Secrets to the Grave (43 page)

There was nothing quiet or secluded about the area now as daylight was fading. The fire road was clogged with vehicles from the sheriff’s office. Portable lights had been set up to focus on the spot where Gina had been found by Search and Rescue, and ran farther back off the road to what had at one time been a group of ranch buildings, now long abandoned and reduced to little more than sticks.

“We followed the drag marks back here,” Tom Scott said loudly to be heard above the three helicopters circling the area—one from the SO, and two up from a television stations in Los Angeles. “It looks to me like she crawled out of this old well. Whoever shot her dumped her down there and left her for dead. That’s some hell of a will she’s got, getting herself out of there.”

Mendez and Hicks both added the beams of their Maglites to the hole in the ground. The well was no more than five or six feet across and probably twenty feet or so down to the most horrific, stinking pile of garbage Mendez had caught a whiff of in a while.

“Jesus,” he said. “If the fall doesn’t kill you, the smell will.”

“People have been throwing their garbage down this hole for years,” Scott said. “Probably half the people in this valley do it. There’s nothing to stop anyone coming up here. Kids from town party out here too. There’s a lot of beer cans around. Shit, I used to come up here when I was in high school.”

He shined his light into the well and specifically on the rusty bent lengths of rebar cemented into the wall one above the other as a crude ladder. “I’ll bet she caught her foot on one of these rungs on her way down. That’s how she snapped that ankle like a toothpick.”

“There’s things moving down there,” Mendez said.

“It’s a friggin’ rat smorgasbord down there,” Scott said. “The rats get down in there through burrows or tunnels in the earth and come into the well where the old concrete has fallen away. God knows what all’s down there. Rats, mice, snakes, scorpions.”

“God knows, but we’re going to have to find out,” Hicks said. “Are you
sure
she was down in there?”

“I can’t swear to it, but that’s what it looked like to me. And by the way that girl smelled—she was down in there for a while.”

“She’s been missing since Wednesday afternoon,” Mendez said.

The big man was impressed. “Wow. If this gal pulls through after all that, I’ve got to meet her. She must be something.”

Funny, Mendez thought, he wouldn’t have said so, having met Gina Kemmer. He would have pegged her for the more timid of the two friends. You never knew how people would handle adversity until push came to shove.

Hicks went over to snag one of the crime-scene team to send him down the hole.

“You couldn’t pay me to go down there,” Scott said.

Mendez laughed. “With those shoulders, you wouldn’t fit, man.”

“Good! I got no truck with mice. Mice come at me, seriously, man, I’ll scream like a little girl.”

“It takes a big man to admit that, Tom.”

The CSI came with Hicks, protesting. “Are you fucking kidding me, man? You want me to go down there?”

“You’re a crime-scene investigator,” Hicks said. “There’s a crime scene.”

“I don’t get paid enough for this.”

“You’ve got to take that up with the county commissioners,” Mendez told him. “In the meantime, I want to know if there’s any evidence down there.”

“Watch out for the mice!” Tom Scott called down after him as the investigator made his descent.

“Fuck you!”

The Search and Rescue leader laughed, then stood back and looked around, sobering.

“Seriously, man, this would be a lonely place to die.”

Zahn’s place was maybe a quarter mile or more over one hill. Marissa Fordham’s house probably half a mile to the south. The Bordain ranch was even farther away to the north and west. Nobody would hear you scream up here. No one would hear your cries for help coming up out of the well. There was nothing up here but rabbits, coyotes, and rattlesnakes.

It wasn’t hard to figure why someone had brought Gina Kemmer up here to kill her.

He turned again to Tom Scott. “You didn’t find any sign of our missing math genius?”

Scott shook his head. “Nope.
Nada
.”

It was hard to picture Zander Zahn shooting someone. But it was even harder to picture him stabbing someone, and he had certainly done that. Where the hell had he gone?

But anybody living out in this area could have known about this spot. Anybody who hiked these hills. Anybody who might have taken a long walk with Marissa Fordham.

“You guys owe me big time,” the evidence tech said, making his way back up the ladder with a big brown paper evidence bag hooked over one arm.

“Whatcha got there, Petey?” Hicks asked.

“Black clothes with what looks to me like dried blood. Looks like they were drenched in it.”

Scott pulled him up the rest of the way out of the hole like he was a toy and set him on firm ground. He opened the bag and Hicks reached in and pulled out a large black sweatshirt that was rumpled and stiff. They all shined their lights on it.

“Drenched in it,” Mendez said. “Somebody took a fucking blood bath.”

And odds were good the blood that someone had bathed in was Marissa Fordham’s.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “We’ve finally got ourselves some evidence.”

68

“We’ve finally got something,” Dixon said. “Hallelujah.”

“I’ve got deputies canvassing the area residents to find out if anybody saw anything Wednesday night,” Mendez said, shrugging out of his coat. “It’s the freaking wilderness out there, but maybe we’ll get lucky.

“Has there been any word on Gina Kemmer?” Hicks asked.

“She’s critical,” Dixon said. “It’s anybody’s guess if she makes it through the night.”

“She made it this far,” Mendez said. “She should have been dead out there three times over.”

“Let’s hope she’s still got some fight in her,” Dixon said.

“Do we have someone on her room?” Mendez asked. “The killer is the only one in the state who isn’t going to be impressed with her story of survival.”

“The state?” Dixon said. “Try the country. I’ve got the networks on my ass for interviews. I’m told there’s hardly a hotel room to be had in town. Between Marissa’s murder, Haley, Zander Zahn, and Gina’s story, the eyes of America are on us. Again.”

“Our killer is going to start getting twitchy now,” Vince said. “If he wasn’t already. It was one thing to leave a four-year-old behind with the potential to ID him. It’s something else to have a grown woman able to do it. He’s going to start feeling cornered now. He’s made too many mistakes.”

“Darren Bordain was pretty twitchy today,” Mendez said. “He refused a photograph, refused a polygraph. And his alibi for the night of the murder is Gina Kemmer, who has been conveniently missing.”

“He certainly didn’t like being in the spotlight today,” Vince said. “From his body language, I’d say he’s hiding something.”

“He could have been involved with Marissa,” Hicks said. “He could have believed he was Haley’s father. Maybe he found out he wasn’t. Maybe he found out Marissa never had a baby.”

“And she never would have a baby,” Dixon said. “I spoke to the pathologist today. She couldn’t say when, but Marissa Fordham had had a hysterectomy at some point in her life.”

“That would certainly piss me off,” Campbell said. “Finding out after four years of paying blackmail that not only is the child not mine, it’s not even hers?”

Mendez nodded, trying the scenario out. “Bordain finds out. He’s furious. He snaps. He kills her. His mother made a big deal out of Marissa—the daughter she never had. He sends her the breasts to say ‘Here’s the fucking daughter you never had. She was a fraud and I killed her.’”

“That fits well,” Dixon said. “Too well. Darren Bordain is a smart guy. Would he do something so obvious as send those breasts to his mother in the mail? I’m still leaning toward misdirection with the breasts. Someone’s playing with us.”

“Vince, what about Steve Morgan?” Mendez asked. “Did he talk to you?”

“Yeah, he did. He’s a cagey bastard,” Vince said. “I’ve known some tough nuts in my day, but this guy doesn’t crack. He gave me a couple little glimpses inside, then shut the door.”

“But could he be a killer?” Dixon asked.

“I’m not sure,” Vince admitted, still turning the interview over in his head. He was exhausted from the mental game. His brain hurt from the effort. He could feel himself flagging.

“There’s something in him that makes him want you to believe he could be that rotten,” he said. “A lot of self-hatred.”

“What did he say about knowing the number of stab wounds the vic had?” Hicks asked.

“Lucky guess.”

“My ass!” Mendez barked.

Vince shrugged and spread his hands, wishing he had something more definitive to say. “I don’t know. If he did it, if he knew that number—which would be unlikely—why would he say it?”

“To poke us in the eye,” Mendez said. “He knows we don’t have anything on him.”

“He admits he wasn’t where he said he was on the night of the murder,” Vince said. “But he wouldn’t tell me where he was, either. He was with another woman, but he isn’t going to give her name up unless he absolutely has to. And at this point, he doesn’t.”

“Let’s say he was with Marissa,” Mendez said.

“But why would he kill her?”

“She threatened to tell Sara.”

“So what?” Vince said. “Sara has been pretty well convinced for a year or more that he’s cheating on her. She got closer to Marissa to try to prove it. He knew that. What would be the point of him killing her?”

“He has a volatile temper,” Mendez said, his frustration beginning to show. “Maybe he just snapped. Maybe she called his mother a junkie whore.”

“That’ll get you punched in the kisser. We know that for a fact,” Vince said. “Morgan is a complicated guy. And he’s undergone a dramatic change in his personality in the last year. That’s a red flag. He’s become self-destructive in his relationships for a reason.”

“He was sleeping with two women who were both murdered,” Mendez said. “That tells me either he killed one or both of them, or he didn’t stop somebody else from killing them. If that was me, I would feel responsible either way.”

Mendez and his White Knight Syndrome. But was Steve Morgan really so different? Vince wondered. If his motives for helping disadvantaged women had been altruistic all along, then he was no different in that respect. He came to the rescue. His wife had gotten left out of the process because he didn’t see her as needing saving—or being sympathetic to his cause, for that matter. Sara was jealous of the time he donated to others.

“Peter Crane was his friend,” Vince said. “Lisa Warwick was his lover. He probably thinks he should have been able to prevent what happened, but he didn’t.

“Now—if he was seeing Marissa—Marissa is dead too. Let’s say he didn’t kill her. He sinks deeper into self-destruction. He picks a fight with a cop. He picks a fight with his wife, he tries to scare her off, letting her think he might be a murderer. Ultimately, to punish himself.”

“I still don’t think we can rule him out,” Dixon said.

“No,” Vince agreed. “You can’t rule him out. Not until we know where he was the night she was killed. Or where he was when Gina went missing.”

“I’ll tell you where he was when Gina went missing,” Mendez said. “He was AWOL. Bill and I were trying to track him down. He told his wife he was working late, but he wasn’t at his office. He told me later that he was having dinner with a client in Malibu. I’d say he pulled that out of his ass. He didn’t show up at home until the middle of the night. I was there waiting for him.”

“What about Bordain?” Dixon asked.

“He doesn’t account for every minute of every day,” Hicks said.

“Meaning he doesn’t have an alibi.”

“I would say so.”

“Mark Foster?”

“We were talking to him early that evening,” Hicks said. “Then he had a rehearsal. After that, nothing.”

“We know approximately when Gina left her house that afternoon,” Mendez said. “But we have no way of knowing when she met up with our bad guy. It could have been early, it could have been late.”

“Maybe this, maybe that,” Dixon complained. “This is giving me a headache. I want something we can take to the bank. Have we got that photo lineup put together for the little girl yet?”

“Bordain refused to have his photo taken, we don’t know where Zahn is, a big no on Steve Morgan,” Hamilton said. “But I was able to put something together with photos from other sources—the college, the local papers,
Oak Knoll
magazine. It’s not ideal. It won’t stand up in court. But it’s better than nothing.”

“Our witness is four. She won’t hold up in court either, but we need something to go on. It’s worth a shot.” Dixon looked at Vince. “Is Anne okay with this?”

“Yeah. I gave her the heads-up already. But if you want it tonight we’d better get on it, pronto.” He lifted his arm and tapped the face of his watch. “Four-year-olds have bedtime.”

69

“I wish we didn’t have to do this so late,” Anne said. “Nighttime is difficult. She already doesn’t want to go to sleep because of the nightmares.”

“We don’t have a choice, sweetheart,” Vince said. “We’ve got a killer running around loose who’s going to be on the ragged edge when he finds out Gina Kemmer isn’t dead. Time is of the essence here.”

Anne sighed. “I know.”

She stood at the door to Haley’s room and looked at Haley, sitting on her bed in her pink pajamas playing quietly with Honey-Bunny and the new stuffed toy cat Milo Bordain had given her.

Sara had picked Wendy up and gone home right after dinner. Anne and Haley had gone through what Anne wanted to make a nightly ritual of a bath, quiet time, then story time, then bed. Routine would help give Haley a sense of stability, and the downward progression of activities would help teach her to relax and quiet her mind.