Never Die Alone

“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, thi

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 De

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 ru

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 just 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?” Bria

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.”