table. Vince picked up one of Gina Kemmer and Marissa and Haley Fordham—probably about two years old at the time—at the beach, laughing and happy, building a sandcastle. He put that one down and picked up an older photo of the two women in bikinis and floppy hats at a different beach.
“How long had you and Marissa been friends, Gina? Is it all right if I call you Gina?”
She nodded.
“Did you and Marissa grow up together?” Mendez asked.
“No,” she said, looking at the floor. “We met when we moved here. It seems like a long time ago. It was like that, like we were sisters, like we’d known each other forever.”
“That’s a special friendship,” Vince said. “How did you both end up here?”
“Um, well, I wanted a change of scenery. This is such a nice town.”
“It is,” Vince said. “It’s a beautiful place. I just moved here last year, myself. I love it. Where did you move from?”
“LA.”
“The big city.”
“Yeah.”
“Pollution, traffic. Who needs it? Right?”
She smiled a little, nodding.
“And Marissa came from ... where?”
“The East Coast.”
“Did she ever talk about her family?” Mendez asked. “We’re trying to locate her next of kin to notify them.”
“No, she never talked about them.”
“That’s odd, don’t you think, Gina? I mean, I talk about my family if only to complain about them. Don’t you? I think most people do.”
“They had some kind of falling-out,” she said.
“Must have been something bad, huh?”
“I guess so.”
“It must have been really bad if Marissa wouldn’t even tell you, her best friend.”
Kemmer said nothing. She had yet to hold eye contact with him for more than a second or two.
“What brought her to Oak Knoll? Why not Santa Barbara? Monterey? San Francisco? All very artsy places. Why Oak Knoll? We’re a little off the beaten track.”
“She just liked it. She came for the fall art fair. It’s very famous, you know. Artists come from all over the country. She came for the art fair, and she loved it here, and she stayed.”
“Kind of impulsive.”
“That was Marissa.”
“When was that?”
“September 1982.”
“So Haley was how old then?”
“Um ... four months. Her birthday is in May.”
“Do you by any chance know where Haley was born?”
“No.”
“We’re trying to find her birth certificate,” Mendez said. “Do you have any idea where Marissa would have kept that?”
“No.”
“Actually, what we really want is to find Haley’s father,” Vince said. “Do you know who he is?”
“Marissa never talked about him.”
“Never? You were like sisters. She must have said something.”
She shook her head.
“Was he from around here?”
“No.”
“But she did have a few boyfriends over the years, right?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Marissa liked men. Men liked Marissa. It worked out for her. Men were drawn to her, fell all over her. They would just give her things—even men she wasn’t dating.”
Mendez looked up from his note making. “What do you mean
“Jewelry, clothes, flowers, whatever. Men loved her.”
“One didn’t,” Vince pointed out.
He reached inside his jacket, plucked a Polaroid from his breast pocket and handed it to her. She took it automatically. It was a shot of Marissa Fordham lying dead on the floor of her kitchen, butchered and bloody.
Gina Kemmer shrieked and jumped up out of her chair, flinging the photograph away from her as if it had transformed into a venomous snake.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” she shouted, scrambling backward, trying to get away from the hideous image. She hit a plant stand with her arm and knocked a huge Boston fern to the floor. The heavy pot broke with the sound of a gunshot and she screamed.
“Someone did that to her, Gina,” Vince said.
“Why would you bring that here?!” She looked horrified and, more important, terrified. “Why would you show that to me? Oh my God!”
“Because that’s the reality here, Gina,” Vince said soberly. “That’s the truth. Someone did that to your best friend.”
The color went out of her face like water being sucked down a drain. She turned and doubled over and threw up on the fallen fern.
Vince stood up and dug a business card out of his wallet and placed it on top of the photograph on the coffee table.
He put a hand on Gina Kemmer’s shoulder as she sat back down on her chair, gagging and sobbing hysterically, shaking hard.
“You’re a poor liar, Gina,” he said without rancor, almost gently. “Your heart’s not in it. It doesn’t come to you naturally. But you’re scared. You probably made a promise to Marissa. You don’t want to break it, but it’s a terrible burden. You’re shaking under the weight of it.
“You give me a call—night or day—when you want to take that burden off your shoulders and tell me the truth.”
26
“That was some hardball you just threw,” Mendez said as they walked out to the car.
“She’s lying,” Vince said. He hadn’t gotten any pleasure out of what he had just done to Gina Kemmer, but he knew his shock tactic had a good chance of being effective. “She needs to know she shouldn’t do that. The policeman is her friend—if she cooperates.”
He climbed into the car on the passenger side, feeling a little light-headed from the drugs he had taken. Mendez slid in behind the wheel.
“Some of those photographs on the table looked older than she claims to have known Marissa Fordham.”
“Absolutely,” Vince said. “The one beach shot had to be from the seventies, and it had the Santa Monica Pier in the background,” he said. “I think coming here from LA is probably the only true statement she made.”
“That and being like a sister to the vic,” Mendez said. “She’s pretty broken up. She’ll have nightmares for years from seeing that Polaroid.”
Vince did feel a twinge of guilt for that. Gina Kemmer was probably a nice enough young woman. She struck him as someone who just wanted to live a comfortable, simple life. She didn’t have the stomach for intrigue and
