Secrets To The Grave Part 61

Vince nodded. "That had to be a terrible shock for you. I'm sorry."

"It still doesn't even seem real. I would never have done anything to hurt him or Darren. We were friends! I was just so scared so scared. All I could think about was running away. I thought Mark would help me. When he told me no ... I was already in a panic. I said the first stupid thing that came into my head."

"You threatened him," Vince said.

Gina nodded, tears squeezing out of her closed eyes. "I never, never, never would have followed through. He should have known that. I can't believe he reacted the way he did. He was always such a nice guy-I thought."

"We can know people really well, Gina, and never know what they're truly capable of when they're cornered. Mark has held that secret inside him most of his life. He's feared it, feared what it could do to everything he's worked so hard to achieve."

"Why can't people just be who they are?" she asked. "It's not like there aren't gay men in the music world. He wasn't going to be the only one."

"He was going to be the only one named Mark Foster," Vince said, "with his parents and his upbringing-whatever that might have been. He was going to be the only one involved with Darren Bordain, who's supposed to have a big political future ahead of him."

"I guess so," she said quietly, her emotions already taking a toll on her strength. The color was fading from her cheeks. "It was the most horrible moment of my life-when he turned on me like that. It was like-I can't even describe it. It was like he was someone I'd never seen before in my life. That was the worst moment-worse than when he shot me."

Vince could see her energy flagging. She was still fighting an infection, to say nothing of her emotional and psychological exhaustion.

"Gina, I know you're tired, and we've got a lot to talk about, but we won't try to do it all now. I just need to ask you, do you know who killed Marissa?"

She was quiet for a moment as she looked inward, not liking what she saw. "I thought I did. Now ... I don't know."

"Who did you think it was?"

"Bruce. Bruce Bordain."

96.

"h.e.l.l of a deal," Hicks said. "Can you imagine either one of those men-Foster or Bordain-doing what was done to Marissa Fordham?"

"No, but one of them did."

"A person has to be out of their head to do something like that and then just walk around like nothing ever happened."

"I don't know," Mendez said. They were creeping around the streets of Lompoc, trying to find the post office. "The other night Anne was talking about when Crane attacked her, how he didn't look like the man she knew. It was like he was a monster inside and the mask came off when he went after her. Maybe there's something to that."

"When I first made detective I worked a rape case," Hicks said. "A guy posing as a gas company employee got this gal to let him into her apartment. Normal-looking guy. Friendly enough. She wasn't suspicious of him at all until he set his toolbox down and turned around.

"She said it was like he had turned into a different person. He turned around and just looked at her and she instantly became terrified. He beat her in the head with a claw hammer and raped her, and she said, during the rape every once in a while, he would pause and lick her like he was a dog or a wolf. And she said she could see in his eyes then that he wasn't human."

"Did you catch him?"

"Yeah. The guy managed a lamp store, had the wife and kids, the whole deal. Looked as normal as could be."

"There it is," Mendez said, pointing to the right.

They parked and went inside. Two people were working the desk: a surfer burnout with a bleached stand-up hairdo, and a large woman with bright blue eye shadow and long claw fingernails.

They waited their turn behind a woman buying stamps and a man picking up his mail after a long vacation. When they got to the male clerk Hicks introduced them and explained what they were there for. Mendez placed the photo array-such as it was: a mishmash of actual photographs and pictures cut from Oak Knoll Oak Knoll magazine-on the counter. magazine-on the counter.

"He would have been in probably a week ago today," he said.

"Dude, I don't know," the surfer clerk said. "They all look familiar to me. Do you know how many faces come through here every day? I don't remember."

He seemed like remembering his own name might sometimes have been a struggle for him.

"It's very important," Hicks said.

"What was in the box, man?"

"Human body parts," Mendez said.

Surfer clerk stared at them. "No way."

"Way," Mendez said.

"No way! You can't send human body parts through the mail, dude. That's against regulations."

"Yeah, well, imagine what he did to get them," Mendez said. "That's seriously against the law."

Surfer clerk grimaced. "Wooo ... Dude."

He turned to his coworker. "Monique, come look. You remember people."

Monique finished up with a registered letter, then moved over. "Is this about that woman down in Oak Knoll? She was stabbed ninety-seven times? I seen that on the news. That's some bad s.h.i.t y'all got going on down there. What's with you people? You had that serial killer too. They putting something in the water down there? It's like y'all got the vortex of evil going on."

"We hope not," Hicks said.

Monique studied the photos one at a time, very methodical, looking carefully at one, then setting it aside, looking at the next one. Surfer clerk waited on the next customer.

"These here are some good-looking men," Monique said. "I don't mind no men like this coming through here-you know what I'm saying? This one here, he look like a movie star," she said, holding up the photo of Steve Morgan. "He's bad, though. I can tell. He got that pout. I don't never trust no good-looking man with a pouty mouth."

She took a good long look at Mark Foster. On the next one she stopped.

"He looks familiar," she said.

Darren Bordain.

"I think he might have been in here," she said. She stared at the picture and chewed her bottom lip. Something wasn't striking her quite right.

"He would have had a brown box about yea big," Hicks said, guesstimating the dimensions of the box with his hands.

Monique thought about that.

"He's very charming ..."

She frowned and shook her head. "No. I don't remember that. That's not what I'm remembering with that face."

She turned the photo over-not really a photo, but a page cut out of Oak Knoll Oak Knoll magazine. Mendez had folded the other people in the picture out of the way-the Bordains and another prominent area family at a charity event. magazine. Mendez had folded the other people in the picture out of the way-the Bordains and another prominent area family at a charity event.

"Oh!" Monique cried out. She tapped a long, curved purple fingernail on the picture. Her eyes were as wide as if she had been frightened. "That one I remember!" I remember!"

97.

"Bruce Bordain?" Vince said. "Bruce thought he was Haley's father?"

Gina nodded wearily. "It's a long story."

"You need to tell me the short version of it now, Gina," Vince said.

Bruce Bordain had been in a hurry to catch a plane the day before. If he had left the country, they couldn't lose any more time than they already had getting on his trail.

"I'm so tired," she said.

"I know you're tired," Vince said, glancing out the gla.s.s wall to check for anyone watching. He'd gotten tossed out of her room once already for overtaxing her. "But this is so important, Gina. We want to bring Marissa's killer to justice, right?"

"Yes," she said. Her respiration had begun to quicken. "Of course."

"Was Marissa involved with Bruce?"

"Yes. For about a year."

"And at some point she told him she was pregnant."

"She was," Gina said.

"Gina, I saw photographs of you and Marissa just a couple of months before Haley was born. She wasn't pregnant."

Frustration and exhaustion furrowed her brow. Another few tears squeezed out between her lashes. "I'm so tired."

"I know, sweetheart. I'm really sorry," Vince said, "but this is so important, Gina. Is Haley Marissa's daughter? Is she Bruce Bordain's daughter?"

"No."

Marissa had been pregnant, but Haley wasn't her daughter, nor was Bruce Bordain her father. Vince swore under his breath. Now he'd opened an industrial-size can of worms and his witness was running out of gas.

"But Marissa was blackmailing the Bordains?" he said.

"You make it sound so dirty," she said. "It wasn't like that. She was trying to do something good. For Haley."

"Gina, Bruce Bordain has been paying for four years for a child that isn't his. Did he find that out?"

"He might have," she admitted in a small voice. "Marissa was tired of it. She'd had it with Milo trying to manipulate her and treating her like she was a doll to play with. At first, she had wanted him to pay for what he'd done to her. But it wasn't worth it."

"What had he done to her?" Vince asked.

Tears ran from the corners of Gina Kemmer's closed eyes. She was slipping away from him, slipping away from the bad memories.

"Gina?"

"Mr. Leone?" The nurse supervisor came into the room with her hands on her hips. "Don't make me throw you out of here again."

Vince staved her off with one finger raised. "Just one more question."

"Mr. Leone ..."

"Gina, what had he done to her?"

He had to lean in close to hear her.

"He killed her ..."

98.

"That one I remember," Monique the mail clerk said. I remember," Monique the mail clerk said.

The picture was of the Bordain family-Bruce, Milo, and Darren-and another prominent Oak Knoll family in formal dress at a charity fundraiser.

Mendez had expected her to point to Darren Bordain.

She hadn't.

Nor had she pointed to Bruce Bordain.

She pointed to Milo.

"Are you sure?" Hicks asked, sounding as doubtful as Mendez felt.

"I'm sure all right. I'm not forgetting that nasty piece of business any time soon. She was so rude!"

"She came in here with a box to mail?" Mendez asked.