Milo Bordain looked at the knife in her hand, some kind of terrible realization dawning.
"Drop the knife!"
Slowly her fingers peeled away from the handle. The knife fell to the ground. Bordain fell to her knees, emotions tearing through her. She opened her mouth to cry, but no sound came. She curled into a ball, her broad shoulders heaving as she sobbed silently.
Trying to suck in some air, Anne pushed herself up onto her knees. Haley flung herself into Anne"s arms, crying and crying.
"Mommy! Mommy!"
"It"s okay!" Anne panted, holding her tight. "We"re okay! We"re all right. It"s over."
And then, somehow, Vince was there, holding them both, and they were safe.
102.
"No one was supposed to get hurt," Gina began. "We never meant for that at all. We were trying to do something good, really. It was all supposed to work out for the best for everybody, but most of all for Haley."
"Let"s start at the beginning, Gina," Vince said. "Tell us about you and Marissa."
They had gathered in her hospital room-Dixon, Mendez, Hicks, and himself. She was strong enough for it now.
She would be sent home in another day or so, though her ordeal was far from over. Her ankle would require more surgery and physical therapy, and would probably always be a reminder of what she had gone through.
For now, though, the more superficial of her physical injuries had begun to fade from view.
"At the very beginning," she started, "Marissa-she was Melissa then-she and I became friends in the seventh grade. We lived in Reseda. I had a normal family. Marissa grew up in the foster care system.
"Her mother was killed in a car accident when she was eight, and her father became an alcoholic and couldn"t take care of her. It was really sad. He died when we were seniors in high school."
"So family was probably really important to Marissa," Vince said.
"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 pa.s.sing 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."
"She took it hard," Vince said. Marissa would have been twenty-three years old at the time. Young, with no family to fall back on, working as a hostess, and her knight in shining armor had set off a series of events that had utterly destroyed her fantasy of a perfect life.
"So where does Haley enter into this?" Mendez asked.
"Once a week we both volunteered at a women"s shelter in Venice," Gina said. "We met this girl our age. She was pregnant. She called herself Star, but we never knew her real name. She said she came to LA to become a movie star, but changing her name was as close as she ever got."
"And the father of her baby?" Vince asked.
"We never knew. I don"t think she knew. One day she"d tell us it was her drug dealer, and the next day she"d say he was a struggling actor or a big-shot director.
"Star would talk about getting rid of the baby, having an abortion. Then she would decide she wanted the baby, and she would talk all this crazy talk about how she would raise the baby and have a really nice apartment and buy the baby everything. But she didn"t have any money. I mean, get real. She was a homeless drug-addicted prost.i.tute. She didn"t have any way to support herself, let alone a baby.
"It bothered Marissa a lot. She was afraid of what Star would do to the baby, how she might have it and throw it in a Dumpster, or have it and drown it in a toilet. Or maybe she would sell it. Marissa said she had read about people selling babies to pedophiles and sick stuff like that. I didn"t even want to know that could happen!"
"So Marissa came up with a plan?" Vince said.
"She said, what if she got the baby and told Bruce Bordain it was his. The timing worked. He has tons of money. What would it be to him to pay for raising a baby? Nothing. And he should have been doing it anyway, for Marissa"s baby.
"The baby would be taken care of and so would Marissa. She would be able to concentrate on her art. She would have the child she always wanted. It would be good for everyone."
"Except Bruce Bordain," Mendez pointed out.
"Well ... neither one of us felt very sorry for him."
"So Star had the baby and what? Marissa just took her?" Hicks asked.
"No, no. It wasn"t like that," Gina said. "They made a deal. Marissa would pay for Star"s drug rehab and prenatal care for the baby. There would be one payoff when the baby was born, and Star would have the birth certificate made out the way Marissa wanted."
"So it was like a private adoption," Vince said.
"Basically. Marissa sold everything she owned and took a second job to do it. She couldn"t let Bordain see her because of course she wasn"t pregnant. So she had to quit her job at Morton"s. She told her boss she was quitting because she was pregnant, knowing Bruce would ask when she wasn"t there. She got a job at a seafood place in Santa Monica and worked days at a boutique.
"She waited until right before Haley was born to call Bordain and tell him she was having the baby. He sent another check, but he told her he didn"t want to hear from her again."
"So she moved to Oak Knoll," Mendez said.
"She knew his wife lived here part-time. It was the only place the Bordains had a home that we could afford to move to."
"And what was your part in it, Gina?" Dixon asked.
"It was an adventure, Marissa told me," she said, rolling her eyes at the ultimate understatement. "I thought, why not? We decided we would take some of the money Bordain had given her and money that I had saved, and start the boutique."
"And this is when Marissa changed her name?" Mendez asked. "About the time you moved up here?"
"Right before. She didn"t trust Star not to change her mind and show up one day and want Haley back. So we made up the whole story about her being from Rhode Island, and being cut off from her family-like a heroine from a Sidney Sheldon novel or something. It was kind of exciting."
"So, you both moved up here," Dixon said. "Bruce Bordain couldn"t ignore Marissa if she was here right under his wife"s nose. Did he ever question that he was the baby"s father?"
"No," Gina said. "I thought he would. I thought he"d want some kind of blood test or something, and then we"d be sunk. But the money mattered less to him than if Marissa would have made a big public stink about it-or I guess I should say it mattered more to Mrs. Bordain. The whole support-the-artist thing was her idea."
"Let me get this straight," Mendez said. "Marissa went to blackmail Bruce Bordain, and his wife came up with a plan that kept her in their lives?"
"Creepy, huh?" Gina said. "But I guess in a weird way it was a control thing over her husband, you know? And she really got into it.
"She treated Marissa and Haley like they were her pretend family or something, like they were life-size dolls or something. Even though Marissa was an artist, Milo decorated their house the way she she wanted it. She designed the art studio-how crazy is that? She would tell Marissa what to wear to events, and if Marissa didn"t do it Mrs. Bordain would have a fit." wanted it. She designed the art studio-how crazy is that? She would tell Marissa what to wear to events, and if Marissa didn"t do it Mrs. Bordain would have a fit."
"How did Marissa feel about that?" Vince asked.
"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.
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.
103.
"Milo Bordain," Mendez said as they walked out of the hospital into the sunshine. "n.o.body 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, n.o.body 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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."
"We can look at anything and make it simple," Vince said. "Even murder. Every one of them can be boiled down to this: Either somebody didn"t get what they wanted, or someone wanted exactly what they got. Disappointment or desire."
"Or both."
And the result was ultimately all the same: lives broken and the death of dreams. Marissa"s life had held a wealth of promise, now gone. She would no longer have the chance to make the world a better place by creating art or by raising a wonderful child. Milo Bordain, who had been a driving force in the community and instrumental in raising funds for half a dozen charities, would leave a void in those positions. Mark Foster, a bright light in his field, had given up his future trying to protect a secret. And Darren Bordain, who had known nothing about his lover"s attempt on Gina"s life or his mother"s murder of Marissa, was left emotionally devastated without the two people most important in his life.
Bruce Bordain, who had effectively set this all in motion by cheating on his wife and destroying the dreams of a young woman, would walk away unscathed.
"How"s Anne?" Mendez asked.
A smile tugged at one corner of Vince"s mouth. "Remarkable. Beat up, cut up, but incredible. But I told her if somebody tries to kill her one more time I"m locking her up for safekeeping."