Mendez nodded, trying the scenario out. “Bordain finds out. He’s furious. He snaps. He kills her. His mother made a big deal out of Marissa—the daughter she never had. He sends her the breasts to say ‘Here’s the fucking daughter you never had. She was a fraud and I killed her.’”
“That fits well,” Dixon said. “Too well. Darren Bordain is a smart guy. Would he do something so obvious as send those breasts to his mother in the mail? I’m still leaning toward misdirection with the breasts. Someone’s playing with us.”
“Vince, what about Steve Morgan?” Mendez asked. “Did he talk to you?”
“Yeah, he did. He’s a cagey bastard,” Vince said. “I’ve known some tough nuts in my day, but this guy doesn’t crack. He gave me a couple little glimpses inside, then shut the door.”
“But could he be a killer?” Dixon asked.
“I’m not sure,” Vince admitted, still turning the interview over in his head. He was exhausted from the mental game. His brain hurt from the effort. He could feel himself flagging.
“There’s something in him that makes him want you to believe he could be that rotten,” he said. “A lot of self-hatred.”
“What did he say about knowing the number of stab wounds the vic had?” Hicks asked.
“Lucky guess.”
“My ass!” Mendez barked.
Vince shrugged and spread his hands, wishing he had something more definitive to say. “I don’t know. If he did it, if he knew that number—which would be unlikely—why would he say it?”
“To poke us in the eye,” Mendez said. “He knows we don’t have anything on him.”
“He admits he wasn’t where he said he was on the night of the murder,” Vince said. “But he wouldn’t tell me where he was, either. He was with another woman, but he isn’t going to give her name up unless he absolutely has to. And at this point, he doesn’t.”
“Let’s say he was with Marissa,” Mendez said.
“But why would he kill her?”
“She threatened to tell Sara.”
“So what?” Vince said. “Sara has been pretty well convinced for a year or more that he’s cheating on her. She got closer to Marissa to try to prove it. He knew that. What would be the point of him killing her?”
“He has a volatile temper,” Mendez said, his frustration beginning to show. “Maybe he just snapped. Maybe she called his mother a junkie whore.”
“That’ll get you punched in the kisser. We know that for a fact,” Vince said. “Morgan is a complicated guy. And he’s undergone a dramatic change in his personality in the last year. That’s a red flag. He’s become self-destructive in his relationships for a reason.”
“He was sleeping with two women who were both murdered,” Mendez said. “That tells me either he killed one or both of them, or he didn’t stop somebody else from killing them. If that was me, I would feel responsible either way.”
Mendez and his White Knight Syndrome. But was Steve Morgan really so different? Vince wondered. If his motives for helping disadvantaged women had been altruistic all along, then he was no different in that respect. He came to the rescue. His wife had gotten left out of the process because he didn’t see her as needing saving—or being sympathetic to his cause, for that matter. Sara was jealous of the time he donated to others.
“Peter Crane was his friend,” Vince said. “Lisa Warwick was his lover. He probably thinks he should have been able to prevent what happened, but he didn’t.
“Now—if he was seeing Marissa—Marissa is dead too. Let’s say he didn’t kill her. He sinks deeper into self-destruction. He picks a fight with a cop. He picks a fight with his wife, he tries to scare her off, letting her think he might be a murderer. Ultimately, to punish himself.”
“I still don’t think we can rule him out,” Dixon said.
“No,” Vince agreed. “You can’t rule him out. Not until we know where he was the night she was killed. Or where he was when Gina went missing.”
“I’ll tell you where he was when Gina went missing,” Mendez said. “He was AWOL. Bill and I were trying to track him down. He told his wife he was working late, but he wasn’t at his office. He told me later that he was having dinner with a client in Malibu. I’d say he pulled that out of his ass. He didn’t show up at home until the middle of the night. I was there waiting for him.”
“What about Bordain?” Dixon asked.
“He doesn’t account for every minute of every day,” Hicks said.
“Meaning he doesn’t have an alibi.”
“I would say so.”
“Mark Foster?”
“We were talking to him early that evening,” Hicks said. “Then he had a rehearsal. After that, nothing.”
“We know approximately when Gina left her house that afternoon,” Mendez said. “But we have no way of knowing when she met up with our bad guy. It could have been early, it could have been late.”
“Maybe this, maybe that,” Dixon complained. “This is giving me a headache. I want something we can take to the bank. Have we got that photo lineup put together for the little girl yet?”
“Bordain refused to have his photo taken, we don’t know where Zahn is, a big no on Steve Morgan,” Hamilton said. “But I was able to put something together with photos from other sources—the college, the local papers, Oak Knoll magazine. It’s not ideal. It won’t stand up in court. But it’s better than nothing.”
“Our witness is four. She won’t hold up in court either, but we need something to go on. It’s worth a shot.” Dixon looked at Vince. “Is Anne okay with this?”
“Yeah. I gave her the heads-up already. But if you want it tonight we’d better get on it, pronto.” He lifted his arm and tapped the face of his watch. “Four-year-olds have bedtime.”
69
“I wish we didn’t have to do this so late,” Anne said. “Nighttime is difficult. She already doesn’t want to go to sleep because of the nightmares.”
“We don’t have a choice, sweetheart,” Vince said. “We’ve got a killer running around loose who’s going to be on the ragged edge when he finds out Gina Kemmer isn’t dead. Time is of the essence here.”
Anne sighed. “I know.”
She stood at the door to Haley’s room and looked at Haley, sitting on her bed in her pink pajamas playing quietly with Honey-Bunny and the new stuffed toy cat Milo Bordain had given her.
Sara had picked Wendy up and gone home right after dinner. Anne and Haley had gone through what Anne wanted to make a nightly ritual of a bath, quiet time, then story time, then bed. Routine would help give Haley a sense of stability, and the downward progression of activities would help teach her to relax and quiet her mind.
Anne knew from her own experience over the last year the value of that kind of routine. Now she could put what had been a difficult experience for her to a positive use for Haley. But tonight she would interrupt that routine to potentially draw out the most terrible memory a child could possibly have: the memory of a monster.
Vince rested a hand on her shoulder, reading her emotions perfectly.
“We’ll show them to her together,” he said. “You and me. Okay?”
“Okay,” Anne said. “Let’s get it over with.”
Vince turned to Mendez. “Keep your fingers crossed.”
Mendez took a seat on a bench in the hall to wait.
Vince pressed Anne into the room with a hand on the small of her back. Her heart was thudding in her chest.
“Haley? We’re going to play a little game, sweetie,” she said, feeling like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Haley looked up at her, wide-eyed and innocent. “What kind of game?”