Mendez couldn’t even hear Monique the mail clerk going on. He was trying to get his head around this new twist in the Bordain tale.

He nodded to the door. Hicks thanked the clerks and followed him out onto the sidewalk.

“Milo Bordain?” Mendez said as they emerged from the Lompoc post office. “Milo Bordain?”

No other words came. They stood on the sidewalk outside the post office, oblivious to the citizens of Lompoc going in and out of the building. Mendez knew his partner’s brain was doing the same thing his brain was doing: spinning its wheels crazily.

“I don’t get it,” Hicks said. “She mailed that box to herself?”

“She packed that box herself?” Mendez said, sick at the thought.

He couldn’t help but picture the murder scene, the incredible brutality, the blood. He could imagine Marissa Fordham’s screams of terror as she tried to escape her killer.

“That can’t be right,” Hicks said, rejecting the idea entirely. “The postal worker; she’s got to be wrong. That can’t be what happened.”

“She recognized the photograph,” Mendez said. “We didn’t even ask her to look at that photograph. And the attitude. That’s Milo Bordain all over.”

Hicks shook his head. “There’s no way. No woman could do that to another woman. Women don’t kill like that—hands-on, crazy, violent. Cut another woman’s breasts off? No.”

A woman with a toddler in tow caught the last of that and gave them a wide berth on her way into the building.

“Maybe she mailed the box but didn’t know what was in it,” Hicks said.

“How could she not know what was in it?”

“The husband or the son gave it to her to mail.”

“To mail to herself?” Mendez said. “And she drove way the hell to Lompoc to do it? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“And Milo Bordain as a homicidal maniac does? No woman could do that to another woman. No way.”

Mendez put his hands on top of his head and walked around in a little circle.

“Marissa Fordham was the daughter she never had,” Hicks said. “The little girl was like her granddaughter.”

“Was her granddaughter,” Mendez said. “Or so she thought.”

“Then why would she try to kill the girl?” Hicks asked. “What grandmother does that?”

Mendez tried to lay out a scenario that worked. “Milo Bordain and Marissa get into it. Maybe Marissa wanted more money or maybe she was done with it. Either way, Milo snaps and goes nuts. She realizes too late that the little girl saw her and can identify her. She has to kill her, too.”

“A woman can snap and kill somebody as easily as a man,” Hicks conceded. “But the mutilation? Shoving the knife in the vagina like that?”

Two elderly women leaving the post office gasped and stared.