“No one is saying you did, Fernando,” Martinez said in a soothing voice. “Your sister, your professors…everyone says you’re a good kid. That’s why I was thinking you might help us. We need help finding someone. A woman named Olivia Bentz. Blond hair, dark eyes. Did you ever meet her, Fernando?”

Bentz had watched through the one-way mirror and felt his life unraveling while the kid shook his head no.

“Olivia Bentz is missing,” Hayes said, “and we have reason to believe your friend Jada is involved in her kidnapping. What can you tell us about that?”

“Nothing!” Valdez insisted.

Frustrated, Bentz had wanted to smash his fist through the glass and curl his fingers around the kid’s throat to shake the truth from him. Since Fernando hadn’t lawyered up, the detectives continued questioning him, and Bentz stayed for every second of the tedious process.

Bledsoe checked on the name Jada, but hadn’t found any females with that name who had been booked in the past eighteen months. Another dead end. Bledsoe would get Jada’s photo ID and records from the college in the morning, but he couldn’t work on that until the college’s administrative offices opened.

Finally Bentz left the surly youth to Hayes and the FBI, who would probably release him, then have someone follow him. There was nothing more he could do at the Center.

As he drove he thought about the photos the LAPD lab had been working on. The pictures of the runner from the Santa Monica web cam looked enough like the same jogger who had been caught on the security cameras of the motel. Something about the runner seemed familiar to Bentz, as if he should be able to visualize her face.

A woman? Yeah, they were all pretty sure about that. The police were checking traffic cameras and parking tickets issued in the area around the motel at the time of the letter’s delivery, along with the pier where Jennifer had jumped into Santa Monica Bay and the security cameras near the place where Sherry Petrocelli’s car had been torched, but Bentz didn’t hold out much hope. This person who had killed so easily seemed to know how to avoid detection.

A master criminal?

A cop?

He drove by instinct, his hands on the wheel, beams of headlights washing over him as his mind spun.

It’s someone with a personal grudge.

Someone who’s enjoying this.

Jada, the girl who looks so much like Jennifer, she has the answers. And Fernando won’t give her up.

And right now Olivia was locked behind bars, a prisoner, because no one could find a shred of a clue that led to her captor. Bentz felt his life unraveling, everything that he believed in falling away, the woman who had turned his life around, made him a better man, now suffering because of his actions.