Secrets to the Grave (57 page)

“And the father of her baby?” Vince asked.

“We never knew. I don’t think she knew. One day she’d tell us it was her drug dealer, and the next day she’d say he was a struggling actor or a big-shot director.

“Star would talk about getting rid of the baby, having an abortion. Then she would decide she wanted the baby, and she would talk all this crazy talk about how she would raise the baby and have a really nice apartment and buy the baby everything. But she didn’t have any money. I mean, get real. She was a homeless drug-addicted prostitute. She didn’t have any way to support herself, let alone a baby.

“It bothered Marissa a lot. She was afraid of what Star would do to the baby, how she might have it and throw it in a Dumpster, or have it and drown it in a toilet. Or maybe she would sell it. Marissa said she had read about people selling babies to pedophiles and sick stuff like that. I didn’t even want to know that could happen!”

“So Marissa came up with a plan?” Vince said.

“She said, what if she got the baby and told Bruce Bordain it was his. The timing worked. He has tons of money. What would it be to him to pay for raising a baby? Nothing. And he should have been doing it anyway, for Marissa’s baby.

“The baby would be taken care of and so would Marissa. She would be able to concentrate on her art. She would have the child she always wanted. It would be good for everyone.”

“Except Bruce Bordain,” Mendez pointed out.

“Well ... neither one of us felt very sorry for him.”

“So Star had the baby and what? Marissa just took her?” Hicks asked.

“No, no. It wasn’t like that,” Gina said. “They made a deal. Marissa would pay for Star’s drug rehab and prenatal care for the baby. There would be one payoff when the baby was born, and Star would have the birth certificate made out the way Marissa wanted.”

“So it was like a private adoption,” Vince said.

“Basically. Marissa sold everything she owned and took a second job to do it. She couldn’t let Bordain see her because of course she wasn’t pregnant. So she had to quit her job at Morton’s. She told her boss she was quitting because she was pregnant, knowing Bruce would ask when she wasn’t there. She got a job at a seafood place in Santa Monica and worked days at a boutique.

“She waited until right before Haley was born to call Bordain and tell him she was having the baby. He sent another check, but he told her he didn’t want to hear from her again.”

“So she moved to Oak Knoll,” Mendez said.

“She knew his wife lived here part-time. It was the only place the Bordains had a home that we could afford to move to.”

“And what was your part in it, Gina?” Dixon asked.

“It was an adventure, Marissa told me,” she said, rolling her eyes at the ultimate understatement. “I thought, why not? We decided we would take some of the money Bordain had given her and money that I had saved, and start the boutique.”

“And this is when Marissa changed her name?” Mendez asked. “About the time you moved up here?”

“Right before. She didn’t trust Star not to change her mind and show up one day and want Haley back. So we made up the whole story about her being from Rhode Island, and being cut off from her family—like a heroine from a Sidney Sheldon novel or something. It was kind of exciting.”

“So, you both moved up here,” Dixon said. “Bruce Bordain couldn’t ignore Marissa if she was here right under his wife’s nose. Did he ever question that he was the baby’s father?”

“No,” Gina said. “I thought he would. I thought he’d want some kind of blood test or something, and then we’d be sunk. But the money mattered less to him than if Marissa would have made a big public stink about it—or I guess I should say it mattered more to Mrs. Bordain. The whole support-the-artist thing was her idea.”

“Let me get this straight,” Mendez said. “Marissa went to blackmail Bruce Bordain, and his wife came up with a plan that kept her in their lives?”

“Creepy, huh?” Gina said. “But I guess in a weird way it was a control thing over her husband, you know? And she really got into it.

“She treated Marissa and Haley like they were her pretend family or something, like they were life-size dolls or something. Even though Marissa was an artist, Milo decorated their house the way
she
wanted it. She designed the art studio—how crazy is that? She would tell Marissa what to wear to events, and if Marissa didn’t do it Mrs. Bordain would have a fit.”

“How did Marissa feel about that?” Vince asked.

“She said that was a small price to pay, and so what if Milo wanted to dress her up? She kind of liked the game playing, seeing what she could get away with—the people she had as friends, the men she chose to date. She would only let Milo have just so much control and no more.

“That had gotten worse lately,” she said. “They had started arguing a lot. The more independent Marissa tried to be, the more controlling Milo was.”

Which would have made a free spirit like Marissa only try harder to slip free of her owner’s hold, Vince thought. It would have been a vicious downward spiral in their relationship that would only have exacerbated Bordain’s need for control

In her own way Milo Bordain wasn’t so different in her need for order than Zander Zahn had been. The difference was Zahn had exercised his need for order over inanimate objects. Milo Bordain needed to control the people in her life like pieces on a chessboard.

“I told Marissa to put an end to it,” Gina said. “Why live like that? It was so sick and twisted. She needed to get away from the Bordains. Her career as an artist had taken off. She was making good money. The boutique is doing well. She didn’t need them anymore.”

And that, Vince knew, was what had gotten Marissa Fordham killed.

Milo Bordain would never have been able to tolerate Marissa—the daughter she never had—taking Haley—her make-believe grandchild—out of her life. Her real-life dolls were going to walk away from her real-life playhouse, and she would control them no more.

“And was Marissa going to do that?” Mendez asked. “Tell Milo Bordain it was over?”

“She was going to tell the truth, and that should have been the end of it.”

“And it was,” Dixon said.

“I can’t believe Milo was the one who did that to her,” Gina said, the tears rising again. “How could one woman do that to another woman? And how could she do that to Haley?”

“She couldn’t leave a witness,” Mendez said.

“But she loved Haley! How could she hurt her like that?”

“People like Milo Bordain don’t love the way the rest of us love, Gina,” Vince explained. “They are the center of their universe, and everyone else is just an object that revolves around them. They might think the object is beautiful and that they have to possess it, but in the end it’s just a thing to them.”

The emotion came over Gina then like a wave she couldn’t hold back, and she started to sob, and Vince suspected she was seeing that crime-scene Polaroid he had shown her of her best friend butchered on the kitchen floor.

He wondered if Milo Bordain would replay that same scene in her memory. Probably, but with very different emotions attached.

She was sitting in jail now. ADA Kathryn Worth had made sure there would be no bail. Milo had been caught with knife in hand going after Anne and Haley. No judge was going to dare risk it—no matter how much money the Bordains could throw around.

Milo Bordain would go to prison where she would be the state’s doll, where she would be told what to wear and where to sleep and when to eat. Vince wondered if she would even see the irony in that.

103

“Milo Bordain,” Mendez said as they walked out of the hospital into the sunshine. “Nobody saw that coming.”

“No,” Vince admitted. “The brutality of that murder ... That’s usually something women reserve for unfaithful husbands, not each other. In hindsight, all the pieces fit. She felt like Marissa was hers, bought and paid for, literally. And like any spoiled child, if she couldn’t keep her toy, nobody else could have it either.”

It sounded so straightforward and logical, he thought, when it was one of the most twisted, insane murders he had ever worked. His buddies at the Bureau had already tapped him to come to Quantico and present the case for study.

“The press is already trying to come up with a catchy nickname for her, comparing her to Lizzie Borden,” Mendez said.

“Lizzie Borden was never convicted, you know,” Vince said. “Milo Bordain is going away forever and ever, amen.”

“The Bordains have deep pockets. They’ll try to buy an insanity plea.”

“I don’t care what they try,” Vince said, digging his car keys out of his pants pocket. The wind came up and flipped his necktie back over his shoulder. “A jury gets a load of those crime-scene photos—wherever they put her, they’ll throw away the key.”

“Do you think she’s crazy?”

“In the legal sense? No,” he said. “Not at all. She killed Marissa out of rage. She thought she had killed Haley, getting rid of the only witness. Why she excised the breasts might have been symbolic initially—destroying what was feminine about Marissa—but sending them to herself in the mail was definitely self-serving.”

“Trying to divert attention away from herself as a suspect by portraying herself as a victim,” Mendez said. “That’s some kind of cold blood running through her veins.”

“She’s calculating, not crazy,” Vince said. “That’s why she was so upset when she didn’t get custody of Haley. She figured if she had the child in her control, she would have made certain one way or another the girl would never ID her as the killer.”

“She’s evil,” Mendez said. “That should be a legal term. She’s guilty of being evil. That’s simple.”

“We can look at anything and make it simple,” Vince said. “Even murder. Every one of them can be boiled down to this: Either somebody didn’t get what they wanted, or someone wanted exactly what they got. Disappointment or desire.”

“Or both.”

And the result was ultimately all the same: lives broken and the death of dreams. Marissa’s life had held a wealth of promise, now gone. She would no longer have the chance to make the world a better place by creating art or by raising a wonderful child. Milo Bordain, who had been a driving force in the community and instrumental in raising funds for half a dozen charities, would leave a void in those positions. Mark Foster, a bright light in his field, had given up his future trying to protect a secret. And Darren Bordain, who had known nothing about his lover’s attempt on Gina’s life or his mother’s murder of Marissa, was left emotionally devastated without the two people most important in his life.

Bruce Bordain, who had effectively set this all in motion by cheating on his wife and destroying the dreams of a young woman, would walk away unscathed.

“How’s Anne?” Mendez asked.

A smile tugged at one corner of Vince’s mouth. “Remarkable. Beat up, cut up, but incredible. But I told her if somebody tries to kill her one more time I’m locking her up for safekeeping.”

“She’s had a rough few days.”

“She’s more worried about Haley, but Haley will be all right. Between the two of us, we’ll make sure of it.”

“You’ll adopt her?”

“Absolutely,” Vince said. “We’ll get a jump start on our family with Haley Leone.”

Mendez grinned and clapped him on the back. “Congratulations.”

“I’m a lucky man,” Vince said. “How about you?”

“I heard Steve Morgan moved out. He told Sara he never had an affair with Marissa. Marissa wouldn’t have him because of Sara and Wendy. But he would have done it, and that’s what counts.”

“And what are you going to do?”

Mendez stuffed his hands in his pockets and shrugged as he leaned back against the car. “Listen when she wants to talk.”

“One step at time.”

“Yeah,” he said ducking his head. “I think maybe I’ll go take one now.”

104

Anne watched Haley playing in the grass with the kittens that had moved into Casa Leone. There was nothing quite like a near-death experience or two to make one appreciate the simple things in life.

“But why did any of this have to happen?” Wendy asked. “Why do all these bad things have to happen?”

They sat side by side on the patio sofa, Anne with her arm around Wendy’s shoulders. Sara had brought her over hoping she could stay for a few hours while Steve moved out of their house.

“I don’t know,” Anne said honestly. “We don’t get to have a nice neat explanation for everything that happens in life—bad or good. I guess that’s what life is: Things happen, and how we deal them makes us who we are. We can either choose to learn and rise above, or give up and let the bad things defeat us.”

“It’s so hard!” Wendy said, tears springing to her eyes.

“I know, honey, but you’re not alone, and you’ll get through it. You won’t let the bad things beat you,” Anne said, giving her shoulders a squeeze. “I have something for you. Watch Haley. I’ll be right back.”

Anne went inside the house and came back out with a small wooden plaque with an inscription engraved on a brass plate.

“Someone gave this to me last year after ... what happened. And I looked at it every day, and thought about what it means and what it means to me in my life. And now I’m going to give it to you. And I want you to look at it every day, and think about it, and think about what you choose for your life.”

Engraved on the plaque was a quote from Ernest Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms
.

“Do you understand what that means?” Anne asked her.

Wendy nodded and hugged her carefully. “I won’t let the bad things beat me.”

Anne smiled. “Why don’t you go help Haley play with those kittens?”