“Gut feeling.”

“You don’t like him.”

“I’m not crazy about you either, at the moment,” Mendez complained.

Vince rolled his eyes. “Get over yourself.”

He chose a trio of pills, tossed them back, and washed them down with locally bottled orange cream soda.

“He worked with Lisa Warwick on projects for the Thomas Center,” Mendez said. “He had an affair with her. He worked with Marissa Fordham on a project for the center. She was beautiful, sexy, single, liked men ...”

“Why would he kill her?”

“Say she threatened to tell his wife. What’s left of his marriage falls apart, and he loses his daughter.”

“What about the wife?” Vince asked, watching his reaction. Confusion.

“What about her?”

“Her good friend was having an affair with her husband,” Vince said. “Women aren’t that shocked when men cheat on them, but to be betrayed by one of their own ... That’s unforgivable.”

Mendez looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “You think Sara could have killed Marissa Fordham?”

“I’m saying if you’re looking at one spouse in a love triangle, you need to look at them both. They both lose in a divorce. The husband loses the wife and family. The wife loses a fairy tale—the handsome prince, the castle, the lifestyle ...”

“That’s crazy,” Mendez said. “Sara Morgan is just trying to hold herself and her family together. For her to have the kind of rage to do what was done to Marissa Fordham ...? No way. Besides, Fordham was found naked.”

“So? Maybe she slept naked and was attacked in the middle of the night. Or, let’s throw a twist into the story: Maybe she and Mrs. Morgan were more than friends.”

Mendez didn’t want to hear any of it. Interesting.

“The nine-one-one call,” he said. “The little girl said her daddy hurt her mommy.”

“People wear disguises.”

“The kid would know her own father.”

“Why?” Vince challenged. “Nobody else knows who he is.”

“Maybe Ms. Kemmer will know,” Mendez said, pulling the car to the curb in front of a fanciful Tudor cottage with a wildflower garden filling the front yard.

Dixon had asked them to bring Gina Kemmer in for the interview, but Vince wanted to see her in her own environment. A lot could be learned from a subject’s surroundings.

He got out of the car and looked around. Ms. Kemmer was the domestic kind. She loved her home, took pride in it, had literally and figuratively set down roots here.

The garden was an expression of joy, filled with old-fashioned climbing roses and tea roses, tall blue delphinium and pink foxglove, and snapdragons of all colors. Flower boxes under the front windows of the house spilled over with pink geraniums and ivy and blue lobelia.

The car in her driveway, parked in front of the little garage that matched the Tudor house, was a blue 1981 Honda Accord. Gina Kemmer was doing well for herself.