Secrets to the Grave

“What about him?”

“You’re friends.”

“Yes.”

“How did he feel toward Marissa?”

“They were pals. They liked to trade Milo war stories.”

“Did they ever seem like more than friends?” Mendez asked.

“No.”

“Did they ever seem like less than friends?”

Foster’s brow furrowed in confusion. “They were friends. I’m not sure what you’re fishing for.”

“Mrs. Bordain’s attachment to Marissa and Haley seemed almost familial,” Mendez said. “Maybe that made for an odd family dynamic. Maybe there was some jealousy.”

“Oh God, no.” Foster shook his head. “If anything, that made Marissa and Darren allies.”

“Is there any chance Darren could be Haley’s father?” Mendez asked bluntly.

Foster’s brows popped upward. “I don’t think so. I mean, you’d have to ask him, but I don’t think so.”

“Is there any chance you could be Haley’s father?” Hicks asked.

“No,” without emotion. “I don’t know who Haley’s father is. Marissa never brought it up. No one else saw a need to. It wasn’t important.”

“It might have been important to someone,” Mendez said. “It might have been important enough to kill for.”

The door opened and Dixon stuck his head in and crooked a finger at Mendez.

“What’s up?” Mendez asked, stepping into the hall and pulling the door closed behind him.

“I want you and Hicks at Mercy General. Search and Rescue found a woman out in the hills. It could be Gina Kemmer. It doesn’t look good.”

“Where did you find her?” Mendez asked.

They stood inside the doors to the ambulance bay in the Mercy General ER with the leader of the Search and Rescue team, Tom Scott, forty-something and built like an NFL linebacker—a mountain of muscle with the chiseled face of a cartoon superhero.

Hicks came back from the trauma unit with a grim face and a nod. “It’s her.”

“She was about fifty yards off a fire road up in the Dyer Canyon area. The dog found her. We were up in that general area looking for a guy. My young dog took off. He’s just in training. I was gonna give him hell for that. So I went after him and when I came over the rise, here he was trying to drag this woman by the arm. He’d pull on her and bark at her and pull on her some more.

“Thank God for him. There’s a lot of chaparral and scrub up there. We wouldn’t have seen this lady. The chopper had gone over that area earlier and didn’t see anything.”

“What kind of shape is she in?” Mendez asked.

Scott rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Bad. GSW to the left shoulder. Looks like a through-and-through, but red and hot and full of pus. Broke her right ankle like nothing I’ve ever seen. Snapped both bones clean. You could turn her foot clear around.”

“Oh my God,” Mendez said.

Hicks went a little pale at the vivid description.

“Severely dehydrated. Severely hypothermic,” Scott went on. “She was absolutely delirious when we got to her. Hallucinating, the whole nine yards.”

“Is she conscious now?”

“No. I’ll be really surprised if she makes it. I don’t know what all she went through out there, but it was terrible. She had what looked like rat bites on her hands, on her legs, on her face. And stink! Like we pulled her out of a Calcutta sewer.”

“Did she say anything when you found her?” Mendez asked. “Did she identify a perp? Anything?”

“No. She was babbling. Incoherent. By the time we got her in the chopper, she was out. I’ve never seen a BP that low and still have a pulse.”

He nodded out the glass doors at the Search and Rescue vehicle where his partner was waiting. “I’m gonna go get my paperwork in, but I’ll meet you guys out at the scene and show you everything.”

“Shit,” Mendez said as he watched the big man walk away. “We can’t catch a fucking break.”

“Us?” Hicks said, looking back toward the trauma unit. “You should see her. If you’ve got any favors to call in with the big guy upstairs, it’s time to use them.”

Mendez crossed himself. “God help her. God help us. The sooner the better.”

67

The place where Gina Kemmer had been found, dragged from the brink of death by a German shepherd dog, was situated in a scrubby, rocky no-man’s-land between several properties, among them Zander Zahn’s home, Marissa Fordham’s home, and the Bordain ranch. The spot was back off the fire road Zander Zahn had taken nearly every day over the hills to begin his morning with his free-spirited friend, Marissa, and her daughter.

There was nothing quiet or secluded about the area now as daylight was fading. The fire road was clogged with vehicles from the sheriff’s office. Portable lights had been set up to focus on the spot where Gina had been found by Search and Rescue, and ran farther back off the road to what had at one time been a group of ranch buildings, now long abandoned and reduced to little more than sticks.

“We followed the drag marks back here,” Tom Scott said loudly to be heard above the three helicopters circling the area—one from the SO, and two up from a television stations in Los Angeles. “It looks to me like she crawled out of this old well. Whoever shot her dumped her down there and left her for dead. That’s some hell of a will she’s got, getting herself out of there.”

Mendez and Hicks both added the beams of their Maglites to the hole in the ground. The well was no more than five or six feet across and probably twenty feet or so down to the most horrific, stinking pile of garbage Mendez had caught a whiff of in a while.

“Jesus,” he said. “If the fall doesn’t kill you, the smell will.”

“People have been throwing their garbage down this hole for years,” Scott said. “Probably half the people in this valley do it. There’s nothing to stop anyone coming up here. Kids from town party out here too. There’s a lot of beer cans around. Shit, I used to come up here when I was in high school.”

He shined his light into the well and specifically on the rusty bent lengths of rebar cemented into the wall one above the other as a crude ladder. “I’ll bet she caught her foot on one of these rungs on her way down. That’s how she snapped that ankle like a toothpick.”

“There’s things moving down there,” Mendez said.

“It’s a friggin’ rat smorgasbord down there,” Scott said. “The rats get down in there through burrows or tunnels in the earth and come into the well where the old concrete has fallen away. God knows what all’s down there. Rats, mice, snakes, scorpions.”

“God knows, but we’re going to have to find out,” Hicks said. “Are you sure she was down in there?”

“I can’t swear to it, but that’s what it looked like to me. And by the way that girl smelled—she was down in there for a while.”

“She’s been missing since Wednesday afternoon,” Mendez said.

The big man was impressed. “Wow. If this gal pulls through after all that, I’ve got to meet her. She must be something.”

Funny, Mendez thought, he wouldn’t have said so, having met Gina Kemmer. He would have pegged her for the more timid of the two friends. You never knew how people would handle adversity until push came to shove.