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How long have I dreamed of someone saying that to me?
“I have a date.”
“Okay.” Benny opened the newspaper. “I’m really sorry, Jasmine. I wanted to tell you I was your father so many times.”
“You’ve already said that and I accepted your apology.”
“I cared for your mother, but I couldn’t leave my wife, not while she was dying.” He formed his right hand into a fist. “And then when she passed away, all of you were in your teens, and your mother wasn’t the same.”
“You already told me this.” I gazed at a squirrel that raced up a tree. “I don’t hate you. I just wish things had been done differently. I needed a father, Benny. I needed to know that someone loved me. When you helped I always felt like I owed you, as if I were never going to pay up my debt to you.”
Sorrow seized me like it had been taking a hold of my heart each day.
I cried a lot at night and felt stupid for each tear.
How pitiful was I to weep for the little girl who always wanted a dad, or shed tears for the shattered new love that Troy and Vivian had? And even my feelings for Chase brought a shower of tears and lightning-fast pain to my chest.
I told no one, but I thought of him almost every minute. Tender moments we shared played in my head like a depressing movie. On and on I reminisced about Paris and all our times together. I smelled his scent on my skin no matter how many times I scrubbed it—new leather mixed with vanilla.
Like an idiot, I repeated his voicemail messages again and again, drowning in his luscious baritone. He begged me to come back to him. He pleaded that he’d take me any way I would come. But with shaking fingers, I ignored his messages and stayed away.
And in the late hours of the night, when Vivian slept and Chase hung outside my window in his limo, I imagined him moving inside of me and my fingers mimicked his strokes. I moaned into my pillow and came so hard my body rocked. But then the hunger for him returned, and the hollowness appeared as if he had gutted me from within.
“Jasmine?” Benny covered my hand with his and squeezed. “Are you okay? Where did you go?”
“Somewhere I shouldn’t be,” I murmured.
Benny opened another newspaper on his side. A thin, black folder lay inside.
“These are just copies, not the originals.” Benny gave it to me. “Each time the three girls died, Chase was with them. Vicki took sleeping pills in the bathroom after having sex with him, returned to him in bed, and laid down. She never woke up. When we reported the death, we told the police she was alone.”
He patted the folder. “Put this information somewhere safe.”
I grabbed the folder and shoved it in my new bag. Chase had delivered it. A big bag with coconut pieces sewed on the fabric. No one knew it was from him.
I cleared my throat. “What about the second woman?”
“Someone poured chemicals into a pool while Evelyn was swimming. It burnt her skin and lungs,” Benny said. “Again, Chase was sleeping in her apartment at Willow Park.”
I wonder if this is why they stopped him from sleeping in the girls’ bedrooms at night, or if he’d ended it himself.
“And the third girl?”
“Yancy, the last one, was attacked leaving Stone Industries. Chase was in the limo waiting for her to show up. At least, that was what he said.” Benny shrugged.
“I overheard Dawn say she washed Yancy’s blood from his body.”
“I figured he was around, but he’s always denied it.”
I focused on Benny. “Do you think he killed them?”
“I’m familiar with killers. I can see them a mile away. It’s always in their eyes and the way they carry themselves.” His lips straightened into a line. “It takes one to know one.”
I averted my eyes and stirred a little in my seat.
Benny was a lawyer, but he was something else, too. Thugs followed him around. Things disappeared when they caused Troy, Vivian, or me any harm.
In fact, no one had seen Noc since he’d been released from jail. Missing pictures were posted outside of Drunken Lyrics asking people to call the police if they knew of Noc’s whereabouts.
