“She said that was a small price to pay, and so what if Milo wanted to dress her up? She kind of liked the game playing, seeing what she could get away with—the people she had as friends, the men she chose to date. She would only let Milo have just so much control and no more.

“That had gotten worse lately,” she said. “They had started arguing a lot. The more independent Marissa tried to be, the more controlling Milo was.”

Which would have made a free spirit like Marissa only try harder to slip free of her owner’s hold, Vince thought. It would have been a vicious downward spiral in their relationship that would only have exacerbated Bordain’s need for control

In her own way Milo Bordain wasn’t so different in her need for order than Zander Zahn had been. The difference was Zahn had exercised his need for order over inanimate objects. Milo Bordain needed to control the people in her life like pieces on a chessboard.

“I told Marissa to put an end to it,” Gina said. “Why live like that? It was so sick and twisted. She needed to get away from the Bordains. Her career as an artist had taken off. She was making good money. The boutique is doing well. She didn’t need them anymore.”

And that, Vince knew, was what had gotten Marissa Fordham killed.

Milo Bordain would never have been able to tolerate Marissa—the daughter she never had—taking Haley—her make-believe grandchild—out of her life. Her real-life dolls were going to walk away from her real-life playhouse, and she would control them no more.

“And was Marissa going to do that?” Mendez asked. “Tell Milo Bordain it was over?”

“She was going to tell the truth, and that should have been the end of it.”

“And it was,” Dixon said.

“I can’t believe Milo was the one who did that to her,” Gina said, the tears rising again. “How could one woman do that to another woman? And how could she do that to Haley?”

“She couldn’t leave a witness,” Mendez said.

“But she loved Haley! How could she hurt her like that?”

“People like Milo Bordain don’t love the way the rest of us love, Gina,” Vince explained. “They are the center of their universe, and everyone else is just an object that revolves around them. They might think the object is beautiful and that they have to possess it, but in the end it’s just a thing to them.”

The emotion came over Gina then like a wave she couldn’t hold back, and she started to sob, and Vince suspected she was seeing that crime-scene Polaroid he had shown her of her best friend butchered on the kitchen floor.

He wondered if Milo Bordain would replay that same scene in her memory. Probably, but with very different emotions attached.