“She was,” Gina said.

“Gina, I saw photographs of you and Marissa just a couple of months before Haley was born. She wasn’t pregnant.”

Frustration and exhaustion furrowed her brow. Another few tears squeezed out between her lashes. “I’m so tired.”

“I know, sweetheart. I’m really sorry,” Vince said, “but this is so important, Gina. Is Haley Marissa’s daughter? Is she Bruce Bordain’s daughter?”

“No.”

Marissa had been pregnant, but Haley wasn’t her daughter, nor was Bruce Bordain her father. Vince swore under his breath. Now he’d opened an industrial-size can of worms and his witness was running out of gas.

“But Marissa was blackmailing the Bordains?” he said.

“You make it sound so dirty,” she said. “It wasn’t like that. She was trying to do something good. For Haley.”

“Gina, Bruce Bordain has been paying for four years for a child that isn’t his. Did he find that out?”

“He might have,” she admitted in a small voice. “Marissa was tired of it. She’d had it with Milo trying to manipulate her and treating her like she was a doll to play with. At first, she had wanted him to pay for what he’d done to her. But it wasn’t worth it.”

“What had he done to her?” Vince asked.

Tears ran from the corners of Gina Kemmer’s closed eyes. She was slipping away from him, slipping away from the bad memories.

“Gina?”

“Mr. Leone?” The nurse supervisor came into the room with her hands on her hips. “Don’t make me throw you out of here again.”

Vince staved her off with one finger raised. “Just one more question.”

“Mr. Leone ...”

“Gina, what had he done to her?”

He had to lean in close to hear her.

“He killed her ...”

Chapter 98

98

“That one I remember,” Monique the mail clerk said.

The picture was of the Bordain family—Bruce, Milo, and Darren—and another prominent Oak Knoll family in formal dress at a charity fundraiser.

Mendez had expected her to point to Darren Bordain.

She hadn’t.

Nor had she pointed to Bruce Bordain.

She pointed to Milo.

“Are you sure?” Hicks asked, sounding as doubtful as Mendez felt.

“I’m sure all right. I’m not forgetting that nasty piece of business any time soon. She was so rude!”

“She came in here with a box to mail?” Mendez asked.

“Yes. And she had it wrapped in brown paper and trussed up with string like a Thanksgiving turkey,” Monique said. “And I explained to her very polite that we don’t want packages wrapped in paper and tied up with string because it gets caught in the machinery. Well, you would have thought I’d told her to stick it where the sun don’t shine. And I wished I had!”

Milo Bordain.