“It was an adventure, Marissa told me,” she said, rolling her eyes at the ultimate understatement. “I thought, why not? We decided we would take some of the money Bordain had given her and money that I had saved, and start the boutique.”
“And this is when Marissa changed her name?” Mendez asked. “About the time you moved up here?”
“Right before. She didn’t trust Star not to change her mind and show up one day and want Haley back. So we made up the whole story about her being from Rhode Island, and being cut off from her family—like a heroine from a Sidney Sheldon novel or something. It was kind of exciting.”
“So, you both moved up here,” Dixon said. “Bruce Bordain couldn’t ignore Marissa if she was here right under his wife’s nose. Did he ever question that he was the baby’s father?”
“No,” Gina said. “I thought he would. I thought he’d want some kind of blood test or something, and then we’d be sunk. But the money mattered less to him than if Marissa would have made a big public stink about it—or I guess I should say it mattered more to Mrs. Bordain. The whole support-the-artist thing was her idea.”
“Let me get this straight,” Mendez said. “Marissa went to blackmail Bruce Bordain, and his wife came up with a plan that kept her in their lives?”
“Creepy, huh?” Gina said. “But I guess in a weird way it was a control thing over her husband, you know? And she really got into it.
“She treated Marissa and Haley like they were her pretend family or something, like they were life-size dolls or something. Even though Marissa was an artist, Milo decorated their house the way
“How did Marissa feel about that?” Vince asked.
“She said that was a small price to pay, and so what if Milo wanted to dress her up? She kind of liked the game playing, seeing what she could get away with—the people she had as friends, the men she chose to date. She would only let Milo have just so much control and no more.
“That had gotten worse lately,” she said. “They had started arguing a lot. The more independent Marissa tried to be, the more controlling Milo was.”
Which would have made a free spirit like Marissa only try harder to slip free of her owner’s hold, Vince thought. It would have been a vicious downward spiral in their relationship that would only have exacerbated Bordain’s need for control
In her own way Milo Bordain wasn’t so different in her need for order than Zander Zahn had been. The difference was Zahn had exercised his need for order over inanimate objects. Milo Bordain needed to control the people in her life like pieces on a chessboard.
“I told Marissa to put an end to it,” Gina said. “Why live like that? It was so sick and twisted. She needed to get away from the Bordains. Her career as an artist had taken off. She was making good money. The boutique is doing well. She didn’t need them anymore.”
And that, Vince knew, was what had gotten Marissa Fordham killed.
Milo Bordain would never have been able to tolerate Marissa—the daughter she never had—taking Haley—her make-believe grandchild—out of her life. Her real-life dolls were going to walk away from her real-life playhouse, and she would control them no more.
“And was Marissa going to do that?” Mendez asked. “Tell Milo Bordain it was over?”
“She was going to tell the truth, and that should have been the end of it.”
“And it was,” Dixon said.
“I can’t believe Milo was the one who did that to her,” Gina said, the tears rising again. “How could one woman do that to another woman? And how could she do that to Haley?”
“She couldn’t leave a witness,” Mendez said.
“But she loved Haley! How could she hurt her like that?”
“People like Milo Bordain don’t love the way the rest of us love, Gina,” Vince explained. “They are the center of their universe, and everyone else is just an object that revolves around them. They might think the object is beautiful and that they have to possess it, but in the end it’s just a thing to them.”
The emotion came over Gina then like a wave she couldn’t hold back, and she started to sob, and Vince suspected she was seeing that crime-scene Polaroid he had shown her of her best friend butchered on the kitchen floor.
He wondered if Milo Bordain would replay that same scene in her memory. Probably, but with very different emotions attached.
She was sitting in jail now. ADA Kathryn Worth had made sure there would be no bail. Milo had been caught with knife in hand going after Anne and Haley. No judge was going to dare risk it—no matter how much money the Bordains could throw around.
Milo Bordain would go to prison where she would be the state’s doll, where she would be told what to wear and where to sleep and when to eat. Vince wondered if she would even see the irony in that.
103
“Milo Bordain,” Mendez said as they walked out of the hospital into the sunshine. “Nobody saw that coming.”
“No,” Vince admitted. “The brutality of that murder ... That’s usually something women reserve for unfaithful husbands, not each other. In hindsight, all the pieces fit. She felt like Marissa was hers, bought and paid for, literally. And like any spoiled child, if she couldn’t keep her toy, nobody else could have it either.”
It sounded so straightforward and logical, he thought, when it was one of the most twisted, insane murders he had ever worked. His buddies at the Bureau had already tapped him to come to Quantico and present the case for study.
“The press is already trying to come up with a catchy nickname for her, comparing her to Lizzie Borden,” Mendez said.
“Lizzie Borden was never convicted, you know,” Vince said. “Milo Bordain is going away forever and ever, amen.”
“The Bordains have deep pockets. They’ll try to buy an insanity plea.”
“I don’t care what they try,” Vince said, digging his car keys out of his pants pocket. The wind came up and flipped his necktie back over his shoulder. “A jury gets a load of those crime-scene photos—wherever they put her, they’ll throw away the key.”
“Do you think she’s crazy?”
“In the legal sense? No,” he said. “Not at all. She killed Marissa out of rage. She thought she had killed Haley, getting rid of the only witness. Why she excised the breasts might have been symbolic initially—destroying what was feminine about Marissa—but sending them to herself in the mail was definitely self-serving.”
“Trying to divert attention away from herself as a suspect by portraying herself as a victim,” Mendez said. “That’s some kind of cold blood running through her veins.”
“She’s calculating, not crazy,” Vince said. “That’s why she was so upset when she didn’t get custody of Haley. She figured if she had the child in her control, she would have made certain one way or another the girl would never ID her as the killer.”
“She’s evil,” Mendez said. “That should be a legal term. She’s guilty of being evil. That’s simple.”
“We can look at anything and make it simple,” Vince said. “Even murder. Every one of them can be boiled down to this: Either somebody didn’t get what they wanted, or someone wanted exactly what they got. Disappointment or desire.”
“Or both.”
And the result was ultimately all the same: lives broken and the death of dreams. Marissa’s life had held a wealth of promise, now gone. She would no longer have the chance to make the world a better place by creating art or by raising a wonderful child. Milo Bordain, who had been a driving force in the community and instrumental in raising funds for half a dozen charities, would leave a void in those positions. Mark Foster, a bright light in his field,
