“Do you by any chance know where Haley was born?”

“No.”

“We’re trying to find her birth certificate,” Mendez said. “Do you have any idea where Marissa would have kept that?”

“No.”

“Actually, what we really want is to find Haley’s father,” Vince said. “Do you know who he is?”

“Marissa never talked about him.”

“Never? You were like sisters. She must have said something.”

She shook her head.

“Was he from around here?”

“No.”

“But she did have a few boyfriends over the years, right?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “Marissa liked men. Men liked Marissa. It worked out for her. Men were drawn to her, fell all over her. They would just give her things—even men she wasn’t dating.”

Mendez looked up from his note making. “What do you mean give her things?”

“Jewelry, clothes, flowers, whatever. Men loved her.”

“One didn’t,” Vince pointed out.

He reached inside his jacket, plucked a Polaroid from his breast pocket and handed it to her. She took it automatically. It was a shot of Marissa Fordham lying dead on the floor of her kitchen, butchered and bloody.

Gina Kemmer shrieked and jumped up out of her chair, flinging the photograph away from her as if it had transformed into a venomous snake.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” she shouted, scrambling backward, trying to get away from the hideous image. She hit a plant stand with her arm and knocked a huge Boston fern to the floor. The heavy pot broke with the sound of a gunshot and she screamed.

“Someone did that to her, Gina,” Vince said.

“Why would you bring that here?!” She looked horrified and, more important, terrified. “Why would you show that to me? Oh my God!”

“Because that’s the reality here, Gina,” Vince said soberly. “That’s the truth. Someone did that to your best friend.”

The color went out of her face like water being sucked down a drain. She turned and doubled over and threw up on the fallen fern.

Vince stood up and dug a business card out of his wallet and placed it on top of the photograph on the coffee table.

He put a hand on Gina Kemmer’s shoulder as she sat back down on her chair, gagging and sobbing hysterically, shaking hard.

“You’re a poor liar, Gina,” he said without rancor, almost gently. “Your heart’s not in it. It doesn’t come to you naturally. But you’re scared. You probably made a promise to Marissa. You don’t want to break it, but it’s a terrible burden. You’re shaking under the weight of it.

“You give me a call—night or day—when you want to take that burden off your shoulders and tell me the truth.”

Chapter 26

26

“That was some hardball you just threw,” Mendez said as they walked out to the car.