She was sitting in jail now. ADA Kathryn Worth had made sure there would be no bail. Milo had been caught with knife in hand going after Anne and Haley. No judge was going to dare risk it—no matter how much money the Bordains could throw around.

Milo Bordain would go to prison where she would be the state’s doll, where she would be told what to wear and where to sleep and when to eat. Vince wondered if she would even see the irony in that.

Chapter 103

103

“Milo Bordain,” Mendez said as they walked out of the hospital into the sunshine. “Nobody saw that coming.”

“No,” Vince admitted. “The brutality of that murder ... That’s usually something women reserve for unfaithful husbands, not each other. In hindsight, all the pieces fit. She felt like Marissa was hers, bought and paid for, literally. And like any spoiled child, if she couldn’t keep her toy, nobody else could have it either.”

It sounded so straightforward and logical, he thought, when it was one of the most twisted, insane murders he had ever worked. His buddies at the Bureau had already tapped him to come to Quantico and present the case for study.

“The press is already trying to come up with a catchy nickname for her, comparing her to Lizzie Borden,” Mendez said.

“Lizzie Borden was never convicted, you know,” Vince said. “Milo Bordain is going away forever and ever, amen.”

“The Bordains have deep pockets. They’ll try to buy an insanity plea.”

“I don’t care what they try,” Vince said, digging his car keys out of his pants pocket. The wind came up and flipped his necktie back over his shoulder. “A jury gets a load of those crime-scene photos—wherever they put her, they’ll throw away the key.”

“Do you think she’s crazy?”

“In the legal sense? No,” he said. “Not at all. She killed Marissa out of rage. She thought she had killed Haley, getting rid of the only witness. Why she excised the breasts might have been symbolic initially—destroying what was feminine about Marissa—but sending them to herself in the mail was definitely self-serving.”

“Trying to divert attention away from herself as a suspect by portraying herself as a victim,” Mendez said. “That’s some kind of cold blood running through her veins.”

“She’s calculating, not crazy,” Vince said. “That’s why she was so upset when she didn’t get custody of Haley. She figured if she had the child in her control, she would have made certain one way or another the girl would never ID her as the killer.”

“She’s evil,” Mendez said. “That should be a legal term. She’s guilty of being evil. That’s simple.”