Every time she thought of her friend, her memory flashed to that horrible picture of Marissa butchered and bloody, lying dead on the floor. The thing was still lying on her coffee table among her more pleasant memories of times past. She needed to get rid of it. She couldn’t have it there. She could imagine the blood seeping out of the photograph and running off it and spreading over the other snapshots of happier times, ruining them.
Her stomach tried to bolt again, but there was nothing left in it to throw up. She went to the kitchen and got a long-handled barbecue tongs out of a drawer. Back in the living room she inched sideways toward the coffee table, trying not to look at the photograph. Hand shaking badly, she tried to catch the corner of it with the tongs, swearing as she knocked it away.
After a couple of tries, she managed to get hold of it. She took it to the kitchen, holding it as far away from her as possible, as if it were the dead carcass of a rat or a snake. In the kitchen, she threw the picture in the trash and the tongs after it, the utensil now contaminated with the evil that had been done to Marissa.
A fresh wave of tears flooded her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She had never been so scared in her life.
Gina wasn’t the kind of person who went looking for excitement or lived life on the edge. That had been Marissa—always the one with the big plan. That was how they had ended up in Oak Knolclass="underline" Marissa’s big plan.
Sure, Gina had been glad to come along. And it had worked out fine. She loved it here. She loved the town and her home. The boutique was doing well. She was satisfied. Life could have just gone on that way forever. The only other thing she wanted was to meet a nice guy—not even a rich guy, just a nice guy.
Everything was ruined now. Marissa was dead.
She pressed a hand over her mouth and tried to swallow the crying, hiccupping, and choking on it. The local news was coming on with the story of Marissa’s murder leading the broadcast. Gina grabbed the remote control and turned the sound up.
First was an exterior shot of Marissa’s house, which had always been one of Gina’s favorite places, so pretty with the porch and the flowers, and Marissa’s fanciful sculptures in the yard. Now it looked abandoned and sinister.
Then coverage went live to a press conference being given in front of the sheriff’s office. The sheriff was telling about the autopsy results. That Marissa had died of multiple stab wounds, and that her daughter was in stable condition in the hospital. He confirmed the earlier reports of a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer. The number for the tip line was put up on the bottom of the screen.
Twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money. Marissa would have said it wasn’t, but it was to Gina. It was to most people. The boutique was doing well, but cash flow was always an issue with a business that had to maintain inventory. She no longer had Marissa to help her out. Twenty-five thousand dollars would take the financial sting out of her death.
But she would have to live to collect it.
Gina’s head swam and she had to sit down. The idea that came to her made her dizzy and sick. It was something Marissa would have thought of—something Marissa would have done without hesitation.
The worst they can do is say no. That’s what Marissa would have said.
But that wasn’t true. Marissa was dead.
Gina closed her eyes and saw the scene from the photograph she had thrown away.
The smartest thing she could have done would have been to pack some things and get the hell out.
But she loved her home. She loved her life here.
She had taken her phone off the hook hours before. Reporters had found out that she had been friends with Marissa. They wanted to interview her. They wanted to ask stupid questions like how did it feel to have her best friend murdered and did she know who the killer was.
Maybe she could sell her story. Maybe that was her leverage.
She muted the television and stared at the sheriff and the number for the tip line. On the coffee table lay the business card the older detective had left for her.
She didn’t know what to do.
She picked up the receiver and punched in the number.
The call went through.
“I need to talk to you ...”
Ten minutes later she was driving down the street, her mind on her mission. She turned the corner at one end of the block just as a plain burgundy Ford Taurus turned onto her street from the other end of the block. In it were two sheriff’s detectives come to watch over her and keep her safe.
32
Mark Foster was younger than Mendez expected him to be. He had imagined the head of the music department in a prestigious school like McAster, and a town like Oak Knoll—known for its summer classical music festival—would be old and stodgy in a rumpled brown suit, wearing little wire-rimmed glasses and with white hair growing out of his ears.
Instead, Foster was probably in his late forties, fit and good-looking with close-cropped thinning brown hair. He was dressed in khaki pants and a blue oxford shirt with a knitted brown necktie. The only part Mendez had gotten right was the wire-rimmed glasses.
At seven thirty in the evening Foster was still working, preparing for a rehearsal of his senior honors brass quintet. Mendez and Hicks stood in the conductor’s area of the stark white music room that rose up around them in level after level of chairs and black metal music stands. Foster distributed sheet music to the stands near them where his quintet musicians would sit.
“I’ll help any way I can,” he said. “I was horrified when I heard the news. What’s the world coming to? The murders last year, now this. You don’t expect that kind of thing here. We live in such a pretty little bubble most of the time. I remember talking with Marissa last fall after Peter Crane abducted that teacher and tried to kill her. We couldn’t believe it.”
“You were good friends?” Hicks asked.
“We ran in the same circles. Saw each other socially, occasionally met for drinks, that kind of thing.”
“When was the last time you saw Ms. Fordham?” Mendez asked.
“A couple of weeks ago at dinner,” he said. “It was so weird. I had gone to Los Olivos to try a new little hole-in-the-wall place I’d heard about. I’m a food fanatic,” he explained. “I live to find places nobody else has discovered yet. I was shocked to see anyone I knew. But there was Marissa, smiling and waving. She was always so vibrant, so full of life.”
“We were told you dated her,” Hicks said.
“We went out from time to time,” he admitted. “Plus One was Marissa’s specialty.”
“What do you mean?”
“She liked charity fund-raisers—the social scene, dressing up, having a good time, rubbing elbows with all the right people,” he explained. “But she never had to buy a ticket. She was always somebody’s Plus One.”
“A party girl,” Mendez said.
“I guess you could say so, but she wasn’t wild. She just liked to have a good time. She was a free spirit. She liked men, and men liked her.”
“Was she ever more than Plus One to you?”
“We were just friends,” Foster said, his expression carefully blank.
“Did she know you’re gay?” Mendez asked.
If Foster was shocked at the question, he did a good job of hiding it.
“I’m not gay.”
Mendez looked at Hicks, pretending confusion. “Really? Someone told us you are.”
Foster shrugged it off. “That’s nothing new. Single artsy teacher, hasn’t gotten any co-eds pregnant—must be gay. I’m not.”
“Huh,” Mendez said. “He seemed pretty sure of it.”