by Lisa Jackson
Portia slid the list of names across the counter. “Everything you’ve got on these girls.”
“The fearsome foursome,” Mary Alice said as she eyed Portia’s handwritten note. “Most of this is on the computer. Don’t you have your own files?”
And then some. “Nothing official,” Portia hedged. “I’ve looked over what’s on the computer but, if you don’t mind, I’d like to see the actual files.”
“Makes me no never mind long as Lacey’s okay with it. Just give me a sec.” High heels clicking, Mary Alice walked to a bank of file cabinets and started searching through the folders. In a matter of minutes, she had slapped the pathetically thin files on the counter and Portia signed them out. Portia carried the few documents back to her cubicle and decided she’d copy everything within the files just so she’d be ready.
She prayed she was misguided, but all her instincts told her it was only a matter of time before one of the girls’ bodies showed up.
When it did, and there was an actual homicide case to be solved, she’d be ready.
Two classes down, too many more to go, Jay thought as he drove north on Friday night. With Bruno by his side, nose to the crack in the window, and Springsteen blasting through the stereo, he hauled some new plumbing fixtures and tiles toward Baton Rouge. Even in the darkness as he squinted into the headlights of cars heading toward New Orleans, he noticed more evidence of Katrina that had yet to be cleared: uprooted, long-dead trees, piles of rotting boards alongside homes being restored by the most stalwart and determined of Louisianans.
So far he’d settled into his new routine. He enjoyed the challenge of renovating his cousins’ house and had found teaching exhilarating. Except, of course, for dealing with Kristi. After the first night when she’d run him down to clear the air between them, they hadn’t spoken. She hadn’t asked a question in class, nor had he singled her out to answer one he’d thrown at the students. She’d sat at the back of the room, taking notes, watching him, her expression fixed and bland. Icily cool and disinterested.
Definitely un-Kristi.
The fact that she tried so hard to look studious and unanimated made him smile. Obviously, by her attempt at detachment, she was having as hard a time dealing with him as he was with her.
Well, fine, he thought, flipping on his wipers for a second, just to scrape off the thick mist that was settling with the night.
Kristi deserved a little discomfort. As much as she’d served up to him. Jesus, in the past two weeks he’d had three dreams involving her. One hot as hell, their naked bodies covered in sweat as they made love in a bed that was floating down a swift, dark river. In the second dream he’d watched as she’d taken off with a faceless man, looping her arm through his as they walked into a chapel with bells chiming, and in the third, she was missing. He kept catching glimpses of her, only to watch as she vanished into a rising mist. That nightmare had tormented him just last night, and he’d woken to a pounding heart, dark fear pumping through his bloodstream.
“Gonna be a long term,” he advised the dog as he signaled to leave the highway. Up ahead the lights of the city cut through the fog.
His cell phone rang. Bruno let out a soft woof as Jay managed to turn off the radio, answering without looking at the digital display.
“McKnight.”
“Hi.”
Well, speak of the devil. Jay’s jaw hardened. He’d recognize the sound of Kristi Bentz’s voice anywhere.
“It’s me, Kristi,” she said, and then added, “Kristi Bentz.” As if he didn’t already know.
“You memorized the number.” The wipers skated noisily over the windshield and he switched them off, driving for half a second with his thigh.
“Yes, I guess I did,” she said tightly.
His right hand gripped the wheel again and he braced himself. “Need something?”
“Your help.”
“With an assignment?”
She only hesitated a heartbeat, but it was enough to warn him. “Yeah.”
God, she was a liar. “Lay it on me.”
Angling his truck off the main road at the outskirts of the city, he followed what was becoming a well-worn route to his cousins’ house.
“I can’t. Not over the phone. It’s too complicated and I’m already late for work. It, uh, it took me a long time to screw up the courage to call you.”
Now that was probably the first bit of truth in the conversation. He didn’t respond.
“I thought that maybe…maybe we could meet,” she said.
“Meet? Like in my office?”
“I was thinking somewhere else.”
Jay was watching the road, spying a kid on a motorized scooter who, as he passed, zipped out of a driveway to speed across the road behind him. “Jesus!” he muttered.
“Wow…I’ll take that as a no.”
“I wasn’t talking to you. I’m driving and a kid nearly hit me.” He slowed for a stop sign. “Where?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the Watering Hole.”
“For a drink?”
“Sure. I’ll buy.”
He stepped on the gas and drove to the next corner, where he turned down the street to his part-time bungalow. “You mean, like a date?” he asked, knowing she’d probably see red.
“It’s just a damned beer, Jay.”
“A beer and a favor,” he reminded her. “You want me to help you with something.”
“Call it whatever you want,” she said, a tinge of exasperation in her voice. “How about tonight? Around nine? I’ll meet you there. It’s not far from where I work.”
He knew he was asking for trouble just seeing her again. Big trouble. The kind he didn’t need. Just having her in his class caused him to have nightmares. Anything more intimate was bound to spell trouble.
He hesitated.
Who was he kidding? He couldn’t resist. Never could, when it involved Kristi. “Nine it is,” he said, and as the words spilled out of his mouth he was already giving himself a hard mental shake. Idiot! Lamebrain!
“Good. I’ll see you then.” She hung up and he drove into the driveway with the cell phone still clasped in his hand. What the hell could she possibly want from him? He slammed the truck into park and sat behind the wheel. “Whatever it is,” he said to the dog, “it’s not gonna be good.”
Kristi untied her dirty apron, dropped it into the hamper near the back door of the restaurant where she worked, snagged her pack from a hook, then headed toward the restroom. Inside the cramped room she stripped off her grimy skirt and blouse, then stepped out of the black flats she wore on the job. With a spritz of perfume in lieu of a shower, she glanced at her reflection in the mirror, groaned, and pulled on her jeans and a long-sleeved T. In one motion she yanked the band holding her ponytail to the back of her head and shook her hair loose. Half a second later, she laced up her running shoes and stuffed her dirty clothes into her backpack. She was late, as usual.
It was already nine and she didn’t want to stand Jay up. She was bugged that she had to ask for his help, but she’d been butting her head against the wall when it came to getting more information on the missing girls. Kristi needed someone with connections, though asking her father for help was out of the question. But Jay was on campus, available in Baton Rouge part of the week, and since he was a professor he had access to records at All Saints. Her six hours a week working for the registrar weren’t enough to open the locked doors and filing cabinets she wanted to search. Nor had she been given a password to the most private and sensitive information stored in the school’s database.
So, she was forced to turn to someone on staff.
She’d thought about Lucretia and discarded the notion; her former roommate wasn’t the most trustworthy or helpful person on the planet.
So she had to find a way to persuade Jay to get involved.
If she could have come up with another person who had access to the kind of information she needed, she never would have called Jay—at least she hoped sh
e wouldn’t have. She’d come to terms with suffering through his class for a few weeks, but this was different. It put her in closer contact to him.
Maybe that’s what you were angling for.
“Oh, shut up,” she said to that persistent and irritating voice in her head. She did not want to be close to Jay. Not now. Not ever. This was just a necessity, a means to an end.
“Date my ass,” she muttered, leaving the restroom and yanking her jacket from a peg.
With a wave to Ezma, she was out the back door of the restaurant, where two of the line cooks were smoking in the blue illumination from the security lights. The night was cool, a mist sliding through the parked cars in the lot and clinging to the drooping branches of the single tree.
Kristi took off at a jog for the Watering Hole. The student hangout would be crowded enough so that it wouldn’t feel intimate, yet there were spots in the connecting rooms that were quieter than the open space around the sports bar. There was a chance Jay might be seen with her, but she figured it didn’t matter. Who would care?
Barely breaking a sweat, she made it to the hangout only eight minutes late. Shouldering open the door, she slid inside. With a quick perusal of the semidark, crowded interior, she zeroed in on Jay seated at the bar, nursing a drink, staring up at a television screen where some football game was being played. He was facing away from her, but she recognized his shaggy brown hair, wide shoulders stretching the back of a gray sweatshirt, and jeans she’d seen him wear in class, the battered, sun-bleached ones with a tear at the top of a back pocket. The stool beside him was empty, but he’d claimed it by resting the sole of his beat-up Adidas running shoe upon one of the cross-rails, as if he were saving her a seat.
Fat chance. She knew he hadn’t wanted to come. She’d heard the hesitation in his voice.
But then, Kristi couldn’t blame him. It had taken her half a week to work up to calling him, and the only reason she had was that she was desperate and needed help. His help.
She took in a deep breath as she wended her way between the tables and knots of patrons talking, laughing, flirting, and drinking. Glasses clinked, beer sloshed, ice cubes rattled, and the smell of smoke hung in the air despite all the efforts of a wheezing air-filtering system. The televisions were muted but music wafting from speakers mounted high on the walls competed with the noise of the crowd.
Jay kicked out the stool just as she reached him, as if he’d sensed her presence.
“Nice trick,” she said, and he lifted his glass toward the bar and the mirror behind it, where her reflection stared back at her.
She slid onto the stool. “And for a second I thought maybe you were clairvoyant.”
One side of his mouth twitched upward. “If I was, then I’d know what the hell it is you want from me, now, wouldn’t I?”
“I guess you would.” To the bartender wiping up a spill, she said, “I’ll have a beer…light. Whatever you’ve got on tap.”
“Coors?” the bartender asked, tossing his wet rag into a bin under the bar.
“Yeah. Fine.” Forcing a smile she didn’t feel, she met Jay’s brutal gaze. “Bet you were surprised that I called.”
“Nothing you do surprises me anymore.”
The bartender set a frosted glass in front of her and she placed her ID and several bills on the bar.
“That’s a tip,” Jay said to the man behind the bar. “Put her drink on my tab.” To Kristi, he added, “Come on, let’s talk in the dart room where it’s a little quieter. Then you can tell me what this is all about.”
“And beat you at a game.”
“In your dreams, darlin’,” he said, and her stupid heart did a silly little flip. She wasn’t falling for his charms. No way, no how. There was a reason she’d broken up with him all those years ago and that hadn’t changed. Worse yet, he was wearing a three-day’s growth of beard, the kind of pseudo-chic look that she detested. Of course it just made him look cowboy-rugged. Crap. The least he could do was look bad.
She grabbed her beer and again serpentined through the tables and crowd to a booth where a busboy was busily picking up near-empty glasses and platters bearing the remnants of onion rings, french fries, and small pools of ketchup. With a nod from the busboy, Kristi slid into one side of the booth while Jay sat opposite her.
Once the table had been swabbed down and they were alone again, Kristi decided to cut through all the uncomfortable small talk. “I need your help because you’re on staff here and have access to files I can’t see.”
“Okay…” he said skeptically.
“I’m looking into the disappearance of the four girls who went missing from All Saints,” she said, and before he could protest she launched into an explanation about her concerns, Lucretia’s worries, the lack of anyone seemingly interested in what happened to the coeds, and the fact that they could have all met with foul play.
Arms crossed over his chest, Jay leaned against the wooden backrest and stared at her with his damnable gold-colored eyes as she laid it out to him.
“Don’t you think this is a matter for the police?” he asked.
“You are the police.”
“I work in the crime lab.”
“And you have access to all records.”
He leaned forward, elbows propped on the table. “There is a little matter of jurisdiction, Kristi, not to mention protocol and the fact that no one but you and maybe a few hungry rogue reporters think a crime has been committed.”
“So what if we’re wrong? At least we tried. Right now, we’re just sitting around not doing anything because no one else gave a damn about these girls.”
“There’s no ‘we.’ This is your idea.”
But he still hadn’t said no or argued that he wouldn’t help her. He took a long swallow from his beer and stared at her. The wheels were turning in his mind; she could almost see them. And the one thing that she’d admired but had also disliked about Jay was that he was a bona fide do-gooder. A regular Dudley Do-Right when it came to matters of the law.
“Doesn’t matter whose idea it is, we need to check it out,” she insisted.
“Maybe you should contact the local police.”
“I’ve tried. Gotten nowhere.”
“That should tell you something.”
“Just that no one gives a damn!” She half rose from her chair. She was reminded just how maddening Jay could be.
“If the locals aren’t interested, you could consider talking to your dad,” he suggested.
“I considered it and threw the idea in file thirteen. He’s already freaked about me being up here. He knows about the missing girls and he’s damned sure I’ll be the next.”
“He could be right, what with you poking around and all.”
“Only if there is a psycho on the loose. If not, I’m in no danger. If so, then we’ve got to do something.”
“By making yourself a damned target?”
“If need be.”
“For Christ’s sake, Kristi, didn’t you learn your lesson the last time, or the time before that?” he demanded, his lips thinning in frustration. When she didn’t answer, he snorted and said, “Apparently not.”
“So are you gonna help me or am I gonna have to go this alone?”
“You’re not going to guilt me into this.” He cocked that damned broken eyebrow and drained his glass.
“How’d that happen anyway?” she asked, motioning to the little scar.
“I pissed a woman off.”
“Really pissed her off. And she beat you up?”
“Hurled a ring at me.”
So that’s what had happened to the engagement she’d heard about. “At least she was passionate.”
“Maybe a little too passionate.”
“Didn’t think that was possible.”
One side of his mouth lifted into a knowing half grin. “Passion can run hot and cold, Kris,” he said. “When one person can’t get what he or she wants, that passion can turn into brutal frustration and ange
r. I figured I was better off without a woman who would tell me she loved me one second and try to kill me the next.” His gaze touched hers. “I think that’s all you need to know about my love life. So, spell it out. What do you want me to do? Copy all the personnel files, grade reports, loan applications, social security numbers of the girls?”
“That would be great.”
“And illegal. Forget it.”
“Okay, okay, so just look through the information and let me know if you see anything that looks suspicious, anything that links the girls besides their choice of classes and the fact that their families gave new meaning to the word dysfunctional. You’re a cop.”
“And I could lose my job.”
“I’m asking you to do a little research, not break the law.”
His lips compressed as a waitress came by and asked if they wanted another round. Jay nodded and Kristi said, “Sure,” then drank half her beer while still waiting for an answer. Finally she said, “If you find anything, we’ll go straight to the police. Or the campus security and leave it to them.”
“You’d do that?” he asked, skepticism tingeing his words. “Just hand over everything you’ve got?”
“Of course.”
He snorted in disbelief.
“Come on, Jay, I’ll play you a game of darts. If I win, you’ll look through the records.”
“And if I win?” he asked.
“You won’t.”
“So sure of yourself?” he asked, his eyebrows slamming together. “No dice. I want to know what the stakes are if I win.”
The waitress came back with the new round, scooped up Jay’s empty and left Kristi with a beer and a half in front of her. “Okay, Professor, if you win, then you name it.”
“That’s pretty cocky.”
“Just confident.” She finished the first beer and stood. One dartboard wasn’t being used. She walked over to it and plucked one set of darts from their holder.
