AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As he drove away, Kristi said to her father, “I never noticed the envelope. All I saw was the snake.”
Montoya was nodding. “He would’ve caught my attention, too.”
Bentz was already putting on gloves and removing the envelope, tape and all from the lid.
The card was the same as the others, the deckled paper, the single black rose drawn in ink, but the Bible verse was different:
~The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance; He will wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.
Psalm 58:10-11~
CHAPTER 34
“You’re telling me this is not Father John’s work?” Bentz demanded, once they’d gathered in Kristi’s kitchen. He was upset and Montoya didn’t blame him. Bentz’s kid had barely survived a brutal attack in which her husband had been killed and now she was being targeted.
“Did he ever leave notes before?” Montoya countered as Kristi offered soft drinks or coffee or water. “You got a Diet Coke?”
“Sure.” She found a bottle in the refrigerator and handed it to Montoya.
Bentz held up a hand. “I’m good,” he said, but it was a lie. Bentz was anything but “good.”
“I just think we have to separate what’s happening to Kristi from the homicides of Teri Marie Gaines and Helene Laroche and the attack on Stacy Parker. Those, I agree, look like the work of Father John, and the fact that he had Stacy call in to the station so he could connect with Dr. Sam on her radio show—yeah, it’s either Father John or a damned good copycat.” Montoya cracked open his cola and took a swallow. “But what’s happening with Kristi. Nuh-uh. That’s a different dude.”
Bentz rubbed the back of his neck, obviously struggling with the idea. To his daughter, he said, “Tell me that with your new security system, you have a camera that covers that area?”
“I do.” She seemed a little nervous about it.
“Let’s take a look.”
“Okay. I’ve got it hooked up to my phone. An app. Wait a second.” She pulled the phone from her pocket, then opened the app and found the area in question. She hesitated, scrolled a bit, and fiddled with the footage. “Let’s see, nothing . . . nothing . . . I’m backing up. It doesn’t show anyone—oh, wait. Oh . . . Oh . . . God.” She handed the phone to Bentz. “This is a couple of nights ago, when I was out for a run. I, um, I came back and I thought I saw someone in the alley across the street. The dog was with me and he barked like crazy, but when I looked again, no one was there. But look at the date and time. This is literally less than ten minutes before I got home. I haven’t been to that side of the fence until tonight when I was taking out the garbage.”
Bentz and Montoya studied the screen. Sure enough a man—well, it looked like a man, but that wasn’t for certain; a tall woman could have been caught in the camera’s eye. It was just a few seconds. He slipped through and unlatched the gate by reaching over, opened a large case of some kind, dropped the snake into the can, then hurried away, his face never full on to the camera’s eye, a black overcoat and pants, a hat low over his eyes. Bentz kept the footage rolling, seeing nothing but a neighboring cat in one frame and a lumbering opossum in another.
“It ends here,” Bentz said.
“What—no . . .” She came around the counter and took the phone again. “See, this is where I open the can and see the snake.” Again, she handed the phone to her father. “Then I jumped back and must’ve hit the camera because everything seems to go screwy after that.”
Montoya watched and saw, just as she said, her image opening the can, then screaming and dropping the garbage sack, the dog barking wildly as she snapped the lid down and rehooked the cord holding the lid in place.
“We’ll need a copy of this,” Bentz said. “Maybe the lab can enhance the images and we can get a better picture of the guy.”
“Maybe, but he kept his face turned, because he probably spotted the camera,” Montoya said.
“We’ll check the neighbors, street cams. He must’ve driven here. I mean, he was carrying a snake for crying out loud—a big snake.” Bentz backed the footage up again and looked at the carrying case from which the snake was deposited. “Maybe we can get something on the bag. Or shoe prints. Or fingerprints on the lid of the can or envelope.”
“He was wearing gloves,” Montoya said. “Avoided the camera. The envelope was pretaped, you saw how he slapped it under the lid. The whole thing took less than five minutes and then . . .” He looked at Kristi. “And then he waited for you to return?”
“I don’t know. It might not have been the same guy, but someone was out there. In the alley across the street. Between the big square blue house—the two story—and the cottage.”
“I’ll go check it out.”
Montoya left through the front door, checked the area around the house and across the street to the alley, walking the length of the short gravel strip and coming out on the far end, another quiet street. Reaching into his pocket for his pack of cigarettes, he came up empty and headed back to the spot across the street from Kristi’s house where, tucked behind a single pine, he could view her front porch, one of the few on the street without any Halloween decorations. From his vantage spot, he could see from one end of the block to the other and he imagined whoever had dropped the snake into her garbage can waiting for her.
But who?
He’d dismissed Father John—not his style.
There had to be a reason whoever was attacking her was doing it now, and he knew that all of Jay’s and Kristi’s family members were out—none had a reason and all had alibis. As for friends or enemies, he found none except the disgruntled author Dennison Drake, whose career had been upended and surpassed by Kristi Bentz, but Dennison had a solid alibi for that night—the reclusive author had been in New York with his agent.
