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
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.
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
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.”
