“She said she was on her way home!” The deputy had to shout to be heard. He pointed in the direction they had been coming from. “She became aware of a car coming up behind her, too close on her tail. She touched her brakes to back him off. He came alongside her about there and swerved toward her. She panicked, hit the brakes, the car went into a skid, and that’s where it stopped.”

“Where is she now?” Dixon yelled.

“Emergency room.”

“What?”

“Emergency room!”

“How bad?” Mendez asked.

The deputy shook his head. “Didn’t look too bad. She banged her head,” he said, pantomiming banging his head against his hand. “And a bloody nose.”

Mendez jogged over to the Mercedes and shined his Maglite in on the driver’s side. The airbag had deployed and there was blood on it. The cause of the nosebleed, he guessed. There didn’t appear to be any other damage done inside the car. He shined the light at an oblique angle down the side of the car. There seemed not to have been any contact between the two vehicles.

“Gotta hope she got a tag number!” he shouted at Dixon. “Are there skid marks?”

“Who can see in this?” Dixon turned to the deputy again. “Did she give you a description of the other car?”

The deputy shook his head.

“Could just have been an asshole,” Mendez said as they got back in the Taurus. He started the car and turned the heat on full blast. “She pissed him off when she hit her brakes.”

“That would just be too easy,” Dixon said. He pulled his hood back and pulled the wet cap off his head. “She’s convinced herself she’s a target.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Mendez said. “Like her son said, if somebody had it in for her, why not just kill her? Why kill Marissa Fordham with forty-some stab wounds and the mutilation and leaving the knife protruding from the vagina? All this perp did to Bordain is send her a gruesome surprise in the mail.”

“Until tonight.”

For Mendez, it didn’t sit right. The amount of rage in the killing of Marissa Fordham ... she had to have been the primary target. Little Haley was collateral damage. This business with Milo Bordain was like a game. That was a different kind of killer altogether. One he’d hoped they wouldn’t see again in Oak Knoll.

He drove them to Mercy General Hospital and parked under the ambulance canopy at the ER entrance. The triage nurse led them back to the exam rooms.

“How is she?” Dixon asked.