by Lisa Jackson
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 a
ll 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.
“Wonderful,” Kristi groused to herself as she backed up, then rammed the car into drive. No one was about but a man walking his dog near the gaslight, and a biker pedaling fast enough to keep the beam of his headlight steady. No criminal was waiting for her. No deranged psycho hiding between the parked cars on the street. All was quiet. All was normal.
But as she drove onto the street, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to go wrong.
So she’d returned.
Like a salmon drawn from the sea to a creek to spawn.
Kristi Bentz was a student again at All Saints.
It was fitting somehow, he thought, from his rooftop viewpoint. Through the skeletal branches of the trees near the thick stone wall of the campus, he focused his binoculars at the attic loft she’d rented.
Where one of the others had once lived.
A sign from the Almighty?
Or from the Prince of Darkness?
He grinned as he watched her check her window latches, make small talk with the Asian girl, then fly down the exterior steps to that pathetic little car she’d parked beneath a security lamp in the nearest lot. His view was cut off, of course, once she was down the stairs and below the wall, but he knew what she was doing.
The sound of the Honda’s engine firing up was barely audible over the drip of rain and swoosh of traffic on the side streets, but he heard it. Was tuned to it. Because it was she, the prodigal daughter. How perfect.
His throat went dry at the thought of her: long dark hair streaked with red, pert nose, intelligent green eyes, and wide mouth…. Oh, what she could do with those lips! He imagined them trailing down his body as she let her tongue slide across his flat abdomen, her breath hot and anxious as she undid the fastening to his jeans.
His groin tightened and his cock grew thick and he knew a minute of regret. He had to deny himself, at least for now. There was another…
He slid through the darkness and inside the fortresslike structure within the campus walls. Without turning on any lights, he made his way to the stairwell and eased down the steps, quiet as a cat. His gift was his vision, a gaze that could penetrate the darkness when others couldn’t. He was born with the ability, and even in the thick Louisiana nights, when low-lying fog clung to the cypress trees and oozed over the water of the bayou, he had vision. Enough that he could see prey and hunt without the use of night goggles or flashlights.
His ability had served him well, he thought, as he slipped outside and took in a deep breath of the fresh scent of rain…and more. He imagined he smelled the salty scent of Kristi Bentz’s skin, but he knew the aroma to be an illusion.
The first of many, he imagined, as he jogged silently and easily through the night. His body was in perfect shape. Honed. Ready.
For the ultimate sacrifice.
She wouldn’t be taken easily.
But she would be taken.
And, at first, willingly.
He just had to plant the seeds to pique her curiosity.
And then she wouldn’t be able to stop herself.
CHAPTER 3
“…This is Hiram Calloway,” a thin, reedy voice said over the static of a bad cell connection. “I got your message about the locks. I thought I’d stop by your apartment and see if I could fix them.”
“Too late,” Kristi said, irritated. Only today, at two o’clock on New Year’s Eve, had he decided to return her calls. “I already installed new ones and put in new latches on the windows. I couldn’t wait any longer. I’ll bill you.”
“What?” he shrieked, his nasal voice hiking up a notch. “You can’t—”
“I can and I did.”
“That kind of thing has to be approved. It’s…it’s in the lease, paragraph seven—”
“I’m just telling you, the apartment wasn’t secure and I think there’s something about that in the lease, too. Check it. And I don’t know what the paragraph is, but I’ve already taken care of the problem.”
“But—”
“I have to get back to work,” she said, snapping her cell off. She slipped the phone into the pocket of her apron and walked past two cooks loitering under the overhang of the back porch where they were smoking in their greasy chef coats. The screen door slapped shut behind her as she made her way through a maze of hallways in the thirties bungalow that had been converted to a restaurant years before. The history of the building had been written up in the local paper ten years earlier and was yellowing in its frame that hung between the bathrooms, marked LORDS and LADIES. As if any of the clientele were blue bloods.
Retying her apron, Kristi passed through swinging doors from the kitchen to the dining area and stopped fuming about Hiram. At least he’d finally called back. Kristi had been beginning to think the manager/grandson was a figment of Irene’s imagination.
So far, it had been a busy morning and early afternoon, but things were slowing down, thank God. Her feet were sore, her clothes feeling grimy from the grease and smoke that hung in the air and clung to her hair. After a few hours working frantically in her section, she’d wondered why she hadn’t taken her father’s advice and tried to nail a desk job at another insurance company. After all, it wasn’t as if she were getting rich on tips. However, just the memory of hours on the phone with complaining customers of Gulf Auto and Life had reminded her of her goal and her dream of writing true crime.
Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything since downing a muffin on the fly early in the morning. After her shift she thought she might splurge on a Mercutio melt and a slice of King Lear’s key lime pie.
Happy New Year, she thought sarcastically as she grabbed a pot of coffee and refilled half-empty cups on the tables in her section.
A group of women strolled in and squeezed into the worn bench seat of a corner booth.
Snagging four plastic-encased menus, Kristi approached. The women hardly noticed, they were so into their conversation, and one of the voices sounded familiar. Kristi couldn’t believe it, but as she stared at the back of a curly head, she realized that she was about to serve Lucretia Stevens, her original roommate when she was an undergrad and living in the close quarters of Cramer Hall. Inside, Kristi cringed. She and Lucretia had never gotten along and had been as different as day to night. Kristi, in those days, had been a party girl and Lucretia a brainiac who, when she hadn’t been studying, had spent hours flipping through Brides magazine and munching on Cheetos. She hadn’t had any social life and had been evasive when talking about her boyfriend, who’d gone to another college. Kristi had never seen the guy and had often wondered if he’d only existed in Lucretia’s mind.
What goes around, comes around, she thought as she slid menus in front of the women and asked them what they wante
d to drink.
“Kristi?” Lucretia asked, before anyone answered.
“Hi, Lucretia.” Geez, this was going to be uncomfortable.
“What’re you doing here?” Lucretia’s eyes were wide, probably due to the contacts that, when she’d worn them in lieu of her glasses, had always made her appear owlish.
“Trying to take your order,” Kristi said, offering a smile.
“Hey, everyone, this is Kristi Bentz, my old roommate when I was a freshman, oh, God, a kabillion years ago.” She laughed, then motioned toward a woman of about twenty-five with narrow-framed glasses and dark brown hair that fell to her shoulders. “Kristi, this is Ariel.”
“Hi,” Kristi said, shifting from one foot to the other.
“Oh, hi.” Ariel nodded, then glanced past Kristi to the door, as if she were looking for someone, at least someone more interesting than Kristi.
“And this is Grace,” Lucretia indicated her thin friend who wore braces and had spiked, reddish hair. The woman couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds. “And this is Trudie.” The last girl, seated next to Lucretia in the booth, was heavier-set, had thick black hair pulled into a long ponytail, a smooth olive complexion and white teeth with a bit of a gap. All three managed smiles as Lucretia said, as if surprised, “Geez, Kristi, you look great.”
“Thanks.”
“Bentz?” Trudie repeated. “Wait a sec. Didn’t I read about you?”
Here we go, Kristi thought. “Probably about my dad. He makes the press.”
“Wait a minute. He’s a cop, right?” Ariel asked, twisting her head and squinting up at Kristi. She was suddenly interested. “Didn’t he crack that case at Our Lady of Virtues a year or so ago?” She shuddered. “That was soooo weird.”
Amen, Kristi thought, anxious to end the personal conversation about a time she’d rather forget.
“Weren’t you involved?” Lucretia was now serious. “I mean, didn’t I read something about you being injured?” Her forehead wrinkled as she thought. “The way the article was slanted it was as if you were almost killed.” She was nodding, her hair shimmering in dark curls beneath the overhead lamps. “Like before.”
