Secrets to the Grave

“No way! You can’t send human body parts through the mail, dude. That’s against regulations.”

“Yeah, well, imagine what he did to get them,” Mendez said. “That’s seriously against the law.”

Surfer clerk grimaced. “Wooo ... Dude.”

He turned to his coworker. “Monique, come look. You remember people.”

Monique finished up with a registered letter, then moved over. “Is this about that woman down in Oak Knoll? She was stabbed ninety-seven times? I seen that on the news. That’s some bad shit y’all got going on down there. What’s with you people? You had that serial killer too. They putting something in the water down there? It’s like y’all got the vortex of evil going on.”

“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.