I know, but ..., Vince thought. He hadn’t been able to shake the lingering sense of guilt. He had broken the lock on that small dark box in Zander Zahn’s mind that contained the memories of what had happened to his mother—what he had done to his mother. What if Zahn couldn’t get that box to close again?

On the other hand, perhaps it had been Marissa who had unwittingly opened that box and had paid a terrible price for doing it.

“Besides, Zahn brought up the subject of his mother’s murder in the first place,” Mendez said as he started the car. “He can’t be that sensitive about it.”

“It’s one thing to use the words ‘I killed my mother’ and something else to pull up those memories in Technicolor,” Vince said.

Rudy Nasser met them at Zahn’s gate. He was dressed for a hurricane in a black storm jacket with the hood pulled up over his head.

“How was he after I left yesterday?” Vince asked as they walked up the narrow gravel path toward the house.

“He seemed fine.”

“He wasn’t agitated?”

“No, why?” Nasser asked with a suspicious look. “What did you do to him?”

“I talked to him about his mother.”

“He didn’t really kill her, did he?”

“He doesn’t have a record for it,” Vince hedged. It wasn’t his place to tell Zander Zahn’s story. If Zahn wanted Nasser to know, he would tell the story himself.

“The conversation stirred up some bad memories for him,” he said. “I feel bad that he was upset.”

Nasser pressed the buzzer at Zahn’s door. “You’re not used to dealing with him. It’s difficult for most people to have any kind of a conversation with him. His mind plays by a different set of rules.”

He rang the buzzer again, frowned and pushed back the sleeve of his raincoat to check his watch.

“Maybe he’s sleeping in,” Vince suggested.

Nasser shook his head. “He’s an extreme creature of habit. He gets up at three A.M. every day to meditate.”

And then he would take his hike over the hills to Marissa Fordham’s house, Vince remembered. Every day.

“He meditates, then he takes his walk,” Nasser said. “He should have been back by now.”

“He walks around in the rain?” Mendez asked.

“The walk is ritual,” Nasser explained. “Rain, shine, whatever.”

“You have a key,” Vince said, his nerves itching. “Use it.”

Nasser let them in and called out for Zander Zahn. The house was silent.

Nasser called again.

The silence seemed to press in on Vince’s eardrums.

“Where’s his bedroom?” he asked.

“Upstairs on the left.”

They went up the staircase, made narrow by foot-high stacks of National Geographic magazines. Nasser knocked on Zahn’s closed bedroom door.

“Zander? It’s Rudy.”

Not even the air stirred.

Vince turned the knob and opened the door.