Secrets to the Grave

25

“Guess who’s babysitting on date night?” Vince said.

Mendez grimaced. “I volunteer. I know you’re pissed. I don’t blame you.”

They had met up at the SO and were driving through a beautiful old neighborhood near the college. A pricey part of town, Vince knew. The streets were lined with big mature trees. The houses were a mix of styles and sizes, built mostly between the thirties and forties with excellent craftsmanship. The house he and Anne had settled on was in this neighborhood, just a few blocks away.

Vince sighed. “I’m over it. I’m trying to look at it from a different perspective. It might actually be a good thing for Anne. She’s pretty passionate about helping this little girl because they share the experience of having been victims of violent crimes. That might help her as much as it helps the child.”

“If that happens, do I get a big pat on the back?”

“Don’t get greedy. I could still kick your ass.”

“You kind of did that this morning,” Mendez pointed out.

Vince laughed. “You think I was hard on you?”

“You made me look like an idiot.”

“You did that on your own by not being prepared. You present a case at the Bureau, you had better have those fucking ducks lined up beak to tail.”

“So you were just trying to toughen me up,” Mendez said, clearly not believing a word of it.

“Hell, no,” Vince chuckled. “I was pissed. I wanted to punish you.”

“Just so we’re clear on that.”

Vince dug a prescription bottle out of the pocket of his sport coat and shook out a colorful variety of pills. One for pain, one for nausea, an antidepressant ...

“You should have seen her take on that horrible woman from CPS,” he said, glowing with pride. “She’s a tough little mouse. She’s got a lot of spunk.”

“I wouldn’t want to cross her,” Mendez said. “She sank her teeth into me a couple of times over her students last year.”

“She stands right up to me,” Vince said, a sudden wave of love swelling through him.

“You’ve got a good thing going, man,” Mendez said. “Look at all the marriages that fail and fall apart these days. People have no sense of commitment anymore.”

“You really think Steve Morgan was having an affair with the vic?” Vince asked.

“Gut feeling.”

“You don’t like him.”

“I’m not crazy about you either, at the moment,” Mendez complained.

Vince rolled his eyes. “Get over yourself.”

He chose a trio of pills, tossed them back, and washed them down with locally bottled orange cream soda.

“He worked with Lisa Warwick on projects for the Thomas Center,” Mendez said. “He had an affair with her. He worked with Marissa Fordham on a project for the center. She was beautiful, sexy, single, liked men ...”

“Why would he kill her?”

“Say she threatened to tell his wife. What’s left of his marriage falls apart, and he loses his daughter.”

“What about the wife?” Vince asked, watching his reaction. Confusion.

“What about her?”

“Her good friend was having an affair with her husband,” Vince said. “Women aren’t that shocked when men cheat on them, but to be betrayed by one of their own ... That’s unforgivable.”

Mendez looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “You think Sara could have killed Marissa Fordham?”

“I’m saying if you’re looking at one spouse in a love triangle, you need to look at them both. They both lose in a divorce. The husband loses the wife and family. The wife loses a fairy tale—the handsome prince, the castle, the lifestyle ...”

“That’s crazy,” Mendez said. “Sara Morgan is just trying to hold herself and her family together. For her to have the kind of rage to do what was done to Marissa Fordham ...? No way. Besides, Fordham was found naked.”

“So? Maybe she slept naked and was attacked in the middle of the night. Or, let’s throw a twist into the story: Maybe she and Mrs. Morgan were more than friends.”

Mendez didn’t want to hear any of it. Interesting.

“The nine-one-one call,” he said. “The little girl said her daddy hurt her mommy.”

“People wear disguises.”

“The kid would know her own father.”

“Why?” Vince challenged. “Nobody else knows who he is.”

“Maybe Ms. Kemmer will know,” Mendez said, pulling the car to the curb in front of a fanciful Tudor cottage with a wildflower garden filling the front yard.

Dixon had asked them to bring Gina Kemmer in for the interview, but Vince wanted to see her in her own environment. A lot could be learned from a subject’s surroundings.

He got out of the car and looked around. Ms. Kemmer was the domestic kind. She loved her home, took pride in it, had literally and figuratively set down roots here.

The garden was an expression of joy, filled with old-fashioned climbing roses and tea roses, tall blue delphinium and pink foxglove, and snapdragons of all colors. Flower boxes under the front windows of the house spilled over with pink geraniums and ivy and blue lobelia.

The car in her driveway, parked in front of the little garage that matched the Tudor house, was a blue 1981 Honda Accord. Gina Kemmer was doing well for herself.

She wouldn’t like law enforcement officers coming into her sanctuary—not that anyone did.

She answered the door looking like she’d been knocked around. Her face and her eyes were swollen and red. Battered by grief. The girls working in the boutique on trendy Via Verde had told them their boss had taken the day off because of her friend’s death. They had batted their eyelashes at Mendez as they gave him Kemmer’s home address and phone number.

“Ms. Kemmer,” Mendez said, holding up his shield. “I’m Detective Mendez from the sheriff’s office. This is my associate, Mr. Leone.”

“We’re terribly sorry for your loss, Miss Kemmer,” Vince said gently. The kindly uncle act. “I apologize for the intrusion. We know this is a tough time for you.”

“I already spoke to detectives yesterday,” she said, looking worried. “I answered all their questions.”

Vince guessed she was probably around thirty. She was probably a pretty girl when she hadn’t been crying for a couple of days.

“Yes, ma’am,” Mendez said. “We’re just following up.”

“Having been Ms. Fordham’s best friend,” Vince said, “we’re hoping you might be able to give us a little more insight into who she was as person.”

“Oh.”

“May we come in?” Mendez asked.

Gina Kemmer nodded, tears welling up. She was in gray sweatpants and a McAster T-shirt that looked like she had slept in it. But she had made an effort and brushed her blond hair back into a ponytail. The girls from the boutique might have called to tell her the cops were on the way.

She turned away from them and walked back into the house, leaving them to follow.

“I can’t believe she’s gone,” she said, sinking down into an overstuffed chintz-covered chair in her living room. Her hand was shaking as she dabbed a tissue under her eyes. “Murdered. Oh my God. I heard she was stabbed like a hundred times! Is that true?”

She was afraid—like she thought if her friend had been murdered, she was probably next. The one good thing about murder, Vince thought: It generally wasn’t contagious.

“She was stabbed, yes,” Mendez said.

“You have a lovely home,” Vince said, admiring the space, checking for photographs. There were two of Gina Kemmer and Marissa Fordham in frames on the console table behind the sofa—one recent, one not.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“Do you rent or own?”

“Rent.”

“Are you the gardener?”

“Yes.”

“That’s some green thumb you have,” Vince said with a smile as he took a seat on the end of the sofa nearest her.

She turned a tiny shy smile and glanced down. “Thank you.”

“I’m so sorry you lost your friend,” he said sincerely. “We never imagine something like this will happen to someone we know. Murder is something that happens in the newspapers, on television.”

“No,” she said. “It’s like a nightmare, but I’m awake. I can’t believe she died that way. What could she possibly have done to deserve that?”

“Nothing,” Mendez said. “No one deserves to die like that.”

“It’s tough,” Vince said. “A person dies only once, but the loved ones they leave behind live that loss every day.”

Gina nodded, crying a little into her crumpled tissue.

“I’ll bet you have a lot of fond memories, though.”

“Yes.”

She had been looking back at her friendship with Marissa Fordham. Photographs were strewn on the coffee table. Vince picked up one of Gina Kemmer and Marissa and Haley Fordham—probably about two years old at the time—at the beach, laughing and happy, building a sandcastle. He put that one down and picked up an older photo of the two women in bikinis and floppy hats at a different beach.

“How long had you and Marissa been friends, Gina? Is it all right if I call you Gina?”

She nodded.

“Did you and Marissa grow up together?” Mendez asked.

“No,” she said, looking at the floor. “We met when we moved here. It seems like a long time ago. It was like that, like we were sisters, like we’d known each other forever.”

“That’s a special friendship,” Vince said. “How did you both end up here?”

“Um, well, I wanted a change of scenery. This is such a nice town.”

“It is,” Vince said. “It’s a beautiful place. I just moved here last year, myself. I love it. Where did you move from?”

“LA.”

“The big city.”

“Yeah.”

“Pollution, traffic. Who needs it? Right?”

She smiled a little, nodding.

“And Marissa came from ... where?”

“The East Coast.”

“Did she ever talk about her family?” Mendez asked. “We’re trying to locate her next of kin to notify them.”

“No, she never talked about them.”

“That’s odd, don’t you think, Gina? I mean, I talk about my family if only to complain about them. Don’t you? I think most people do.”

“They had some kind of falling-out,” she said.

“Must have been something bad, huh?”

“I guess so.”

“It must have been really bad if Marissa wouldn’t even tell you, her best friend.”

Kemmer said nothing. She had yet to hold eye contact with him for more than a second or two.

“What brought her to Oak Knoll? Why not Santa Barbara? Monterey? San Francisco? All very artsy places. Why Oak Knoll? We’re a little off the beaten track.”

“She just liked it. She came for the fall art fair. It’s very famous, you know. Artists come from all over the country. She came for the art fair, and she loved it here, and she stayed.”

“Kind of impulsive.”

“That was Marissa.”

“When was that?”

“September 1982.”

“So Haley was how old then?”

“Um ... four months. Her birthday is in May.”

“Do you by any chance know where Haley was born?”

“No.”

“We’re trying to find her birth certificate,” Mendez said. “Do you have any idea where Marissa would have kept that?”

“No.”

“Actually, what we really want is to find Haley’s father,” Vince said. “Do you know who he is?”

“Marissa never talked about him.”

“Never? You were like sisters. She must have said something.”

She shook her head.

“Was he from around here?”

“No.”

“But she did have a few boyfriends over the years, right?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “Marissa liked men. Men liked Marissa. It worked out for her. Men were drawn to her, fell all over her. They would just give her things—even men she wasn’t dating.”

Mendez looked up from his note making. “What do you mean give her things?”

“Jewelry, clothes, flowers, whatever. Men loved her.”

“One didn’t,” Vince pointed out.

He reached inside his jacket, plucked a Polaroid from his breast pocket and handed it to her. She took it automatically. It was a shot of Marissa Fordham lying dead on the floor of her kitchen, butchered and bloody.

Gina Kemmer shrieked and jumped up out of her chair, flinging the photograph away from her as if it had transformed into a venomous snake.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” she shouted, scrambling backward, trying to get away from the hideous image. She hit a plant stand with her arm and knocked a huge Boston fern to the floor. The heavy pot broke with the sound of a gunshot and she screamed.

“Someone did that to her, Gina,” Vince said.

“Why would you bring that here?!” She looked horrified and, more important, terrified. “Why would you show that to me? Oh my God!”

“Because that’s the reality here, Gina,” Vince said soberly. “That’s the truth. Someone did that to your best friend.”

The color went out of her face like water being sucked down a drain. She turned and doubled over and threw up on the fallen fern.

Vince stood up and dug a business card out of his wallet and placed it on top of the photograph on the coffee table.

He put a hand on Gina Kemmer’s shoulder as she sat back down on her chair, gagging and sobbing hysterically, shaking hard.

“You’re a poor liar, Gina,” he said without rancor, almost gently. “Your heart’s not in it. It doesn’t come to you naturally. But you’re scared. You probably made a promise to Marissa. You don’t want to break it, but it’s a terrible burden. You’re shaking under the weight of it.

“You give me a call—night or day—when you want to take that burden off your shoulders and tell me the truth.”