Free Lisa Jackson's Bentz & Montoya Bundle: Hot Blooded, Cold Blooded, Shiver, Absolute Fear, Lost Souls, Malice, & an Exclusive Extended Excerpt From Devious by Lisa Jackson Page A

leavin’ her all spread-eagled and…crap.”
    “So did you see anything you thought was odd?”
    “Everything, man!”
    This was getting him nowhere. “What about your other roommate? Cindy. Where’s she?”
    “Dunno,” Denise grumbled. “She and Rosa had a fight a week or so ago. Cindy split. Haven’t seen her since.”
    “She hasn’t called?” Bentz asked. “No! Hasn’t paid her share of the rent, either. I say ‘good riddance to bad news.’ She was a real pain.”
    Bentz asked more questions and didn’t learn anything new.
    For the most part, Marvin’s story matched Denise’s. As the night hours crept quickly toward dawn, Montoya and Bentz interviewed the other denizens of the Riverview Apartments. They discovered that no one admitted seeing Rosa enter with any man, nor had any person noticed a lone man leave. Bentz suspected so many people came and went that unless this guy was extremely unusual, none of the tenants of the building would take note.
    It was broad daylight by the time they headed back to the station. The streets were crowded with the rush of eight-to-fivers, only a few clouds drifting across the sky. Sunlight glared against the pavement and bounced off the hoods of other vehicles. Horns honked, engines thrummed and pedestrians filled the crosswalks, spilling around parked cars as New Orleans woke up. By necessity Montoya drove with a lighter foot, barely breaking the speed limit.
    Once in his office, Bentz yanked off his tie and took the time to check the files of open cases. It didn’t take long to come up with the folder and computer information on Cherie Bellechamps, the prostitute who had been found a few weeks earlier. She, too, had been strangled with something causing a peculiar ligature around her neck. Cherie had been posed as well, in mock prayer in her seedy apartment. Left with a marred C-note on the bedside table, a loaded gun in the drawer, all the lights blazing and the radio playing. The crime-scene team had collected dirt, hair, semen and fingerprints. Whoever had offed Cherie hadn’t been careful not to leave other evidence.
    The ex-husband, Henry Bellechamps, who lived on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, had been the primary suspect, but with an ironclad alibi and no evidence linking him to the crime, he’d been questioned and let go. The local PD in Covington was supposed to be keeping an eye on him, but so far, nothing. Henry Bellechamps had suddenly become a model citizen.
    Bentz rubbed the stubble on his chin and twisted a kink from his neck. He’d have to check the guy out, see what old Hank had been doing earlier this evening, but it was his guess that the truck driver was clean. At least as far as the murders were concerned. And the third roommate—Cindy Sweet—he wanted to hear what she had to say, know where she’d been.
    In the Bellechamps case, the crime team had collected dozens of fingerprints that had turned up some other suspects, all of whom said the last time they’d seen Cherie Bellechamps she’d been very much alive. Their alibis confirmed that they hadn’t been in the apartment at the time of death. The hair samples and blood types hadn’t matched those of the perp.
    So much for a break in the case.
    He glared at the computer monitor where a picture of Cherie’s dead body was displayed and posed. So similar to the dead woman tonight. The murders had to be linked. Had to. They were too eerily the same.
    Wonderful, he thought sarcastically, as the fan blew hot air against the back of his neck, just what this city needs: a serial killer.

Chapter Six
    “Have you met the new neighbor?” Mrs. Killingsworth asked as her dog, a tiny pug with a pushed-in snout and bulging eyes snorted and dug in one of her flower beds. “Hannibal, you stop that!” The pug ignored her and tore into a freshly turned mound of earth. “He never listens!”
    A matronly woman forever working in the yard in her husband’s overalls, Mrs. Killingsworth had been