Tami Hoag - Secrets to the Grave

“She has this weird neighbor,” she said. “He’s seriously creepy. A couple of times he just showed up while I was here working with Marissa. She would say hello to him and he would just hang around, looking at her. He never had much to say. He would just hang out for a while, and then he would leave.”

“Did Ms. Fordham seem afraid of him?”

“No. I was afraid of him,” she admitted. “That’s strange—don’t you think? That he would just—just— loiter like that, like some kind of—I don’t know—pervert or something.”

“But it didn’t bother Marissa?”

“No. When I would say something about it, she would just shrug it off. ‘That’s just Zander,’ she would say. ‘He’s harmless,’ she would say. ‘He’s odd, but he’s a friend,’ she would say.”

She looked at him hard, looking for an answer he couldn’t give her. “What if he wasn’t harmless?”

“We’ve already spoken with Mr. Zahn,” he said.

She sat up a little at that. “And? Didn’t you think he was weird?”

“Do you know any of her other friends?”

“That’s really annoying, you know,” she snapped, brushing a rope of unruly waves back behind one ear. “You never answer a question.”

He conceded with a hint of a sheepish smile tipping up one side of his mustache. “Goes with the job. Sorry.”

Sara Morgan sighed. “She worked with Jane Thomas, designing the fund-raising poster for the women’s center. Gina Kemmer. Gina owns Girl—it’s a boutique on Via Verde near the college. I don’t really know her more than to say hello, but I’ve seen them together a lot. And she has a patron— patroness . Milo Bordain supports her work. Bruce Bordain’s wife.”

Mendez jotted the names down in his notebook. Bruce Bordain, the parking lot king of Southern California, was a big shot not only in Oak Knoll, but all the way south to Los Angeles. He had made his money first buying up and managing parking lots, then expanding into the construction of multimillion-dollar, multilevel parking structures. He owned some high-end car dealerships just for fun, and sat on the boards of McAster College and Mercy General and who knew what else.

His wife was a well-known patron of the arts, instrumental in the organization of the prestigious Oak Knoll Festival of Music, which took place every summer, drawing renowned classical musicians from all over the world.

“And you never knew her to have a boyfriend?” Mendez asked. “An ex-boyfriend? A lover?”

Sara Morgan stared down at the blood soaking through the gauze around her hand. “No.”

“She must have had,” he pressed. “She had a child. She never talked about the girl’s father?”

“Not to me.”

“You never asked?”

“It’s none of my business. I don’t pry into people’s lives.

“Can I go home now?” she asked softly.

“Are you all right to drive?” he asked. “I can have a deputy take you home or follow you home.”

“No,” she said, getting up from the bench. “No offense, Detective Mendez, but I’ve had more than I ever wanted to do with your office already.”

He let her walk herself back to her car, but he watched her the whole way.

8

“The little girl hasn’t regained consciousness,” Vince announced as he took a seat in what they so aptly called the “war room.”

This was the room where Cal Dixon gathered his six full-time detectives to plan their strategy for a major investigation. They had spent a lot of time in this room in the last year. The walls and whiteboards were still covered with photos and information regarding the See-No-Evil cases, which were still being actively worked in preparation for the upcoming trial of Peter Crane.

Dixon was lucky; most larger departments didn’t have the luxury of forming their own task force for a murder investigation. Because the crime rate in his jurisdiction was relatively low, Dixon could pull all of his investigators together to tackle a high-profile case as one unit. And Dixon, himself a homicide detective for years with LA County, could turn his administrative duties over to his second in command and spearhead the investigation.

“She was admitted with severe dehydration and hypothermia,” Vince went on. “I can confirm she was strangled manually—at least partially.”

“What do you mean—partially?” Dixon asked as he organized some papers on the podium.

“The kid is tiny. Any adult could easily have crushed her larynx entirely. But that didn’t happen. She also has damage to the insides of her lips where her teeth cut into the flesh, which suggests suffocation. Could be your UNSUB started to choke her and didn’t have the stomach for it, then switched to pressing something over her face. Luckily, he only thought he finished the job.”

“Sick bastard,” Dixon growled, frowning darkly. “I’m glad to have you in on this with us, Vince. I’m talking with the budget director this afternoon to see about cutting you a consulting fee.”

“Don’t worry about it, Cal. I’m doing fine. What I make consulting makes my salary from the Bureau look like minimum wage. I don’t need your money. You guys are always on my priority list, you know that.”

Vince had grown to think of Dixon and his people as extended family. He may have initially come to Oak Knoll to work a case, but he had found a home here, a second life, and Anne. Whatever Cal Dixon needed, Vince was happy to oblige.

“I appreciate that,” Dixon said.

Mendez took a seat next to Vince. “The attack on Marissa Fordham was over the top. Out-of-control rage. It seems strange to me that didn’t just spill over to include the child. It’s like he killed the mother, then flipped a switch on the rage.”

“He killed the woman with a lot of personal fury,” Vince said. “The child was unfortunate collateral damage.”

“He had to kill her because she was a witness,” Hicks said. “It didn’t mean the same thing to him.”

“He must have believed the kid could ID him,” Dixon said. “The question is, will she ever be able to?”

“So far her brain activity appears to be normal,” Vince said. “But there are a lot of factors that could weigh against us. That kind of trauma, that young a child—a kid might block that out for the rest of their life just out of self-preservation.”

“If she comes around, do you think Anne might be able to help us with her?” Mendez asked.

Vince’s instinctive reaction was to say no. Not because he didn’t think his wife was capable of helping. Quite the opposite was true. Anne had a gift with kids. He had encouraged her to go back to school to finish her degree in child psychology. But his first instinct was to protect her. She had been through enough. He didn’t want her pulled into another murder investigation.

“Isn’t that the job of Child Protective Services?”

“This seems out of their league,” Mendez said.

This was a mostly rural county with a lower-than-average crime rate. Oak Knoll, with a population of roughly twenty thousand (not counting college students), was the Big Town. Crime here routinely consisted of small-time drug deals, burglary, the odd assault, a murder now and again.

There was no Oak Knoll Police Department. The city contracted with the sheriff’s office for their needs. There was no dedicated homicide division within the SO, but a group of detectives who worked all manner of crimes. County Child Protective Services had no psychologist on staff. They had a small administrative group, two full-time social workers, and a number of volunteers. Anne was one of only two court-appointed special advocates for children in the county.

All of these things would change as more people were enticed north out of the LA sprawl. But for now life in the Oak Knoll environs remained more or less idyllic.