So much for any film of the storage units.
Martinez, a petite woman with fiery red hair and a razor-sharp tongue, stood at the door of Unit 8 and waved Hayes inside.
“Take a look,” she said with the hint of a Hispanic accent. “But I gotta warn ya, it’s not pretty.”
Hayes braced himself, keeping his eyes away from the victims for a moment. He focused on the dusty cement floor, the jars of nails, and a broken lawn chair that had been pushed into the corner of the unit. After all this time, he still wasn’t comfortable around dead bodies. The scent and look of death bothered him, got under his skin, cut into his brain, lingering there for days. He usually managed to hide it.
Not tonight.
Looking down at the defiled bodies of twin girls who seemed barely out of their teens, he couldn’t mask the raw pain that cut him to the quick.
They had been laid out purposefully, bound and gagged, naked, curled into the fetal position. Bruises and ligature marks were visible on their necks. Facing each other, their eyes open under the glare of a single lightbulb, each girl stared sightlessly at her twin. Their skin was so pale it seemed blue. Each victim’s blond hair had been pulled away from her face and tied with a long red ribbon. The same ribbon bound them. Posed as they were, identical twins, they resembled two macabre wraiths gazing into a mirror.
Staged to look like they were still in the womb. Just like the Caldwell twins.
Hayes’s jaw tightened. “Any ID?”
“Yeah…their clothes and purses, even their jewelry and cell phones, all over there. Along with their birth certificates, times of birth highlighted in pink.” Martinez hitched her chin to a corner. There on the floor, the clothing and personal effects of the two girls sat in neatly folded stacks.
A tidy, fastidious crime scene, Hayes thought as he leaned over the folded clothes. This was all too familiar. On top of each pile was a copy of the birth certificates, the date and time of their births highlighted with pink marker. Probably the same pink ink that would be found on the girls’ bodies, Hayes suspected. Assuming, of course, this was the killer who’d torn through L.A. years ago.
“Lucille and Elaine Springer,” Martinez said. “I already called Missing Persons. They’re checking now.”
Jonas thought of his own kid. Twelve years old and going on thirty, as they said, but still an innocent. It would kill him to lose Maren, but to have someone intentionally take her life…Bile rose in his throat and he turned his attention away from his personal life to the situation at hand.
The photographs had been taken, body temperatures recorded; the victims were ready to be moved. But Jonas knew, with chilling certainty, what they would find when the bodies were rolled over onto their backs.
Oh, sweet mother.
“Remind you of anything?” a gravelly voice asked. Hayes looked over his shoulder to see Detective Andrew Bledsoe in the doorway.
Jonas straightened and nodded. “The Caldwell case.”
“And isn’t that a coincidence with our friend Bentz back in town?” Somehow Bledsoe managed a smug smile, as if the twin girls had never been more than corpses, just another case to solve.
Martinez scowled, her lips tight. She glared up at Bledsoe, her eyes dark with a seething rage. “Is there a reason you’re here?”
Though he was in his fifties, he was one of those guys who looked a decade younger. At five-ten and under two hundred pounds, Bledsoe cultivated a perpetual tan and kept his jet-black hair slicked back. His suits were usually tailor-made and his steely blue eyes didn’t miss much. He was a good cop. And a pain in the ass. “I was on my way back from a scene in Watts, heard it on the scanner.”
“Well, we’re busy here.” Martinez didn’t conceal her disdain for Bledsoe. The guy had always bugged her. Hayes knew it; everyone in the department did. Riva Martinez wasn’t one to hide her feelings.
Turning her back on Bledsoe, she knelt near one of the bodies while Hayes studied the other.
“Ligature marks around the neck,” Martinez noted, almost to herself, “and numbers and letters scrawled across each torso, just under their breasts.”
The message written heavily in neon pink on their torsos was clear. Each victim was marked with her time of birth twenty-one years ago, and her time of death this morning-which was exactly twenty-one-years later. To the minute. As if the killer found pleasure in snuffing out their lives the moment they became adults.
“Goddamn it.” Hayes felt cold inside despite the stifling, suffocating heat of the small enclosure. These girls had been born fourteen minutes apart, so they had died precisely fourteen minutes apart.
Hayes didn’t doubt that the younger of the two-Elaine, born at 1:01 AM-had witnessed the horror of Lucille being strangled at 12:47 AM. Probably strangled by the very ribbon that was now binding her hair, wrists, and ankles, as well as gagging her mouth. Hayes suspected that the ribbons in their hair would contain traces of skin from where the fabric had dug into the soft flesh of their throats. And he knew he would find other ligature marks on their necks. The victims were subdued by some kind of strap, then finally killed with a heavy ribbon woven with thin, sharp wire.
Each girl had lived exactly twenty-one years.
Just like the Caldwell twins, the last homicide Rick Bentz had worked here in L.A. That case had gone ice cold when he’d turned in his resignation.
Hayes hated to admit it, but this time Bledsoe had a point.
Why were these victims chosen to be killed now, only days after Rick Bentz had returned to Los Angeles?
CHAPTER 12
“Stupid!” Olivia glared at her cell phone. It was in her hand, but she hadn’t punched in Bentz’s number because she felt nervous about phoning him. Which was ridiculous! She’d never been one of those women who was timid or shy or the least bit lacking in confidence. Yet here she was seated in her living room, feet curled beneath her, a cup of tea long forgotten and cold on the coffee table, and she wasn’t sure what to do. Hairy S perched on the other end of the cozy couch while one of Bentz’s old Springsteen CDs played in the background, but the homey atmosphere was little comfort.
She was paralyzed.
Didn’t know whether to call Rick or not.
Even though she’d seen that he’d called earlier but hadn’t left a message.
“Oh, to hell with it,” she said and hit the speed dial number that would connect him to her.
He picked up before it rang twice. “Hey,” he said, and he did sound glad-or was it relieved?-to hear from her.
“Hey back at you.”
“What’s up?”
“Just checkin’ in,” she said. Tell him. Tell him now. You don’t have to wait until he returns. Let him know that you’re going to have a baby. Insist that no matter what his reaction is, you’re thrilled with the pregnancy, that you’ve already started looking at baby clothes and thinking of where to put a bassinette. “What’re you doing?”
“Driving down to San Juan Capistrano.”
“The mission? Why? Searching for swallows?” she teased, reminding him of the phenomenon of the swallows returning to Capistrano each year. “Didn’t know you were a bird-watcher.”
“Too late for the swallows, I think. They come in the spring.”
“Then?” she asked.
“I needed to get out of that fleabag of a motel.”
“To find Jennifer?”
A pause. “Maybe.”
“Seen her lately?” She couldn’t hide the sarcasm in her voice. Who was he kidding?
“I don’t know.”
She wanted to tell him he was being foolish. Instead she bit back a sharp reply and moved to safer territory. “How’re you feeling? Your leg.”
“It’s still attached.”
“Doing your exercises?”
“Every day.”
“Liar.” She laughed and she heard him chuckle.