Lisa Jackson's Bentz & Montoya Bundle: Hot Blooded, Cold Blooded, Shiver, Absolute Fear, Lost Souls, Malice, & an Exclusive Extended Excerpt From Devious (183 page)

But who could blame her? Between her own experiences at the hands of predators, her father’s warnings, and her landlady’s remarks, she was bound to be jumpy. “Get over it,” she admonished, cutting past Wagner House, a huge stone edifice with dark mullioned windows and black iron filigree. Tonight, the grand old manor seemed foreboding, even sinister.
And you think you can write true crime? How about fiction? Maybe horror? Or something equally creepy with your imagination! Geez, Kristi, get a grip!

Hurrying as the rain began to pour, she heard footsteps on the walk behind her. She hazarded a quick glance over her shoulder and saw no one. Nothing. And the footsteps seemed to have stopped. As if whoever was following her didn’t want to be discovered. Or was mimicking her own hesitation.

Her stomach squeezed and she thought about the can of pepper spray in the backpack. Between the spray and her own skill in self-defense…

Dear God, get over yourself!

Hoisting her bag higher, she started off again, ears straining for the scrape of leather against concrete, the whisper of heavy breathing as whoever it was gave chase, but all she heard was the sound of traffic in the streets, tires humming over wet asphalt, engines rumbling, an occasional squeal of brakes or whine of gears. Nothing sinister. Nothing evil. Still, her heart was hammering and despite her mental berating, she unzipped a pocket of the leather pack and fumbled for the canister. Within seconds it was in her hand.

Again she looked over her shoulder.

Again she saw nothing.

Half running, she cut across the lawn and through the gate nearest her apartment. She’d reached the street when her cell phone jangled. Jumping wildly, she cursed softly under her breath as she reached into her coat pocket. Her father’s name lit the screen. Clicking on, and grateful, for once, that he had called, she greeted, “Hey, don’t you ever work?”

“Even cops get breaks every once in a while.”

“And so you decided to take one and check up on me?”

“You called me,” he reminded her.

“Oh, right.” She’d forgotten…one more little reminder that she wasn’t a hundred percent—her damned faulty memory. Every once in a while, she totally blanked out on something important. “Look, I wanted to tell you my new address and that I got a job at the Bard’s Board. It’s a diner and all the food is named after Shakespearean characters. You know, like Iago’s iced latte and Romeo’s Reuben and Lady Macbeth’s finger sandwiches or something. It’s owned by two ex-English teachers, I think. Anyway, I have to learn them all by Monday morning when I start. I guess it’ll get me back into the swing of the whole memorizing thing again.”

“Romeo’s Reuben sounds sexual.”

“Only to you, Dad. It’s a sandwich. I might not mention it to your partner.”

“Montoya will love it.”

She smiled and, as she reached the apartment house, asked, “So how’re you feeling?”

“Fine. Why?”

She thought of the image of him fading to gray as she’d driven away the other day. “Just checkin’.”

“You’re making me feel old.”

“You
are
old, Dad.”

“Smart-ass kid,” he said, but there was humor in his voice.

She almost said, “A chip off the old block,” but curbed the automatic response. Rick Bentz was still a little touchy when reminded that he wasn’t her biological father. “Listen, I’ve got to run. I’ll talk to ya later,” she said instead. “Love ya!”

“Me, too.”

She started up the exterior stairs only to meet a petite girl at the second-floor landing who was struggling with what appeared to be a leaking garbage bag.

The dark-haired Asian girl looked up and smiled. “You must be the new neighbor.”

“Yeah. Third floor. I’m Kristi Bentz.”

“Mai Kwan. 202.” She gestured widely toward the open door of the nearest unit that occupied the second floor. “Are you a student? Hey, give me a sec while I take this to the Dumpster.” Moving lithely, she eased around Kristi and hurried down the remaining stairs, her flip-flops clicking loudly in the rain.

Kristi wondered if she wasn’t some kind of kook with her sandals and dripping bag. And anyway, Kristi wasn’t about to wait in the cold and rain. Reaching the third floor, she heard the snap of Mai’s flip-flops hurrying up the staircase below her. Kristi had just unlocked her door and stepped inside when Mai called out from the darkness. “Kristi, wait!”

For what?
Kristi thought, but stood just inside the door as the scent of rainwater swept through her apartment. Mai appeared at that moment and didn’t wait for an invitation, just waltzed right in, her sandals making puddles on the old hardwood floor.

“Oh, wow!” Mai said, eyeing Kristi’s new place. Her hair, chopped into shaggy layers that ended at her chin, gleamed in the lamplight. “This looks great!” She grinned, showing off white, straight teeth rimmed in shiny coral lip gloss. Her dark eyes with their carefully shadowed lids took in the space.

A small kitchen was tucked behind bifold doors at one end of the long room, which was punctuated with dormers that allowed views over the walls of the campus. Kristi had pushed a small desk into one of the dormer alcoves, and a reading chair and ottoman into the other. She’d cleaned the furniture as best she could and scattered a few cheap area rugs over the floor. One of the lamps, a fake Tiffany, was hers. The other, a modern floor lamp with a shade that was seared from being held too close to a lightbulb, had come with the unit. The walls were covered with posters of famous writers and pictures of Kristi’s family, and she’d bought candles and positioned them over the windowsills and scratched end tables. With a mirror she’d purchased at a secondhand store, and a few well-placed pots with growing plants, the place looked as student-chic as she could make it.

“This is great! Geez, you’ve even got a fireplace. Well, I guess all the units on the north end do.” Mai walked to the thick carved mantel and ran her fingers along the old wood. “I love fires. You’re a student here, too?” she added.

“Yeah. A junior. Journalism major,” Kristi clarified.

“I was surprised when I heard this had been rented.” Mai was still walking through the place, glancing at the pictures Kristi had hung on the wall. Squinting, she leaned closer to a framed five-by-seven. “Hey, this is you and that famous cop in New Orleans…wait a sec. Kristi Bentz, as in the daughter of—?”

“Detective Rick Bentz, yes,” Kristi admitted, a little uncomfortable that Mai had recognized her father.

Mai stepped closer to the picture, eyeing the framed snapshot as if to memorize every nuance in the photograph of Kristi and her dad on a boat. The picture was five years old, but one of her favorites. “He cracked a couple of serial killer cases around here, didn’t he? Ones up at that old mental asylum? What was the name of it?” She snapped her fingers and before Kristi could answer, she said, “Our Lady of Virtues, that was it. Oh, wow. Rick Bentz…Huh…He’s kinda like a living legend.”

Well, now, that was stretching the truth. “He’s just my dad.”

“Wait a minute…” Mai cocked her head. “And you…you…” She turned and faced Kristi again and a look of awe passed over her face. “You were involved, too, weren’t you? Like almost a victim. Jesus! I’m kinda into the whole serial killer thing…. I mean I don’t glorify them or anything—they’re evil—but I find them fascinating, don’t you?”

“No.” Kristi was firm on that. However, there was the true-crime book she was considering. In that way, she, too, held more than a passing interest in the deviants whose number seemed to grow more prolific every day. But she didn’t feel like going into it with a neighbor she’d met less than five minutes earlier. “You said something about being surprised that I rented the apartment.”

“That
anyone
did.” Mai glanced again at the picture of Kristi and her father.

“Really? Why?”

“Because of its history.”

“What history?”

“Oh…you know.” When Kristi didn’t respond, Mai added, “About the previous tenant.”

“You’re going to have to fill me in.”

“It was Tara Atwater, as in the same Tara Atwater that went missing last spring term?”

“What?” Kristi’s heart nearly stopped cold.

“Tara is the third missing girl. The second one, Monique, is the reason the press kind of started nosing around a little more intently. Last May. But it was the end of spring term and people just assumed she dropped out. The story kind of died until this fall when Monique left school before the end of fall term. Where have you been?”

“In New Orleans,” Kristi said, pretending ignorance. She didn’t want Mai to see how affected she truly was.

“You
had
to have heard about the missing students.” Without waiting for an invitation, Mai plopped onto the oversized chair, sitting on it sideways so that her feet dangled over one of the arms. “It’s been all over the news…well, at least in the last few days. Before then, the administration acted as if each of them had just dropped out or run off or whatever. No one could substantiate that any of them were really missing. But what’s really weird is that their families don’t even seem to care. Everyone assumes they just took off and poof”—she snapped her fingers again—“vanished into thin air.”

Not everyone,
Kristi thought, remembering her father’s worries.

“They turn up missing and it’s a big deal. Then the story gets shuffled off page one and everyone seems to forget, until the next girl disappears.” She frowned, her smooth forehead wrinkling in frustration.

“And one of them lived here.” Kristi motioned to the interior of her new apartment, the “steal” she’d found on the Internet. No wonder it had been in her price range.

“Yeah. Tara. From Georgia. Southern Georgia, I think, yeah, some tiny podunk town. A Georgia Peach, whatever that means. I don’t know much about her. No one did. I mean I saw her a few times, but never thought twice. Then she ended up missing; no one really realized she was gone, for a while.”

“So that’s why no one rented the place?”

“Mrs. Calloway put it on the Internet and stuck the
FOR RENT
sign up, then Rylee Ames disappears. Now the missing girls are big news again—I can’t believe you didn’t know!—but by then, you’d rented the place.” She plucked a tiny feather off the overstuffed arm of the chair and let it drift to the floor.

The hairs on the back of Kristi’s neck raised as she thought about Tara Atwater. Had she really rented a space most recently occupied by a girl who was missing, who could have ended up the victim of foul play? Damn, what were the chances of that? Kristi observed her studio with new eyes. She asked, “And the police, they’re sure she disappeared…that the others disappeared, too? That they weren’t just runaways?”

“‘Just runaways,’” Mai repeated. “Like that’s okay.” She lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know what the police think. I really don’t think they put the whole thing together until recently.” She let out a disgusted sigh. “What’s that saying about our culture, huh?
Just
runaways.”

Kristi thought about the latches and locks in her apartment that didn’t work. “So tell me about Hiram.”

“Irene’s grandson?” Mai shrugged. “Major geek. Into all things technical.”

“He’s supposed to fix the latches on my windows and install a new dead bolt.”

“In which century? He’s like a ghost, you never see him.”

“A techno-major geek ghost?”

“Exactly. Hey, if you’re not busy on New Year’s Eve, some of my friends and I are going to hang out at the Watering Hole. You could join us and y’know, ring in the new year. ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ funky little hats, confetti, champagne, and crap. The cover’s really cheap. Just enough to pay for the band.”

“Maybe,” Kristi said, acting as if her social calendar wasn’t completely empty. “I’ll see.”

The first notes of a classical piece Kristi couldn’t quite place erupted and Mai reached into her pocket for her cell. She glanced at the screen and grinned. “Gotta run,” she said quickly as she climbed to her feet. “Nice to meet ya.”

“You, too.”

“Seriously. Call me if you want to party and kick in the new year.” She pushed a button on her cell phone as she eased to the door and opened it with her free hand. “Hey! I was wondering when I was gonna hear from you. A text? Nah, I didn’t get it….” She was out the door and wrapped in her conversation with the person on the other end of the call.

Kristi closed the door behind her and, alone in the apartment, was left with a creepy feeling. “Don’t let it get to you,” she told herself. The building was centuries old, people could have died here, been killed here. All sorts of atrocities could have occurred here over the years. Tara Atwater’s disappearance wasn’t even necessarily a crime. She eyed the cozy room but couldn’t fight a sudden chill. What had happened to the girl? Was her disappearance really linked to the others? What had happened to all of them? Had they all met some horrid fate as her father seemed to think?

Find out, Kristi. This is the story you’ve been looking for. Here you are in the thick of it, in the very damned apartment from which one of them went missing. This is it!

She picked up her purse and dialed Hiram. True to the history of her previous three calls, she was sent directly to voice mail. “Great,” Kristi muttered, grabbing her purse. She wasn’t waiting for the dweeb. How tough could it be to install a damned dead bolt? She’d go to a hardware store, buy the hardware she needed, and put it in herself. She figured she’d take the expenses off the next month’s rent and Hiram could explain it to his granny himself.

Locking the door behind her, she headed to her car. No one followed her. No dark figure lurked in the shadows. No sinister eyes trailed her every move. At least none she could distinguish in the thick, shimmering, rain-washed shrubbery surrounding the pock-marked parking lot. She climbed into the Honda without incident, and after turning on the headlights and wipers, stared through the windshield, again seeing nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe Mai was just messing with her, jerking her chain.

Why? Sooner or later she’d be found out. No, Mai Kwan was telling the truth as she knew it.