“Can you think of another reason someone would want her dead?”

“Of course not!” she snapped, slapping the steering wheel in frustration. She had gauze around her hand and blue Smurf Band-Aids on three fingers. “How could I possibly know that?”

Several more tears squeezed over the edges of her lashes. Mendez took in her reactions, feeling bad for her. She had just lost a friend. He couldn’t blame her for being upset.

“Can you show me the studio, please?” he asked again.

She wanted to say no, but in the end turned her car off, resigned. Mendez opened her door for her.

They walked together beneath the pepper trees toward the barn. Sara Morgan was in bib overalls streaked with paint, splotches of yellow, swipes of red. It wasn’t hard to imagine her with paint on her hands, on her chin, on the tip of her pert nose. And it would look good on her, he thought. Even though the morning had turned warm, she hugged herself hard, as if she were freezing and trying to stop the shivers.

“What happened to your hands?” he asked, noting that the fingers on her right hand sported a couple of Smurf Band-Aids as well.

“I’m working on a multimedia piece that includes wire and metal as part of it,” she said. “It’s difficult to work with, but I don’t like to wear gloves.”

“Suffering for your art?”

She made a little sound that might have been impatience or sarcastic humor.

“How is Wendy doing?”

She frowned down at the ground and her old Keds tennis shoes. “She’s having a hard time. She still has nightmares about finding that body in the park and about Dennis Farman trying to hurt her. She misses Tommy. She thinks you should be looking for him.”

“We are,” he said. “Trying to, anyway. We just don’t have a clue where to look. Janet Crane hasn’t contacted anyone—or the relatives aren’t talking if she has. There’s no trail to follow. We just don’t have anything to work with.”

“I guess if I found out my husband was a serial killer I would take my child and disappear too.”

The big sliding door that led into Marissa Fordham’s barn/studio stood open by a couple of feet. The space had been converted to a large work area at one end, and a gallery at the other. The morning sun poured in through a wall of windows, bathing everything in buttery yellow light.

“Oh, no,” Sara Morgan said, as they stepped inside. “No, no, no ...”

It should have been a beautiful space. It probably had been a beautiful space filled with Marissa Fordham’s extraordinary art—all of which had been torn and ruined, slashed and broken. Paintings, sculpture—all of it now nothing but debris, the detritus of a murderer’s rage.