“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.

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.

Bentz was being a damned fool, off chasing the ghost of his dead ex-wife when he could be home, here, with his real, living, flesh-and-blood spouse. It just didn’t make sense. Bentz, usually pragmatic, was definitely not playing with a full deck. No doubt his near-death experience had messed with his mind. Big-time.

There wasn’t much traffic this time of night, but the lights of the city, revitalized since the hurricane, blazed, as he pulled into his driveway.

Pocketing his keys, he walked up the sidewalk and into his house, a double-wide shotgun that he’d been renovating when Hurricane Katrina had struck with all the vengeance of hell. God, the place had been a mess, though not hit as severely as some of the homes that were nearly obliterated. Still, the damage was enough that he hated the thought of another hurricane. He’d rebuilt, like so many others. His renovation plans included retaining as much of the original charm of his shoebox of a house as he could, while updating to accommodate his new family. Not only had he gained a wife in Abby, but she’d come with a skittish gray tabby named Ansel who hid beneath the furniture, and a happy-go-lucky chocolate lab, Hershey. The dog now danced at his feet, his tail wagging so wildly it swiped precariously at everything on the coffee table.

“Hey, boy,” he said while scratching behind the Lab’s ears. “Wanna go outside?” With a deep bark, Hershey raced him down the long hallway that bisected the house and led to the enclosed backyard.

Following Hershey, Montoya put in a call to Abby. She was a photographer and tonight she’d scheduled a late-night photo shoot in her studio outside the city.

The dog was running back and forth, a bundle of energy. “I get it, man,” Montoya told the dog, tossing a yellow tennis ball into the yard as he waited for Abby’s voice mail to kick in. Hershey took off at a dead run and found the ball in the darkness while Montoya left his wife a message. The big lab then galloped back and dropped the ball at Montoya’s feet. His tail wagged until Montoya snatched the ball up and tossed it so the dog could pounce on it again. Another throw and an equally quick retrieval, again and again. They played the game for nearly half an hour, the dog a bundle of energy, Montoya thinking about his ex-partner and Bentz’s emotional suicide mission to L.A.

What was the guy doing? Bentz’s first wife Jennifer had been no angel. And she was dead and buried. Fortunately. The way Montoya understood it, she’d been a bitch of a thing when she’d been alive. Bentz had divorced her, hadn’t he? Montoya had never met Jennifer but he’d heard from Bentz himself that she’d cheated on him, over and over again, even with Bentz’s damned half brother. A priest, no less.

“Bitch,” he said, throwing the ball into the air and watching the dog take off, nearly flying.

Ironically, Olivia had been attracted to that same man once, Father James McLaren, before she’d married Bentz. But she’d come to her senses and they’d been happy together.

Until recently.

Ever since Bentz had awakened from the damned coma, the one his daughter had insisted would take his life, he’d been a changed man. Remote. Almost haunted.

Montoya had chalked it up to inactivity; not being able to work, not having the strength to fight or walk on his own. Now Montoya wasn’t so certain. Maybe when a guy brushes up with death that closely, he comes back to life with a new, dark attitude. Because that was how it was. Rick Bentz had not returned to consciousness with a newfound appreciation for life, a revitalized joie de vivre. Nu-uh. None of that getting called to the light shit. No born-again Christian was Bentz.

Instead he’d awakened with an urgency to find his dead ex-wife, a bitch if there ever had been one.

Bentz was a good man who’d definitely gone around the bend.

It was all a flippin’ mess.

In Montoya’s opinion, Jennifer Bentz should bloody well stay dead.

Before driving to San Juan Capistrano, Bentz had done his homework. He’d searched the Internet as well as the public records of Orange County and the town of San Juan Capistrano, looking for anything relating to an inn or hotel dedicated to Saint Miguel or San Miguel. He’d thought Shana McIntyre might have been lying-jerking his chain. But no. He’d found reference and pictures of a small chapel that wasn’t a part of the larger mission.

He’d also found that Saint Miguel’s Church and grounds had been sold by the diocese in the early sixties and renovated into an inn. Over the past forty years it had been sold and resold. The latest transaction in the public records indicated that the inn had been purchased by a Japanese conglomerate eighteen months earlier and wasn’t open for business.

Using his G.P.S., he navigated the streets of the quaint, famous city. Gardens flourished and red tile roofs capped stucco buildings throughout the town. Twilight was settling in as he drove through the historic district where people window-shopped or dined outside at umbrella-covered tables.

Across the railroad tracks, Bentz drove several miles, angling away from the heart of the town and into an area that hadn’t flourished. He passed warehouses on the old San Miguel Boulevard and crossed a dry riverbed to a squalid dead-end street.