by Lisa Jackson
“Kinda like New Orleans.”
“I mean it. That so-called friend of Jennifer is messin’ with ya. San Juan Capistrano? Come on. You tell this friend you’ve been seeing ghosts and she sends you to Capistrano. Give me an effin’ break.”
“She’s not a ghost,” he said, though in truth he was feeling haunted. Exactly what whoever was behind this wanted.
“Look I gotta go.” Bentz’s ridicule capacity was on overflow.
“Great. Walk about the hallowed grounds, talk to the white lady or the faceless monk or the dead guy in his rocking chair. Or Jennifer, since you obviously think she’s hanging out with them. Listen, if you ever get close enough to talk to her, give her my love.”
“Screw you, Montoya,” he said as the light turned green and he eased ahead toward the mission.
“You should get so lucky.” His partner hung up and Bentz felt his lips twist upward a bit. He missed that cocky son of a bitch, just as he missed his job, but not quite as much as he missed Olivia.
“Check the cell phone records, include the texts and read what they say if anything,” Hayes said as he and Martinez left the crime scene and walked toward their cars. “They should give us a window of time when the girls were abducted. If this is like the Caldwell case, then we can assume the vics were killed somewhere else and brought here to be staged and discovered. We need to find out who owns the facility and who rents units here, not just Unit 8 but all of them. See if there’s any connection to the Springer twins. Or if anyone saw anything suspicious.”
“I’ll have all the traffic cameras checked as well, and some of the security cameras in nearby businesses.”
They would canvass the area using uniformed police and detectives to try and locate anyone who had seen anything. A convenience store and gas station were in clear sight of the underpass and storage units. Maybe someone, an employee or customer, saw something that would give them a lead. Anything to go on. If the times of death on the bodies were accurate, the victims had already been dead over twelve hours, and each minute that passed was critical to the investigation.
“And we should contact those groups dedicated to twins in the area. The killer knows they’re twins. He had to know when they were born to abduct them just before their birthday. That takes planning.”
“Online groups, too,” Martinez suggested, and the scope of the investigation just got a whole lot wider.
“Right.”
“Our doer is organized,” Martinez observed as she took in the scene. “Meticulous. Probably a neat freak.”
“Who only kills once every twelve years,” Hayes reminded her.
“We think. I’ll check with other agencies, in other states, the F.B.I. He might be spreading his love around. See if there are any murders of twins in the surrounding states. Hell, make it the entire United States.”
“And recent releases from the prisons. Maybe he’s been incarcerated for the last twelve years. I’ll run a check of prison records. We should look at the psychological profiles of anyone who’s been released for a violent crime in the last year.”
“Could be a long list.”
“Amen.” He hated to think how much time it would take.
They reached Martinez’s car and she opened the door, then asked, “So tell me, what was the meaning of that crack by Bledsoe? What the hell does Rick Bentz have to do with this?”
“Nothing. Probably coincidence.” Hayes reached into his pocket and slid his shades onto his face. “The connection is that Bledsoe worked with Bentz and Trinidad on the Caldwell twin case.”
She was nodding. Getting it.
“Bledsoe always needs someone to blame.”
“That’s it? Not because Bledsoe was shut down by Bentz’s wife?” she asked. “Detective Rankin said something about it when his name came up this morning.”
“Rankin has her own ax to grind,” Hayes said. He didn’t want to get dragged into department gossip, especially not twelve-or fifteen-year-old rumors.
“Yeah, she said she dated Bentz, too.”
“Along with others.”
“Including Corinne O’Donnell,” she pointed out.
“That’s right.” He nodded, leaning a hip against the car and feeling heat from the back panel through his pants. “And there were a few more. One was Bonita Unsel. Worked Vice before she came to Homicide. Others. I can’t really remember. Ancient history.”
“History that happened before Bentz left town.” Little lines gathered between her eyebrows as an eighteen-wheeler rolled up the ramp to the freeway. “Maybe our guy isn’t so much about killing twins as in putting another murder in Bentz’s face. Maybe he knows Bentz is back in town.”
“It’s possible,” he agreed.
“So how did it all go down back then—the Caldwell twins’ murders?” Martinez asked. “Was it Bentz who dropped the ball on the case?”
Hayes shook his head. “Nah. The guy was a mess, believe me. But it wasn’t his fault, at least not entirely, that the case went cold.” Though he’d never admitted it, Hayes did think that Bentz should have resigned from the double homicide early on, leave it to Bledsoe or Trinidad. At the time Rick Bentz had been a pale version of his once sharp self, dulled to the point of not caring about his work. The LAPD had taken the position that Bentz, as lead investigator was responsible for finding the killer of two beautiful twenty-one-year-old college coeds. The case was in the public eye, which made the failure to make an arrest that much worse. “He became the scapegoat.”
“Bledsoe still seems to blame him.”
Hayes lifted a shoulder. “Bledsoe and Bentz never got along. They worked the case together, but, as I said, Bentz was the lead. When he left, Bledsoe took over, but always blamed his old partner.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, no love lost between those two.”
Martinez’s cell phone went off. “I’ll call ya if I find out anything.” She clicked on the phone. “Martinez.”
Hayes glanced back at the scene, crossed an alley, and jogged to his car, thinking about the long list of calls to be made and records to be checked in this early process of tracking down a killer. With the mountain of work ahead of him, he’d be lucky to see his daughter again before she turned thirty.
CHAPTER 13
The night was muggy and the scent of the Mississippi River rolled through the streets of New Orleans. Tonight, driving through the French Quarter, Montoya felt as dark and disturbed as the slow-moving water, his conversation with Bentz echoing through his mind.
Bentz was being a damned fool, off chasing the ghost of his dead ex-wife when he could be home, here, with his real, living, flesh-and-blood spouse. It just didn’t make sense. Bentz, usually pragmatic, was definitely not playing with a full deck. No doubt his near-death experience had messed with his mind. Big-time.
There wasn’t much traffic this time of night, but the lights of the city, revitalized since the hurricane, blazed, as he pulled into his driveway.
Pocketing his keys, he walked up the sidewalk and into his house, a double-wide shotgun that he’d been renovating when Hurricane Katrina had struck with all the vengeance of hell. God, the place had been a mess, though not hit as severely as some of the homes that were nearly obliterated. Still, the damage was enough that he hated the thought of another hurricane. He’d rebuilt, like so many others. His renovation plans included retaining as much of the original charm of his shoebox of a house as he could, while updating to accommodate his new family. Not only had he gained a wife in Abby, but she’d come with a skittish gray tabby named Ansel who hid beneath the furniture, and a happy-go-lucky chocolate lab, Hershey. The dog now danced at his feet, his tail wagging so wildly it swiped precariously at everything on the coffee table.
“Hey, boy,” he said while scratching behind the Lab’s ears. “Wanna go outside?” With a deep bark, Hershey raced him down the long hallway that bisected the house and led to the enclosed backyard.
Following Hershey, Montoya put in a call t
o Abby. She was a photographer and tonight she’d scheduled a late-night photo shoot in her studio outside the city.
The dog was running back and forth, a bundle of energy. “I get it, man,” Montoya told the dog, tossing a yellow tennis ball into the yard as he waited for Abby’s voice mail to kick in. Hershey took off at a dead run and found the ball in the darkness while Montoya left his wife a message. The big lab then galloped back and dropped the ball at Montoya’s feet. His tail wagged until Montoya snatched the ball up and tossed it so the dog could pounce on it again. Another throw and an equally quick retrieval, again and again. They played the game for nearly half an hour, the dog a bundle of energy, Montoya thinking about his ex-partner and Bentz’s emotional suicide mission to L.A.
What was the guy doing? Bentz’s first wife Jennifer had been no angel. And she was dead and buried. Fortunately. The way Montoya understood it, she’d been a bitch of a thing when she’d been alive. Bentz had divorced her, hadn’t he? Montoya had never met Jennifer but he’d heard from Bentz himself that she’d cheated on him, over and over again, even with Bentz’s damned half brother. A priest, no less.
“Bitch,” he said, throwing the ball into the air and watching the dog take off, nearly flying.
Ironically, Olivia had been attracted to that same man once, Father James McLaren, before she’d married Bentz. But she’d come to her senses and they’d been happy together.
Until recently.
Ever since Bentz had awakened from the damned coma, the one his daughter had insisted would take his life, he’d been a changed man. Remote. Almost haunted.
Montoya had chalked it up to inactivity; not being able to work, not having the strength to fight or walk on his own. Now Montoya wasn’t so certain. Maybe when a guy brushes up with death that closely, he comes back to life with a new, dark attitude. Because that was how it was. Rick Bentz had not returned to consciousness with a newfound appreciation for life, a revitalized joie de vivre. Nu-uh. None of that getting called to the light shit. No born-again Christian was Bentz.
Instead he’d awakened with an urgency to find his dead ex-wife, a bitch if there ever had been one.
Bentz was a good man who’d definitely gone around the bend.
It was all a flippin’ mess.
In Montoya’s opinion, Jennifer Bentz should bloody well stay dead.
Before driving to San Juan Capistrano, Bentz had done his homework. He’d searched the Internet as well as the public records of Orange County and the town of San Juan Capistrano, looking for anything relating to an inn or hotel dedicated to Saint Miguel or San Miguel. He’d thought Shana McIntyre might have been lying—jerking his chain. But no. He’d found reference and pictures of a small chapel that wasn’t a part of the larger mission.
He’d also found that Saint Miguel’s Church and grounds had been sold by the diocese in the early sixties and renovated into an inn. Over the past forty years it had been sold and resold. The latest transaction in the public records indicated that the inn had been purchased by a Japanese conglomerate eighteen months earlier and wasn’t open for business.
Using his G.P.S., he navigated the streets of the quaint, famous city. Gardens flourished and red tile roofs capped stucco buildings throughout the town. Twilight was settling in as he drove through the historic district where people window-shopped or dined outside at umbrella-covered tables.
Across the railroad tracks, Bentz drove several miles, angling away from the heart of the town and into an area that hadn’t flourished. He passed warehouses on the old San Miguel Boulevard and crossed a dry riverbed to a squalid dead-end street.
Although the rest of the town was charming and bustling with activity, this area felt tired and worn. FOR LEASE signs faded in empty storefront windows. He slowed as the old inn came up on his right, the lawn now thick with waist-high weeds, the stucco and brick exterior crumbled and tinged with soot. Apparently hard times had hit this part of the neighborhood.
Bentz turned his rental car around in an alley and parked in a pockmarked lot serving a strip mall that held a used bookstore, some kind of “gently used” clothing store, and a small mom-and-pop corner market going to seed. One of the shops, formerly a pizza joint, according to the signs, stood vacant. Now a FOR RENT sign with a local number was taped to the window.
The single business that seemed to be thriving was an adjacent tavern that advertised “Two For One” night on Tuesdays. A couple of beater pickups, a dirty van with the words WASH ME scraped into the dingy back panel, a dented red Saturn, and a silver Chevy with a faded parking pass were scattered sparsely on the broken, dusty asphalt. The aura of the neighborhood was gray, wrought with desolation and desperation, as if this little patch of the town were clinging to dreams of a bygone time.
From his car he viewed a few people on the street; a couple of kids were skateboarding on the cracked sidewalks and an older guy, in shorts and a broad-brimmed hat, was smoking a cigarette while walking his caramel-colored dog, a one-eyed pit bull mix who tugged on the leash. The dog lumbered along and sniffed the tufts of dry grass and wagged his stump of a tail any time the old guy so much as said a word.
Bentz climbed out, left his cane, but picked up a small flashlight and a pocket-sized kit of tools in case he needed to pick a lock. Hitting the remote to lock the Escape, Bentz walked back to the old inn where an ancient chain-link fence encircled the grounds. Barely legible, a NO TRESPASSING sign creaked in a slight breeze that kicked up the dust and pushed a torn plastic sack and a few dry leaves down the street.
He checked the gate.
Locked tight, of course.
Searching for a way inside, he hitched his way around the perimeter of the building while aiming the beam of his flashlight on the fence. He moved slowly, inching around the perimeter until he discovered a spot where the metal mesh had been torn. He slipped through. His arm brushed against the sharp broken links, his shirt tearing, his skin scraping. He barely noticed. His hip and knee were protesting as well, but he ignored the discomfort, intent on his mission.
Inside, he stared somberly at the crumbling, decrepit building. The bell tower was one of the few sections still intact. Most of the windows had been boarded over and tall weeds choked what had once been a lush yard and manicured grounds. Some of the roof tiles had slid off and splintered on the overgrown pathways and gardens. A fountain in the heart of the circular drive had gone dry; the statue of an angel poised to pour water from a vessel into a large pool, now decapitated and missing one wing.
This was the location of their trysts?
Their romantic rendezvous?
Narrowing his eyes as he stared at the run-down buildings, Bentz had a hard time turning back the clock, thinking about the old mission as it once had been with manicured lawns and gardens, stained-glass windows, and flowing fountains.
He stepped over a pile of debris and worked his way through rubble and brush to the ornately carved front doors. A rusting chain snaked through the handles, its lock securely in place.
To keep out the curious, the homeless, or looters.
Or a cop with too much time on his hands who might be obsessed with his dead ex-wife.
Ignoring the voice in his brain, he picked the lock and found his way through an archway into what had once been a courtyard, a square surrounded on all sides by the two-storied inn. Each long side was divided into individual units, complete with doorways on the ground level and balconies with boarded over French doors on the second. The courtyard was already in shadow, the gloom of evening seeping around the chipped and broken statue of St. Miguel as the sun sank low behind the bell tower.
So far, so good, Bentz thought.
The place seemed empty.
Lonely.
Walking along the portico, peering through a few dirty panes of the remaining windows, he nearly stepped on a rat that scurried quickly through a crack in the mortar.
Not Bentz’s idea of a romantic getaway.
At least not now, not in the inn’s cur
rent condition. The place was downright creepy, a great setting for a horror film. Testing each of the doors along the covered walkway, he felt the prickle of apprehension on the back of his neck.
All rooms were locked firmly.
Number seven, a corner suite, was no different. The number dangled precariously from the frame and looked ready to drop into the debris collecting on the porch.
Using his set of picks, he sweated as he worked the lock and it finally sprang open, the old hinges creaking eerily.
Now or never, he told himself, but he felt as if he were walking upon Jennifer’s grave as he stepped into the stuffy, stale suite. In an instant he was thrown back to a time he’d tried hard to forget.
A table was broken and cracked. A television stand was overturned, the floor scraped and filthy. Cobwebs collected in the corners and the dried corpses of dead insects littered the windowsills.
The entire place was near being condemned, Bentz guessed, his skin crawling. Stairs wound upward and creaked with each of his steps as he painfully climbed to the second floor, where a landing opened to a bedroom. There were two other doors. One led to a filthy bathroom, where dingy, cracked sinks had been pulled from the wall and a toilet was missing. The second door was closed, its latch broken, but when Bentz pushed on the old panels, he discovered it opened to an inside hallway. In one direction was the emergency exit stairs. In the other a long corridor stretched along the back wall of the building. He walked it and found the hall eventually funneled into a staircase that dropped into the area that had once been the lobby and office of the inn.
Handy, he thought. A secret entrance for a priest who didn’t want to be seen going through the front door of unit seven to meet his mistress.
Bentz returned to the bedroom, dark and gloomy.
Their bedroom. Where the memories and despair and guilt still lingered.
The place Kristi may have been conceived, if Shana McIntyre could be believed. There was a chance Shana was lying, of course, that she knew of this place from her own romantic trysts. Shana had never made any bones about the fact that she didn’t like him. She would thoroughly enjoy playing a sick joke on him, just to watch him squirm.