Secrets to the Grave (26 page)

Mendez had glanced away to look in the trash. He reached into the receptacle and came out with a long-handled tongs at the end of which was the Polaroid of Marissa Fordham, stabbed, her throat slashed, dead eyes half open.

He held it up next to the happy snapshot.

“She was a beauty,” he said.

She was no more.

They could only hope her friend had not met the same fate.

42

I’m dead
.

But if she were dead, should she have been able to have that thought?

Gina drifted for a time in the blackness with no answer. She couldn’t feel her body. It was as if her soul had abandoned it, as if it were no longer of any use to her.

That was the definition of dead, wasn’t it? The body died and the soul went on. If a person believed in the soul, then that belief extended to include an afterlife. Heaven and hell.

Was she in hell?

Should she have been?

She wasn’t a bad person. She hadn’t done a bad thing. But she hadn’t stopped a bad thing from happening either.

Maybe that meant she was in purgatory.

Her mother’s crazy aunt Celia had always told the kids purgatory was full of dead babies. She hadn’t seen any dead babies. She hadn’t seen anything but blackness.

She floated then for a while longer. It seemed very peaceful to be dead.

Then—slowly at first—something began to impede on the quiet calm within her. Her mind didn’t register what it was. Sound? Feeling?

Pain?

PAIN.

Gina came to consciousness with a gasp, like a swimmer breaking the surface from a deep, deep dive. Her eyes opened. Her mouth opened. Her whole body strained as she came free of the blackness that had enveloped her and protected her. She gasped for air once, twice, a third time. Each breath hurt worse than the one before it.

She learned very quickly then to take only shallow breaths, but she took them too quickly and her vision began to dim again. Good, she thought. Dead was better.

But she wasn’t dead, and she didn’t die. At the edge of consciousness her body was able to regulate its breathing. Gina lay there trying to corral the pain into something she could comprehend. Were her bones broken? Were her organs damaged? What had happened to her? Where was she?

She was no place she had ever been.

Pinpoint beams of sunlight came down from above her, penetrating the dark like lasers. The wall in front of her appeared to be coated with layers of dirt and grime. The thick root of some plant was growing into the space through a jagged crack in the concrete like a long bony finger reaching in to point at her.

Was she in a cell? A basement?

The pain burst out of the flimsy confines of her will and engulfed her, choked her, convulsed through her until there was no room in her being for anything else—not air, not consciousness.

She had no idea how long she was out. It could have been moments. It could have been hours. When she came awake again, nothing seemed to have changed. She hadn’t been dreaming—unless she was dreaming still.

No dream. Nightmare.

She felt dizzy and sick to her stomach. The stench of her surroundings went up her nostrils and down the back of her throat. Feces and urine, rodent and decay. Garbage. Sour beer. Her stomach turned itself inside out and she retched and retched.

She wanted to push herself up with her left arm so as not to vomit on herself, but her hands were stuck behind her back. Then she remembered the masking tape around her wrists.

The tape wasn’t tight. She twisted her right hand and plucked at it with her fingers, working it off. She went again to support herself with her left arm, but the arm collapsed beneath her, sending a searing pain through her.

Oh my God
.
Oh my God
.

No dream. No nightmare. She was wide awake.

Tears came then, and fear. Where the hell was she?

The memory came back in strobelike flashes. Night. Walking. Choking on her fear. Begging for her life. A gunshot.

A gunshot. She’d been shot. She looked down at herself. Her T-shirt was soaked with blood, a hole burned through the upper left shoulder. She didn’t know if the bullet was still in her body or if it had passed through her. Whatever it had done, it hadn’t killed her. Hours had to have passed and she hadn’t died from loss of blood.

That was one good sign.

Slowly she took stock of her body. She had feeling in her left arm, but it seemed to be useless. Her right arm worked. She moved her left foot, bent her left knee. No damage there. Her right leg was a different story.

The attempt to move her right foot was excruciating. She struggled up onto her right elbow and looked down, panic knifing through her. The foot was turned inward almost perpendicular to the leg bone, as if it had been snapped off at the ankle.

“Help!” Gina called out. “Help! Somebody help me!”

She called out until her throat was raw. She was in the middle of nowhere. There was no one to hear her.

The space she was in was maybe five feet wide. It was a long way to the light. She was a poor judge of distance, but it had to be more than twenty feet. She remembered now the doors, like cellar doors. The doors—cracked and dilapidated—were the ceiling of her prison.

She reached out with her right hand to touch the wall, rough and hard. Concrete. Filthy. Beneath her was garbage—old boards, collapsed cardboard boxes; stinking plastic garbage bags that had been ripped and torn, their contents spilling out: eggshells and coffee grounds and putrid food and milk cartons. And beneath it all was the smell of stagnant water.

She was in an abandoned well, and she wasn’t alone.

Slowly she became aware of the feeling of being watched. Her heart pounding, Gina turned her head left inch by inch and came face-to-face with the biggest rat she had ever seen in her life.

43

“No signs of forced entry. No signs of a struggle. No signs that she packed anything in a hurry—or at all,” Mendez told Dixon.

They had gathered in the sheriff’s office to share the news. Dixon sat back against the edge of his desk with his arms crossed tight across his chest. As always, his uniform was pressed crisp and impeccable. The only wrinkles were the creases Vince could see deepening across the sheriff’s forehead and around his mouth.

Dealing with the press was taking its toll. Not only the entire state of California, but the nation was watching this case with a magnifying glass. The national press had moved in. The story of the beautiful artist murdered in the beautiful setting was made even juicier by the back story of Oak Knoll with the sensational See-No-Evil murders and the upcoming trial of Peter Crane.

Throwing gasoline on an already hot fire, the story of the delivery of Marissa Fordham’s breasts to Milo Bordain had been leaked by someone to the hungry media pack.

Vince didn’t envy Dixon his public relations job on this. Dealing with the press and the public was like trying to satisfy a multitude of two-year-old children who wanted what they wanted NOW. None of them wanted to hear that this case wasn’t going to be solved overnight.

“And nobody has spotted her car,” Dixon said.

“No, sir.”

Dixon stared out the window for a moment. “What do you think, Vince?”

“She was pretty shaken up yesterday,” Vince said. He had claimed a seat for himself on the credenza built in along the outer wall of the office. Mendez and Hicks stood, nobody taking the much lower positioned chairs in front of the desk. Cops.

“She definitely knows more about Marissa and what got her killed than she told us,” he went on. “My gut tells me they were in something together. Marissa would have been the leader. Gina probably got dragged along for the ride.”

“We’re thinking blackmail,” Mendez said. The Lidocaine had finally worn out of his face so he didn’t have to talk out the side of his mouth. But his lip was still fat beneath his mustache. “There’s a reason why nobody seems to know who Haley’s father is. And we still haven’t located a birth certificate.”

“That would explain how she came to have that much money in the trust account for the little girl,” Dixon said.

“That would also make sense looking at the crime,” Vince said. “The personal quality of the attack, the amount of rage involved, the concentration of stab wounds to the lower abdomen, removal of the breasts—”

“Right down to the knife in the vagina,” Mendez added.

“Exactly,” Vince said. “The killer’s rage was focused on everything that made Marissa a woman—every body part related to reproduction.”

“And we have plenty of candidates for the title of Dad, don’t we?” Dixon said.

“The list goes on and on,” Hicks said. “And those are just the men we know about. It’s just as apt to be somebody she
didn’t
date openly, right? I mean, the guys she was seeing casually are single men. It might be embarrassing for one of them to have a kid pop up, but it wouldn’t ruin anybody.”

“Steve Morgan isn’t a single man,” Mendez pointed out.

Dixon scowled at him. “No. He’s a man who’s going to sue the department.”

Mendez spread his hands. “He assaulted me!”

Vince intervened. “If she was seeing Steve Morgan on the sly, she could have had other married lovers.”

“Gina Kemmer probably knows,” Hicks said.

“But Marissa Fordham didn’t move here until after the baby was born, right?” Dixon asked.

“Right,” Hicks said. “At this point, we don’t really know where she came here from. She told people Rhode Island, but for all we know she might have come here from Vegas—somebody’s drunken weekend indiscretion.”

“A threat’s not a threat unless it’s in your face,” Vince said. “Being here in the community is a constant reminder that revelation is just one missed blackmail payment away.”

“Has the little girl said anything about her father?”

“No, not specifically. She talks about ‘daddies,’ plural,” Vince said. “She asked me if I was ‘the daddy.’”

“Chances are even better that Gina knows who the father is,” Mendez said. “If she didn’t leave on her own ...”

“We need to get a helicopter in the air looking for her car,” Dixon said.

“You need to be able to go through her house with a fine-tooth comb,” Vince said. “If Gina has the birth certificate—or a copy of it—stashed somewhere, it’s got the killer’s name on it in big black letters.”

“The ADA wouldn’t give us a search warrant this morning,” Mendez complained. “There’s no evidence of foul play. There’s no evidence Gina Kemmer didn’t just leave of her own free will.”

“She’s got no family in the area to declare her a missing person?” Dixon asked.

“
Nada
. She told us she came up here from LA.”

“Then we issue a warrant for her arrest as a material witness,” Dixon said. “We’ll get our search warrant that way.”

“Bill and I talked about the material witness angle last night,” Mendez said. “It’s a little bit thin. What do we say she witnessed?”

“Get the affidavit started,” Dixon said. “I’ll call the ADA myself.”

“I’ll get on it,” Hicks volunteered. He hustled out of the room and down the hall to get the paperwork started.

“Do we have anything yet on the box with the breasts?” Dixon asked.

“Latent prints says the box is a mess,” Mendez said. “Covered in fingerprints. Prints on top of prints on top of prints. The thing has been handled by who knows how many people.”

Dixon blew out a sigh, letting his shoulders slump for just a second. “Nobody at that post office is going to remember one person mailing a plain brown box.”

“It’d be great if they had video surveillance in their lobby.”

Dixon looked at Mendez like he’d lost his mind. “Video surveillance at the post office? In Lompoc?”

“Someday it’ll be everywhere,” Mendez said. “Post offices, airports—”

“Right,” the sheriff scoffed. “For all those post office crime waves.”

Vince chuckled. “First the mini-marts, next the post office.”

“I can see it now.” Dixon laughed. “Blitz attacks led by rogue stamp collectors.”

“I’m telling you,” Mendez insisted, taking the ribbing in stride. “And I’ll come to the nursing home and rub your noses in it when technology takes over law enforcement.”

“You do that, Tony,” Dixon said. “Right now, we’ve got a case to deal with. Vince, why send the breasts to Milo Bordain?”

“The obvious reason would be basically putting an exclamation point on the murder. He destroyed Marissa and expressed his disdain for the woman who paid for her to live in this community.”

“You don’t think Mrs. Bordain is in any danger?”

“Marissa had to be the primary source of his hatred,” Vince said. “The brutality of the crime was intensely personal. Sending the breasts to Mrs. Bordain was something that happened from a distance, suggesting a certain amount of emotional detachment.”

“So the answer is no.”

“Never say never, but it seems unlikely. I know of a case in Spain where a disturbed man murdered a patron of a particular controversial artist because he believed the artist’s works sent satanic messages. He couldn’t get to the artist so he eliminated the artist’s source of support—a well-known figure in the art community,” Vince said. “Marissa Fordham’s work couldn’t be called controversial in any way.”

“Feminist, though,” Mendez said. “She did the poster for the Thomas Center for Women, celebrating the strength of women’s spirits. That might be considered controversial by some people.”

“Jane does say they get a certain amount of mail from strict ultra-conservative religious groups,” Dixon said.

“If this is supposed to be some kind of crusade, then you’d be looking at a very different UNSUB,” Vince said. “That would be someone more apt to want attention to get their point across. I think we would have heard from the killer either directly or through the press if that was the case.”