“Ask Haley about her. See if you can get any impressions. Her name is Gina Kemmer. I think she and Marissa go way back.”

“All right.”

They sat at the table in the breakfast room overlooking the backyard. Anne picked at her food, anxiety chewing at the ends of her nerves. Their yard was boxed in by tall privet hedges, but no fence. A woman was missing. The only witness to a murder was upstairs sleeping ...

Her heart was beating a little too fast.

“Do you want the deputy in the house?”

“No,” she whispered, angry with herself for letting the fear creep in.

“Nervous?” Vince asked.

“Don’t say I told you so.”

“I won’t,” he said. “Eat your eggs, Mrs. Leone. I need you strong and healthy to bear my children.”

They both smiled at that.

Vince’s pager came to life beside his coffee mug. He checked the readout.

“Tony. I’ve got to go.”

Chapter 41

41

“We can go in and make sure she’s not dead on the floor,” Mendez said. “But we can’t take anything—unless we’ve got an obvious crime scene—and then Worth wants me to call her so she can come and make sure I’m not lying.”

“That’s better than nothing,” Vince said. “She’s going to dot every i and cross every t in ink. She’s good. She’s careful.”

The three of them—Hicks, Mendez, and Vince—went into Gina Kemmer’s cute little Tudor house with gloves on and paper booties over their shoes. Just in case. Nothing seemed out of place. There were no signs of forced entry or of there having been a struggle in the house.

Someone had cleaned up the broken plant pot and the vomit in the living room. The snapshots that had been lying loose on the coffee table had been put away.

Vince had wanted another look at them. He would have liked to have put them up on a wall and just stare at them, waiting for that one certain something to pop out at him. He had wanted to study the two women—their faces, their body language, how they related to each other. He had wanted to find a date on the back of one of those snapshots that predated 1982.

He opened a drawer in the base of the table. No photos. He looked in a magazine rack, in a small bookcase. Nothing.

Wandering through the house, Vince was struck again by the feeling Gina Kemmer had put roots down here. He didn’t think she would pull those roots back up easily and just leave.