When Bentz closed his eyes he could still see how the victims had been posed: naked, facing each other, bound in a red ribbon that reminded him of blood. Bentz had nearly thrown up at first look.

Whenever he thought back on the Caldwell murders he worried that he hadn’t given the investigation 100 percent of his focus. He had worked the case as best he could, considering his own mental state, but it wasn’t enough. Bledsoe was right. Bentz had left Trinidad holding the bag. And now, it seemed, two other girls had lost their lives to the same maniac.

Maybe if he’d been more on his game with the Caldwell twins, the new double homicide wouldn’t have happened and two innocent girls would still be alive today.

After a sleepless night Bentz decided to offer up his help on the new double homicide investigation. He knew he wouldn’t really be a part of the LAPD, but certainly he could help, “consult,” as it were, as he’d been the lead at one time in the Caldwell twins’ murder.

He said as much when he called his old partner for information.

“Shit, Bentz. You know I can’t talk about this,” Trinidad said. “As for the reasons you came back to L.A.-I heard some of it from Hayes-I can’t be a part of it. I got to think about my retirement. I can’t do anything to screw it up, and I’m not talking about the new murder case. Not with you. Not with my wife. Not with the press. Not with any-damned-body.”

“I worked the first case.”

“That’s assuming they’re related.”

“They are.”

“You know this because of a news bulletin, a thirty-second sound bite at eleven? Give it a rest, Bentz. I gotta be straight with you. No one here wants your help.”

Bentz didn’t give up. Remembering the Caldwell twins’ tragedy spurred him into making another call. This time to Hayes.

“I figured you’d call,” the detective said. “This is police business, Bentz. Got nothing to do with you. I’m already sticking my neck out for you as it is. So, don’t even ask. We’ll all be a lot better off.”

Bentz hung up, but he wasn’t able to leave it alone. So he phoned Andrew Bledsoe.

He wasn’t pleased to get a call.

“Jesus, Bentz, you’ve got a lotta nerve calling here after how you left me and everyone in the damned department hangin’. Now, you want information? Are you out of your frickin’ mind? You know I can’t talk to you. Shit, didn’t you do enough damage back when you were on the force? You remember that time, don’t you? When it was legal for me to talk to you? I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it any more now. What is this? You calling me? Why? No one else will talk to you?” Bledsoe raged. “Shit, you’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren’t you? Don’t forget, dickhead, you almost got canned, so you can damned well read about this one in the papers like everybody else!”

Bledsoe hung up, still muttering under his breath.

Bentz hadn’t expected anyone to bend over backward for him. Nonetheless he was frustrated as hell that he wasn’t allowed any information about a double homicide that in all probability was linked to his last case with the department, the murder investigation he wasn’t able to solve.

He was stewing about it when Olivia called. On her way into the shop late, she had decided to phone him around nine West Coast time. At first, his wife was evasive about the reason for the early morning call. But Bentz suspected something was up and said as much.

“Can’t I just phone to say I miss you?” she asked.

“Any time.” But it really wasn’t her style.

“I’m just hoping that you’ll wrap this up soon. How’s it going?”

“Not as fast as I’d hoped,” he admitted. He didn’t tell her about seeing Jennifer at the old inn; he didn’t want to discuss it with anyone until he knew what he was dealing with, had some concrete evidence that she’d been there. However, he did fill her in on the case of the murdered twins and how it seemed to mirror the last case he’d worked on in L.A. twelve years ago.

“And you think because you returned to California this sicko is on the hunt again?” she asked, skeptically.

“I don’t know what to think,” he admitted.

“Does the LAPD want your help?”

He laughed. “What do you think?”

“That bad?”

“Worse. They want me to get out of Dodge, I think.”

“Are you considering it?”

“Well, yeah, I’m thinking about it, being as you miss me so badly.”

“Hey. Don’t put this on me. You’re on some kind of mission out there, so you stick it out until you’ve done whatever it is you have to do. I’m fine here. I’m not going to have it on my head that you returned for me and left unfinished business. Uh-uh. No way.”

“I’ll wrap it up as soon as I can,” he promised. And then they hung up and he was left with the feeling that Olivia was holding out on him. He sensed that something more was going on and with all that was happening here in L.A., he was concerned. New Orleans was nearly two thousand miles away, but he’d seen “Jennifer” in Louisiana more than once, and the death certificate had been sent to the NOPD, so whoever was behind this knew him inside out and probably realized that he was married.

Although Bentz knew he was the primary target of this head game, whatever it was, the easiest way to hurt him was through those he loved, which only added to the worry gnawing a deep hole in his gut.

Like it or not, he had the feeling that Olivia or Kristi could be at risk.

By noon he’d drunk several cups of the coffee brewed in the motel’s office and bought a copy of every paper he could find in the boxes on the street. He had spent hours reading news accounts of the double homicide and had learned the names of the victims and some of the details of the crime. Of course some information was missing, kept under wraps by the LAPD so that they could flush out the true killer when the time came. Sick as it was, attention-seekers looking for their fifteen minutes of fame sometimes claimed responsibility for vile acts. They lived off the attention, the media frenzy, or were deranged enough to believe they had actually performed the crime, no matter how horrendous. A double homicide of this nature got a lot of press and therefore attracted a lot of false claims.

It was all a pain in the ass.

Montoya had spent his morning finishing the paperwork on a homicide. The night before there had been a knifing at the waterfront just off the river walk, not far from the New Orleans Convention Center. The victim had died, but with the help of witnesses the killer had been apprehended. Montoya was finishing the crime report when Ralph Lee called from the lab. Despite being ankle-deep in forensic evidence attached to real cases, Lee had taken the time to examine and test the death certificates and pictures that had been sent to Bentz.

“There’s not a lot you can work with,” he said as Montoya leaned back in his chair, stretching out his neck and shoulder muscles. “It looks like the photographs haven’t been tampered with. I haven’t been able to see any evidence of alteration.”

Montoya didn’t know if that was good or bad.

“What we were able to determine was that the car the subject was getting into was a GM product, probably a Chevy Impala. You said you thought the shots were taken in California and that’s consistent with the vegetation, license plate numbers, and street signs. The one we saw was for Colorado Boulevard. I enlarged the photos so that I could read the headlines on the newspapers and then I double-checked. The USA Today and L.A. Times were dated two weeks ago on Thursday, and the headlines are consistent for that date. We tried to get a reflection of the photographer from some of the shots, but couldn’t get any images. I have a few partial license plates for cars parked in the area and I listed them along with make and model in case your shutterbug inadvertently caught his own car on film, assuming it wasn’t the Impala.