They stood in the ambulance bay, in the damp cold. Nasser had needed a cigarette. He wore the collar of his pea coat turned up against the chill. It made him look a little sinister with his dark features and razor-trimmed goatee.

“Did he ever mention a woman named Bordain to you?”

“I don’t recall. Why would he?”

“She was Marissa’s patron. She owns the property where Marissa lived.”

“Oh ... ,” he said. “I know who she is. Zander was afraid of her.”

“Afraid?”

“She intimidated him, made him feel small.”

“Do you think Zander is the kind of guy who would try to get back at somebody for something like that?”

“Zander? What would he do?” Nasser asked. “Cast an evil mathematical equation on them? He won’t even go in a convenience store to buy gum.”

“That’s what I thought.”

They were quiet for a moment. Nasser finished his smoke and stubbed out the butt in the giant sandpit atop an equally giant trash receptacle by the door.

He nodded toward the building. “It’s taking a long time.”

“It was a long knife,” Vince said.

“Do you think he’ll make it?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s such a fragile soul,” Nasser said. “It’s like he was never meant for this world, you know?”

“He’s had a tough row to hoe.”

“Do you think he killed Marissa?”

“No. I don’t,” Vince said. “Let’s take a ride. Maybe we can prove it.”

They sailed out the dark country road in Nasser’s old 3 Series BMW. The muffler needed some help, and the ragtop quaked like it might fly off at any moment.

Zahn’s place was creepy in the gathering gloom, the fog slithering around the old refrigerators and rows of strange garden statuary. The house was black and unwelcoming. Coyotes yipped and howled in the distance.

Nasser let them in and turned on the hall lights.

Vince went into the room with the collection of filing cabinets that were stacked so close together he could barely fit between the rows.

I keep every paper, Zahn had told him.

It hadn’t occurred to him when they were searching the place in the morning because they were searching for a man, not a document. Not even Zander Zahn would have attempted to hide himself in a filing cabinet.

When it came to him, it seemed so simple he wanted to kick himself. If Marissa had wanted to put Haley’s birth certificate someplace nobody would look, what better place than in the home of a hoarder? And who better to trust it to than her strange friend Zander? Zander, so devoted to her, so enamored of her. Of course he would hide it and never tell a soul. His loyalty to Marissa was absolute.