Lisa Jackson's Bentz & Montoya Bundle: Hot Blooded, Cold Blooded, Shiver, Absolute Fear, Lost Souls, Malice, & an Exclusive Extended Excerpt From Devious (201 page)

Empty.

The women had disappeared.

Kristi entered the kitchen and stopped, ears straining, but she heard nothing. She peered through the windows, but saw nothing outside. The answer was the locked door to the basement; it had to be. She tried the handle. It didn’t budge. So the girls who came here had a key.

To what?

She thought of Lucretia’s talk of a cult. Could this be the meeting place, an old manor complete with gargoyles and a haunted history? Could the cult meet here? Her heart raced, perspiration ran down her back, and she gripped the damned mace as if it were the very essence of life.

Leaning close to the door panels, she closed her eyes and strained to hear anything, but the house was again silent as a tomb. She tried the door again. Nothing. She shined her light over the kitchen looking for a key—anything—that might open the dead bolt, but found nothing.

And she couldn’t wait here any longer.

Not if she wanted to catch the person who had broken into her place.

Holding her can of mace in one hand and her phone in the other, she slipped out of Wagner House and started running across the campus, adrenaline spurring her, unaware of the eyes that were following her every move.

Run, Kristi, run.

You’ll never get away.

Vlad watched her flee across campus and he smiled to himself. He’d known she was in the house, had sensed her presence, seen her from his hiding spot outside on the overhang of the portico. She was a brave one. A little foolhardy, but athletic, strong, and smart.

One of the elite.

It was only a matter of time before she joined with the others, and though her sacrifice wouldn’t be as willing, it would be complete. So much more satisfying than those thrill seekers who came to him eagerly. Pathetically. They were searching for something only he could give them, a feeling of family and unity, a chance to no longer be alone.

They didn’t completely understand, of course. Couldn’t know what would ultimately be expected of them. But it didn’t matter. Eventually they gave.

As Kristi would.

He stared after her until she reached the far side of the quad, then he slipped inside the window and started down the stairs. Tonight was the choosing. Later would be the giving.

He only hoped that the bloodletting would be adequate….

But of course it wouldn’t.

It never was.

The need was insatiable.

CHAPTER 17

K
risti hit the speed dial button on her phone as she hurried across the street. She hated to be one of those women who always turned to a man, but damn it, she needed a back up and Jay was the only person she’d confided in. Armed with the mace in one hand and her phone in the other, she reached the rear entrance of her apartment house and paused near the hedge of crepe myrtle by the stairs. The phone rang one time. Twice. “Come on, come on,” she whispered just as Jay picked up.

“Hey.”

“I’ve got a kind of a situation,” she whispered without any preamble. “I think someone might be in my apartment.”

“Are you there now?” he asked urgently.

“I’m outside. I saw a shadow in the window.”

“Human?” Jay asked, but he’d relaxed a bit upon hearing she wasn’t in the unit.

“I think so.”

“I’m on my way. Don’t go in without me.”

Suddenly she felt foolish, as if she’d let the night get to her. She was probably overreacting. “Maybe I made a mistake. I don’t know.”

“I can be there in five. Just wait.”

“Jay—”

“I said I’d be there,” he said tersely. “Wait for me.”

She heard a door open above her, so she hung up, switching the phone to silent. Hiding at the base of the stairs, she stayed in the shadows, waiting for whoever was inside her apartment to appear. There was enough light at the base of the stairs to be able to catch his image on her cell phone, or so she hoped. Then she could follow him on foot or in her car and figure out just who he was and what he wanted. If he had a car, she’d get the license plate number; if he was on foot, she’d tail him.

Why would anyone break in to her apartment?

Maybe because it belonged to Tara Atwater.

Yeah, but that was months ago. Why now? And how? The locks had just been changed.

Nerves strung tight, Kristi waited on the balls of her feet, ready to match wits and weapons with whoever it was.

But if he had a gun…?

Footsteps descended and she counted off the steps…ten, eleven, twelve…

And then a pause.

At the second story.

Crap! He must’ve seen her. She hugged the building, straining to hear, squinting up at the staircase where a bulb glowed in the ceiling of each level.
Come on you bastard,
she thought. The footsteps resumed, but they were light and quick, farther away. Not descending.

What?

Oh, damn! He’d slipped off the stairs at the second level and was moving along the wide portico of the building to the far staircase, the one located near the crosswalk that led to All Saints. She was off in a shot, springing from the shadows just as a pickup screeched into the parking lot, bright beams of headlights flooding the front of the apartment house.

Jay!

He was out of the truck in a second, his face taut and drawn. “What happened?”

“He’s getting away!” She heard whoever it was clamor down the stairs at the far end of the building, vault over the railing, then run across the street. “That way!” She only got a quick glimpse of a figure in black before he ducked behind the large house and disappeared.

There was a squeal of breaks, an angry honk of a horn, and a man’s shout: “What the fuck kind of idiot are you!” the driver shouted.

“Who is it?” Jay demanded, catching up to her as she ran.

“Don’t know.” She crammed her cell phone and her can of mace into the pocket of her sweatshirt. Her bag flopped at her side as she sprinted, her feet pounding the cement and uneven asphalt. Damn it, she was going to catch the creep!

Running easily alongside her, Jay whistled sharply, and from the open window of the truck’s cab, Bruno sprang, landing on the pockmarked pavement with a soft woof. Kristi and Jay rounded the building together as the angry driver’s car, a red Nissan, disappeared at the next light, veering toward the freeway.

The street in front of the campus was suddenly empty.

“No!” Kristi cried as she dashed across the two lanes and the sidewalk before shooting through the main gate of the college.
Damn, damn, damn!
He couldn’t get away.

Once past the tall columns, she ran to the edge of the live oaks skirting the brick wall and stopped short. Breathing hard, she scanned the tree-lined walkways and grassy spaces between the buildings, the very pathway she’d just raced across. Jay slowed to a stop beside her, breathing deeply, his eyes scanning the area. Lamps illuminated the pathways, but shadows and shrubbery flanked the old halls and newer buildings. The mist had begun to rise again and there were many murky hiding places. Groups of students as well as those walking alone were heading through the quad, scattered about the walkways and hurrying up the steps into the wide entrances. Kristi looked from the library to the student union but saw no one fleeing into the darkness.

“On your right!” a woman’s voice yelled over the sound of changing gears as a bike whizzed past, the rider hunched over her handlebars.

Bruno let out a low growl.

Kristi’s heart sank as she studied the grounds.

No one seemed out of place. She didn’t see a dark figure darting through the trees or dashing up the steps of one of the tall, vine-clad buildings that comprised the small campus of All Saints. “Damn…damn…
damn
!” Lurking in the distance, at the far end of the quad and tucked behind some willow trees was the massive dark structure of Wagner House. Lamplight from the lower floor was barely visible.

“Did you see him?” Jay asked tensely. “What did he look like?”

She was glad for his presence as he stood near her, his gaze scraping every visible inch of this section of the quad. “No…he was just a shadow in the window and the blur of a dark figure when I was closer.” She motioned toward Jay’s dog. “Can Bruno find him?” The dog, hearing his name, turned his eyes to Jay, waiting for direction. “Isn’t he part bloodhound?”

“And part blind. But he has a great nose. Maybe if the guy left something at the scene, in your apartment, or something he might have dropped along the way, but Bruno’s not trained.” Jay eyed one knot of students then the next, studying anyone walking alone.

It was useless.

Kristi knew it.

The intruder had vanished.

At least for the moment.

She let out a long sigh and tried to tamp down her anger; her frustration. “I guess we lost him.”

“Looks like.” Eyebrows slammed together as he squinted at a trio of girls walking through the library doors. Jay asked, “So what happened? How’d he get in?”

Kristi shook her head.

He gave her a long look and said, “Okay. Let’s go see what he took.”

“Oh, God…” She didn’t want to think that her computer might be missing, or any of her things. She had her wallet, her cell phone, and all of her ID, but everything else, including her meticulous notes on the abductions, her small amount of jewelry—thankfully mostly costume stuff—and pictures of her father as well as her mother…oh, God, if he took those…“I don’t want to think about it.” Jay would insist she call the police and then she would have to explain about Tara Atwater’s things—assuming they were still in the apartment—and her theory that something of value within them might connect her to the other missing girls, or their kidnapper.

Then there was the issue of her father. Mentally she groaned. Despite the fact that she was an adult, there was just no way Rick Bentz wouldn’t learn about what she was doing. There would be hell to pay.

Squaring her shoulders, Kristi walked back to her apartment with Jay and Bruno. She braced herself for the battle that was to come. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t taken on Rick Bentz in the past. She would just have to do it again. Sooner or later he’d figure out that he couldn’t tell her what to do, right?

But he could sure make life damn miserable in the meantime.

At her third-story unit, the door was shut, the dead bolt in place.

“The intruder has a key?” Jay asked, as there was no way to unlock the door without one. “That narrows the field of suspects a bit.”

“Quite a bit,” she said, thinking of Irene and Hiram Calloway, the only people beside herself who possessed a key. But why would either of them be nosing around her place?

With emotions ranging from anger to dread, Kristi unlocked the door and stepped inside.

“Stay,” Jay ordered Bruno; then to Kristi, “Don’t touch anything.”

“I know.” If they had to call the police for the break-in, the crime scene couldn’t be disturbed.

But the apartment was dark. Still. She hit the light switch and overhead illumination flooded the studio.

Everything was just as she’d left it. Her computer was on the desk, her posters tacked to the wall, Tara’s things strewn on the tarp on the floor. All of her pictures were where she’d left them, nothing outwardly disturbed. And no lamps had been lit; the only illumination came from the light on the old stove, the one she used as a night-light, the one that had allowed her to see the intruder. It seemed that her small apartment was the same as when she’d left it.

Except that someone had been inside. She’d seen him. The thought made her skin crawl. Who was it? What did he want?

“This doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“Why?”

She stepped into the room and studied the contents more carefully. “Nothing’s disturbed.”

“You’re sure?”

“I…yeah, I think so.” Her gaze scraped the mantel, bookcases, tables, and bed, before landing in the kitchen, which, dishes in the sink, was also exactly as she’d left it.

“But someone was in here?” he asked.

“Yes!…I think so.” She thought back. “Of course they were. I saw him in the stove light. When I got here, I heard him on the third landing of the staircase, then he descended a flight to the second floor where the porch runs across the face of the building to the stairs on the far end. I don’t know if he saw me or what, but he got scared and didn’t come down the only staircase leading from my door. Instead he took off on the second-level porch.” She walked to the sink, grabbed a cup from the counter, and drew some water from the tap. “Whoever it was
had
to be up here.” She took a long swallow of the tepid water.

“But not necessarily inside.”

“No, no, I’m sure I saw…” She was going to say she was certain that she’d seen someone inside her apartment, but was she? She looked through the window over the kitchen sink and stared into the night, but it was too dark to see the outline of Wagner House over the wall and through the trees. As there were no lights turned on in the upper floors of the manor house turned museum, she couldn’t decipher the building’s silhouette, let alone that third-story window where she had been standing when she’d seen someone in her unit.

Wagner House was so far away.

And it had been dark.

For the first time since spying someone in the window, she doubted what she’d seen.

“Well?”

“I…I don’t know. I
think
someone was in here.”

He glanced down at the tarp covering the floor and all of the items placed so carefully on the plastic surface. “What’s this?”

“A long story,” she said, not certain she wanted to share it. Nervously, she grabbed a long-handled lighter and lit a few candles in the apartment. Then, deciding candle glow might be too intimate, she turned on all the table lamps.

Jay whistled to the dog and made Bruno lie on the floor. Then he closed the door and sat, straddling one padded arm of the single chair in the room. “Well, Kris, you’re in luck. I just happen to have all night.”

The crime lab techs had already arrived and Bonita Washington, one of the smartest women Bentz knew, was barking out orders, making certain no one disturbed “her” scene. “I mean it,” she was saying, “you all wear booties and you don’t touch anything or you don’t get it. That goes double for you,” she said, her green eyes narrowing on Bentz’s partner, Reuben Montoya. African American and proud of it, Washington was a few pounds overweight and all business. “You signed in?” she asked Bentz.

He nodded as he followed her into the small frame house that had been recently renovated. Just inside the door, he stopped and looked around. Furniture had been kicked back, there were scuff marks on the floor, and in the living room a dark stain, most likely blood.

“We checked,” Bonita said, nodding. “It’s blood all right.”

“But no body?”

“Nuh-uh.”

One of the criminalists was taking pictures, another dusting for fingerprints. The story was that the police had taken a call from Aldo “Big Al” Cordini, owner of one of the strip joints in the Quarter. One of his dancers, Karen Lee Williams aka Bodiluscious, hadn’t shown up for work for a couple of nights and he’d sent someone to her house to check on her. No one had answered the door and her car, which she’d told the owner of the club was inoperable, was still in her garage.

The blood on the floor wasn’t enough to suspect a homicide but the fact that Karen Lee hadn’t shown up in any of the local hospitals or clinics added to the fear that she’d been killed.
Or abducted,
Bentz thought, his mind returning to the missing coeds at All Saints in Baton Rouge.

Not that whatever happened to Karen Lee had anything to do with the missing girls—there was nothing to link them—but because of his daughter, his mind naturally went there. The coeds at All Saints had disappeared without a trace. Karen Lee obviously went down fighting.

They looked over the scene and started talking to the few neighbors who had returned to their homes in this storm-devastated part of the city. No one had seen anything unusual. All Montoya and Bentz learned was that Karen Lee was a single mom with a kid tucked away with Karen’s mother somewhere in west Texas. The child, a daughter, was nine or ten, or thereabouts, and named Darcy. No one knew of any friends or family nearby, any boyfriends past or present. No one knew what had happened to the kid’s father, as Karen Lee had never talked about him.

“So we’ve got a big zero,” Montoya said as they returned to Bentz’s car. “Not even a body.”

“Maybe she’s alive.”