He returned to the motel, showered, shaved, called and left a message for Olivia, then spent the next few hours spinning his wheels, thinking, and reentering numbers into the new cell. He pieced together the events of the last few days and wondered how the woman—“Jennifer”—had known where he would be. As far as he could tell, his room wasn’t bugged. He didn’t find any listening devices tucked into hidden niches. Not that it mattered. To his recollection he hadn’t mentioned his plans while talking on the phone here. He did a second peripheral check of the rental car and couldn’t find any tracking device in the undercarriage or wheel wells.

But somehow, “Jennifer” had known where he was going, where he had been.

How?

And why was she doing this?

In the motel room with the television tuned to an all-news channel, the blinds open so that he didn’t feel completely cut off from the world, he sipped his tepid coffee, his mind turning back to the night before. What the hell had happened on the pier? She’d been there. He’d seen her, but Hayes had said that the cops had questioned the people on the pier, the old man who’d been smoking a cigar and the kids who had been so into each other. When Hayes had asked about the runner, he hadn’t been found and no one remembered him.

Bentz made a note of it, though most likely the missing jogger wasn’t any big deal.

Great.

Using his laptop computer he Googled images of the Santa Monica pier and found the webcam, a camera that photographed the entrance to the pier every four seconds. Maybe he could get photos of the pier from last night, as well as from traffic cams. Though he was no longer a cop in L.A., he still had a badge and some pull. He was certain he could talk his way into getting the information.

By eleven he’d talked to the security company that ran the camera on the pier and been promised that they would review the images from the night before. Afterward Bentz had made his way through a pot of coffee while searching the Internet for a hospital or clinic that might have issued the outdated parking pass he’d noticed on the gray Chevy. Then he used his new phone to leave messages with Fortuna Esperanzo and Tally White, two of Jennifer’s close friends who hadn’t bothered calling him back.

Tally was a schoolteacher and Fortuna still worked in an art gallery in Venice. Neither woman was a fan of his.

A motorcycle backfired on the street. Through the thin motel walls Benz heard Spike get off a round of quick, sharp barks before he was shushed by his owner. Bentz stretched, felt his spine pop, then stood and tested his leg.