The headlights flashed on Milo Bordain’s massive white Mercedes sedan. The car sat almost perpendicular to the road, the back end dropped down in the ditch, the headlights pointing slightly upward into the night.
“She picked a hell of night to have this happen,” Dixon said as he pulled the hood of his storm jacket up over the top of his cap.
Mendez followed suit, wishing he had left the office with Vince and Hicks. Maybe if he had a wife and kid waiting at home for him, he wouldn’t have been hanging around his desk to get buttonholed for this call on this shitty night.
It was a cold, nasty rain, pelting down like tiny daggers from the sky. Gusts of wind redirected it inside the hood of the jacket and down the neck. The legs of his pants and his socks were wet in a matter of minutes.
“She said she was on her way home!” The deputy had to shout to be heard. He pointed in the direction they had been coming from. “She became aware of a car coming up behind her, too close on her tail. She touched her brakes to back him off. He came alongside her about there and swerved toward her. She panicked, hit the brakes, the car went into a skid, and that’s where it stopped.”
“Where is she now?” Dixon yelled.
“Emergency room.”
“What?”
“Emergency room!”
“How bad?” Mendez asked.
The deputy shook his head. “Didn’t look too bad. She banged her head,” he said, pantomiming banging his head against his hand. “And a bloody nose.”
Mendez jogged over to the Mercedes and shined his Maglite in on the driver’s side. The airbag had deployed and there was blood on it. The cause of the nosebleed, he guessed. There didn’t appear to be any other damage done inside the car. He shined the light at an oblique angle down the side of the car. There seemed not to have been any contact between the two vehicles.
“Gotta hope she got a tag number!” he shouted at Dixon. “Are there skid marks?”
“Who can see in this?” Dixon turned to the deputy again. “Did she give you a description of the other car?”
The deputy shook his head.
“Could just have been an asshole,” Mendez said as they got back in the Taurus. He started the car and turned the heat on full blast. “She pissed him off when she hit her brakes.”
“That would just be too easy,” Dixon said. He pulled his hood back and pulled the wet cap off his head. “She’s convinced herself she’s a target.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Mendez said. “Like her son said, if somebody had it in for her, why not just kill her? Why kill Marissa Fordham with forty-some stab wounds and the mutilation and leaving the knife protruding from the vagina? All this perp did to Bordain is send her a gruesome surprise in the mail.”
“Until tonight.”
For Mendez, it didn’t sit right. The amount of rage in the killing of Marissa Fordham ... she had to have been the primary target. Little Haley was collateral damage. This business with Milo Bordain was like a game. That was a different kind of killer altogether. One he’d hoped they wouldn’t see again in Oak Knoll.
He drove them to Mercy General Hospital and parked under the ambulance canopy at the ER entrance. The triage nurse led them back to the exam rooms.
“How is she?” Dixon asked.
The nurse, a short woman with smoker’s skin and dyed-black hair, waved a hand in dismissal. “She’s insisting on a CT scan, but she’ll be fine. She’s shaken up. More scared than hurt. She’ll have a good goose egg on her forehead tomorrow, but there’s no sign of a concussion.”
She motioned to a door and left them. Dixon knocked twice and opened it.
Milo Bordain sat on the exam table, an unimpressed nurse tending to a small cut and abrasion on the left side of Bordain’s forehead.
“Cal! Thank God you’re here! Someone tried to kill me!”
She did look worse for wear, Mendez thought. Her blond hair was escaping the usually perfect tight bun she wore, and her makeup was mostly gone, showing her age in the harsh fluorescent lighting. In a hospital gown and wearing a paper blanket for a stole, she seemed much less formidable than in her usual layers of designer wear.
“We’ll do our best to get to the bottom of it, Mrs. Bordain,” Dixon said.
“Ouch!” she cried out and snapped at the nurse who was dabbing something at the cut on her forehead. “That stings!”
“Yeah,” the nurse said, unapologetic. “Good thing you don’t need stitches.”
“If I need stitches, I’m calling my plastic surgeon. I’m not letting anyone here touch my face.”
“Can you tell us what happened, Mrs. Bordain?” Mendez asked, pen in hand.
“I came in to town this afternoon to see how things were going with the tip line. Then I came to the hospital to try to see Haley, and she’d been released.
“Nobody told me she was being released today,” she complained, irritated. “I wanted to have a chance to see her and tell her I’m thinking about her. And I brought her a little present—”
“About the accident ... ,” Mendez prompted.
Bordain turned to Dixon and spoke as if Mendez weren’t there. “He is so rude. I don’t understand why you would bring him here with you, Cal. You know he upsets me.”
“I can step outside if you’d like to talk about me,” Mendez said.
“I need him to take notes,” Dixon said smoothly. “So you were on your way home?”
“Yes. And I was already upset about Haley, and still thinking about what happened yesterday, and about Marissa. I want to have a memorial service for her, but I don’t know when her body will be released. Then someone told me only a relative could claim the body, but Marissa has no relatives here other than Haley—”
“And the car ... ,” Mendez said pointedly.
She huffed another sigh.
“Suddenly I see these bright headlights coming up behind me,” she said. “I knew the car was going too fast for that road in the rain. People drive like maniacs out there—especially the Mexicans.”
Mendez exchanged a glance with the nurse, who was also Hispanic
“The car came right up behind me,” Bordain went on. “I thought it was going to hit me! You hear all the time about those insurance scams where some uninsured illegal gets you to rear-end them and then bilks the insurance company and sues the law-abiding citizen—”
“But there was only one car,” Dixon said.
“Yes. I was angry that he was right on my tail, so I tapped my brakes to tell him to back off. Then he pulled up alongside me and swerved toward me. My heart was in my throat!”
“Do you know what kind of car it was?” Mendez asked.
“No. I’m sorry but I don’t know anything about cars.”
“What about the driver?”
She closed her eyes, pained and in pain. “I don’t know.”
She would know if it was a Mexican, Mendez thought.
“Was it a car or a truck?” Dixon asked.
“A car.”
“Dark- or light-colored?”
“Dark. Everything was dark. And it was raining so hard I could barely see the road.”
“Did you get a look at the driver at all?”
“Just a glance. I was terrified. I was trying to stay on the road.”
“But it was a man,” Dixon said.
“Yes, I think so. He might have been wearing a watch cap pulled down low, or maybe his hair was black. I didn’t get a good look,” she said. “He swerved at me. I swerved to miss him. The next thing I knew my car was out of control. I thought I was going to be killed!”
“We saw your airbag deployed,” Dixon said.
“I thought it broke my nose! Those things are dangerous!”
