“Yes. She loved to hang out with my family, and she was always taking care of the other kids in the foster homes she lived in. You didn’t know her, but Marissa was the kind of person who would just open up her heart and draw everyone in—especially little kids. She always said she was going to have a big family of her own one day.”

Vince offered her a tissue and patted her hand. “I wish I could have met her,” he said. “It sounds like she was a very special person.”

Who had also perpetrated blackmail and fraud, he knew. But then people were never only one thing.

Gina nodded and struggled for a moment with her emotions.

“So the two of you stayed friends through school and then ... ?” Mendez prompted.

“We both got jobs, got fired, got other jobs. But we always stuck together. I only had brothers growing up, and Marissa didn’t have anybody, so we became each other’s sisters.”

“And by 1981, where were you?” Dixon asked.

“We were living in Venice near the beach. I was working in downtown LA in the garment district. Marissa was a starving artist. She would sell her paintings at the beach on the weekends, but she worked as a hostess at Morton’s steakhouse to pay the rent. That’s where she met Bruce Bordain.”

“And they got involved ... romantically?”

“Marissa got involved romantically,” she corrected him. “I don’t know. Maybe it was because of her not having a dad or whatever. I mean, Bordain is old enough to be her father, but she really liked him. He made her feel special. He bought her gifts, took her places. He gave her the whole song and dance about not being in love with his wife, and how they didn’t even live together.”

“But it was just a passing thing for him?” Vince said.

Gina nodded. “She was just a toy for him. And then she got pregnant and that was the end for him. She called him and told him, and a few days later she got a check in the mail from him to go get an abortion.

“Can you believe that?” she said, disgusted. “ ‘Go take care of it,’ he said in his note. Like it was nothing. Like, like she was having a wart removed. Then he stopped returning her phone calls.”

“Did she have the abortion?” Vince asked.

“It was terrible,” Gina said. “She didn’t want to. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to keep the baby. She wanted Bruce to love her. The stress literally made her sick. Then she miscarried and everything went wrong. She started hemorrhaging. I thought she was going to die!”

“That’s when she had the hysterectomy,” Dixon ventured.

Gina nodded. “It was worse than if he had killed her. Having kids was Marissa’s biggest goal in life.”