Lisa Jackson's Bentz & Montoya Bundle: Hot Blooded, Cold Blooded, Shiver, Absolute Fear, Lost Souls, Malice, & an Exclusive Extended Excerpt From Devious (29 page)

“What we discuss doesn’t leave the room,” Sam said, trying to remain patient and worrying about the girl.

“Well it ain’t doin’ any good, now, is it? Otherwise, she’d be home.”

“Does she do this often?”

“Much as she can.”

“But you might call the police.”

“What for? Ennytime I do, they jest give me the run-around. I’ve called too many times already and then Leanne she strolls in here like it ain’t no big deal. I’m sick and tired of chasin’ after her.”

“Still—”

“It’s not yer problem.”

Sam wasn’t sure about that. She dropped her pencil onto the desk. “Just tell her I called.”

“Yeah, yeah, if she ever shows up.”

“Thanks,” Samantha said, and hung up. Her heart twisted for Leanne. The kid had just never had a chance, with no father and Marletta for a mother. Sam decided that she’d call back tomorrow, just in case the message didn’t get through, then typed a quick e-mail to ensure the girl knew Sam was trying to reach her. She then dialed her own father, who, she decided for about the thousandth time, was no less than a saint. When he didn’t answer she felt a second’s disappointment but left a message.

“Hi, Dad, it’s Sam. You’re out, probably with the cute widow, right? Well, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do and call me when you get the chance. I just want you to know that Corky ran into Peter, and he’s doing great. I haven’t talked to him, of course, but I thought I’d pass on the word about brother dear. Call when you’ve got a chance, okay? Love ya!” She hung up in frustration, then heard Ty’s voice from the living room.

“Samantha—I think your cop’s on television.”

“My cop?” she said, walking into the living room, where Ty was standing, the remote in his hand, watching the television. Detective Rick Bentz filled the screen. A reporter was interviewing him as he and his partner were exiting a huge house in the Garden District. While the reporter tried to ask questions, Bentz kept muttering “no comment.”

“What is it?”

“A murder, apparently,” Ty said as the reporter stared into the camera.

“…so that’s it. Another woman murdered. Another one linked to prostitution. The question that has to be asked is are the killings linked? Do we have a serial killer, here, in New Orleans? It’s starting to look that way.”

Chapter Twenty-six

“Bentz has been busy lately,” Ty observed as he clicked the remote and the image on the television faded.

“Criminals don’t have weekends off,” she said, bothered by the report. The possibility of a serial killer was sobering and reminded her that there were other problems beside hers in the city. “So what have you found out?” she asked, motioning toward the notes, pictures and files spread over the coffee table.

“Not much more than I knew before.” He rubbed the back of his neck as if his muscles were strained. “I’ve got a partial list of people who were acquainted with Annie, what they’ve been doing for the past nine years and where they are now.”

“That’s a start. Tell me about them.”

“Okay.” He walked back to the couch, sat down and leaned over the coffee table to his computer. Squinting, he clicked the mouse and said, “Oswald—Wally, Annie’s father, is still up in the Northwest…in…Kelso, Washington—that’s Washington State.”

“I know where it is. He’s the guy that asked you to look into this.”

“Yep, good old Uncle Wally. As mismatched with Estelle as he could be. She was white-collar society, he, strictly blue-collar. One job to the other. I never could figure them out, but they were young when they hooked up and she got pregnant with Kent, so, they got married. Then, of course, divorced when the kids were young and Estelle found someone more suitable in Dr. Faraday. Wally never remarried, lives alone in some kind of modular home park and works for a logging company.” Ty glanced up at Samantha. “Since he wanted me to investigate what happened to his daughter, I don’t think he’s a viable suspect, but I haven’t ruled him out completely. Stranger things have happened.”

“I guess.” Samantha rounded the couch and leaned over the back, reading the computer screen over Ty’s shoulder, her head next to his.

“Estelle is still living in the house in Houston where Annie died. She’s never moved, never remarried, doesn’t even date, spends a lot of time volunteering at the church and lives off of what she got from the divorce and her investments. A shrewd lady, Aunt Estelle. She’s parlayed a sizable inheritance into a small fortune. In our one phone conversation, she agreed to be interviewed for the book as long as I see her in person. I’m not exactly at the top of her favorites list but not persona non grata either. She doesn’t want Annie’s story told, but since it will be, she’d like to tell her side of it.” One side of his mouth lifted. “She’s a controlling woman, and my guess is that she thinks that if she talks to me, I’ll take her version of what happened as gospel and print it verbatim.”

“Which you won’t.”

“Of course not. The truth is the truth. You can color it any way you want, even try to whitewash it, but it’s still the truth. Estelle is a great manipulator, but I’ll be hell to control.” He slanted a look over his shoulder. “It will be interesting to see what she has to say.”

Sam remembered the cold, dry-eyed woman who wouldn’t allow Sam to attend the graveside service for her daughter. Tall and graceful, with upswept blond hair and pale blue eyes, she’d looked down her straight nose at Samantha at the gates to the cemetery. “Please,” she’d said, “this is a private ceremony. Just family.”

“I just came to pay my respects,” Sam had replied, her heart wrenching with guilt, as if she somehow could have counseled the girl, somehow gotten through to her, somehow prevented this unthinkable tragedy.

“Don’t you think you’ve done enough? My family has been devastated by this, and it’s your fault. If you had helped her—” Estelle’s cool facade had shattered and her lips had begun to tremble. Tears had filled her ghostly eyes, and she’d blinked rapidly. “You just don’t understand…Please…It would be best for everyone if you left.” Beneath her foundation makeup, Estelle had paled. She lifted a trembling hand and swiped beneath her eyelids, careful not to muss her mascara. “I—I can’t deal with this right now.” She turned to a lanky man with thinning brown hair, tanned skin and grief-stricken expression. Sam had recognized him as Estelle’s husband, Annie’s stepfather, Jason Faraday. “This is so awful, “Estelle said as the man leveled Sam a look that begged her to back off. “I…I don’t want that woman here.”

“Shh. Don’t worry,” he’d whispered, wrapping a protective arm over her thin shoulders. “Come on.” He’d shepherded Estelle toward the freshly turned mound of earth in a green expanse of lawn dotted with headstones, family plots and vaults.

Sam had gotten the message. A few weeks later, the sympathy card she’d sent to the family had been returned unopened.

“Good luck talking to her,” she said now, shaking her head to dislodge the painful memory. “I don’t think Estelle had anything to do with Annie’s death. In fact I’m not sure it wasn’t suicide. The police did check it out.”

“I was there, remember? On the force. Kicked off of the case because I was related to the deceased and because I was pretty vocal that I didn’t like the way the investigation was being handled.”

“You still haven’t convinced me that Annie was murdered. I mean the Houston police force is pretty good.” She crossed her arms over the back of the couch as he scrolled down.

“Bear with me.”

“Fine.”

“This is where things get interesting,” he said. “Jason and Estelle divorced less than a year after Annie’s death. As soon as it was legal, Jason remarries a nurse from his office staff, sells his part of the partnership in the group where he worked as a surgeon and he and the new missus pull up stakes and move to Cleveland. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But get this, he’s been in New Orleans more than once in the last few months. His new wife’s sister lives in Mandeville, just across the lake, and he’s had a couple of conferences here.”

“Wait a minute. This doesn’t make sense. You think a killer got away with murder, and now, nine years later, he’s calling me, wanting to dredge it all up again? Why? There is no statute of limitations. Remember, whoever ‘John’ is, he blames
me
for Annie’s death. If he killed her, why blame me, why not let well enough alone and allow everyone to think that Annie killed herself. If what you’re saying is true, he went to great pains to make it look like she committed suicide. Why stir things up now? It doesn’t make sense.”

Ty looked up at her. “We’re not dealing with a sane man, though, are we? The guy who’s been calling you, he’s got all sorts of hangups about sin and repentance and atonement. My guess is that something triggered his need to call you and bring the Annie tragedy back into the limelight. Maybe he heard you on the radio show or maybe something happened in his personal life. We already know he’s screwed up about God and punishment and sin. He snapped, Samantha.”

She still wasn’t buying it, but played along. “Okay, just for argument’s sake, let’s say you think the killer could be Jason Faraday.”

“One possibility. He split from Estelle fast and practically gave her everything in the divorce, then pulled up stakes and got the hell out of Dodge so to speak. He started a new life for himself with ties down here.”

“Who else?” She picked at the dying fronds of a Boston fern.

“Annie’s brother. Kent and she were pretty close. They’d lived through their parents’ divorce and their mother’s remarriage. Kent was pretty messed up after Annie died. He didn’t work, didn’t go to school and suffered from some kind of depression. All this time his mother’s second marriage was breaking up. He was the man of the house and during that time he was committed to a private mental hospital for a while, one in Southern California, Our Lady of Mercy.”

“Catholic? For rich kids, right?” she asked, noticing how his dark hair curled at the nape of his neck.

“Troubled kids.”

“But it was run by the Catholic Church.”

“Estelle’s a devoted member of the church, so her kids were raised that way.” He slanted her a look. “It’s not a sin you know.”

“I do know. Guess how I was raised?” she asked, walking into the kitchen and dropping the brittle fronds into the trash.

“I don’t have to guess. It’s all in my notes.” “Oh, right. You know, Ty, I should be ticked off about this. It’s called invasion of privacy, I think.” She was dusting her hands as she padded back into the living room and resumed her position leaning over the back of the couch.

His smile wasn’t the least bit abashed. “So I’m a bastard, what can I say?”

“Add in insufferable, bullheaded and inflexible.”

“Your kind of man.”

“In your dreams.”

“There, too,” he admitted, sending her a hot glance that caused a catch in the back of her throat. Things were moving quickly, probably too quickly. Right now her life was turned inside out, she needed room to breathe, to think, to figure out why some twisted man was tormenting her. It wasn’t the time to get seriously involved with anyone and yet…and yet…

She cleared her throat and picked at a piece of lint on the back of the cushions. “You were telling me about the members of Annie’s family,” she reminded him.

“And I had a thought.” Rotating his head to look her square in the face, he said, “You know, since you’re a hotshot celebrity-psychologist, maybe you could make inquiries to the hospital about Kent, find out about his depression and illness.”

“I’m a psychologist, not psychiatrist…big difference in the medical world. They like that MD tagged onto the end of your name.”

“This is a mental hospital, they’ll take you seriously.”

“I think I’m known in the medical community as an ‘entertainment shrink.’ That doesn’t sound too serious to me.”

“You lived in the area?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “The last I heard one of my college friends is practicing there.”

“So, you’ve got an in.”

“Patient files are still confidential.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything illegal,” he said, but the undertones in his voice suggested otherwise. “Just see what you can find out about Kent.”

“So you can print it in a book. I think that’s more than illegal. Unethical and morally corrupt might be thrown in.” “Anything you find out, I won’t use.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Look, I’ll call my friend, but that’s all. This is strictly, strictly off the record.”

“Absolutely.”

“So tell me more about Annie’s family. The brother, Kent, where is he…no wait, he’s here, isn’t he?” she guessed. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be so interested. He’s in New Orleans.”

“Close enough. Baton Rouge. He’s finally gotten his act together and finished school at All Saints College. He graduated in general studies, worked at the college part-time, though his mother supported him all the way through school.”

“Is he married?”

“Not Kent. He goes through girlfriends like water. Broke up with the last one at the end of May, though he’s probably dating again. He always seems to have a woman.”

“And a job?”

“He works part-time through a temp agency. I think Estelle is still paying most of the bills.”

“You’ve done your homework,” she said, feeling edgy. He snorted a laugh. “It’s called research when you’re an adult.”

Could Ty possibly be right? For years Samantha had believed that Annie Seger had taken her own life and now, if his theory was right, everything she’d believed had changed and the horror of the past, the secret guilt for Annie’s death that she’d tried so hard to bury, was back again, stronger than ever.

“John’s” calls are proof enough of that.
She rounded the couch, and straddled an overstuffed arm. “So you really think a member of her family is responsible for her death? Her father or stepfather or brother?”

“I’m not limiting the suspects to her family. But I’m sure it’s someone she knew. It could have been her boyfriend. Ryan Zimmerman lives in White Castle, just up the Mississippi a few miles. His schooling was interrupted, just as Kent’s was, and he went through a period where he was drugged-out all the time. Eventually, through drug treatment, he went back to school and finished Loyola, no less. Transferred in from a smaller school in Texas.”

“You’ve talked to him?”

“Not yet. I’d originally thought I’d start with the smaller players in all of this, get their interpretations of the people closest to Annie, so that I didn’t tip my hand. Maybe had a little deeper insight, but now, I’m not so sure.”

“Because of the calls I’ve been getting.” “Yeah.” He plowed his fingers through his hair and scowled, obviously angry with himself. “I worry that somehow I started this ugly ball rolling, and you got in its path.”

“But then, again, maybe you didn’t. There’s no use in dwelling on that. Tell me about Ryan. What about his love life?”

He checked the computer, but Sam guessed he knew all this information like the back of his hand. “Ryan got married last year…but he separated about three months ago. She’s a local girl he met while going to school. She wants a divorce, he’s against it.” Ty’s gaze held hers. “He doesn’t believe in divorce, it’s against his faith.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“It’s not all that surprising,” Ty pointed out. “Annie and Kent are from the same family. She met Ryan through the church, and, let’s face it, Catholics are a distinct minority in Texas unless you happen to be a Mexican-American.”

“So, Ryan got married in the Catholic Church and less than a year later his wife wants a divorce. Why?”

“I’m still working on that. It could be his lack of ambition. He’s got a teaching degree but still drives a truck.” Ty moved the mouse around. “But I spoke to a couple of other girlfriends he had who have insisted that he never got over his first love.”

“Meaning Annie,” Sam guessed, cold inside as she slid onto the cushions from the arm of the couch.

“Right. She stole him from her best friend, Priscilla McQueen, another cheerleader.

“This sounds like it’s out of
Peyton Place.
What happened to her?”

“Prissy still lives in Houston. Married now and has a baby. Her husband works for an oil company.”

“You’ve got this all on computer?” she asked, motioning toward the laptop.

“And on disk as well.”

“Okay, so I’m trying to make sense of all this. You think that Ryan wasn’t the father of Annie’s unborn baby, and you know this because of blood types.”