.
Gina had finally managed to get her back up against the wall, passing out from the pain and the effort at the end of the process. The rain hitting her face brought her back to reality.
There is no soft autumn rain in Southern California. The rain comes with a vengeance, an angry payback from Mother Nature for months of cloudless skies. The rickety doors far above Gina’s head were meager protection from the storm.
She needed something to cover herself to keep from getting soaked. The temperature had dropped. She was cold and, she supposed, in shock—although she didn’t exactly know what that meant. Biology had never been her strong suit.
What she did know was that she was sitting in the midst of a garbage heap with garbage bags all around her. Most of them had been torn by the rats that were now beginning to emerge from below and from holes in the walls. Too dark to see now, Gina could hear the rustling, the intermittent squeaks. Her skin was crawling and fear was like a writhing thing in her throat and stomach.
Fighting tears, she felt around on her right side and got hold of a plastic bag with her good hand. It was only partially full of garbage, but stinking enough to make her gag, and it seemed to take forever to work one of the tears open enough to empty it.
She screamed as mice fell from it with the trash. It seemed like dozens of them raining down, screeching, and running, scrambling over her body, her arms, her legs, her chest.
Hysterical, she dropped the bag and swatted at them with her good hand, sure they were going inside her clothes and tangling in her hair. Her body jerked and twisted, setting off explosions of pain. The sounds of rodents squealing and scurrying seemed amplified in the confined space of the well, echoing up the shaft and filling her ears, filling her head.
Gina felt around and grabbed the empty bag. Holding her breath against the stench, she put the thing over her head and did her best to arrange it around her shoulders.
She tipped her head back and opened her mouth, catching the raindrops, the first clean drink she had had in more than twenty-four hours.
Had anybody missed her yet? Had the girls at the boutique tried to call her? When they only got her machine again and again, had they gone to her house in search of her? They wouldn’t have found anything wrong. No one had broken into her home. Her car was gone. She had left of her own accord.
How had her life come to this? She wasn’t a bad person. She and Marissa had only set out to do a good thing. Maybe Marissa’s method had been questionable, but she had her reasons. And her only motive had been Haley. That they had both benefitted had been incidental to that goal—to provide for Haley.
How could such a noble motive come to such a bad end?
How did she know if any of this was real at all? Gina wondered. Maybe she really was losing her mind. Could she be hallucinating? How would she know the difference?
