Secrets to the Grave

26

“That was some hardball you just threw,” Mendez said as they walked out to the car.

“She’s lying,” Vince said. He hadn’t gotten any pleasure out of what he had just done to Gina Kemmer, but he knew his shock tactic had a good chance of being effective. “She needs to know she shouldn’t do that. The policeman is her friend—if she cooperates.”

He climbed into the car on the passenger side, feeling a little light-headed from the drugs he had taken. Mendez slid in behind the wheel.

“Some of those photographs on the table looked older than she claims to have known Marissa Fordham.”

“Absolutely,” Vince said. “The one beach shot had to be from the seventies, and it had the Santa Monica Pier in the background,” he said. “I think coming here from LA is probably the only true statement she made.”

“That and being like a sister to the vic,” Mendez said. “She’s pretty broken up. She’ll have nightmares for years from seeing that Polaroid.”

Vince did feel a twinge of guilt for that. Gina Kemmer was probably a nice enough young woman. She struck him as someone who just wanted to live a comfortable, simple life. She didn’t have the stomach for intrigue and subterfuge, but she was somehow tangled up in this mess just the same.

“Find out everything you can about her life in LA,” he said. “I’m willing to bet Marissa Fordham was there at the same time.”

“So why the big story about being from the East Coast?”

“I don’t know. She probably liked the mystique. Coming to a new community, she could start fresh and be whoever she wanted to be. It’s a hell of a lot more interesting to say you come from money in Rhode Island than to say you grew up in Oxnard.”

“True,” Mendez said. “And if she and Gina have been friends for a long time and moved up here together, Gina for sure knows who Haley’s father is.”

“And if Daddy killed Mommy, Milo Bordain is willing to pay her twenty-five thou for that information,” Vince said. “And if Daddy killed Mommy, and Gina is the only person who knows who Daddy is ...”

“And Daddy knows Gina could make twenty-five grand to give him up ... ,” Mendez continued the thought. “I’ll tell the patrol sergeant to send a prowl car past here every half hour.”

“She’s our bait for a predator,” Vince said. It sounded callous, but would be a much safer situation for Gina Kemmer than if they simply left her to her own devices. “Ask Cal to put an unmarked car on the street. We should keep her in sight.”

“We’re stretched pretty thin for detectives.”

“Then a couple of lucky uniforms get to move up to plainclothes for a while.”

“Do we tell Gina we’re watching? Give her a little peace of mind?”

“No. Let’s see what she does. For all we know, she could lead us straight to our killer. Look into her finances too,” Vince suggested. “That’s an expensive car and an expensive neighborhood for a girl that age. She has a boutique, it ain’t Tiffany’s.”

“Are you thinking blackmail?”

“Think about what Nasser said yesterday. That he didn’t believe Marissa Fordham made enough money from her art to pay for her lifestyle. Maybe nobody knows who Haley’s father is because it was profitable for Marissa Fordham to keep that information to herself.”

“Maybe Daddy got tired of paying,” Mendez said, starting the car. “That’s a damn fine motive for a murder.”

Vince nodded. “Or two.”

Vince parted company with Mendez back at the SO. The detective went inside to set the background check on Gina Kemmer into motion and to see what Marissa Fordham’s bank and phone records had revealed.

Vince got behind the wheel of his old Jaguar and drove out of town. The drive to Marissa Fordham’s home was beautiful and tranquil—a stark contrast to what he would experience when he reached her house.

Anne had asked him to go to the house to collect clothes and toys for Haley. He would have gone anyway. The scene had been processed. The CSIs were gone. Once he ran the gauntlet of media being held at bay at the end of the driveway, he would have the murder scene to himself.

The downside of being Vince Leone was that he was easily recognized by crime reporters. He had spent too many years in the spotlight of high-profile cases for the Bureau. Locally, there had been so much coverage of the See-No-Evil murders, and Anne’s abduction, people on the streets of Oak Knoll called him by name.

News vans lined the sides of the road as he drew closer to the driveway. Several reporters, bored and lounging beside the vehicles, spotted him and jumped to attention, running toward him.

Vince flashed his ID at the deputy guarding the end of the driveway and was waved past before the hungry newshounds could get to him.

Another deputy sat in his cruiser under the shade of a pepper tree at the top of the driveway. Vince waved to him on his way to the house.

He went in through the front door, ducking under the yellow tape. The house was empty of human life, but he always felt a strange, tense energy in the aftermath of a violent crime. Sometimes he thought it might be the lingering fear and tension of the victim, hanging in the air, entangled with the scents of blood and death. Sometimes he thought perhaps it was the remnants of evil, a dark energy that vibrated in the air like the last tremors of sound from a tuning fork.

The current wisdom and protocol of his colleagues in the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit was not to send profilers immediately to the scenes of the crimes they were called to consult on. The procedure was to review all available information on the case at Quantico in their subterranean offices known to the agents as the National Cellar for the Analysis of Violent Crime.

There, removed from the emotion and other influences at the scene of the crime, the entire team could review the case objectively and brain-storm ideas, combining their individual experiences into a dynamic group effort. It was a system that worked very well and allowed them to take on more cases at once. Vince had worked within that structure for years, but it had never really suited him.

After years as a homicide detective, he still liked to walk a scene, see it in three-dimensional reality as opposed to videotape or photographs. He wanted to be aware of everything in the surroundings, including that last, lingering tremor of energy in the aftermath of death.

It was his unique mix of experience and education that had made him the profiler he had become: a homicide cop/FBI field agent with a degree in psychology earned on the side.

He went to Marissa Fordham’s bedroom. The sheets and mattress had been taken from the bed to be sent to the state crime lab. Everything else remained as it had been.

She had been attacked here first. Cast-off blood spattered the ceiling from the killer yanking the knife out of her body and over his head only to plunge it down into her again. The ransacking had come later when Marissa had either been dead, or lay dying on the kitchen floor.

Had she been attacked as she lay sleeping or in the aftermath of sex? By an angry lover or a jealous would-be lover? By a stranger or a friend?

In his mind’s eye he pictured the scene over and over, each time with a different person in the role of killer. Zahn, Rudy Nasser, the faceless form of Haley’s father, Steve Morgan, even Sara Morgan—taking the advice he had given Mendez, unlikely as it was for a woman to murder another woman in such a violent manner. Women usually reserved rage like that for abusive or faithless husbands.

What had been the motivation here? Rage? Jealousy? A flashback to another crime?

Had Haley witnessed this early part of the attack? Had she watched in horror as her mother ran from the room, naked and bleeding with a knife-wielding killer chasing her?

Her bedroom was directly across the hall. It was the room of a fairy princess, frilly and pink. Her mother had covered the walls with a mural of a magical land full of magical creatures. A winged fairy rode on the back of a unicorn. A smiling tabby cat looked down from the branches of a lollipop tree.

Sweet and innocent. Innocence shouldn’t end at the age of four, he thought.

He followed the blood trail to the kitchen and stood there, looking from the pool of dried blood on the floor to the blood-streaked telephone on the wall. The little girl had to have climbed onto the chair against the wall and from the chair to the counter to reach the phone.

She had to have made the call either during the attack on her mother or just after, while the killer had been busy searching the house for whatever he had been so desperate to find. Vince could picture him coming back into the room to see little Haley on the phone, could see him grabbing the little girl and choking her, then smothering her, then dropping her seemingly lifeless body like a piece of garbage next to the body of her mother.

If Gina Kemmer didn’t come through, that left Haley as the only key to the crime.

Vince recalled the picture from the night before: his wife holding the sobbing child in her arms, trying to console the inconsolable.

Innocence shouldn’t end at the age of four. It would have been better for Haley if her mind simply blocked out everything that had happened. But it wouldn’t have helped the case. They needed to catch a killer. And the child would be the key.