She felt the boat pick up speed, knifing through the water to its deadly destination, water rushing against the hull.
The pain began to subside. She lifted her head and took a long breath. She was going to be fine. She and the baby. Somehow she’d find a way to save them. She just had to work on it-Oh, sweet Jesus!
Another razor-sharp pain ripped through her.
Like a knife twisting deep inside.
She gasped.
The baby?
A miscarriage?
No! No! No!
She pulled in a shaking breath, tried to think, to get hold of herself. She was overreacting.
She pulled in a shaking breath, tried to think. She was overreacting.
Nothing was wrong with the baby or her pregnancy. The baby’s fine.
But the pain didn’t let up. She cast a glance at the open photo album and fought another hard, wrenching abdominal cramp.
The baby’s FINE!
She began to pant, to let out her breath in short little huffs as the cramping continued and she could barely think.
The baby’s fine, the baby’s fine, the baby’s fine!
She gritted her teeth against the pain and the horrid, deplorable thought that she could be losing the tiny life within her.
And then she felt the blood.
Warm and oozing, just a trickle.
She was bleeding. Damn it all, she was bleeding.
“What the hell are you doing?” Bentz demanded as he crossed the stained concrete slab of the parking structure.
“Covering your sorry ass.” Montoya had his service weapon trained on the suspect.
Walking up to her, Bentz still couldn’t believe how much she looked like Jennifer. “Jada…” Beyond her resemblance to his ex-wife, he was sure he didn’t know her. “Who are you?”
When she didn’t respond, Montoya filled him in. “Her name is Jada Hollister and she’s a theater major at Whitaker Junior College. A wannabe actress. Friend of Fernando Valdez.”
“I bet.” Seething, Bentz stared at the imposter. He had to restrain himself from tearing her limb from limb. “Where’s Olivia?”
“What? Who?”
“My wife. My real wife. Where the hell is she?” he demanded.
Her cool demeanor, the act she’d perfected, remained in place. “I have no idea.”
Bentz’s temper exploded. “I’m through fuckin’ around, you got it? Now where the hell is my wife?”
“I’d tell him, if I were you,” Montoya said.
She put her hands on her hips. “But I don’t know.”
“Think real hard,” Bentz advised.
“Oh, shut up,” she snapped at him. “What is that, like a line from a really bad B Western?”
A car drove down from an upper level and the driver, an African-American woman with a flamboyant scarf wrapped around her head, saw the gun in Montoya’s hand and hit the gas of her Mercedes wagon. As she wound her way down, Bentz saw that she was on her cell. She’d be calling 9-1-1.
“The LAPD is going to be here shortly,” Bentz said, his voice deathly quiet. “And I guarantee they’ll go so much easier on you if you tell us where we can find my wife. Now.”
“But I don’t know,” Jada insisted, her brow furrowing. She followed the path of the disappearing Mercedes.
“Your name is Jada Hollister?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“And you’re friends with Fernando Valdez.”
“If you can call it that.”
“He paid you to pretend to be Jennifer?” Bentz asked.
She hesitated and he said, “I’m not kidding about the police. You’re involved up to your neck in several homicides and my wife’s disappearance. If you don’t start telling the truth, I’ll see that you’re arrested, locked up, and kept in prison for the rest of your life.”
“Bullshit! I haven’t done anything!”
“Really? Because the way I see it, you and Fernando, you’re in this together and you’re both going down.”
Jada looked from Bentz to Montoya before focusing on the gun still trained on her. “Oh, crap,” she said, biting her lip and obviously struggling with her decision.
“It’ll go much easier on you if you tell us about your boyfriend,” Montoya urged.
“Boyfriend? Fernando?”
“He’s the mastermind.”
She laughed. “He couldn’t mastermind his way out of a open bag. He’s not behind it,” she said with a sneer.
“Then who?”
Her eyes narrowed a bit. Calculating. Then she tossed more guilt Fernando’s way and let out a long-suffering sigh. “It was someone he knew, okay? A woman.”
“What woman?” Bentz asked.
Jada sent Montoya a go-screw-yourself glare. “You can put that down now.”
He holstered his weapon, then stripped the keys to the SUV that Jada still had clutched in her fingers.
“Someone paid you to mess with my mind.”
“I guess.” She lifted a shoulder, showed some more of her attitude.
“You know!” God, he wanted to shake the truth from her. “Listen, you’re in big trouble.” How could she not get it? “People are dead.” He yanked out the picture of Olivia being held captive, looking scared out of her mind, and stuck it under Jada’s nose. “Meet my wife. The one who’s missing. Your friend, the person who hired you, abducted her.” There was a tremor of rage in his voice and his hands, holding the picture, shook.
“She’s not my friend.” Jada’s face paled as she stared at the copy of the picture. She cringed as he noticed the terror in Olivia’s eyes, the raw skin around Olivia’s mouth.
“We have other pictures,” Bentz said, his voice low and threatening. “Of the corpses. Maybe you’d like to see Shana McIntyre in her pool, or Lorraine Newell with her brains blown out, or Fortuna Esperanzo-”
“Enough!” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “For the love of God, I don’t know anything about any murders, okay? I mean…I did get involved with this freak of a woman who wanted me to play someone. An acting role, that’s all. She claimed that if I dyed my hair darker, curled it, wore some green-colored contacts, and put in some cheek prostheses, I would be a dead ringer for this Jennifer woman.” To prove her point, she took out her contacts, her eye turning a pale blue, then she extracted false teeth and cheek prostheses, changing her appearance. “She had a vial of perfume she wanted me to wear and so…so I did. You have to trust me. No one was supposed to get hurt.”
“Like hell.”
“Really. She said it was just an elaborate prank. She wanted to scare an old boyfriend. And she was going to pay me big money.”
“How big?”
“Twenty-five grand. Thirty if I’d do the jump into Devil’s Caldron. She thought of that after she heard I used to high dive.”
“Thirty thousand dollars,” Bentz spat out, disgusted. “What is that, about eight thousand a life?”
“I told you I didn’t know anything about anyone getting killed!” she said emphatically. Suddenly she was serious as she started to finally see how dire her situation was. “I tried to get out of it, but she wouldn’t let me. I really thought it was a joke, one of those elaborate pranks you see on TV. I figured I might get some exposure out of it, jump-start my career. She gave me a script and coached me over the phone, and I got a couple of free trips to New Orleans out of it. Her one rule was that I not get caught. I guess I blew that.” She parted, looking ruefully at the oil-stained concrete floor. Bentz decided she was sorrier for the loss of her fee, as opposed to the loss of life. What a piece of work!
“Who is she?” Bentz demanded. “Who hired you?”
“I don’t know. I never saw her. We just talked on the phone.”
“How did you get paid?”
“Cash…” Jada reluctantly gave it up. “She said she’d been saving it for years. She left it for me in a locker at my gym in Santa Monica, not far from the Third Street Promenade.”