“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.

He’d cruised past the pay phone on Wilshire knowing nothing would come of it and had even driven to the spot where he’d last seen the woman who looked like Jennifer waiting for the bus on Figueroa. He’d spent two hours at the stop, arriving an hour before the time he’d seen her the day before, and leaving an hour afterward. To no end. No woman in a lemon-colored sundress. No Jennifer. And though he’d determined the route that particular bus took each afternoon, it didn’t cast any light on his investigation.

He’d grabbed a pizza to go, brought it back to his motel room, and ate a couple of slices as he went over his notes, focusing on the information he’d gathered from Shana McIntyre. She’d given up more than he’d expected, but still, he didn’t get the sense that Jennifer had been in touch with her.

He’d tracked down the bus driver on the route where he’d seen Jennifer. The driver, a woman in her late forties with spiky gray hair and a bored attitude, didn’t remember a woman who looked like Jennifer in a yellow dress. She hadn’t been certain, of course, but she knew that the woman in the photos was not a regular bus rider on her route.

Another dead end.

He was racking up more than his fair share.

Bentz had placed calls to the others on his list but didn’t reach anyone, and he didn’t leave messages. He wondered about the rest of Jennifer’s friends. Would they be any more help than Shana had been?

And what about Alan Gray? Where had that rich prick landed? The Internet told him little, but piecing together information from several magazine and newspaper articles, it seemed Gray had a place in Palm Desert and played a helluva lot of golf. Good golf, judging by scores from some recent amateur tournaments.

He’d phoned and left a message for Hayes, but Jonas hadn’t returned the favor; probably didn’t know anything. But then, who did, he wondered as the air conditioner blew the blackout drapes around. They were open, the blinds cracked to allow sharp lines of sunlight through the dusty window.

Nothing made any sense, Bentz thought, glancing through the window to watch a curvy woman in her mid-thirties adjust the sun shade over the dash of her ancient Cadillac. Satisfied that the unfolded sun protector was in perfect position, she grabbed a huge purse from the passenger seat, slung the strap over her shoulder, then locked the Caddy. Looking over her shoulder, she hurried through the breezeway to an interior unit that faced the pool.

He wondered about the other occupants of the shabby motel. Every guest here had his or her secret, furtive truths to keep hidden within the identical units with worn carpeting, toilets that needed their handles jiggled, and mini-refrigerators that would barely hold a six-pack.

Snapping the blinds shut, Bentz tried to concentrate.

All in all, the day had been a dark walk down memory lane, which hadn’t helped him determine whether or not Jennifer was alive or dead.

As he finished his third piece of pepperoni and olives, he wondered why the hell he’d ever come to L.A. Maybe everyone else was right. Maybe he was chasing after a ghost. Maybe whoever was behind the pictures and death certificate was just getting his or her jollies, knowing that Jennifer had been haunting him ever since he’d woken from the coma. Maybe now that perv was just trying to use that information to push him over the edge. To make sure he was really going out of his friggin’ mind.

But who would have known that he’d seen the ghostly image of his wife upon waking? Just Kristi and a couple of nurses. Unless they’d said anything to someone who wanted to get at Bentz, nothing would have come of it.

“Hell.” He closed the pizza box, wiped his fingers, and speed-dialed his wife, the woman he loved. The one waiting for him in their home outside New Orleans. The one who was trying her damnedest to trust him.

Olivia didn’t answer and he didn’t bother leaving a message. What would he say? That he loved her? She knew it already. That he missed her? Then why wasn’t he on the next plane back to Louisiana? That he didn’t know what the hell he was doing in L.A.? Then why was he still here?

He thought of his conversation with Shana. Tomorrow Tally White would be working at the middle school where she was a teacher. As for Lorraine, Jennifer’s stepsister, he hadn’t connected with her, either. There were other friends and acquaintances as well, of course, but Shana, Tally, and Lorraine were at the top of his list as confidantes of his ex-wife. Women who might just know what had happened to her. Not to mention Fortuna Esperanzo, Jennifer’s friend at the gallery.