She had taken her phone off the hook hours before. Reporters had found out that she had been friends with Marissa. They wanted to interview her. They wanted to ask stupid questions like how did it feel to have her best friend murdered and did she know who the killer was.

Maybe she could sell her story. Maybe that was her leverage.

She muted the television and stared at the sheriff and the number for the tip line. On the coffee table lay the business card the older detective had left for her.

She didn’t know what to do.

She picked up the receiver and punched in the number.

The call went through.

“I need to talk to you ...”

Ten minutes later she was driving down the street, her mind on her mission. She turned the corner at one end of the block just as a plain burgundy Ford Taurus turned onto her street from the other end of the block. In it were two sheriff’s detectives come to watch over her and keep her safe.

Chapter 32

32

Mark Foster was younger than Mendez expected him to be. He had imagined the head of the music department in a prestigious school like McAster, and a town like Oak Knoll—known for its summer classical music festival—would be old and stodgy in a rumpled brown suit, wearing little wire-rimmed glasses and with white hair growing out of his ears.

Instead, Foster was probably in his late forties, fit and good-looking with close-cropped thinning brown hair. He was dressed in khaki pants and a blue oxford shirt with a knitted brown necktie. The only part Mendez had gotten right was the wire-rimmed glasses.

At seven thirty in the evening Foster was still working, preparing for a rehearsal of his senior honors brass quintet. Mendez and Hicks stood in the conductor’s area of the stark white music room that rose up around them in level after level of chairs and black metal music stands. Foster distributed sheet music to the stands near them where his quintet musicians would sit.

“I’ll help any way I can,” he said. “I was horrified when I heard the news. What’s the world coming to? The murders last year, now this. You don’t expect that kind of thing here. We live in such a pretty little bubble most of the time. I remember talking with Marissa last fall after Peter Crane abducted that teacher and tried to kill her. We couldn’t believe it.”

“You were good friends?” Hicks asked.

“We ran in the same circles. Saw each other socially, occasionally met for drinks, that kind of thing.”

“When was the last time you saw Ms. Fordham?” Mendez asked.