“I know you’re going out of your mind not working, but hell, can’t you do something else?”
“You mean something a little less insane?”
“Yeah. Golf would be good. Or fishing. Hell, we’ve got great fishing down in the Gulf.”
“I’ll think about it. I could buy me a new fancy pole and set of clubs in between my calligraphy and yoga classes.”
“Wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
“Then you, too. Sign us both up. And add in ballroom dancing. You’d look fantastic in one of those sparkly gowns.”
Montoya didn’t so much as chuckle. “You think you’re funny?”
“I know I’m funny.”
Montoya wasn’t laughing. He asked, “You see your ex-wife again?” Bentz hesitated as he drove onto the ramp. “Maybe,” he admitted, slowing for a red light. “Not sure.”
“Really?”
“Really. She phoned, too. Called me by the pet name she’d given me.”
“Right.”
“I’m just telling ya.”
“So what’re you doing about it?”
Should he tell the skeptic? Hell, why not? “I talked with one of Jennifer’s friends. She said James and Jennifer met in San Juan Capistrano, so I thought I’d drive down.”
“Are you kidding me? What does that have to do with anything? You think your dead brother is involved?” Montoya muttered some oath in Spanish, before adding, “This is sounding crazier by the second. I’ve been to San Juan Capistrano. A couple of times. There’s a history to it, man. The whole town is supposed to be rife with ghosts.”
“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.