Lisa Jackson - Malice

“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 went 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?