My palms are beginning to sweat.
Where the hell is she?
Damn it, could the bitch just show up?
I called her, left a message from Petrocelli’s phone…
The cell phone jangles.
Finally!
I answer quickly, forcing the name off my lips. “Officer Petrocelli.”
“Hi, this is Olivia Bentz. I think you tried to call me. My husband said you were going to pick me up at the airport, somewhere in Baggage Claim?” She sounds harried and tired.
Perfect.
My own tight nerves relax a bit. “That’s right,” I say.
“I’m here near the United carousel.” Then I spy her approaching the area. Wearing sunglasses, her hair pulled away from her face, she’s carrying a purse and pulling a single overnight bag.
She packed light.
Smart girl.
We both smile and hang up our respective phones.
“Olivia Bentz?” I call out as I flag her down. “How was your flight?”
She shrugs. “Delayed.”
“I’m Sherry, a friend of Jonas Hayes. He asked me to pick you up.”
“So I heard.”
She eyes my uniform and I say, “You know I’m with the LAPD. Right?” She nods politely when I flip open Petrocelli’s wallet with her badge. With my wig, I look enough like Sherry to satisfy her.
“I appreciate the lift, Officer Petrocelli,” she says. So well-mannered and polite.
“Call me Sherry. The car’s right outside,” I tell her, and we walk through the doors to the parking area where the police cruiser awaits. I open the back door.
“You can put your things back here,” I say, and she does, even her purse, which, I assume holds her phone. While she moves toward the front seat I spy her phone in a pocket of her purse. I remove my hat, and while I’m stowing it on the backseat I pick up her cell phone, click it to off, then tuck it back into the purse as I straighten. She’s already slipping into the passenger seat.
Perfect.
Unafraid, she doesn’t hesitate for a second and I feel a sense of well-being. How long I’ve waited for just this moment. But I can’t get too cocky. Not yet. I’ve got a narrow window of time, so I hurry to the driver’s side. The sooner I drive away from the airport with all its damned security cameras and wannabe cops, the better. I can’t foul up now. Not when I’m so close, so damned close.
“How far is it to the Center?” she asks as she straps on her seat belt and I climb behind the wheel.
“Not far.” I flash her a warm smile. “It’s after rush hour, so it shouldn’t take long. Half an hour at most.”
“Good.”
“Ever been to L.A. before?” I ask.
“Once, a long time ago. In my early twenties. I lived in Arizona-Tucson-for a while. While I was there I drove to San Diego a couple of times, and once I made it to Los Angeles. As I said, it’s been a while.”
Perfect. So she won’t have any real sense of direction. Because she’s not going anywhere near Parker Center.
She just doesn’t know it yet.
How long had they been in this sterile interrogation room? Bentz shifted in the wooden chair, thinking it had been an eternity since he’d talked to Olivia on the phone.
The coffee in front of him had gone cold, but Bentz wasn’t interested. Hayes, who’d been conducting the interview, had stepped out to see if Olivia had arrived. Bentz imagined her sitting in the squad room, waiting patiently. It wasn’t fair to drag her into this, but he was glad she had come. Couldn’t wait to see her. Touch her.
Bentz stood up and stretched, sick of the small, airless interrogation room. So typical; there was at least one in every precinct. A camera mounted high in the corner near the ceiling had recorded the entire conversation. Bentz could have asked for a lawyer or kept his mouth shut, but he had nothing to hide.
He knew it.
He sensed Hayes knew it. His account of the events at Devil’s Caldron had been confirmed by Travis and his girlfriend. This was an exercise in futility, but one that ensured Hayes didn’t make any mistakes.
He glanced at his reflection on the wall. God only knew who was standing behind the two-way mirror. Andrew Bledsoe and Riva Martinez were probably there, waiting for him to slip up and make a mistake. Maybe the DA was there, along with other detectives. Hell, maybe even Dawn Rankin was watching.
It was ridiculous, but Bentz understood procedure. Rake Rick Bentz over the coals. Prove that he’s a good cop gone bad, someone insane enough to show up in Los Angeles and start killing people who had known his ex-wife.
Even though he’d talked things through with Hayes earlier, this was official, “for the record.” So he’d suffered through the questions about his marriage to Jennifer, her betrayal, the divorce, the fact that while they’d been living together a second time, trying to see if it would work, she’d cheated on him all over again. And around that time, the accident that had taken her life. He understood that it was necessary to rehash this dark period in his life, though that hadn’t made it any easier.
Then Hayes had segued to Jennifer the ghost, and Bentz had recalled how he’d seen her in his hospital room back in Louisiana. How he’d determined that the woman “haunting” him was actually a real flesh-and-blood imposter, one he’d stupidly driven along the coast. They’d stopped at Devil’s Caldron, the park overlooking the sea, where she’d made the tragic leap into the ocean that had killed her.
“Well, tomorrow morning we should have some answers about your ghost. Or at least, your ex-wife,” Hayes had said. The detective had cut through bureaucratic red tape and arranged for the exhumation of Jennifer’s body, scheduled for the next morning. A step in the right direction.
Bentz was questioned about Shana McIntyre and Lorraine Newell. Hayes brought up the Caldwell twins, asked what he knew about the double homicide so similar to the Springer twins’ case. “We’ve been through this before,” Bentz had said, knowing that Olivia was waiting for him. He was tired, hungry and could offer them nothing more than the truth.
“Look, I can say all this a million ways,” he’d said, “but it won’t change what happened. I had nothing to do with Shana’s murder or Lorraine’s, and I don’t have a clue what happened to those twins. It sounds like the Twenty-one or a copycat. That they were killed after I returned to Los Angeles…I agree, there seems to be a connection. Am I a catalyst? I hope to hell not, but I don’t know. It would be quite a coincidence, and I don’t have a lot of faith in those.”
Bentz looked up as the door opened and Hayes stepped in. “Is she out there?” Bentz asked.
“Not yet,” Hayes said.
An icy dread chilled Bentz. “What do you mean? They should be here by now. Would you give me my damned cell phone back?”
“Procedure, man.” Hayes held up his hands defensively. “You’ll get it back just as soon as we’re done here. Martinez is tracking down Petrocelli right now.” Across the table, his tie loosened, Hayes looked as bone weary as Bentz felt. “I just need to get a few more things on the record.”
Bentz raked one hand through his hair. “And that would be?”
“At Devil’s Caldron today, did the victim know you were armed?”
“She saw my gun. Made some comment about it earlier in the car.”
“So you were chasing her with a gun.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t take it out of my holster. She knew I wouldn’t fire at her.”
“How would she know that?”
Good question. “Because she knows me. She knows things about me only Jennifer knew.” His guts ground as he admitted, “It seems like every time I learned something I didn’t know about Jennifer from one of her friends, that friend ended up dead. Almost…I know this sounds crazy, but it’s almost as if they were expendable and had served their purpose.” He looked at Hayes and shook his head. “It’s pretty damned freaky. Like she was one step ahead of me. She seemed to figure out my next move before I even made it. Damn it, Hayes, she knew I’d be at the airport.” And as he said the words, a new horror crawled through him. “Oh, God,” he whispered, “Olivia.”