How stupid.
Now she was going to die. Not in the same way Marissa had died, thank God. There was a gun to her back. At least it would be fast.
She should have let bad enough alone. She should have packed her things and left or at least kept her mouth shut or called the sheriff’s tip line. Twenty-five thousand was a lot of money.
She was crying. She didn’t want to die. Her feet felt like lead weights. She could hardly move them forward.
She begged. She promised. She pleaded.
She was told to shut up and cracked across the back of the head with the gun. Instantly dizzy, she stumbled and went down on her knees in the dirt.
She was told to get up. Hard to do with her hands taped behind her back. Why not just die here, on this spot? What was the difference? Dead was dead.
But her killer had other ideas.
She was yanked upward by one arm from behind. She got her feet under her and moved forward.
There was no light but moonlight and the headlights behind them. There was no road but the fire road. There would be no other traffic.
No one would save her, and no one would find her. Coyotes would eat her body.
She was turned roughly and marched off the path a few feet. The skeletons of a couple of long-abandoned buildings were like modern sculptures in the near distance. On the ground in front of her were what looked like old storm cellar doors.
She hadn’t thought of it in years, but now she had the clearest memory of the storm cellar doors at her grandmother’s house back East. She had been nine years old. She remembered her brother opening the doors and daring her to go down into the dark, dank cellar. She hadn’t wanted to, but he dared her, and she walked down the stone steps only to have him close the doors behind her.
Her killer stepped in front of her, still holding the gun on her, and reached down to open one side of the door, revealing a large hole in the ground.
There was no such thing as a storm cellar in California.
Her killer turned to open the other door.
Gina bolted, spinning and running back toward the fire road. She tripped and fell. Unable to break her fall with her hands, she hit face-first, crying out as small rocks tore the flesh of her cheek as she skidded.
A hand tangled in her hair and yanked hard, pulling her half up off the ground. She never regained her feet. She refused to. She wouldn’t make it easy. She had to be dragged and kicked and shoved back to the hole as she cried, “No, no, no, no!”
She tried to dodge sideways at the same time the gun went off and the bullet penetrated her body.
She was falling before she realized she’d been pushed.
She was gone before she hit the bottom of the well.
37
“What do you mean she’s gone?” Mendez asked stupidly. He sat at his desk writing up his notes from the day, eating a burrito from the vending machine and drinking a Mountain Dew.
“She’s gone, man,” Trammell said. “She was gone when we got there. We hung around in case she was just out to dinner or shopping or something, but she never came back. I walked around the house. Nothing looked out of place. No forced entry or anything like that. Looks like she left of her own accord. There’s a team of deputies sitting out in front of her house now in an unmarked vehicle. They haven’t seen her, either.”
“Shit,” Mendez said, checking his watch.
It was just 11:37. Gina Kemmer could have gone out with friends. She could have gone to stay with a friend. That made sense. She had been so distraught when he and Vince had left, she might have wanted support and a sympathetic ear.
Or she might have bolted. If she had been caught up in something with Marissa Fordham and Marissa Fordham was now dead, she might have decided the smartest thing she could do would be to get out of Dodge.
“Let’s get a BOLO out on her car,” he said. “Say she’s wanted for questioning in relation to a murder.”
He dug his notebook out of his coat pocket and pulled out the sheet where he had written down Gina Kemmer’s license plate number and the make, model, and color of her car. He handed it to Trammell, who went to make the call to dispatch.
“Damn,” Mendez said. “We didn’t leave her alone for that long.”
“She’s probably with a friend,” Hicks said.
Their gray metal desks sat front to front. Both were awash in paperwork.
“She just lost her best friend,” Hicks said. “You said she was a mess. She probably wanted a shoulder to cry on.”
Mendez thought about it. “I don’t know. I’ve got a bad feeling. If she knows what got Marissa Fordham killed, then she’s a target.”
“There’s not much else we can do about it now.”
“I want to get into her house.”
“You’ll never get a warrant.”
“She’s a material witness in a murder investigation. She’s gone missing—”
“That’s a liberal idea of a material witness: She knew the deceased woman. She hasn’t admitted to witnessing anything,” Hicks said, playing devil’s advocate. “It’s a free country. She’s an adult woman. She’s free to go and do whatever she wants. We don’t know that she’s missing. We’ve got no one to report her missing. Who’s going to write you a search warrant?”
“No one,” Mendez said, scowling. He hated being wrong. “If we were on television, I would get a warrant.”
Hicks laughed. “If we were on television, we could just go bust into her house without one.”
“And we could wear T-shirts and jeans to work, and we’d all drive Porsches,” Mendez said.
“And we’d have hot babes all over us,” Campbell said.
Mendez looked at him with a straight face. “You don’t have hot babes all over you? Man, that’s sad.”
Campbell fired a wad of paper at him, laughing. “Screw you!”
Mendez sighed. “Damn, I want in that house.”
“Hey, man,” Hicks said. “I’m just trying to save you from a certain death. If you go knocking on ADA Worth’s door at this time of night with what you’ve got, she’ll have your ass.”
True enough, Mendez thought. “I’d have to have my fingers crossed while I typed my affidavit.”
Every unit on the streets of town and the roads out in the county would be looking for Gina Kemmer’s car. If she was parked at the home of a friend in town, it shouldn’t take that long to find her.
Mendez tossed the last of his bad burrito into the trash and stood up.
“Where are you going?” Hicks asked.
“I’m going to drive around and look for her.”
This was one of the benefits of not having a life: He could feel free to drive around town in the dead of night, looking for a needle in a haystack.
Hicks had opted to go home to his wife, who was pregnant with their third child.
No pregnant wife for Mendez, much to his mother’s dismay. Why you don’t marry, Anthony? Why you don’t give me any grandchildren? she would ask practically every time he talked to her, and certainly every time he went to see her. His sisters were no better.
The rest of them had reproduced prodigiously enough he didn’t really feel like he had to be in a hurry. He had been too focused on his career to devote much time to looking for a wife.
He had goals. He was still thinking seriously about making the move to a career with the FBI. He wanted to see Peter Crane put away for his crimes first, then he would go after it. It didn’t make sense to put roots down deep only to have to pull them up again and relocate to the other coast.
In the meantime, he didn’t have any trouble getting a date when he wanted one. But he never let a relationship get too serious.
His thoughts turned to Sara Morgan as he turned down another street, scanning for Gina Kemmer’s blue Honda Accord. He had been surprised to hear her say her marriage to Steve Morgan was over. Not because he thought she should have stayed with the bastard, but because it seemed out of character for her to be so candid about something so private.