“It still doesn’t even seem real. I would never have done anything to hurt him or Darren. We were friends! I was just so scared. All I could think about was running away. I thought Mark would help me. When he told me no ... I was already in a panic. I said the first stupid thing that came into my head.”

“You threatened him,” Vince said.

Gina nodded, tears squeezing out of her closed eyes. “I never, never, never would have followed through. He should have known that. I can’t believe he reacted the way he did. He was always such a nice guy—I thought.”

“We can know people really well, Gina, and never know what they’re truly capable of when they’re cornered. Mark has held that secret inside him most of his life. He’s feared it, feared what it could do to everything he’s worked so hard to achieve.”

“Why can’t people just be who they are?” she asked. “It’s not like there aren’t gay men in the music world. He wasn’t going to be the only one.”

“He was going to be the only one named Mark Foster,” Vince said, “with his parents and his upbringing—whatever that might have been. He was going to be the only one involved with Darren Bordain, who’s supposed to have a big political future ahead of him.”

“I guess so,” she said quietly, her emotions already taking a toll on her strength. The color was fading from her cheeks. “It was the most horrible moment of my life—when he turned on me like that. It was like—I can’t even describe it. It was like he was someone I’d never seen before in my life. That was the worst moment—worse than when he shot me.”

Vince could see her energy flagging. She was still fighting an infection, to say nothing of her emotional and psychological exhaustion.

“Gina, I know you’re tired, and we’ve got a lot to talk about, but we won’t try to do it all now. I just need to ask you, do you know who killed Marissa?”

She was quiet for a moment as she looked inward, not liking what she saw. “I thought I did. Now ... I don’t know.”

“Who did you think it was?”

“Bruce. Bruce Bordain.”

Chapter 96

96

“Hell of a deal,” Hicks said. “Can you imagine either one of those men—Foster or Bordain—doing what was done to Marissa Fordham?”

“No, but one of them did.”

“A person has to be out of their head to do something like that and then just walk around like nothing ever happened.”