“So he thinks his ex-wife might still be alive?” Trinidad said, frowning and finishing his drink. “He IDed her.”
“Yeah, but she was real busted up.”
“You’re buying into it?” Trinidad’s eyebrows rose. “Sounds like bullshit to me.”
“I’m not buying into anything, but I checked. The only person to request a death certificate on her was Bentz himself. No one else bothered.” Unsettled, Hayes twisted his cup in his palms. “I mean it’s possible he’s gone off his nut. The guy nearly died in a freak accident. In a coma for a while.”
“And comes out of it only to be visited by his long-deceased ex-wife,” Trinidad scoffed. “How nice.”
“Or nuts.” Hayes took a swallow of the sake and watched a young Asian couple enter and take seats at the bar. “He gave me a copy of the envelope and death certificate that were sent to him. He’s having ’em checked for fingerprints and to see if there’s any DNA on the seal of the envelope through the New Orleans PD.”
“So you’re not stickin’ your neck out for him, are you? Nothing you can do unless you’ve got the originals and even if he gave them to you, I’d say you’d be making a mistake getting involved with this.”
“No problem since he didn’t. But I thought you were supposed to be his friend.”
Trinidad lifted a shoulder. “Friends don’t help friends become paranoid.” He leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “Rick Bentz is a loose cannon. Nearly lost it when he killed the Valdez kid, and, hey, that’s understandable. But afterward, he never pulled himself together. I thought maybe he’d got a handle on everything when he settled in with the New Orleans PD. Rumor has it he’s some kind of hero, solving difficult homicides. But, I’m telling you, there was a time he was this close”-he held up his thumb and forefinger so that they nearly touched-“to snapping. Looks like he finally did. My advice, even though you don’t want it: You’d be smart to avoid whatever it is he’s peddling.”
“Haven’t done anything yet.”
“Yeah, well, it’s the ‘yet’ part that’s the problem, isn’t it?” The edges of Trinidad’s mouth tightened.
At the bar, the Asian girl laughed as she ordered her drink and her boyfriend rubbed the back of her neck gently, but firmly, never letting up. Hayes bet he was already getting a hard-on. Young love. He’d been there a couple of times.
Trinidad patted the pocket of his shirt and found his cigarettes. He took one out, fingered it, and signaled for the waitress, not bothering to fight Hayes for the tab. Together they walked into the early evening light where the hazy sunset was reflected on the glass wall of a new condominium building. Farther down the street, the domed tower of the Cathedral of St. Vibiana was visible, its ornate Spanish architecture a contrast to the geometric skyline of downtown Los Angeles.
Trinidad lit up, drawing smoke deep into his lungs as they walked along the crowded sidewalk. “Bentz was a good cop. The Valdez thing really fucked him up.” Shaking his head, he added, “Then his wife messin’ around with his brother. Hell. Who wouldn’t go off the deep end?” They turned a corner to a spot on the street where Trinidad had wedged his Chevy Blazer. “But I’m about ready to retire.” He let out a cloud of smoke. “Looking up old records? Exhuming a body when everybody knows who’s in the casket? I don’t need this shit.”
“What if Jennifer Bentz didn’t die?”
“She did. We don’t need DNA to prove it. Her car. Her body identified by her husband. No other missing person who matches her description.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I’m just sayin’ that Bentz had a tendency to bend the rules until they broke, and I’m not that guy anymore. I’ve got less than a year until retirement. I don’t want to fuck it up.”
But his words didn’t match his expression as he tossed his cigarette onto the street and stomped on the smoldering butt with a little more force that was necessary. “Shit.” He looked up at the sky and shook his head. “Goddamned Bentz. Why the hell is he back now, seein’ ghosts, makin’ waves? That son of a bitch left me holding the bag, y’know. And other officers, too. Walked away from a couple of cases, some messy ones that never did get solved.”
Hayes remembered one high-profile case, a double-murder investigation that went stone cold when Jennifer Bentz’s accident derailed her ex-husband. The Caldwell twins…The killer had gotten away, leaving little evidence behind other than their mutilated bodies. At the time of the double homicide, Bentz had been a mess, a rabid drunk.
“Bentz would never ask you to do anything illegal,” Hayes said as Trinidad opened the door of his Blazer.
“Yeah, right.” He jabbed his key into the engine and looked up at Hayes. “You know the old saying: If you believe that, I’ve got some swampland I’d like to sell you in Florida.”
“It worked for Disney.”
Trinidad grinned, showing off a mouthful of big teeth. “You keep thinking that way. But be careful.”
“So, you’re not gonna help him.”
“Help him find his dead ex-wife who faked her suicide and killed some woman in a car wreck?”
“Yeah.”
Trinidad shook his head. “No way, man.” With a roar of the engine, he was off.
Hayes climbed into his SUV, twisted on the ignition, and gunned it just as his cell phone chirped. Roaring into a sea of traffic, he glanced at the display.
Riva Martinez’s name came onto the screen.
His partner.
“Hayes,” he said. “What’s up?”
“We’ve got a double. Two female bodies found in a storage unit in one of those facilities under the 110.” She gave him the cross street and address of an on-ramp to the Harbor Freeway-the 110-then added, “Looks like the vics are twins.”
“What? Wait a second.” His mind raced ahead and he told himself to slow down. He was making connections that didn’t exist. Seeing Bentz again had reminded him of the Caldwell case, the unsolved double murder that had occurred twelve years earlier.
“Got a problem?” Martinez asked.
“Twins?” Hayes spoke slowly as adrenaline rushed through his veins. “Identical?”
“I’d say so. We’ll know for sure soon. You’d better get down here.”
She hung up, leaving Hayes with an overwhelming sense of doom. He hit the gas.
Bentz had never solved the Caldwell murders. The killer of those twins had never been caught. Somehow he’d disappeared from the face of the earth, or at least left Southern California. Of course there had been hypotheses cast about. Some people thought that the guy was in prison, caught for some other crime, and had never been fingered for the Caldwell murders. Others believed that he’d died or moved on. There was speculation that the killer had just up and quit, but that didn’t come from cops. No one in the department really believed a sadistic murderer had just given up his avocation for fly-fishing or golf.
“Damn.” Ignoring the speed limit, Hayes set his lights on the dash and put in a quick call to Trinidad. His thoughts were dark and jumbled as he plunged through an intersection where the light was changing from amber to red.
How was it possible that within forty-eight hours of Rick Bentz returning to L.A., a killer had nearly duplicated the double murder that had led to the end of Bentz’s career?
Coincidence?
Or diabolically calculated?
The last twenty-four hours had proved fruitless for Bentz. One dead end after another. He’d driven to Santa Monica again, parked, and walked the length of the boardwalk. At the end of the pier he stared out to sea and imagined Jennifer here. With him. With James. By herself.
He’d even driven by some of the places he and Jennifer had frequented when she’d been alive. A burger joint where they’d shared baskets of fries not far from West Los Angeles College. A bar on Sepulveda where she’d introduced him to martinis. A romantic Italian restaurant where they’d sat next to each other in a dark booth, Jennifer’s hand on his thigh. Ernesto’s was no longer. The building itself had gone through many transformations and now was a Thai place that specialized in “to go” orders. Out of some twisted sense of irony, he bought a bowl of gai yang that was heavy on the garlic.