There was no sign of anyone in the surf.

Once again, like the night in Santa Monica, “Jennifer” had disappeared. “Damn it all,” he muttered between clenched teeth, then turned to the boy and girl and tried to concentrate.

“What’s your name?” he asked the kid.

“Travis.”

“Good. Here, Travis, take the phone, climb up to the top, and call 9-1- 1.” He slapped his cell phone into the kid’s hand. “Tell them what happened, that a woman jumped into Devil’s Caldron, then if they want to keep you on the line, stay. If not, hang up and speed-dial number 9. It’ll connect you to Detective Jonas Hayes, a friend of mine and a detective for the LAPD. Tell him what happened here and that I won’t be making it to Point Fermin. Tell him we need a search-and-rescue team. ASAP!”

Travis nodded, obviously relieved to have something to do, any thing to help.

“But where are you going?” the girlfriend asked Bentz.

He nodded toward the swirling sea below. He knew it would be fruitless, but he had to try and find her. She couldn’t have just vanished. No way!

Montoya’s diligence was finally rewarded.

He’d spent so much time on the Internet and phone to California that his shoulders ached from inactivity. But it had paid off. He glanced to the window and saw that it was dark, most of the detectives from the day shift long gone.

But the long tedious hours had been worth it, he thought now, twisting the kinks from his neck.

Earlier, through the California DMV, he’d located several Yolanda Salazars who resided in Encino.

He’d weeded through them and zeroed in on the woman he was looking for. Just like Carlos had told him on the phone, Yolanda was married to his cousin’s boy, Sebastian. He’d pulled all the records he could on her, found her to be clean, a student at a junior college, studying accounting while she paid the bills as a hairdresser.

But the bit of information on Yolanda that caught Montoya’s attention was her maiden name. According to her marriage license she was born Yolanda Filipa Valdez.

Valdez? His heart skipped a beat as he made the connections. He leaned back in his chair and clicked the pen he was holding as a copy of her California driver’s license appeared on the screen.

A pretty woman. Thirty-two, according to the driver’s license. A model citizen.

Nothing to make her suspicious whatsoever.

Aside from not registering her car, which wasn’t that big of a deal. But there was another piece to the puzzle, a factor that made the lack of registration more interesting.

Yolanda just happened to be the older sister of Mario Valdez, the boy Bentz accidentally shot while he was still working for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Montoya clicked his pen again, put in another unanswered call to Bentz and Jonas Hayes, the one detective Bentz felt was on his side in L.A.

Montoya considered flying out to the West Coast to help, then discarded the idea. Bentz was a grown man, able to handle his own problems, even if people were dropping like flies around him. He’d figure it out.

If he needed help, he’d call. Right?

He stared at the picture of Yolanda Valdez Salazar. “What’s your deal?” he asked the image. Did she look enough like Bentz’s wife to fake him out? Had she been involved with the deaths of Shana McIntyre and Lorraine Newell? He clicked his pen again and eyed the screen. And what about those twins who were killed? Was she the mastermind behind the double homicide that looked, on the surface, identical to the murders twelve years earlier? She would have been around twenty when Mario was killed, and the same age when the first double homicide was committed. Younger than her victims.

“Nah,” he said aloud, leaning even further back in his chair and frowning. That didn’t add up.

The picture on the screen just stared at him blankly. A killer? The mastermind behind the entire Jennifer Bentz haunting?

If so, she would have had to have made a trip or two to New Orleans to “appear.” He figured he’d help the L.A. cops out and check her credit card statements, find out if she’d taken a trip to the Big Easy any time in the last year. And then he’d e-mail all the information he’d gathered about the woman to Detective Jonas Hayes of the Los Angeles Police Department.

He smiled, imagining that he was tugging on her string a bit, unraveling her master game. “It’s over,” he told the image on the computer monitor. “You screwed with the wrong guy.”

“So what the hell happened here?” Hayes demanded over the rush of the surf and wind and the steady whomp, whomp, whomp of the Coast Guard helicopter hovering high overhead.

“I wish I knew.” Bentz felt numb inside, disbelieving. They stood on the sand, the afternoon sun warm and bright as a crowd of rescue workers scoured the roiling waters of Devil’s Caldron. The California Highway Patrol was coordinating the search with the Coast Guard.

“But you’re saying that this woman jumped into the water from up there?” Hayes pointed at the platform some forty feet above the water swirling in the cove.

“Yes.” Bentz eyed the decking with its railing from below, seeing the posts and beams that supported the platform as it jutted over the cove.

“No one could have survived that.”

A muscle in Bentz’s jaw worked. He wanted to protest, to think that the woman was alive, that her leap into the churning waters wouldn’t have taken her life.

He’d already explained his conversation with her, but of course he would have to make a formal statement to that effect. Hayes had asked him the reasoning behind the aborted drive to Point Fermin. He’d questioned how Bentz had been fool enough to get into the car with her.

A good question.

Bentz had thought about everything that had happened in the last few hours, turning the events over and over again in his mind. But he had no answers as to why the woman had finally let him approach her, only to elude him here. For the past two hours he’d scoured the rocky shoals, beach, and tidewaters hoping against hope that the woman who’d sworn she was Jennifer had survived the horrifying descent to the cove. But so far no one had found any sign of her.

“So where’s the body?” Hayes was saying, staring out to sea. “Shit, we’ll have to send divers down if the Coast Guard doesn’t come up with anything. If they can even get down there. Shit.”

Bentz reached down and cupped a handful of sand, thinking that she could not have disappeared without a trace, without leaving behind a patch of clothing, a trace of hair or skin. How was it that this woman defied all laws of forensic science?

“Nothing more we can do,” Hayes said, shaking his head. “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

As they headed to the trail, Hayes couldn’t help lecturing Bentz. “So you get into a car with her. Taking a little afternoon drive? God almighty, Bentz. I guess we’re lucky she didn’t take you over that cliff with her. But I don’t get this woman trailing you, then disappearing. And why is it that this ghost of yours is so hell-bent into diving into water?”

“She’s not a ghost,” Bentz said as they started up the steep incline to the parking lot. “And I don’t know.” He was hobbling as he climbed the path, his knee and thigh on fire. No doubt he’d reinjured himself.

“When we get to the top, I’ll need your weapon,” Hayes said. “Just to make sure it wasn’t fired.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Just the same.”

“Yeah, I know.”

It took nearly fifteen minutes to reach the parking lot. Bentz was sweating, his leg throbbing. He eyed the silver car that Jennifer had driven, the one “Jennifer” had said was a gift. Everything about her story was all smoke and mirrors, nothing being what it seemed. The police had already roped the vehicle off, a tow truck on its way to take the Chevy to the police garage where it would be examined thoroughly.