“He was sleeping with two women who were both murdered,” Mendez said. “That tells me either he killed one or both of them, or he didn’t stop somebody else from killing them. If that was me, I would feel responsible either way.”

Mendez and his White Knight Syndrome. But was Steve Morgan really so different? Vince wondered. If his motives for helping disadvantaged women had been altruistic all along, then he was no different in that respect. He came to the rescue. His wife had gotten left out of the process because he didn’t see her as needing saving—or being sympathetic to his cause, for that matter. Sara was jealous of the time he donated to others.

“Peter Crane was his friend,” Vince said. “Lisa Warwick was his lover. He probably thinks he should have been able to prevent what happened, but he didn’t.

“Now—if he was seeing Marissa—Marissa is dead too. Let’s say he didn’t kill her. He sinks deeper into self-destruction. He picks a fight with a cop. He picks a fight with his wife, he tries to scare her off, letting her think he might be a murderer. Ultimately, to punish himself.”

“I still don’t think we can rule him out,” Dixon said.

“No,” Vince agreed. “You can’t rule him out. Not until we know where he was the night she was killed. Or where he was when Gina went missing.”

“I’ll tell you where he was when Gina went missing,” Mendez said. “He was AWOL. Bill and I were trying to track him down. He told his wife he was working late, but he wasn’t at his office. He told me later that he was having dinner with a client in Malibu. I’d say he pulled that out of his ass. He didn’t show up at home until the middle of the night. I was there waiting for him.”

“What about Bordain?” Dixon asked.

“He doesn’t account for every minute of every day,” Hicks said.

“Meaning he doesn’t have an alibi.”

“I would say so.”

“Mark Foster?”

“We were talking to him early that evening,” Hicks said. “Then he had a rehearsal. After that, nothing.”

“We know approximately when Gina left her house that afternoon,” Mendez said. “But we have no way of knowing when she met up with our bad guy. It could have been early, it could have been late.”

“Maybe this, maybe that,” Dixon complained. “This is giving me a headache. I want something we can take to the bank. Have we got that photo lineup put together for the little girl yet?”