Lisa Jackson's Bentz & Montoya Bundle: Hot Blooded, Cold Blooded, Shiver, Absolute Fear, Lost Souls, Malice, & an Exclusive Extended Excerpt From Devious (58 page)

Olivia couldn’t confide in her mother. She had as a child and Bernadette’s reaction had only made things worse. “Everyone needs a little faith sometimes,” she hedged and glanced at her watch. “I really have to go.”

“Well, okay … but I think you should know that I gave Reggie your number.”

“You did
what?”

“He has the right to know,” Bernadette said stubbornly, raising her chin a bit. “He is your father.”

“You just wanted him off your back.”

Bernadette stiffened, and though Olivia couldn’t read the expression in her eyes because of the sunglasses, she expected anger was flaring in those green orbs. “He did his time and paid his debt to society. He has the right—”

“What about mine, Bernadette? What about
my
rights?” she demanded. Then she shut up. This was a no-win argument. Reining in her fury, she changed the subject. “So what’s with the dark glasses, Mom? It’s twilight, and if you haven’t noticed, this restaurant isn’t exactly well lit. Why are you wearing shades?”

The corners of her mouth pinching, Bernadette ignored the questions. As if they hadn’t been asked. Finally she sighed. “I guess I should have expected this reaction from you. I’d thought, no, hoped that maybe you’d grown up, Livvie. I guess I was wrong.”

Way to go, Mom,
Olivia thought. She remembered the way her mother had always argued, forever on the attack. To Bernadette’s way of thinking, a best defense was a strong offense. “I don’t know why I wasted my time. Well, I told you about Reggie’s request. Now it’s up to you.”

“You have to admit he hasn’t been exactly a stellar dad.”

“Fine. We both know that. I passed along the message. That’s all I needed to do.” She stood abruptly and fished in her purse for her wallet.

“I’ll get this,” Olivia said, but Bernadette was having none of that today. She found a twenty-dollar bill and dropped it onto the table. “There’s one other thing, Olivia,” she said icily. “You may as well know, I’m leaving Jeb.”

She shouldn’t have been surprised, as her mother not only had horrid taste in men, but felt compelled to marry them, then divorce when the blush of love subsided. Olivia suspected that Bernadette thought that if she had the right partner she could find a fairy tale romance complete with happy ending, but so far all her princes had turned out to be frogs. Or worse. Ogres. “That’s probably a good idea.”

“I … I hope so.” Bernadette was standing now but some of her fire seemed to have been doused.

“Is there a reason?”

“We … we don’t get along.” Her lower lip quivered in a distinctly un-Bernadette-like fashion. “And it’s gotten worse. He found out that I lied about how much my inheritance was.”

“Why did you keep it from him?” Olivia asked, not wanting to know the answer.

“So I could have something. Something of my own.” Bernadette swallowed hard, then tucked her hair into her hat again. As she did, the candlelight shifted and Olivia thought she saw a blemish under the thick layer of powder on Bernadette’s cheek. A bluish smudge.

“Mom?” Olivia asked, dread mounting.

Bernadette’s head snapped up sharply at the familiarity. It had been years since Olivia had referred to her by anything other than her given name. “What?”

“What’s going on?” Olivia stood and focused hard on the discoloration beneath Bernadette’s makeup. A bruise. As if Bernadette had banged her head against something.

Or been hit.

“Take off your glasses.”

“No. Not now.”

Olivia did it for her. Though Bernadette backed away, Olivia snagged the frames and pulled them from her mother’s face. “Oh, God, he hit you,” she said angrily. Bernadette’s eyes were swollen, the whites reddish, black circles beneath them.

“I’ll be all right.”

“Are you crazy?” Olivia exploded. “You’ll
never
be all right. That son of a bitch should be in jail. It was Jeb who did this, right? That’s why you’re leaving him.”

“I have to go now,” Bernadette said. “And you’re late for work.”

“Screw work!”

Her mother started to walk away, but Olivia grabbed her elbow. From the nearby tables and booths, patrons stared at them, conversation died.

“This is assault, Bernadette. You have to go to the police. You have to report him, make him stop. I know a cop who—”

“I’m not going to the police, Livvie.”

“But that bastard—”

“Shh!
This is my problem. I’ll handle it,” Bernadette said, slipping the shaded lenses onto the bridge of her broken nose again. “You just worry about your father, okay? Don’t cause a scene!” Yanking her sleeve away from Olivia’s fingers, she hurried, head down, through the glass door.

“Is everything all right?” a nervous little man with a pencil-thin mustache asked from a nearby table. He was blinking rapidly.

“Fine. It’s fine,” Olivia said, though she didn’t believe a word of it. Nothing was right tonight. Nothing at all.

Chapter Sixteen

The library was nearly empty, only a few students hunched over books on Sunday night. Just the die-hards. Or those without someplace better to go, Olivia thought as she shut the reference book and stretched her spine. She’d closed up the shop at six then driven to the campus, where she’d spent the last three hours studying and trying to forget her visit from her mother, attempting to convince herself that whatever problems Bernadette was having with her current husband, she couldn’t help.

Or could she?

Had her mother come not to tell her about Reggie, but to try and mend what seemed impossibly tattered mother-daughter fences?
You didn’t even give her a chance
, her mind nagged, guilt storming through her soul.
Catholic upbringing.
Compliments of Grannie Gin. Bernadette certainly didn’t have much to do with it.

Pausing at the desk to check out two books on the psychology of sociopaths, she remembered the last time she’d seen her mother. At Grannie Gin’s funeral.

It had been a muggy day, the kind when hot air seemed to adhere to her skin. Bernadette had been distant, but that wasn’t unusual as she’d sat through the mass. She’d listened to the service, dropped a rose on Grannie’s casket, shown up at the house where the few members of the family, distant cousins for the most part, and some friends had gathered, but she’d kept mostly to herself, chain-smoking on the back porch and sipping from a never-finished drink of Jack Daniels. She’d seemed lost in thought, and the few times Olivia had approached her, she’d been subdued, tears slowly tracking from beneath her black veil.

Now, Olivia realized, she’d never taken off her hat or the lacy veil for fear that a bruise might show through.

Again Olivia felt a pang of guilt as she walked, keys clutched in one hand, outside to her truck. The night was cool, winter threatening to grasp hold of the Crescent City. There were only a few students crisscrossing the campus, knots of kids in two-or threesomes hurrying along the walkways. Olivia was the only person walking alone, she realized, and for the first time in her life, it bothered her. Not just because of the cool, dark night and the recent dreams, but because she was unconnected, flying solo when most of the world was coupled up.

Which was ridiculous. She had only to look at her mother, or her friend Sarah, or remember Ted, the man she nearly married, to realize how much better off she was alone. The only two men she’d found remotely interesting in the past couple of years were a world-weary cop and a priest, both, she guessed, who carried a ton of baggage with them. What was wrong with her?

It must be the holidays. Everyone gets a little nuts during the holidays. Isn’t that when the most suicides occur?

She turned the collar of her jacket up and heard the sounds of a stereo playing from one open dorm window and laughter from another.

So what if you’re alone? And why do you always pick men who are unavailable? Off-limits? Because you don’t want to get involved, not really. You know, Livvie, you might just be a candidate for a psychological study … or the subject of one of those trashy afternoon talk shows. “Women who love men who can’t love them because they’re already married to their careers.”

“Idiot,” she muttered as the path cut through a copse of trees. It was darker here and she was alone. All of the other students had disappeared into the buildings on campus.
So what?
She hurried along the path.

Click, click, click.

A noise came from behind her.

Her heart squeezed. It’s nothing. Just your overactive imagination.

She glanced over her shoulder to the darkened shrubbery flanking the buildings. No one.

Stop it, she told herself. No reason to be jumpy.

But she heard the noise again and her heart began to thud. She started to run.

“Hey! Watch out! On your right,” a gruff voice yelled.

She leapt to the left, out of the thicket to the parking lot.

From the darkness a bicyclist blew past her in a flash of silver spokes and glossy helmet reflecting in the blue light from the security lamps.
Click, click, click,
the cyclist shifted gears and was swallowed by the night.

So that was it! A sound she’d heard hundreds of times.

You’re losing it, Benchet,
she thought, relieved as she spied her pickup, the only vehicle in the lot right where she’d parked it. She jogged across the pockmarked asphalt, unlocked the truck, and slid behind the steering wheel.
Get a grip!
She fired the engine and gunned it, toppling the sack of groceries she’d picked up earlier. “Great.”

A few minutes later she was on the freeway heading out of the city. She turned on the radio and heard Trish LaBelle’s voice giving out advice over the airwaves. Trish had been with WNAB before joining the staff at WSLJ. Her program was in the early evening, about over now, Olivia thought, then there was Gator Brown’s light jazz, which led into Dr. Sam’s popular late-night advice program. Trish’s format was different. She pretaped questions from viewers, then interspersed the questions and answers with music that seemed to fit the mood.

Olivia listened for a few minutes, but as she stared through the windshield, she thought of Bernadette’s message that Reggie Benchet wanted to see her.

Why would her father want to connect now, after all these years of no contact? Why? She drove in silence, by rote, maneuvering her Ranger off the freeway. Rain began to fall, the drops flashing in the glare of her headlights. She barely remembered her father; didn’t want to start a relationship now. Lost in thought, she drove down the winding country road and stopped only to pick up the mail at the end of the lane. What would she say if Reggie Benchet called her? What was there to say? As she drove on, her truck’s headlights flashed against the stark trunks of the giant cypress and oaks surrounding the cabin, and as the truck crossed the small bridge to her grandmother’s cottage, she caught her first glimpse of the little house she’d called home all of her growing-up years. A home devoid of a father, and often as not a mother.

But she’d had Grannie. And God, how she missed that little scrap of a woman.

She parked, picked up the strewn groceries, and tossed them into the paper bag with her mail. As she walked to the front door, she could hear Hairy S barking his fool head off. Tonight she didn’t care that he was acting like an idiot as she unlocked the door and made her way inside.

She was still caught up in the events of the past couple of days. Rapid-fire thoughts burst through her mind. Images of the blackened shell of a house where the girl was killed, of a priest with a long sword, of Father James stretching upward on the ladder, of her mother’s bruised face. And then there was the kiss she’d shared with Bentz in this very house, a long, passionate kiss that had touched her heart as well as curled her toes.

Dear God, she was a hopeless romantic. He was a cop, for crying out loud, a homicide dick who looked at her as some kind of freak.

She set the mail on the dining room table, then greeted Hairy S properly, petting him and scratching him behind his ears as he twirled in frantic little circles at her feet. “Need to go out?” she asked as she hung up her coat. The dog yipped. She opened the French doors off the small kitchen. Barking madly, he raced outside, across the porch and into the shadows, hot on the trail of a squirrel or possum or heaven-only-knew-what-other swamp critter. “Avoid the gators, would you?” she called after him, then winked at Chia. “He’s an idiot, isn’t he?”

The parrot squawked and hopped from one perch to the next in her tall cage. Her eyes dilated and retracted above the bright band of red and gold over her beak.

“We women, we’re a whole lot smarter,” Olivia said as Chia made a cooing sound, ruffled her feathers, and showed off her black tongue. “A whole lot.”

Yeah, right. Then why the confusion over the men in your life?

Rather than listen to the nag in her head, Olivia played her telephone messages. The first was from the contractor she’d contacted about the alarm, promising to be out and give her a bid in an installation the Monday after Thanksgiving. The second was Sarah again.

“Olivia. When you have a minute, would you give me a call? I, um, I still haven’t heard from Leo and I know it’s only been a couple of days since I talked to you … He’s probably okay, but damn it, I found a woman’s earring in my bed … can you believe that, in
my
bed? Crap. What a jerk! You’re right about him … I know it, I know it, I know it.” Olivia’s heart sank. She heard the pain in Sarah’s voice. The humiliation. “Well, um, just call me when you get a chance, okay?”

After Sarah’s call, there was a long hesitation on the phone, as if whoever had called didn’t know what to say, but then he eventually hung up. It was odd, she thought and replayed it again … was there music in the background … a song she recognized? Yeah … something from her past, a Springsteen song … then she recognized it.
Tunnel of Love.
Ted’s favorite.

“Damn,” she said, her skin crawling. Could her ex-fiancé have really tracked her down? She thought of him, how angry he’d been with her, how he’d followed her to Tucson only to finally give up. After she’d threatened him with a restraining order.

She ignored the call and went on to the next, a message from Dr. Leeds’s secretary asking for a date when she could meet with him again. The last call was from Detective Bentz asking her to call him at the station in the morning. His message was all business, but she smiled at the sound of his voice and pushed aside the eerie feeling that the earlier unspoken message had left. “Silly girl,” she told herself and called the station only to be told that he was gone. She considered trying to locate him at home or his cell, then thought better of it. She glanced at the clock. It was too late to catch anyone at the University, so decided to phone the psychology department in the morning, and rang up Sarah in Tucson, only to hear Sarah’s answering machine pick up. Olivia left a message, hung up the cordless phone, and in the porch light, saw the dog jumping crazily at the back door. “I’m coming,” she said, reaching for the door handle and letting him inside. “Hungry?”

Hairy S danced at his dish. She poured some fresh kiblets into his bowl, then unpacked her groceries and threw a frozen dinner into the microwave.

“Turkey à l’ orange,” she said to the dog. “Only six grams of fat.” Hairy, nose buried deep in his dish, made no indication he’d heard a word. What a day, she thought, as the microwave dinged and she gingerly took off the plastic wrap as orange-smelling steam wafted up. A can of diet cola and her meal was complete. She glanced at the photo of herself and Grannie Gin, the one she’d pointed out to Bentz. She’d been so carefree then, hadn’t really needed a father. She hadn’t yet been to school, hadn’t suffered the embarrassment of not knowing him, hadn’t borne the indignity of learning, compliments of Connie Earnhardt, that he was in prison in Mississippi.

Olivia had only vague images of the sperm donor and those, she was certain, were due to the few old snapshots she’d seen of a man in a sailor’s uniform, a handsome, athletic man who had swept Bernadette Dubois off her seventeen-year-old feet. It had been a whirlwind romance and the details were sketchy. Virginia Dubois hadn’t approved and Olivia, barely in high school, had caught snatches of conversation she wasn’t supposed to hear. While lingering at the foot of the stairs, her ears straining, her fingers curled over the railing, she’d listened over the thudding of her heart.

“He left you, don’t you remember that?” Grannie Gin had demanded while frying bacon. The hickory-smoked scent wafted through the dining room as the strips sizzled noisily in the pan. “And you were pregnant.”

“He didn’t know …” Bernadette had protested, sobbing. “I didn’t tell him.”

“And that was a good thing. The truth came out early enough. I said it then and I’ll say it now, Reginald Benchet is no-count and never will be.” Grannie Gin had sighed heavily. “You’ve got one child left, Bernadette,” Grannie had said and added a handful of onions into the hot grease. Though Olivia couldn’t see what was happening, she smelled the onions, had witnessed the ritual dozens of times. The slices hit the pan with a grease-splattering hiss. “You’d best tend to Livvie. Forget Reggie. He was bad from the day he was born. Branded by the devil, I tell ya. I knew his mother and his grandmother. Both loose women with the morals of alley cats and his daddy … pure evil.”

“You don’t know anything of the sort,” Bernadette had argued, then blew her nose.

“I do. I’ve seen what that man can do.”

“How … oh, for the love of God, don’t tell me you had one of your visions about him.” There was a break in the conversation when all Olivia had heard was the sputter of the grease cooking and a woodpecker tapping on some part of the house. She’d bit her lower lip and watched the lace curtains in the dining room flutter with a breeze. “That’s it, isn’t it?” Bernadette had accused. “You think you’ve seen something when really you’ve just dreamt it up. That’s crazy talk and we both know it. And it’s bad for Livvie. You’re filling her head with all this nonsense and now she’s started mumbling about seein’ things … like she saw her sister die
before
Chandra drowned. That’s your fault, you know.”