by Lisa Jackson
“Yes! You!” Somehow this creep was trying to trick her, trick the cops with his clean, respectable façade, but she wouldn’t be fooled, not after days of being held captive. “Where’s Chloe, damn it! Where the hell is she?” Zoe was nearly hyperventilating, her mind spinning, only vaguely aware that other people in the department, other policemen and women were clustering around them. Voices. Phones. Shuffling feet. Stares. Her heart thudding, she was sweating, in a near panic at the sight of him.
The cop who was looking at her said, “You’re identifying this man as your abductor?”
“Yes!” Zoe nearly screamed. What was wrong with them? Why was he standing here all innocent-like. As if he didn’t know. “It’s . . . it’s . . . him! Where’s Chloe, you bastard? Where’s my sister?” she cried, but as she said the words and her panic at the sight of him subsided a bit, she realized that something was off. Not right. Even though she wanted to pummel the jerkwad with her bare fists, to gouge out his eyes, she wasn’t sure. The face, oh, God, the face was the same and the build, but all cleaned up? Not a scratch on his face, not a bruise, not . . . wait, there was a little scar, but it was old and . . . what the hell? The psycho didn’t have an old scar there but he sure as hell had fresh ones. Her throat closed in on itself as she stared at him, tried to get her bearings. Could this guy be, what? A dopple-ganger, another twin? Oh, Geez, was that the deal? The freak was actually a twin himself? She thought she might have a heart attack right then and there just staring at him.
Little nuances—differences—jumped out at her. Her stomach dropped. “Do you . . .” No, she wouldn’t talk to the guy. To the cop, she asked, “Does he have a tattoo? On his arm? There should be a tat!”
To her amazement, the guy nodded and pushed his sleeve up past the bend of one elbow where the inky image of a rattlesnake was coiled around his biceps. “Only one I’ve got.”
“No, no.” She was shaking her head, disbelieving, trying to wrap her near-crazed mind around what she was seeing. “That’s not right!” she whispered, attempting to get a grip on herself “Not a snake . . . this is all wrong.” Remembering the mountain and a bloody heart on her captor’s arm, she felt sick inside. She was wrong. This wasn’t the creep. The man standing before her had a straighter nose and, of course, that tiny scar, faint but discernable, from years past. She was sure the freak didn’t have one there. Finally, her heartbeat slowing, the truth that had been dawning taking hold, she admitted, “The tattoo was way different, like that of a mountain and a bloody heart, some weird crap like that.” Oh, God, she wanted this man to be her would-be killer, to see him in custody, in handcuffs and shackles, behind bars or worse. She tried to think straight, to push past her pain and exhaustion, her hunger and dehydration, but she couldn’t and felt her knees start to give.
For the first time she noticed how many of the cops had left their desks, their expressions interested and wary, some with hands on their weapons as they collected around the tense group clogging the hallway. All staring at her.
“What . . . what about some kind of mole?” she asked in desperation. “On your . . . ?” She turned her gaze to the cop who had walked out of the office with the freak. “On his butt cheek.”
Selma took in a swift breath. “You saw him without clothes?”
“Except for a rubber apron. Yeah.” But if this wasn’t the guy, then, oh God, Chloe was still in the maniac’s clutches . . . or worse.
“You want me to drop trou? Would that convince you?” the guy demanded and before she could answer, without batting an eye, turned around and let his pants fall from his buttocks. The cop stared at them all as if they were all ceritifiable while more and more people gathered around.
“Hey! I don’t think that’s necessary, Bridges!” the cop said as some Hispanic dude with a goatee and diamond stud earring swaggered around the corner and stopped short.
“Whoa! What the hell kind of freak show is this?” he demanded, eyeing the gathering crowd. He acted like a cop, too—kinda—but he was wearing a black leather jacket and a bad-boy attitude that were at odds with him being a part of the force.
“This is Zoe Denning,” the first cop said, and then to Zoe, his face all serious intensity as he motioned to the guy who had just shown his buttocks. “Is this your abductor?”
“No,” she admitted, as the guy pulled up his pants and, his expression no longer of surprise, adjusted his shirt. “No, it can’t be. But—”
“But,” he said, his eyes darkening, “I look enough like him to be his twin.”
“You want to talk about Myra now?” Brianna said, disbelieving as she stared at Milo. “I really can’t. I have an appointment.”
“Here?” Milo asked, and looked at the apartment building. “Your appointment is here?” He eyed her suspiciously.
She checked her watch. She wasn’t scheduled to meet with Jase for another fifteen minutes, but she wasn’t certain she wanted to spend the time alone with Milo; there was just something about him that she didn’t trust.
“You followed me. And you came to my house and looked in my bathroom window.”
He didn’t answer, but actually blushed, as if embarrassed.
“While I was showering!”
“No . . . no . . . I’d rung the bell. Really. I wanted . . . I needed to talk to you and you didn’t answer. I saw lights on, so I walked around the house and . . .”
“Looked at me while I was showering? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“You were out of the shower. You had a towel around you.”
“Doesn’t matter! That’s voyeurism, Milo. I could have you arrested! I should have you arrested! You can’t go around peeping in windows.”
“You wouldn’t!” He was nervous now, his tongue darting around the corners of his mouth.
“I’m not sure about that.” She was furious and wanted to let him have it with both barrels. “You scared me to death!”
“I just . . . I just didn’t know how to talk to you.” He seemed sincere and confused and upset. “I’m sorry. Really. Please,” he said. “I just want to talk about Myra. I thought you cared about the whole twinless twin thing . . . I . . .”
A horn blasted as a minivan rolled down the street.
“Okay,” Brianna said. “Just find a parking spot. I’ll wait.”
“You could just hop into the van.”
No way would she jump into a van with a guy who had admitted to peering through her windows, a man who, at some level, made her more than nervous. She clicked off her phone’s camera but put it in alarm mode, should she need to call for help. She considered moving her Honda, parked as it was in a tow-away zone, but decided this hastily convened meeting would only take a few minutes. Twinless twin or not, it was all the time she could give him.
It took Milo five minutes to park his vehicle and walk back to her spot near the tree, and she couldn’t help but second-guess her own sanity at having agreed to this. She glanced around the area, just to make certain she wasn’t alone.
A woman pushing a baby carriage while trying to walk some kind of big dog, a Lab mix, she thought, was on the far side of the street. She also spied a man leaning over the rail of the third-floor porch. Smoking a cigarette and staring at her. Hard. Or was it her imagination? Were her nerves jangled because of Milo and the fact that Donovan Caldwell had died today. It was all kind of weird. Outré. Unnerving. Silently she told herself she was just a bundle of nerves and jumping at shadows, not in small measure due to Milo Tillman, her own personal stalker.
Was it even safe to deal with him?
What if he had a weapon?
What then?
She glanced up at the apartment building again and saw the gray-haired guy still watching her. Friend or foe?
Dear God, she was letting her imagination run wild with her. Now she was seeing evil in someone doing nothing threatening. But as Milo approached, she felt herself tense.
“Let’s go somewhere where we can sit down,” he suggested. “I thin
k there’s a café two blocks down.”
Like this was a date or something? Two friends having coffee? No way!
“I’m sorry,” she said. She needed to keep her relationship with this man professional. She’d crossed the barriers before and blurred the lines several times. Max had been a mistake, and she probably was more involved with Tanisha and Selma than she should be. They’d become friends. But Milo? The Peeping Tom? No way. His excuse for peering through her window was flimsy at best. “I really don’t have a lot of time. So what’s going on? What’s happening that couldn’t wait until our next meeting?”
“I, um, I lied about that,” he admitted, and her gut clenched.
“You lied?”
“About needing to talk about Myra. Well kind of... and about watching you.” He scratched the back of his neck nervously. “I think you’re in danger.”
“Me?” What was he talking about? Where was this going?
“I’ve followed you,” he admitted as a car left the parking lot of Jase’s apartment building, nosing into the street where the traffic was picking up.
“I know.” She glanced up to the third floor of the building. The smoker was still there, observing the ground below and, she felt, keeping an eye on her. All the better considering.
“And I’ve seen you with him.”
“With who?”
“Jacob.”
“Jacob?” she repeated, confused. “I don’t know a Jacob.”
He stared at her as if she were nuts. “But I saw you together. You know, after the meeting. The other night?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Milo’s face grew hard. “It was later, you remember, after the meeting where Selma told us about her daughters going missing?” An earnest look crossed his face, but of course she still didn’t trust him. “You went to dinner, I think, or out for drinks with Tanisha and Selma after the meeting and Jacob, he was waiting for you by your car.”
Now she got it. Milo was mixed up. That was it. Or he got Jase’s name wrong. “His name isn’t Jacob.” When he didn’t respond, she added, “He’s a reporter. Jason Bridges.”
But Milo’s face had changed. Any confusion in his expression had been chased away by anger. “What he is, Brianna, is a liar. His name is Bridges, yeah, but he’s Jacob and he’s a murdering son of a bitch. He killed Myra.”
He drove as if Lucifer himself was on his tail, taking corners too fast, putting Myra’s Ford through its paces, and all the while he was on his cell phone, listening to Myra berate him, reminding him over and over again that he’d failed. He’d left the city in a rush and now was flying toward the cabin, fields and farmland flashing by.
“You’re out of options. You need to kill her.” Myra’s disappointed voice had been cold. Calculating. As if she’d just stepped out of the grave. But insistent, so much so that he heard it even when he wasn’t on the phone with her.
He’d failed. He knew it now. Actually he’d known it the instant he’d missed his second shot and the pickup had sped out of range. He’d made the mistake of thinking he could fix things, that he could still hunt Zoe down, but had realized that returning to New Orleans had been a mistake.
He’d messed up, bungled the plan big-time, and Myra, that bitch, wasn’t going to let him forget it. He remembered the night he’d nearly killed her, how he’d wrapped his fingers around her thin throat and squeezed, listening to her squawk and gasp, watching her eyes bulge first in disbelief and then in terror.
She’d cheated on him and he’d caught her and confronted her and killed her. Snapped her lying, cheating neck the minute she’d turned twenty-one. Myra with her blood-red lipstick so much like the ribbons that tied his mother’s hair. And those red teddies with their seductive garters, again reminding him of Mother’s damned ribbons. The two women he’d loved had both been bitches and he’d taken care of them, hadn’t he? He’d shown Myra. Shown Mother. Shown both of those lying sluts. His mother should never have left his father and Myra, God, she’d spread her legs so easily for another man . . . She’d deserved to die!
No, no, wait. He couldn’t have killed Myra. Never. His head pounded with blurred memories of strangulation and ribbons and hatred and . . .
Stop! That was wrong. He’d gotten it all wrong. Mixed up dreams with what had really happened.
Right? Of course! Myra, his beautiful Myra was alive and had just been on the phone and read him the riot act for not doing as she commanded, for letting Zoe get away.
“We’ll deal with the first one later,” she had said in the awful, ever-present voice. “She can ID you and the damage is done there, but you can take care of her after the heat has died down. For now, idiot, concentrate.”
He felt his back muscles bunch. Hated it when she berated him. Even now, reviewing the conversation they’d had earlier in the day . . . or had it been another time?
“For now, just kill Chloe,” she had insisted, “so that’s one less mistake to worry about and then get the hell out of town. Leave the van. Take my car. Lie low. You still have money, right? You’ve been careful with your mother’s estate?”
He thought of his mother with her wide eyes, thinning hair, and red, red ribbon tying it back. The nursing facility had been expensive, would have eaten up all of her savings, which at the time had been substantial, so she, too, had to die.
She was a bitch anyway.
He didn’t mind helping her along, putting a little too much medication into her protein drink.
“Money’s not a problem,” he’d said aloud and wondered from her lack of response, if Myra had been listening. That was the way with her. She often didn’t reply to him and it pissed him off. “But what about you? If I kill Chloe and leave New Orleans, what about you?” He’d come back here because of Myra.
“I’ll always be with you, Jacob,” she’d cooed, soothing him, once again present. Sometimes he wondered if she even existed the way she toyed with him. “You know that.”
He smiled. She’d been angry with him, but forgiving. So he would do as she had bidden. Kill Chloe, make sure that little kicking bitch was dead, and then he’d blow town and bide his time.
He could wait for Zoe.
He was a patient man.
Bentz didn’t believe for a second that Jase Bridges was capable of murder, but as they sorted everything out in a conference room, the reporter himself came up with an outlandish theory in which he described finding out just this very afternoon that he had a twin brother he hadn’t known about, nor met. He’d only discovered the truth earlier in some kind of purging confession from his old man, who was also a drunk.
Montoya, who’d come a little late to the party, was skeptical. “Whoa. Wait. All these twins? Seriously?” he wondered aloud. “The twin girls who were taken, the mother who’s a twinless twin, and now Bridges having a twin brother he didn’t know about. What’s going on? Are we on some hidden camera show?”
Bentz didn’t have time to argue the facts. There was another girl missing and now, they had a place to start looking. The farmer who brought Zoe Denning into the station was a local who knew the area.
Zoe’s description of the isolated cabin in which she and her sister had been held coupled with Rand Cooligan’s knowledge of the terrain and the spot where he’d found her running through the field had helped. The police had narrowed the possibilities to six tracts that met the description of a small, run-down and isolated shack with a long, possibly quarter-of-a-mile lane and forests bordering the river. Four were dismissed as Cooligan knew the owners.
However, Bentz didn’t think just because the farmer could vouch for the landholders that put them in the clear, so he was dispatching deputies to those parcels. The other two he would personally visit.
“There’s the Shepherd place,” Rand said in the meeting. “Small one-room house, been abandoned for five, maybe six years. Never seen anyone going in or out, and the gate’s padlocked, rusted shut. I know ’cuz me and my boy went hunting that way j
ust last fall.”
“And the other place?” Bentz asked.
“The Tillman place?” Rand shook his head. “The owner, Sigmund Tillman, was an older guy. Oh, gosh, he’s been dead now, what? Twenty years. Left the place to his daughter as I recall.”
“But she doesn’t live there?”
“Nah. And she’s dead, too,” Rand said, thinking hard and nodding. “Murdered. Far as I know they never caught whoever did it.”
“Tillman?” Selma whispered, her eyes rounding. “There’s a man named Tillman in our support group. Milo. His twin sister’s name . . . Oh, God, I should remember this.”
“Myra,” Rand said.
“Okay, we’ll start there.” Bentz looked at Montoya. Another twin? Well, why not? To his partner, he said, “Let’s roll.”
CHAPTER 31
“Jacob killed your sister?” Brianna repeated, and wondered how far off the rails Milo was. Jason had a brother named Prescott, she knew that, but not one named Jacob. Even if there was a brother who looked identical to Jason, why would he have killed Milo’s sister?
A cold feeling slid down her spine as the words identical to Jason slipped through her mind. Her heart froze. Was it possible? Did he have a twin? Hadn’t Jase said something about his mother leaving after his infant brother had died?
Was it all a lie?
She glanced up at the balcony where the tall, gray-haired guy had been smoking. He was still there, lighting up another cigarette and staring at her through the smoke he exhaled. Her skin crawled. Why the hell was he staring at her, and why was he standing so close to Jase’s apartment? She’d thought it was because he lived in a neighboring unit and that still could be true, but as she moved slightly so that her line of sight was obstructed by the stairwell, she noticed Jase’s door was open wide though his truck was nowhere to be found on the street or in the lot.
Not a big deal.
Or was it?
“No one could prove it. Myra just disappeared. Here in New Orleans, around the time of our twenty-first birthday,” Milo was saying. “We were going to celebrate together, but never got the chance. When all this talk about Selma’s daughters being abducted when they were turning twenty-one happened, I wondered, of course, but—” He shrugged, sunlight and shadow playing over his face as the wind rustled through the branches overhead, causing the leaves to turn. “Then I saw Jacob and that’s when I tried to get into contact with you.”
