“Only people with things to hide need an alias,” Mendez said. “What about Gina Kemmer?”

“What about her?”

“See if she has a record,” Dixon said.

“Can I sue the department for cauliflower ear?” Hamilton asked.

“We need computers,” Mendez complained.

“I need world peace,” Dixon said, pushing to his feet. “And for this case to be solved. If you all can deliver either of those things, get out there and do it.”

Chapter 44

44

Vince left Mendez to wait for the search warrant for Gina Kemmer’s house. He had given instructions to include photographs on the list of evidence to be searched for.

He liked the blackmail angle. It was neat and tidy in its own way. Simple cause and effect. Woman blackmails man. Man reaches breaking point, kills woman.

Why send the breasts to Milo Bordain? The answer that had rolled off his tongue for the sheriff made sense at a glance, but he wasn’t so sure it held up to scrutiny.

Sending body parts held an element of gamesmanship. It was usually done to intimidate the family of the victim and/or to taunt the police. A metaphoric nose thumbing. That didn’t fit into the neat and tidy blackmail scenario. Why would the perpetrator bother with it? He had a problem—Marissa—and he dealt with it. Why involve Milo Bordain?

He thought about the photograph on Gina Kemmer’s refrigerator. Gina, Marissa, Mark Foster, and Darren Bordain.

Mendez and Hicks had said Bordain hadn’t dated Marissa but had joked that he should have because it would have driven his mother crazy.

Vince only knew Darren Bordain from the television ads for the Bordain Mercedes dealerships. He must have been in his early thirties. Good-looking in a sort of androgynous way—not unlike his mother. In fact, quite like his mother. But where the masculine side of the trait tended to give Milo Bordain a masculine quality, the feminine side of the trait loaned the son a certain elegance to his features.

Mendez and his team needed to delve a little deeper into that relationship. If Darren Bordain had been involved with Marissa, had fathered her child, had been blackmailed by her, the ironic twist would have been his mother’s attachment to and support of Marissa. If the son resented the mother enough, sending her a box of body parts wouldn’t have been a big stretch.

People would have a hard time imagining a man like Darren Bordain—the elegant, privileged son of a well-respected family; the man who came into their homes every evening during the local news broadcast to promise them a better life if they would drive a Mercedes—being capable of doing the things that had been done to Marissa Fordham. Just as they had had a hard time with the idea of their handsome, friendly, family-man dentist as a serial killer.