Malice

by Lisa Jackson

An old memory surfaced and a feeling of déjà vu settled over him. Another time. Another place.

  He remembered chasing Jennifer, through the sun-dappled park at Point Fermin. How he’d caught her, breathless at a pergola, where he’d kissed her madly, both of them sweating, her breasts, beneath a thin blouse, pressed up against him. He’d hoisted her hands over her head, pushed her back against the rough trunk of a tree, and proceeded to strip her and make love to her in the shadows.

  Oh…

  Hell…

  Another memory surfaced. Of running after her along the beach at Santa Monica just after sunset, the western sky ablaze, the tide lapping at their ankles, as the Ferris wheel spun on the pier jutting over the ocean…

  Fool. Stop it! Forget her. Nail this woman and put Jennifer out of your mind forever. It’s Olivia you love, Olivia who is your life.

  He saw Jennifer turn, cutting into a parking structure.

  Gritting his teeth, breathing hard, his leg throbbing, he ran, faster and faster.

  Within seconds he reached the entrance to the parking garage, its florescent bulbs sputtering weak light. No one on this level. He stopped, listened.

  Over the sound of his own pumping heart, he heard the sound of feet madly slapping concrete, running up stairs. Spying the staircase, he followed, his knee screaming, as he pounded upward, looking into the spiraling stairs above and catching sight of her dark hair. As if she felt his stare, she glanced down at him, managed a wicked smile over the rail, then turned toward the interior lot.

  Damn!

  Was she on the third floor?

  The fourth?

  Grabbing the rail, hauling himself upward, he pressed on, his heart thudding, his lungs tight, his skin damp with sweat. Don’t give up. Don’t let her get away. This is your chance!

  On the third floor, he turned into the shadowy lot, but saw no one, only a few abandoned cars, their paint jobs shimmering beneath the watery lights.

  Back to the staircase, running upward, straining to hear anything over the pounding of his pulse. On the fourth floor he thought he saw a glimpse of her, on the far side of the structure, and definitely heard her racing footsteps. He flew toward the sound, rounded a pillar and saw her, still fifty feet away, clicking a keyless remote.

  The lights on a dark blue SUV flashed.

  No!

  He couldn’t let her get away.

  She pulled the door of the car opened, then turned back to Bentz and grinning provocatively, blew him a kiss.

  “Jennifer!” he yelled.

  In that second a man stepped out of the shadows, a gun leveled at her head.

  Bentz nearly stumbled.

  “Police. Freeze!” Reuben Montoya ordered, his face a grim mask, his hand steady as he held his pistol. “Jada Hollister, you’re under arrest.”

  As long as the boat was moving, there was still time.

  Olivia could find a way to escape…somehow.

  Of course she’d been around this cage, searching for a means of escape over and over again with no luck. Now the camera was just out of reach and the only thing close enough for her to touch outside her cage was the damned photo album with its faded pictures and bloody smears. Apparently this psychotic woman got off on dripping her blood, or someone’s blood onto Bentz’s life.

  At least the leather-bound album was near. Extending one arm through the bars, she managed to flip the pages. Her horror magnified as she viewed the history of Bentz’s life in photographs: Rick as a child with James, his half brother. Photos from high school showing Rick in boxing shorts and gloves, posing by a punching bag. His college graduation photo and one from the police academy. Then a shot of a younger version of the woman who held her hostage, a faded snapshot of her with Rick at a bar, drinks and cigarettes in hand, all smiles and very much together.

  Just as she’d said.

  This psycho and Rick had been lovers.

  She was a woman scorned-twofold, as Rick apparently had dumped her twice:

  For Jennifer.

  She’d said as much, of course, but these pictures were confirmation. Biting her lip, Olivia sifted through pages of his life with Jennifer, and pictures of him with other women, presumably after he’d split from his wife. Again, this woman surfaced. And this time her smiles weren’t as wide; not as trusting.

  How could someone be so obsessed?

  Olivia felt sick to her stomach.

  She flipped a few more pictures, seeing the family together again and then…and then there were snapshots of her. The wedding. Photos of Bentz and her at charity events.

  Tears filled her eyes as she saw the love that they’d shared, caught in these pictures. The twinkle in her eye, the sexy grin on Rick’s jaw.

  Oh, God, what had happened to them?

  Her heart twisted when she thought of all she’d lost. And now it was too late. This sick killer’s rage hadn’t stopped with Jennifer’s death. If anything it had intensified, her obsession with Rick Bentz more focused, and Olivia had become her target. Now, just like Jennifer before her, she was going to die in some carefully plotted and executed horrific “accident.”

  Olivia closed her eyes and felt a pang deep in her abdomen.

  So sharp she sucked her breath in through her teeth. Oh, dear God. She collapsed forward against the cage and held tight onto the bars, her fists clenching, knuckles showing white as the pain ripped through her.

  She felt the boat pick up speed, knifing through the water to its deadly destination, water rushing against the hull.

  The pain began to subside. She lifted her head and took a long breath. She was going to be fine. She and the baby. Somehow she’d find a way to save them. She just had to work on it-Oh, sweet Jesus!

  Another razor-sharp pain ripped through her.

  Like a knife twisting deep inside.

  She gasped.

  The baby?

  A miscarriage?

  No! No! No!

  She pulled in a shaking breath, tried to think, to get hold of herself. She was overreacting.

  She pulled in a shaking breath, tried to think. She was overreacting.

  Nothing was wrong with the baby or her pregnancy. The baby’s fine.

  But the pain didn’t let up. She cast a glance at the open photo album and fought another hard, wrenching abdominal cramp.

  The baby’s FINE!

  She began to pant, to let out her breath in short little huffs as the cramping continued and she could barely think.

  The baby’s fine, the baby’s fine, the baby’s fine!

  She gritted her teeth against the pain and the horrid, deplorable thought that she could be losing the tiny life within her.

  And then she felt the blood.

  Warm and oozing, just a trickle.

  She was bleeding. Damn it all, she was bleeding.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Bentz demanded as he crossed the stained concrete slab of the parking structure.

  “Covering your sorry ass.” Montoya had his service weapon trained on the suspect.

  Walking up to her, Bentz still couldn’t believe how much she looked like Jennifer. “Jada…” Beyond her resemblance to his ex-wife, he was sure he didn’t know her. “Who are you?”

  When she didn’t respond, Montoya filled him in. “Her name is Jada Hollister and she’s a theater major at Whitaker Junior College. A wannabe actress. Friend of Fernando Valdez.”

  “I bet.” Seething, Bentz stared at the imposter. He had to restrain himself from tearing her limb from limb. “Where’s Olivia?”

  “What? Who?”

  “My wife. My real wife. Where the hell is she?” he demanded.

  Her cool demeanor, the act she’d perfected, remained in place. “I have no idea.”

  Bentz’s temper exploded. “I’m through fuckin’ around, you got it? Now where the hell is my wife?”

  “I’d tell him, if I were you,” Montoya said.

  She put her hands on her hips. “But I don’t know.”

  “Think rea
l hard,” Bentz advised.

  “Oh, shut up,” she snapped at him. “What is that, like a line from a really bad B Western?”

  A car drove down from an upper level and the driver, an African-American woman with a flamboyant scarf wrapped around her head, saw the gun in Montoya’s hand and hit the gas of her Mercedes wagon. As she wound her way down, Bentz saw that she was on her cell. She’d be calling 9-1-1.

  “The LAPD is going to be here shortly,” Bentz said, his voice deathly quiet. “And I guarantee they’ll go so much easier on you if you tell us where we can find my wife. Now.”

  “But I don’t know,” Jada insisted, her brow furrowing. She followed the path of the disappearing Mercedes.

  “Your name is Jada Hollister?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “And you’re friends with Fernando Valdez.”

  “If you can call it that.”

  “He paid you to pretend to be Jennifer?” Bentz asked.

  She hesitated and he said, “I’m not kidding about the police. You’re involved up to your neck in several homicides and my wife’s disappearance. If you don’t start telling the truth, I’ll see that you’re arrested, locked up, and kept in prison for the rest of your life.”

  “Bullshit! I haven’t done anything!”

  “Really? Because the way I see it, you and Fernando, you’re in this together and you’re both going down.”

  Jada looked from Bentz to Montoya before focusing on the gun still trained on her. “Oh, crap,” she said, biting her lip and obviously struggling with her decision.

  “It’ll go much easier on you if you tell us about your boyfriend,” Montoya urged.

  “Boyfriend? Fernando?”

  “He’s the mastermind.”

  She laughed. “He couldn’t mastermind his way out of a open bag. He’s not behind it,” she said with a sneer.

  “Then who?”

  Her eyes narrowed a bit. Calculating. Then she tossed more guilt Fernando’s way and let out a long-suffering sigh. “It was someone he knew, okay? A woman.”

  “What woman?” Bentz asked.

  Jada sent Montoya a go-screw-yourself glare. “You can put that down now.”

  He holstered his weapon, then stripped the keys to the SUV that Jada still had clutched in her fingers.

  “Someone paid you to mess with my mind.”

  “I guess.” She lifted a shoulder, showed some more of her attitude.

  “You know!” God, he wanted to shake the truth from her. “Listen, you’re in big trouble.” How could she not get it? “People are dead.” He yanked out the picture of Olivia being held captive, looking scared out of her mind, and stuck it under Jada’s nose. “Meet my wife. The one who’s missing. Your friend, the person who hired you, abducted her.” There was a tremor of rage in his voice and his hands, holding the picture, shook.

  “She’s not my friend.” Jada’s face paled as she stared at the copy of the picture. She cringed as he noticed the terror in Olivia’s eyes, the raw skin around Olivia’s mouth.

  “We have other pictures,” Bentz said, his voice low and threatening. “Of the corpses. Maybe you’d like to see Shana McIntyre in her pool, or Lorraine Newell with her brains blown out, or Fortuna Esperanzo-”

  “Enough!” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “For the love of God, I don’t know anything about any murders, okay? I mean…I did get involved with this freak of a woman who wanted me to play someone. An acting role, that’s all. She claimed that if I dyed my hair darker, curled it, wore some green-colored contacts, and put in some cheek prostheses, I would be a dead ringer for this Jennifer woman.” To prove her point, she took out her contacts, her eye turning a pale blue, then she extracted false teeth and cheek prostheses, changing her appearance. “She had a vial of perfume she wanted me to wear and so…so I did. You have to trust me. No one was supposed to get hurt.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Really. She said it was just an elaborate prank. She wanted to scare an old boyfriend. And she was going to pay me big money.”

  “How big?”

  “Twenty-five grand. Thirty if I’d do the jump into Devil’s Caldron. She thought of that after she heard I used to high dive.”

  “Thirty thousand dollars,” Bentz spat out, disgusted. “What is that, about eight thousand a life?”

  “I told you I didn’t know anything about anyone getting killed!” she said emphatically. Suddenly she was serious as she started to finally see how dire her situation was. “I tried to get out of it, but she wouldn’t let me. I really thought it was a joke, one of those elaborate pranks you see on TV. I figured I might get some exposure out of it, jump-start my career. She gave me a script and coached me over the phone, and I got a couple of free trips to New Orleans out of it. Her one rule was that I not get caught. I guess I blew that.” She parted, looking ruefully at the oil-stained concrete floor. Bentz decided she was sorrier for the loss of her fee, as opposed to the loss of life. What a piece of work!

  “Who is she?” Bentz demanded. “Who hired you?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw her. We just talked on the phone.”

  “How did you get paid?”

  “Cash…” Jada reluctantly gave it up. “She said she’d been saving it for years. She left it for me in a locker at my gym in Santa Monica, not far from the Third Street Promenade.”

  “You got the money already?”

  “Part of it. Only five thousand, to help me pay my rent…” Her voice faded as she finally understood the gravity of her situation, and it was finally hitting hard.

  “I’ll want the address of the gym where she left the money. You’re a member?”

  “Yeah. It was…a perk. I had to look good, be in shape, be able to swim, you know.”

  Bentz wanted to throttle the selfish bitch, but he controlled the urge by reminding himself of Olivia. He had to save his wife.

  “And we’ll need the script,” Montoya added.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Montoya asked, “How does Fernando Valdez fit into this?”

  “He doesn’t,” she said with a shrug. “I was supposed to use him, get to know him, pay him some attention, get him to do things for me.”

  “Like loan you the car.”

  She rolled her eyes and sighed.

  “A smoke screen,” Bentz said, “so I wouldn’t be looking in the right direction.”

  Jada said, “I guess. She didn’t want me to have anything to do with the police department, either. And I was told to avoid somebody named Hayes. He was totally off limits.”

  “Hayes?” Bentz said barely able to draw a breath.

  “Yeah. I thought maybe he was in on it with her.”

  Jonas Hayes? A bad cop? No way.

  “You think?” Montoya said, as if reading Bentz’s mind.

  Bentz shook his head. “No. Couldn’t be him.”

  “I’m just sayin’.” Jada shrugged as if she didn’t have a care in the world, her bad attitude returning. “She said something once, like, I don’t know, when I asked about what was going on, she told me not to worry, that she had it handled that Jonas would take care of things, or tell her about it.”

  “Pillow talk?” Bentz said with mind-numbing certainty.

  “I don’t know.” Jada rolled her now-blue eyes. “Maybe.”

  Not just maybe. It made sense. Bentz had suspected a cop. And if it was a cop with access to police intelligence, someone with a position at Parker Center, someone who could learn through Hayes how the investigation was going, he or she could be one step ahead.

  Someone like Corrine O’Donnell.

  A woman he’d dumped twice. For Jennifer. Bentz cringed inside, not willing to believe…then he remembered Corrine’s overly concerned smile and words of encouragement when he’d filed the Missing Person’s report on Olivia. How could he have missed it? Corrine, involved with Jonas, Bentz’s link to the LAPD.

  It explained how Jada had anticipated Bentz’s every move. Bentz’s throat we
nt dry as his mind sped through the past week, the images of dead women, car chases, “Jennifer” sightings.

  Was it really possible?

  Was Corrine the one behind all this?

  And Hayes, holy Mother of God, how did he fit in?

  Jonas Hayes had known everything Bentz was doing, had insisted they play it by the book. The wail of sirens split the night air, reverberating through the parking garage, snapping Bentz back to the moment. The LAPD was on its way. “You’d better not be bullshitting me,” he warned Jada.

  “I just want to get paid.” She eyed him expectantly.

  Montoya sent her a look of pure disgust. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t bet on it. I want to be Brad Pitt, you know, but sometimes things don’t work out the way we plan.”

  Her lip curled. “Yeah, well, too bad about the Brad Pitt thing,” she said and Bentz could almost see the wheels turning in her mind. “And by the way, I want my lawyer. I’m not saying another word until we have some kind of deal.”

  Martinez stopped by Hayes’s desk and handed him blowups of the picture of Olivia. “This is the hard copy of what they came up with in the lab.”

  Technicians in the lab had analyzed the shot, which they’d enlarged and enhanced in an attempt to bring out every detail of the picture, even images that were hidden.

  “They sent it to you via e-mail, too.”

  “Got it,” Hayes said, bone tired. He compared the images, on the screen, on paper.

  “It’s a boat, obviously,” Martinez said. Sliding her finger a bit, she touched the corner of the picture over Olivia’s head. “These puffy things stuffed in here? Life jackets. And take a look at those curved lines on the walls. Seems to be painted with stripes.” She pointed to a detail in another blowup. “They make that out to be the handle of an oar.”

  “A boat. So she’s being held on the water somewhere?” Jonas touched the knot of his tie, thinking about that. “So in a marina probably? Or private boat slip? Or…even dry-docked?” He eyed each shot, looking for more details.

  “Or out to sea.”

  “Damn.” Something about the blowup nagged at him, tugged at his mind.

  “We might have to coordinate a search effort with the Coast Guard.” Martinez brought him back to reality as she tapped another shot. “There’s an image that isn’t visible to the naked eye in this one. The lab thinks it’s a script, probably the name of the vessel on a life preserver. It ends in n, n, e.”