Secrets to the Grave ok-2

by Tami Hoag

  She expected to feel pain, terrible, blinding pain. She felt nothing. It was as if her brain had become unplugged from her body. She was so weak, so very weak, but she was free of the pain.

  Marissa grabbed her arm again and pulled. Gina moved her good leg and pushed. She gained maybe a foot.

  How far is the fire road?

  Not far. Keep going. Keep pushing.

  The process was repeated again and again with rest breaks in between. With each effort she felt weaker and weaker until she couldn’t pull her good leg up more than a few inches, and she couldn’t move herself any farther than that.

  I can’t, Marissa. It’s too far. It’s too late.

  What else have you got to do with your time? You might as well go until you die.

  I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.

  She didn’t want to die. She couldn’t die. She was the only one who knew the story.

  66

  “I don’t know what more I can tell you guys,” Mark Foster said, following Mendez and Hicks back to the interview rooms. “I don’t feel like I can be that much of a help.”

  “It’s like I told you over the phone, Mr. Foster,” Hicks said. “We’re trying to establish a really detailed outline of Ms. Fordham’s life in the week or so leading up to her murder.”

  “Things that might seem insignificant to you could fill in the puzzle for us,” Mendez said. He opened the door to room two and motioned Foster in.

  Everyone took a seat at the small table. Foster looked around, seeming a little uneasy.

  “I’ve never been in this situation,” he admitted. “All I know is what I’ve seen on television.”

  “We’re not going to shine a light in your face or bring in a big dude with brass knuckles,” Mendez assured him. “Unless we don’t like your answers.”

  They all laughed politely.

  Foster was in his uniform of khaki pants and blue oxford shirt, but had added a sweater vest to the ensemble, and a blue blazer to ward off the chill of the day. He looked too warm now.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” Mendez asked. “It’s a rotten day out there.”

  “No, I’m fine, thanks,” Foster said, drying the raindrops off his wire-rimmed glasses with a handkerchief. “I saw on the news you’re looking for Gina Kemmer. Have you found her yet?”

  “No. Nothing yet. You were friends with her, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You spoke with her the day she went missing,” Hicks said.

  Foster’s eyes opened and widened. “What? When?”

  “Wednesday. Late afternoon.”

  “Uh ...” Foster’s wheels were spinning as he searched his memory—a little frantically, Mendez thought. “Wednesday ... Oh, yeah. I was really busy that day. Gina called. She wanted to talk about a memorial for Marissa. I didn’t have time to get into it.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Sunday night. She had some friends over. You don’t think anything has happened to her, do you?”

  “We don’t know,” Mendez said. “I spoke with her the afternoon she went missing. She seemed extremely upset.”

  “Well, losing Marissa that way ... ,” Foster said. “They were like sisters. She was hysterical when I first spoke to her after the news broke.”

  “Did she mention anything—any reason she thought someone would have wanted to harm Ms. Fordham?” Hicks asked.

  “No. My God, we were both in a state of shock. You don’t think the killer would have gone after her too, do you?”

  Mendez lifted a shoulder. “It’s possible.”

  Foster shook his head. “I can’t imagine the kind of mind that does something like that. People are saying she was stabbed seventy-two times and her body was mutilated. That’s insane. That person has to be insane, right?”

  “That’s not our call to make,” Mendez said. “We just catch them and lock them up.”

  “I hope you’re close to catching this one.”

  “You said the last time you saw Marissa was in Los Olivos—”

  “Actually, that’s not right. I saw her a week before she died at the Licosto Winery. They were having their fall festival. Great wine. Chefs from all around the area. Marissa was there with Haley. How is Haley?”

  “She’s doing well,” Hicks said. “We’re hoping she’ll be able to identify the killer for us.”

  “That’s a lot to put on a four-year-old child.”

  “She’s our only living witness.”

  Foster shook his head, troubled by the thought.

  “Did anything seem to be bothering Marissa that day?” Mendez asked.

  “Marissa let things roll off her back,” Foster said. “She’d had a little set-to with Mrs. Bordain that morning, but she just shrugged it off.”

  “What was that about?”

  “Something ridiculous,” he said. “I know Milo pretty well from working on the summer music festival committee. She’s a force to be reckoned with but she always believes she’s got the best of intentions. I always say whenever two or more are gathered Milo will form a committee and organize something.”

  “She’s manipulative,” Mendez said.

  “It never occurs to her that other people have opinions different from her own,” Foster said. “She’s got all her people in her circle and she wants them to do what she wants them to do. Marissa was the exact opposite. She would go along with the program most of the time, but she’d put her foot down and say no every once in a while just to let Milo know she could.”

  “Can you give us a ‘for instance’?” Hicks asked.

  “Sure. For instance, Milo is very politically inclined. She and Bruce are big contributors to their party. She wanted Marissa to appear and participate in a fund-raiser for a candidate. She had Marissa’s dress chosen, the appointments made for the hairdresser, the whole thing. But Marissa didn’t share the same political views as the Bordains, and she refused to do it. Milo didn’t speak to her for two weeks.”

  “Was that a difficult spot for Marissa to be in? Having to please her sponsor?” Mendez asked.

  “Not within the bounds of reason. But Milo isn’t always reasonable. She’s spoiled. She wants things her way or she’ll pick up her Barbie dolls and go home.”

  “What about Darren Bordain?” Hicks asked.

  “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.

  Hicks went over to snag one of the crime-scene team to send him down the hole.

  “You couldn’t pay me to go down there,” Scott said.

  Mendez laughed. “With those shoulders, you wouldn’t fit, man.”

  “Good! I got no truck with mice. Mice come at me, seriously, man, I’ll scream like a little girl.”

  “It takes a big man to admit that, Tom.”

  The CSI came with Hicks, protesting. “Are you fucking kidding me, man? You want me to go down there?”

  “You’re a crime-scene investigator,” Hicks said. “There’s a crime scene.”

  “I don’t get paid enough for this.”

  “You’ve got to take that up with the county commissioners,” Mendez told him. “In the meantime, I want to know if there’s any evidence down there.”

  “Watch out for the mice!” Tom Scott called down after him as the investigator made his descent.

  “Fuck you!”

  The Search and Rescue leader laughed, then stood back and looked around, sobering.

  “Seriously, man, this would be a lonely place to die.”

  Zahn’s place was maybe a quarter mile or more over one hill. Marissa Fordham’s house probably half a mile to the south. The Bordain ranch was even farther away to the north and west. Nobody would hear you scream up here. No one would hear your cries for help coming up out of the well. There was nothing up here but rabbits, coyotes, and rattlesnakes.

  It wasn’t hard to figure why someone had brought Gina Kemmer up here to kill her.

  He turned again to Tom Scott. “You didn’t find any sign of our missing math genius?”

  Scott shook his head. “Nope. Nada.”

  It was hard to picture Zander Zahn shooting someone. But it was even harder to picture him stabbing someone, and he had certainly done that. Where the hell had he gone?

  But anybody living out in this area could have known about this spot. Anybody who hiked these hills. Anybody who might have taken a long walk with Marissa Fordham.

  “You guys owe me big time,” the evidence tech said, making his way back up the ladder with a big brown paper evidence bag hooked over one arm.

  “Whatcha got there, Petey?” Hicks asked.

  “Black clothes with what looks to me like dried blood. Looks like they were drenched in it.”

  Scott pulled him up th
e rest of the way out of the hole like he was a toy and set him on firm ground. He opened the bag and Hicks reached in and pulled out a large black sweatshirt that was rumpled and stiff. They all shined their lights on it.

  “Drenched in it,” Mendez said. “Somebody took a fucking blood bath.”

  And odds were good the blood that someone had bathed in was Marissa Fordham’s.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “We’ve finally got ourselves some evidence.”

  68

  “We’ve finally got something,” Dixon said. “Hallelujah.”

  “I’ve got deputies canvassing the area residents to find out if anybody saw anything Wednesday night,” Mendez said, shrugging out of his coat. “It’s the freaking wilderness out there, but maybe we’ll get lucky.

  “Has there been any word on Gina Kemmer?” Hicks asked.

  “She’s critical,” Dixon said. “It’s anybody’s guess if she makes it through the night.”

  “She made it this far,” Mendez said. “She should have been dead out there three times over.”

  “Let’s hope she’s still got some fight in her,” Dixon said.

  “Do we have someone on her room?” Mendez asked. “The killer is the only one in the state who isn’t going to be impressed with her story of survival.”

  “The state?” Dixon said. “Try the country. I’ve got the networks on my ass for interviews. I’m told there’s hardly a hotel room to be had in town. Between Marissa’s murder, Haley, Zander Zahn, and Gina’s story, the eyes of America are on us. Again.”

  “Our killer is going to start getting twitchy now,” Vince said. “If he wasn’t already. It was one thing to leave a four-year-old behind with the potential to ID him. It’s something else to have a grown woman able to do it. He’s going to start feeling cornered now. He’s made too many mistakes.”

  “Darren Bordain was pretty twitchy today,” Mendez said. “He refused a photograph, refused a polygraph. And his alibi for the night of the murder is Gina Kemmer, who has been conveniently missing.”