Secrets to the Grave

6

Mendez was on his fifth cup of coffee by the time the hearse crept down the long driveway with the body of Marissa Fordham inside. It was after ten. He had been on the scene more than three hours.

Dixon had overseen the processing, asking for extra photographs, video of every room of the house. It wasn’t his habit to take over a scene, but for something like this there was no question. He had worked homicide for the LA County Sheriff’s Office for years. He had run more homicides than Mendez hoped to ever see.

The struggle between victim and perpetrator appeared to have started in Marissa Fordham’s bedroom, where lamps had been toppled, furniture shoved around and tipped over. Dresser drawers had been pulled open, the contents vomited out onto the floor.

A large bloodstain dyed the flowered sheets of the bed. Cast-off blood stippled the ceiling, indicating the viciousness of the stabbing.

Some of the dresser contents had fallen on top of blood streaked on the floor.

“He came back and looked for something,” Dixon muttered, directing the deputy with the camera to get a close shot.

“Hell of a vicious attack for a robbery,” Bill Hicks commented.

“He killed her first,” Mendez said. “Anything that happened next was an afterthought. He took too much time with the body for the murder not to have been his priority.”

“And he left the jewelry,” Dixon said, pointing at some expensive-looking pieces casually strewn across the top of the dresser. “He was looking for something in particular.”

“I wonder if he found it,” Hicks said.

“I don’t know, but he cleaned himself up before he looked for it. There’s no blood on the stuff that came out of the drawers. He washed up before he looked.”

“That’s cold, man,” Mendez said. “The little girl was laying in there half dead while he was cleaning up, having a look around.”

“He probably thought she was dead. No witness, no hurry to leave.”

Dixon gave the directive to clean out all the drain traps in the bathrooms and kitchen, in case they might yield some trace evidence that might later be matched to a suspect.

Mendez believed someday the DNA markers of convicted felons would be stored in a giant database available to law enforcement agencies all over the country. They would have only to run DNA on a hair left behind at the scene, a drop of the killer’s blood, a piece of skin, and a search of the database would give them the name of their perp.

Unfortunately, it was 1986 and that day was still a long way off. For now, they would collect evidence and hang on to it, hoping they would be able to match it to a suspect when they had one.

Somehow, the victim had made it out of the bedroom. The trail of blood and overturned chairs and lamps was easy to follow.

Mendez couldn’t help but picture it in his mind: Marissa Fordham, bleeding profusely as she tried to get away. Her hands had been covered in blood, as if she had tried desperately to stem the gushing from her wounds. Her heart would have been pounding. She would have been choking on panic.

Where had her child been during all of this? Had the little girl seen it happen? Had she been roused from her own bed by the commotion? Had she stumbled, sleepy eyed, out of her own bedroom to witness her mother fighting for her life?

Hell of a thing for a little kid to have to see.

At last check with the hospital, the child was still alive.

What kind of witness would she make?

The 911 operator had reported the call to Dixon. “My daddy hurt my mommy.”

If it was that simple, they had only to go in search of the child’s father. Maybe Zander Zahn didn’t know who that was, but someone would. Women didn’t keep secrets like that. Marissa Fordham would have confided in a girlfriend. They just had to find out who her friends were.

The deputy who had been first on the scene came in through the kitchen door, looking to Mendez.

“There’s a woman here who had an appointment with the victim.” Mendez followed him outside and around to the front yard of the little ranch house.

The local media had come to camp out shortly after Vince had gotten there. A TV news van had arrived from Santa Barbara before nine. Bad news traveled fast.

The deputies had kept them at a respectful distance down at the end of the driveway. A lone blue Chrysler minivan had been allowed to pass. The woman sitting behind the wheel stared at Mendez now as he approached her door.

Sara Morgan.

He recognized her instantly. The cornflower blue eyes, the tousled mermaid’s mane of blond hair. Her daughter, Wendy, had been one of four children to stumble upon the body of murder victim Lisa Warwick the year before.

She watched him approach, her expression guarded. Her window was open. He guessed she probably wanted to close it, turn the car around, and leave.

“Mrs. Morgan.”

She remained in the car. “What’s going on? Has something happened? Is Marissa here? Is she all right?”

“You had an appointment with Ms. Fordham?” he asked. “What kind of an appointment?”

“Where is Marissa?” she demanded, annoyed and frightened. “You can answer my question first, Detective.”

“Ms. Fordham is deceased,” he said bluntly, and watched the color drain from her face.

“Was there an accident?” she asked in a thin voice, her hands clenching and unclenching on the steering wheel. “Did she have an accident?”

“No, ma’am,” Mendez said.

Sara Morgan looked past him toward the house, murmuring, “Oh my God. Oh God.”

Tears magnified her eyes.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Mendez said.

“What about Haley? Where’s Haley?”

“She’s been taken to the hospital.”

“Oh my God.” Two big crystalline tears spilled over her lashes and rolled down her cheeks. She had begun to tremble.

“How did you know Ms. Fordham?” Mendez asked. “Were you friends?”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” she murmured, her focus still on the house.

“The deputy told me you had an appointment. What kind of appointment?”

“What?” she asked, coming back to him as if she were a little startled to see him, to hear him speak.

“Your appointment was for what?”

“Marissa is—was—teaching me to paint on silk,” she said, struggling with the change of verb tense as if it were something surprising and bitter in her mouth. “She’s an extraordinary artist. Was.”

“You teach art, don’t you?” Mendez asked.

She shook her head dismissively. “Community Ed. It’s nothing. Marissa ... Oh my God. She’s dead. Why would somebody do that? Who could have done that?”

“How well did you know her?” Mendez asked.

Sara Morgan shrugged. “I don’t know. We were friends—friendly—casual friends.”

“Do you know if she was seeing anyone?”

“No. I wouldn’t know that. We never talked about anything like that.”

“You don’t know anything about the little girl’s father?”

She seemed annoyed he would ask. “No, of course not.

“I would really like just to leave now, Detective,” she said. “I’m sure I can’t help you. I would like just to go home. This is very ... I don’t even know what to say.”

Mendez ignored what Sara Morgan wanted. “I didn’t see a studio in the house. Where did she do her work?”

“The studio is in the old barn.”

“Would you show me?”

“It’s right there. Behind the house. You don’t need me,” she argued.

“You might be able to tell if something is missing.”

“Missing?” she asked. “You think someone came to rob her? You think she was killed because someone wanted to steal her art?” she said, becoming more agitated. “That’s crazy.”

“Can you think of another reason someone would want her dead?”

“Of course not!” she snapped, slapping the steering wheel in frustration. She had gauze around her hand and blue Smurf Band-Aids on three fingers. “How could I possibly know that?”

Several more tears squeezed over the edges of her lashes. Mendez took in her reactions, feeling bad for her. She had just lost a friend. He couldn’t blame her for being upset.

“Can you show me the studio, please?” he asked again.

She wanted to say no, but in the end turned her car off, resigned. Mendez opened her door for her.

They walked together beneath the pepper trees toward the barn. Sara Morgan was in bib overalls streaked with paint, splotches of yellow, swipes of red. It wasn’t hard to imagine her with paint on her hands, on her chin, on the tip of her pert nose. And it would look good on her, he thought. Even though the morning had turned warm, she hugged herself hard, as if she were freezing and trying to stop the shivers.

“What happened to your hands?” he asked, noting that the fingers on her right hand sported a couple of Smurf Band-Aids as well.

“I’m working on a multimedia piece that includes wire and metal as part of it,” she said. “It’s difficult to work with, but I don’t like to wear gloves.”

“Suffering for your art?”

She made a little sound that might have been impatience or sarcastic humor.

“How is Wendy doing?”

She frowned down at the ground and her old Keds tennis shoes. “She’s having a hard time. She still has nightmares about finding that body in the park and about Dennis Farman trying to hurt her. She misses Tommy. She thinks you should be looking for him.”

“We are,” he said. “Trying to, anyway. We just don’t have a clue where to look. Janet Crane hasn’t contacted anyone—or the relatives aren’t talking if she has. There’s no trail to follow. We just don’t have anything to work with.”

“I guess if I found out my husband was a serial killer I would take my child and disappear too.”

The big sliding door that led into Marissa Fordham’s barn/studio stood open by a couple of feet. The space had been converted to a large work area at one end, and a gallery at the other. The morning sun poured in through a wall of windows, bathing everything in buttery yellow light.

“Oh, no,” Sara Morgan said, as they stepped inside. “No, no, no ...”

It should have been a beautiful space. It probably had been a beautiful space filled with Marissa Fordham’s extraordinary art—all of which had been torn and ruined, slashed and broken. Paintings, sculpture—all of it now nothing but debris, the detritus of a murderer’s rage.

Sara Morgan put her hands to her face and started to cry, mourning not only the loss of the woman she had known, but the loss of the beauty Marissa Fordham’s soul had expressed in her art. She slipped inside the door, careful not to step on anything, and squatted down and reached out toward a small impressionistic painting cut almost in two. A small dark-haired child in a field of yellow flowers.

Mendez gently put his hand on her shoulder. “Please don’t touch anything, ma’am. This is a crime scene now.”