Tami Hoag - Secrets to the Grave

“We hope not,” Hicks said.

Monique studied the photos one at a time, very methodical, looking carefully at one, then setting it aside, looking at the next one. Surfer clerk waited on the next customer.

“These here are some good-looking men,” Monique said. “I don’t mind no men like this coming through here—you know what I’m saying? This one here, he look like a movie star,” she said, holding up the photo of Steve Morgan. “He’s bad, though. I can tell. He got that pout. I don’t never trust no good-looking man with a pouty mouth.”

She took a good long look at Mark Foster. On the next one she stopped.

“He looks familiar,” she said.

Darren Bordain.

“I think he might have been in here,” she said. She stared at the picture and chewed her bottom lip. Something wasn’t striking her quite right.

“He would have had a brown box about yea big,” Hicks said, guesstimating the dimensions of the box with his hands.

Monique thought about that.

“He’s very charming ...”

She frowned and shook her head. “No. I don’t remember that. That’s not what I’m remembering with that face.”

She turned the photo over—not really a photo, but a page cut out of Oak Knoll magazine. Mendez had folded the other people in the picture out of the way—the Bordains and another prominent area family at a charity event.

“Oh!” Monique cried out. She tapped a long, curved purple fingernail on the picture. Her eyes were as wide as if she had been frightened. “ That one I remember!”

97

“Bruce Bordain?” Vince said. “Bruce thought he was Haley’s father?”

Gina nodded wearily. “It’s a long story.”

“You need to tell me the short version of it now, Gina,” Vince said.

Bruce Bordain had been in a hurry to catch a plane the day before. If he had left the country, they couldn’t lose any more time than they already had getting on his trail.

“I’m so tired,” she said.

“I know you’re tired,” Vince said, glancing out the glass wall to check for anyone watching. He’d gotten tossed out of her room once already for overtaxing her. “But this is so important, Gina. We want to bring Marissa’s killer to justice, right?”

“Yes,” she said. Her respiration had begun to quicken. “Of course.”

“Was Marissa involved with Bruce?”

“Yes. For about a year.”

“And at some point she told him she was pregnant.”

“She was,” Gina said.

“Gina, I saw photographs of you and Marissa just a couple of months before Haley was born. She wasn’t pregnant.”

Frustration and exhaustion furrowed her brow. Another few tears squeezed out between her lashes. “I’m so tired.”

“I know, sweetheart. I’m really sorry,” Vince said, “but this is so important, Gina. Is Haley Marissa’s daughter? Is she Bruce Bordain’s daughter?”

“No.”

Marissa had been pregnant, but Haley wasn’t her daughter, nor was Bruce Bordain her father. Vince swore under his breath. Now he’d opened an industrial-size can of worms and his witness was running out of gas.

“But Marissa was blackmailing the Bordains?” he said.

“You make it sound so dirty,” she said. “It wasn’t like that. She was trying to do something good. For Haley.”

“Gina, Bruce Bordain has been paying for four years for a child that isn’t his. Did he find that out?”

“He might have,” she admitted in a small voice. “Marissa was tired of it. She’d had it with Milo trying to manipulate her and treating her like she was a doll to play with. At first, she had wanted him to pay for what he’d done to her. But it wasn’t worth it.”

“What had he done to her?” Vince asked.

Tears ran from the corners of Gina Kemmer’s closed eyes. She was slipping away from him, slipping away from the bad memories.

“Gina?”

“Mr. Leone?” The nurse supervisor came into the room with her hands on her hips. “Don’t make me throw you out of here again.”

Vince staved her off with one finger raised. “Just one more question.”

“Mr. Leone ...”

“Gina, what had he done to her?”

He had to lean in close to hear her.

“He killed her ...”

98

“ That one I remember,” Monique the mail clerk said.

The picture was of the Bordain family—Bruce, Milo, and Darren—and another prominent Oak Knoll family in formal dress at a charity fundraiser.

Mendez had expected her to point to Darren Bordain.

She hadn’t.

Nor had she pointed to Bruce Bordain.

She pointed to Milo.

“Are you sure?” Hicks asked, sounding as doubtful as Mendez felt.

“I’m sure all right. I’m not forgetting that nasty piece of business any time soon. She was so rude!”

“She came in here with a box to mail?” Mendez asked.

“Yes. And she had it wrapped in brown paper and trussed up with string like a Thanksgiving turkey,” Monique said. “And I explained to her very polite that we don’t want packages wrapped in paper and tied up with string because it gets caught in the machinery. Well, you would have thought I’d told her to stick it where the sun don’t shine. And I wished I had!”

Milo Bordain.

Mendez couldn’t even hear Monique the mail clerk going on. He was trying to get his head around this new twist in the Bordain tale.

He nodded to the door. Hicks thanked the clerks and followed him out onto the sidewalk.

“ Milo Bordain?” Mendez said as they emerged from the Lompoc post office. “Milo Bordain?”

No other words came. They stood on the sidewalk outside the post office, oblivious to the citizens of Lompoc going in and out of the building. Mendez knew his partner’s brain was doing the same thing his brain was doing: spinning its wheels crazily.

“I don’t get it,” Hicks said. “She mailed that box to herself?”

“She packed that box herself?” Mendez said, sick at the thought.

He couldn’t help but picture the murder scene, the incredible brutality, the blood. He could imagine Marissa Fordham’s screams of terror as she tried to escape her killer.

“That can’t be right,” Hicks said, rejecting the idea entirely. “The postal worker; she’s got to be wrong. That can’t be what happened.”

“She recognized the photograph,” Mendez said. “We didn’t even ask her to look at that photograph. And the attitude. That’s Milo Bordain all over.”

Hicks shook his head. “There’s no way. No woman could do that to another woman. Women don’t kill like that—hands-on, crazy, violent. Cut another woman’s breasts off? No.”

A woman with a toddler in tow caught the last of that and gave them a wide berth on her way into the building.

“Maybe she mailed the box but didn’t know what was in it,” Hicks said.

“How could she not know what was in it?”

“The husband or the son gave it to her to mail.”

“To mail to herself?” Mendez said. “And she drove way the hell to Lompoc to do it? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“And Milo Bordain as a homicidal maniac does? No woman could do that to another woman. No way.”

Mendez put his hands on top of his head and walked around in a little circle.

“Marissa Fordham was the daughter she never had,” Hicks said. “The little girl was like her granddaughter.”

“ Was her granddaughter,” Mendez said. “Or so she thought.”

“Then why would she try to kill the girl?” Hicks asked. “What grandmother does that?”

Mendez tried to lay out a scenario that worked. “Milo Bordain and Marissa get into it. Maybe Marissa wanted more money or maybe she was done with it. Either way, Milo snaps and goes nuts. She realizes too late that the little girl saw her and can identify her. She has to kill her, too.”