by Lisa Jackson
Well, that was over. He’d made it clear.
She grabbed a broom from the closet and began sweeping the floor. The phone rang and she managed to answer it and balance the receiver between her shoulder and ear as she brushed empty shells from beneath Chia’s cage.
“It’s Bentz.” Cold. Professional. Her heart did a quick little flip before she set the broom aside. From the background noise, the hum of an engine, and the crackle of the police band radio, she guessed he was on his cell phone. “I thought you’d like to know that we found the victims.”
Oh, God. “So soon? Wait, victims? Plural?” More than one woman had been killed?
“Jane Does. But just as you described them,” he admitted, his voice a little less harsh. “One chained to the wall with the symbols around her, the other strapped to the wheel you described.”
“And both …”
“Yeah. Beheaded.”
Her stomach retched and she shot to the sink, thinking she would throw up. She should have felt a little sense of validation, that she’d been right and proved the skeptics wrong. Instead she just felt horror. Blind, mind-numbing horror.
“Both victims were in the same place,” he explained.
Her chest tightened as she remembered the women and their pain. As she kicked out a kitchen chair and dropped into it, Bentz gave her a summarized and, she suspected, sanitized version of what he’d found.
“But it was just as you described. Right on the money. Except that the crypt was really an old storage silo.”
Tears threatened. She felt weak. Helpless. All too clearly she remembered her visions, recalled the moments the women were slain. And she could do nothing but watch in horror. Her hands shook as she held the phone. Her right was still bandaged. Her mirror upstairs shattered.
“We’ll get him, Liv—Olivia,” Bentz said more kindly and her heart twisted.
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
How many more would she see tortured and killed? The tears began to flow, running down her cheeks and chin to fall to the table. “Listen. I know this is rough—”
She blinked hard. No one could understand. No one.
“—In the meantime, the department’s authorized around-the-clock security for you.” She swallowed hard, brushed aside her tears with the back of a hand. “Did Ole Olsen’s crew come over?”
“Yes.” She nodded, glancing around the kitchen, though she knew he couldn’t see her. From her perch Chia set out a high-pitched whistle. Olivia forced a smile she didn’t feel. “That wasn’t part of the system, just Chia’s comment, but believe me, I’ve literally got more bells and whistles than I know what to do with. I think I need a degree in electrical engineering just to lock this place down.”
“Just make sure you use it.”
“I will … if I can ever figure it out.” Buck up, Olivia. Sitting around crying won’t help the victims and it certainly won’t help you.
“You’re a smart woman. You’ll do fine,” he said, but she found little warmth in his compliment. Women were dying and she could do nothing. Nothing.
“Olivia? Are you all right?”
She gritted her teeth. “No, I’m not. I feel responsible for this somehow.”
“It’s not your—”
“I know that, okay! But it’s hard.” She tried vainly to pull herself together. “Look, I was about to call you. You asked if I had any siblings and I said ‘no’ but that was before I looked into my family Bible and discovered I have a brother.”
“I know.”
She froze. “You know?”
“I heard that your mother had a son before she was married to your father. She gave him up. Private adoption. So far, no record of it.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” she asked, her temper instantly igniting. Maybe she didn’t know Bentz at all. She’d accepted the fact that they couldn’t be lovers. She had come to the painful conclusion that Bentz was breaking off their short-lived relationship not only because he was adhering to his sense of professionalism but also because he was just plain incapable of allowing a woman to get too close. No doubt about it, he’d been burned and burned badly. Nonetheless, he should have had the decency to tell her about her brother. “Didn’t you think I’d want to know about this?”
“That’s one of the reasons I called. I just found out this afternoon before I got called to the scene. This was my first chance to get hold of you.”
Mentally, she counted to ten. Tried to calm down. It didn’t work. “How did you find out?”
“From one of your mother’s exes. Oscar Cantrell.”
“The one who owns Benchmark Realty.”
“That’s him. Bernadette drank a little too much one night and spilled the beans. I need to talk to her.”
“You’ll be wasting your time.” Olivia leaned a hip against the table and stared outside to the verandah. A crow was hopping along the rail. “I’ve already spoken to her about my brother. She either doesn’t know or won’t say who adopted him. I don’t know if she went through an attorney or if my grandmother handled it herself.”
“The department is already searching the county and state records,” Bentz said. “As well as hospitals and clinics.”
“I don’t think Bernadette went to a hospital,” Olivia said. “My grandmother did a lot of things in her life. One of them was priding herself in being a midwife though she wasn’t licensed.”
“So you don’t think your mother even went to a doctor for prenatal care?”
“That’s very, very doubtful.”
“I’ve got to go. Someone’s paging me,” Bentz said. “But you take care of yourself. If you see anything or feel that you’re in any kind of danger, call me.”
“I will,” she promised, “but just nail this guy, okay?”
“I’m workin’ on it.”
“Make it soon, Bentz. Make it soon.”
Kristi was pissed. She flopped herself into the passenger side of her father’s Jeep and folded her arms across her chest. “Three hours,” she said as he started the car. “I waited three damned hours!”
“I called,” Bentz pointed out. “Told you I got held up.”
She glared out the window and wished her dad were anything but a homicide dick. She hated his profession. Being a cop’s kid sucked.
He pulled out of the lot next to Cramer Hall. There wasn’t much traffic on campus; most of the kids had left earlier. “I offered to have someone pick you up.”
“I could have found a ride,” she grumbled. “If you were too busy—”
“It was important.”
“It’s always important,” she threw back at him. God, why hadn’t she stayed at school? Right now she and Brian could be drinking beer, pretending to study, and kissing in his room… instead she was stuck the next five days hanging out in her dad’s apartment, dodging calls from Jay and wishing she were back at All Saints. While some kids were pathetically homesick by this time of year, Kristi was already wishing she wasn’t going home to that cracker box of an apartment that Rick swore he’d someday move from. Fat chance. He loved it there and now that she was gone … she felt a jab of guilt. He was paying for her school. Big bucks. On his salary he couldn’t afford anything else while she was in college. But she was still mad. Real mad.
Slumping down in the passenger seat, she scowled out the window. “Mom was never late picking me up,” she said and, from the corner of her eye, noticed Bentz’s mouth tighten. Just as she knew it would. Rarely did she pull out the “Mom” weapon, only when she was really, really ticked off. Today qualified, so she opened the mental drawer and found the long blade that she knew cut straight to her father’s heart. She decided to give it one little twist. “I hate it that you’re a cop. Mom did, too.”
“She knew I was going to join the force when she married me.” He switched on the wipers.
“But I didn’t have a choice.”
“None of us get to choose our parents,” he said through lips that barely mo
ved, then slanted a glance at her as he wended his way through the narrow campus streets. “You just got lucky.”
Was he kidding? No. There wasn’t even a hint of amusement on his face. That was the problem. “Detective” Rick Bentz was always so damned serious. Could barely crack a smile; not that she’d given him any reason to lately. There had been a time when he’d been more easygoing, but that had been long ago. She felt a little bad about the way she’d treated him. Some of her anger had dissipated once she’d gotten her little digs in and she knew he was trying to be a great dad and repair some of the damage between them.
“Jay called. I think he wants you to come to his house for Thanksgiving.”
She blew out her breath. “Jay and I are breaking up.”
“Oh?” He slowed for a stop sign. “Does he know it yet?”
The ring in her pocket seemed suddenly as big as a tire from one of those monster trucks. “I was waiting to tell him in person.”
“Good idea.” He frowned, as if he’d been through something similar. Oh, yeah, right. No way. Not the man married to his job. “You might want to let him down slowly.”
Now her father was giving her advice on her love life. What a laugh! “Who are you? Dear Abby or Dr. Sam?”
One side of his lip twisted upward. “Jay’s an okay guy.”
“I thought you didn’t like him.”
“I don’t like anyone you date.”
“Don’t I know it,” she grumbled and considered telling him about Brian but he’d just get on her case about not breaking up with Jay first and he wouldn’t like it that she was seeing a guy who was around thirty. No way. Bentz would have a fit. Probably have Brian checked out through the department’s computers or, worse yet, meet him and give him the third-degree. No thank you. Time to change the subject. “So you’re working on that serial killer case, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it as bad as the last one?”
“They’re all bad,” he said and drove past the campus gates, where the traffic increased, the headlights and streetlights chasing away the gloom. “But yes, I think this is worse than the Rosary Killer.”
“Why?”
He hesitated.
“God, Dad, you can trust me.”
“It’s just closer to home. Some of the girls killed have been college coeds.”
“Yeah, I figured.” She’d known that would freak him out. “I heard some of the kids talking and the school made an announcement. We’re supposed to be extra careful.”
“You’d better be.”
She rolled her eyes, but didn’t tell him to butt out of her life. “So are you gonna get this guy?”
“You bet.”
“Then you’ll be famous again.”
“Or infamous.” He flashed her a smile as he drove through the city, gunning it as he turned onto the freeway. He didn’t even complain when she tuned the radio to “her” station instead of that crappy WSLJ that he listened to. Oldies. Jazz. Obscure music you couldn’t find on CDs and, of course, the radio talk show that he found so fascinating, Midnight Confessions hosted by Dr. Sam. Ever since last summer when that Rosary Killer was on the loose, her dad had been tuning in. It was weird. Kristi had first introduced him to Dr. Sam and, unbeknownst to Bentz, had even called in a few times and gotten some advice from the radio shrink.
Well, who wouldn’t, after what she’d found out about herself, her mother, the man she’d thought was an uncle, and the man who had raised her. They’d all been living a lie. It was probably why her mom had died. Why else would Jennifer have lost control of her car and crashed into the tree? She hadn’t been legally drunk—no way. Jennifer Bentz had hated excessive alcohol almost as much as she’d hated her husband being a cop. It had been a clear day. No other car involved. But there had been some traces of Valium in her bloodstream … Damn it all.
Kristi was also starting to believe that her mother had hated herself. For all the mistakes she’d made in her life. The more Kristi learned about psychology from weird Dr. Sutter, the more she was convinced her mother had been consumed with self-loathing. Why? Because she’d messed up. Gotten it on with her brother-in-law, a priest no less, ended up pregnant and then lived a lie. Who wouldn’t go nuts? Worse yet, years later Jennifer had taken up with Father James again. Like he was some kind of irresistible force or forbidden fruit. No wonder she’d been seeing a shrink and her father had poured himself into a bottle. Then there was the incident when Bentz had killed a kid he thought was going to shoot his partner. That had happened in L.A. Just like everything else.
So they’d moved east. To New Orleans. The only place her dad could get another job as a detective. Yeah, that made a lot of sense. Sometimes Kristi just wished they lived somewhere in the middle of the country—somewhere like Kansas or Oklahoma—and her mom was still alive and really into gardening and her dad sold insurance or real estate, like normal people. They would have a nice two-story house with a picket fence and a dog and a cat, and she would have an older brother to watch over her and a younger sister to confide in and fight with. There would be a patio with a barbecue and maybe one of those old-fashioned swings on the front porch and … She snapped herself out of the daydream.
Get real!
She glanced over at the man who called himself her dad. Lines of worry fanned from the corners of his eyes as he squinted against the traffic. His lips were thin and she knew he was thinking about the case. Not that she could blame him.
All in all, he wasn’t such a bad guy.
For a paranoid, recovering alcoholic, homicide dick.
The Chosen One was frantic.
His head thundered, felt as if it was going to explode.
No amount of prayer, nor flogging, could calm him.
Alone in his sanctuary, he stood naked and shaking at the small table, flipping anxiously through the pages of his book. Then, in despair, he rocked back on his heels. His heart was pounding, his head on fire. St. Olivia’s feast day was in June … no, that would never do. He couldn’t wait that long for her sacrifice and Olivia wasn’t even canonized … no, no … He began to sweat. His heart rate accelerated to a fever pitch. Then there was Oliva … feast day March fifth, no, no … The storm in his head raged and he drew in deep breaths …
Calm down.
Think rationally.
The other ones he’d sacrificed had not answered to the names of the saints whom they’d become, had they?
No. He’d had to rename them.
He would have to stick to his original method and baptize Olivia into the proper name. That was all. He was becoming confused. His mission unfocused. Sometimes he doubted himself … if only he had someone in whom he could confide. He’d had his apprentice and there had been comfort in sharing … but that was over now and he had to resort to confession … when the doubts became unbearable, he could confess and not worry about detection.
He closed his eyes and sent up a short prayer for clarity. That’s what he needed now. Ever since the last sacrifice, he’d lacked clarity. The rite itself had buoyed him to the God-like state he experienced at each sacrifice but afterward, much too soon this time, he’d tumbled down so far into the black depths of despair, even questioning his mission.
He tried recalling the act, visualizing St. Catherine of Alexandria’s face as he’d lifted his sword, but even that did not bring him to euphoria, nor arousal. Because of the woman. Olivia. She was getting nearer. He could feel her. Watching. Wanting to stop him.
This is a test. God is always giving you a challenge and you must not waver on your mission.
“Maintain,” he told himself and then, drawing deep breaths, began again, slowly turning the pages of his book, his eyes scanning each thin page. There were many saints to choose from … he just had to find the perfect one—yes, that was it, God was speaking to him. It had to be soon. Yes … yes … Here!
St. Bibiana … Vivian … not so far from Olivia, many of the same letters in her name, not that it mattered, bu
t… oh, yes … the way she was martyred. He read hungrily, already thinking of his mission. St. Vivian had been jailed in a madhouse and routinely flogged. Eventually she’d been left for the dogs … who surprisingly weren’t interested in feasting upon her.
He tapped his fingers on the page.
Obviously, those pathetic curs weren’t the right kind of dogs, nor trained properly … nor hungry enough.
He would have to do some research. In the library. Rottweiler? Pit bull? Or a hybrid with a wolf … oh, that would be a nice touch and there were those lowlifes who bred such animals, all without papers, behind the authorities’ backs … and the place, well, that was already taken care of … He had a whip … he glanced to the wall where an ancient cat-o'-nine-tails hung next to a picture of the Madonna. Oh, yesssss …
The Chosen One finally found peace. His headache abated to a dull, irritating throb. His mission was clear again. He smiled and made the sign of the cross at the altar, then he found his pinking shears and began cutting out the picture of St. Vivian … beautiful… pious … smooth skinned … just like Olivia Benchet …
Chapter Twenty-nine
“I can’t believe that you actually found this place!” Olivia exclaimed, throwing open the door. It was late Wednesday morning, and Sarah Restin, two bags sitting on the floorboards, was standing on Olivia’s front porch. “God, it’s so good to see you!” Olivia threw her arms around her friend and said, “Don’t pay any attention to the dog.” Hairy S was having his usual barking fit, running in crazy circles and setting off a chain reaction of cawing and scolding from the crows and squirrels hiding in the surrounding trees.
“I said I was coming, didn’t I?” Sarah said, holding tight and sidestepping Hairy. Olivia remembered that Sarah didn’t like animals, had a particular phobia of dogs, the result of having been bitten in the leg while riding her bike as a girl. “I just lucked out and got on an early flight… a very early flight,” Sarah said, eyeing Hairy S warily.