Secrets to the Grave

96

“Hell 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 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 shit 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 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!”