by Tami Hoag
The car in her driveway, parked in front of the little garage that matched the Tudor house, was a blue 1981 Honda Accord. Gina Kemmer was doing well for herself.
She wouldn’t like law enforcement officers coming into her sanctuary—not that anyone did.
She answered the door looking like she’d been knocked around. Her face and her eyes were swollen and red. Battered by grief. The girls working in the boutique on trendy Via Verde had told them their boss had taken the day off because of her friend’s death. They had batted their eyelashes at Mendez as they gave him Kemmer’s home address and phone number.
“Ms. Kemmer,” Mendez said, holding up his shield. “I’m Detective Mendez from the sheriff’s office. This is my associate, Mr. Leone.”
“We’re terribly sorry for your loss, Miss Kemmer,” Vince said gently. The kindly uncle act. “I apologize for the intrusion. We know this is a tough time for you.”
“I already spoke to detectives yesterday,” she said, looking worried. “I answered all their questions.”
Vince guessed she was probably around thirty. She was probably a pretty girl when she hadn’t been crying for a couple of days.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mendez said. “We’re just following up.”
“Having been Ms. Fordham’s best friend,” Vince said, “we’re hoping you might be able to give us a little more insight into who she was as person.”
“Oh.”
“May we come in?” Mendez asked.
Gina Kemmer nodded, tears welling up. She was in gray sweatpants and a McAster T-shirt that looked like she had slept in it. But she had made an effort and brushed her blond hair back into a ponytail. The girls from the boutique might have called to tell her the cops were on the way.
She turned away from them and walked back into the house, leaving them to follow.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” she said, sinking down into an overstuffed chintz-covered chair in her living room. Her hand was shaking as she dabbed a tissue under her eyes. “Murdered. Oh my God. I heard she was stabbed like a hundred times! Is that true?”
She was afraid—like she thought if her friend had been murdered, she was probably next. The one good thing about murder, Vince thought: It generally wasn’t contagious.
“She was stabbed, yes,” Mendez said.
“You have a lovely home,” Vince said, admiring the space, checking for photographs. There were two of Gina Kemmer and Marissa Fordham in frames on the console table behind the sofa—one recent, one not.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
“Do you rent or own?”
“Rent.”
“Are you the gardener?”
“Yes.”
“That’s some green thumb you have,” Vince said with a smile as he took a seat on the end of the sofa nearest her.
She turned a tiny shy smile and glanced down. “Thank you.”
“I’m so sorry you lost your friend,” he said sincerely. “We never imagine something like this will happen to someone we know. Murder is something that happens in the newspapers, on television.”
“No,” she said. “It’s like a nightmare, but I’m awake. I can’t believe she died that way. What could she possibly have done to deserve that?”
“Nothing,” Mendez said. “No one deserves to die like that.”
“It’s tough,” Vince said. “A person dies only once, but the loved ones they leave behind live that loss every day.”
Gina nodded, crying a little into her crumpled tissue.
“I’ll bet you have a lot of fond memories, though.”
“Yes.”
She had been looking back at her friendship with Marissa Fordham. Photographs were strewn on the coffee 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 give her things?”
“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 subterfuge, but she was somehow tangled up in this mess just the same.
“Find out everything you can about her life in LA,” he said. “I’m willing to bet Marissa Fordham was there at the same time.”
“So why the big story about being from the East Coast?”
“I don’t know. She probably liked the mystique. Coming to a new community, she could start fresh and be whoever she wanted to be. It’s a hell of a lot more interesting to say you come from money in Rhode Island than to say you grew up in Oxnard.”
“True,” Mendez said. “And if she and Gina have been friends for a long time and moved up here together, Gina for sure knows who Haley’s father is.”
“And if Daddy killed Mommy, Milo Bordain is willing to pay her twenty-five thou for that information,” Vince said. “And if Daddy killed Mommy, and Gina is the only person who knows who Daddy is ...”
“And Daddy knows Gina could make twenty-five grand to give him up ... ,” Mendez continued the thought. “I’ll tell the patrol sergeant to send a prowl car past here every half hour.”
“She’s our bait for a predator,” Vince said. It sounded callous, but would be a much safer situation for Gina Kemmer than if they simply left her to her own devices. “Ask Cal to put an unmarked car on the street. We should keep her in sight.”
“We’re stretched pretty thin for detectives.”
“Then a couple of lucky uniforms get to move up to plainclothes for a while.”
“Do we tell Gina we’re watching? Give her a little peace of mind?”
“No. Let’s see what she does. For all we know, she could lead us straight to our killer. Look into her finances too,” Vince suggested. “That’s an expensive car and an expensive neighborhood for a girl that age. She has a boutique, it ain’t Tiffany’s.”
“Are you thinking blackmail?”
“Think about what Nasser said yesterday. That he didn’t believe Marissa Fordham made enough money from her art to pay for her lifestyle. Maybe nobody knows who Haley’s father is because it was profitable for Marissa Fordham to keep that information to herself.”
“Maybe Daddy got tired of paying,” Mendez said, starting the car. “That’s a damn fine motive for a murder.”
Vince nodded. “Or two.”
Vince parted company with Mendez back at the SO. The detective went inside to set the background check on Gina Kemmer into motion and to see what Marissa Fordham’s bank and phone records had revealed.
Vince got behind the wheel of his old Jaguar and drove out of town. The drive to Marissa Fordham’s home was beautiful and tranquil—a stark contrast to what he would experience when he reached her house.
Anne had asked him to go to the house to collect clothes and toys for Haley. He would have gone anyway. The scene had been processed. The CSIs were gone. Once he ran the gauntlet of media being held at bay at the end of the driveway, he would have the murder scene to himself.
The downside of being Vince Leone was that he was easily recognized by crime reporters. He had spent too many years in the spotlight of high-profile cases for the Bureau. Locally, there had been so much coverage of the See-No-Evil murders, and Anne’s abduction, people on the streets of Oak Knoll called him by name.
News vans lined the sides of the road as he drew closer to the driveway. Several reporters, bored and lounging beside the vehicles, spotted him and jumped to attention, running toward him.
Vince flashed his ID at the deputy guarding the end of the driveway and was waved past before the hungry newshounds could get to him.
Another deputy sat in his cruiser under the shade of a pepper tree at the top of the driveway. Vince waved to him on his way to the house.
He went in through the front door, ducking under the yellow tape. The house was empty of human life, but he always felt a strange, tense energy in the aftermath of a violent crime. Sometimes he thought it might be the lingering fear and tension of the victim, hanging in the air, entangled with the scents of blood and death. Sometimes he thought perhaps it was the remnants of evil, a dark energy that vibrated in the air like the last tremors of sound from a tuning fork.
The current wisdom and protocol of his colleagues in the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit was not to send profilers immediately to the scenes of the crimes they were called to consult on. The procedure was to review all available information on the case at Quantico in their subterranean offices known to the agents as the National Cellar for the Analysis of Violent Crime.
There, removed from the emotion and other influences at the scene of the crime, the entire team could review the case objectively and brain-storm ideas, combining their individual experiences into a dynamic group effort. It was a system that worked very well and allowed them to take on more cases at once. Vince had worked within that structure for years, but it had never really suited him.
After years as a homicide detective, he still liked to walk a scene, see it in three-dimensional reality as opposed to videotape or photographs. He wanted to be aware of everything in the surroundings, including that last, lingering tremor of energy in the aftermath of death.
It was his unique mix of experience and education that had made him the profiler he had become: a homicide cop/FBI field agent with a degree in psychology earned on the side.
He went to Marissa Fordham’s bedroom. The sheets and mattress had been taken from the bed to be sent to the state crime lab. Everything else remained as it had been.
She had been attacked here first. Cast-off blood spattered the ceiling from the killer yanking the knife out of her body and over his head only to plunge it down into her again. The ransacking had come later when Marissa had either been dead, or lay dying on the kitchen floor.
Had she been attacked as she lay sleeping or in the aftermath of sex? By an angry lover or a
jealous would-be lover? By a stranger or a friend?
In his mind’s eye he pictured the scene over and over, each time with a different person in the role of killer. Zahn, Rudy Nasser, the faceless form of Haley’s father, Steve Morgan, even Sara Morgan—taking the advice he had given Mendez, unlikely as it was for a woman to murder another woman in such a violent manner. Women usually reserved rage like that for abusive or faithless husbands.
What had been the motivation here? Rage? Jealousy? A flashback to another crime?
Had Haley witnessed this early part of the attack? Had she watched in horror as her mother ran from the room, naked and bleeding with a knife-wielding killer chasing her?
Her bedroom was directly across the hall. It was the room of a fairy princess, frilly and pink. Her mother had covered the walls with a mural of a magical land full of magical creatures. A winged fairy rode on the back of a unicorn. A smiling tabby cat looked down from the branches of a lollipop tree.
Sweet and innocent. Innocence shouldn’t end at the age of four, he thought.
He followed the blood trail to the kitchen and stood there, looking from the pool of dried blood on the floor to the blood-streaked telephone on the wall. The little girl had to have climbed onto the chair against the wall and from the chair to the counter to reach the phone.
She had to have made the call either during the attack on her mother or just after, while the killer had been busy searching the house for whatever he had been so desperate to find. Vince could picture him coming back into the room to see little Haley on the phone, could see him grabbing the little girl and choking her, then smothering her, then dropping her seemingly lifeless body like a piece of garbage next to the body of her mother.
If Gina Kemmer didn’t come through, that left Haley as the only key to the crime.
Vince recalled the picture from the night before: his wife holding the sobbing child in her arms, trying to console the inconsolable.
Innocence shouldn’t end at the age of four. It would have been better for Haley if her mind simply blocked out everything that had happened. But it wouldn’t have helped the case. They needed to catch a killer. And the child would be the key.