day Bentz saw Jennifer for the first time in L.A.
After leaving Shana’s Beverly Hills estate he’d driven southwest, deciding to find Figueroa Street and satisfy his own morbid curiosity.
He was still mentally digesting everything he’d learned from Shana, trying to cull the facts from the fiction, or at least from Shana’s very slanted view of things, as he wended his way through the early afternoon traffic. One thing was clear from his meeting with Shana McIntyre; the pictures of Jennifer had unsettled her. No way had Shana faked her reaction. That had to mean something.
And in her catty way she’d reminded him to check out Alan Gray, the man Jennifer had professed to love.
For a while.
A developer who had made his money in the seventies and eighties, long before the recently stalled economy, Alan Gray had been in and out of Jennifer’s life. Bentz reminded himself to look the mogul up and see what good old Alan was doing these days. He would be in his late fifties or early sixties by now, possibly retired.
Bentz would check.
Squinting against the bright sun, he flipped down his visor and spotted several motels that could well have been one of the spots where Jennifer and James had met for their trysts. Unfortunately, there would be no records to prove that any of the stucco-faced buildings had been the private spot where they had met.
And so what if they had?
It had been over twelve years.
In that span of time places had changed hands, old buildings torn down and new ones sprouting up. He was just about to turn toward Culver City when he caught a glimpse of a slim, dark-haired woman in a yellow sundress and dark glasses standing at a bus stop.
So what? he thought initially. But as he drove past, he saw her profile and his heart stopped. The nose and chin…the way she held her purse as she stood near a bench, her eyes trained down the street where the approaching bus lumbered and belched blue smoke. She lifted one hand to her forehead, shading her eyes even further.
Just as Jennifer had always done.
Shana’s words rushed back to him: “In her own weird way, Jennifer loved you.” He’d been stunned then and was still.
This is crazy, his mind warned. It’s not her. You know it’s not Jennifer. Power of suggestion, that’s all it is!
With one eye on his rearview mirror and the other trained ahead, he searched for a parking space as the bus slowed to a stop.
“Oh, hell.” Gunning his car into a parking lot for a strip mall he nosed his rental into the first available space, an area that warned that the lot was for customers only. The doors to the bus were open. Two teenaged boys plugged into iPods laughed and pushed each other as they hauled their skateboards onto the bus.
Bentz threw himself out of the car and hitched his way across the street.
She was gone.
The woman in the yellow dress was nowhere to be seen.
The doors of the bus closed and the driver turned on the flashers to signal that she was heading into traffic.
“No!” Bentz pushed into the street, his bad leg aching as he hobbled after the city vehicle. He reached the stop just as the bus rumbled noisily away.
Was she aboard?
As it pulled away from the curb, Bentz stared through the dusty windows. He scanned the face of every passenger he could see, but recognized no one. There wasn’t anyone remotely resembling his ex-wife.
Bentz took note of the bus number and the time, then studied the surrounding landscape. No dark-haired woman in a lemony sundress was strolling along the sidewalk or walking quickly around a corner or climbing into any of the vehicles lining the streets.
He felt a prickle of déjà vu run through his soul.
As if he’d been here before.
As if he’d been chasing Jennifer along these very streets.
He stared after the bus as it disappeared from view, considered chasing it down, trying to outrun it and board at the next stop.
Get a grip, he silently told himself. It wasn’t her. It’s just the power of suggestion, all because of Shana, the bitch. Jennifer, living or dead, is not on that bus. Come on, man, get real! When in known history did Jennifer ever take public transportation?
“I just don’t like it, that’s all,” Kristi admitted. She was driving with one hand, her cell phone in the other as she talked with Reuben Montoya, her father’s partner.
“He needed to get away.”
“Why?” she demanded, working her way through the narrow streets of Baton Rouge as she drove toward All Saints College.
“He just said he needed some time away. He was going stir crazy not being able to work.”
“Why go back to L.A.?”
“Ask him.”
“I did and he stonewalled me.” Kristi was beginning to panic. Something was wrong, really wrong. Ever since the accident her dad hadn’t been himself. She’d thought—no, hoped—that after he worked through physical therapy he would return to normal, but that wasn’t the case.
“Your father can handle himself,” Montoya said. “Don’t worry about him.”
“Trust me, I don’t want to.” She hung up and drove into the parking lot of her apartment building, which faced the campus. A once-grand old house, the building had been cut into single units, each one becoming a basic collegiate apartment. She lived here alone with her cat, punctuated by the occasions when Jay taught forensic science at the college. Those nights he stayed with her. The rest of the time he lived in New Orleans and worked for the crime lab.
Once they were married this December and she was finished with school, they would live in New Orleans. Fingers crossed that the first draft of her true-crime book would be finished by then.
But first, her father. God, what was Bentz doing? She mulled it over as she pulled out a sack of groceries from the back of her Honda hatchback and hiked up to her third-floor studio. She toyed with the idea of calling Olivia, her stepmother, but their relationship hadn’t always been smooth. It would be better to talk with her in person, but who could find the time?
As she was placing the last of her cheapo low-cal meals-for-one in the freezer, she saw Houdini outside the window. The black cat slunk inside and she picked him up, stroking his head as her phone chirped. “Hello?” she said as her quirky feline hopped down to the floor.
“Hey, Kristi, it’s Olivia.”
Perfect.
“Hi.”
“How’re things at school?”
What was this? Olivia never called. “All good,” Kristi said tentatively.
“And the wedding?”
