Devious

by Lisa Jackson

  The voice was obviously disguised and not only threatening, but also smug. “I take it you don’t know who it is?”

  “No.” Valerie shook her head.

  “So why would you become a target? You’re not a nun,” he thought aloud.

  “I wish I knew, but maybe it has something to do with Camille’s diary. He took it. Maybe there’s something condemning in it, something that would tie him to her.”

  “Maybe,” Bentz said, taking notes. “But I agree. You’re the target of his threat.”

  Montoya nodded. “We’ll put a detail outside,” he said, “to watch the place.”

  She was nodding.

  He continued. “And we’ll want to go through all of Camille’s personal items, take ’em with us.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want to take a look in the attic,” Bentz interjected. “See for myself, in case she left anything that wasn’t boxed up.”

  “I’ll take you out there,” Slade said, and he pulled a flashlight from a drawer. For a man who’d come to New Orleans to patch things up with his wife, he seemed to know his way around her house. And the antagonism Montoya had sensed between them in their first interview, here at the house, then at the hospital, that invisible current of discord, seemed to be missing.

  “Anything else you want to add?” Montoya asked. “Anything else unusual?”

  He wasn’t surprised when she nodded again. “Yeah. I got a couple of calls this afternoon. Hang-ups. No caller ID,” she admitted.

  “We’ll need your phone.”

  “But—” she started to argue, then said, “Sure.”

  “And we’ll need to take this.” He motioned to the BlackBerry, but Valerie was already nodding. She looked Montoya straight in the eye. “You knew my sister, Detective,” she said, her chin quivering despite the fire in her gaze. “Get the guy who did this to her. Nail his hide to the wall.”

  “I will,” he said, knowing he was promising what might turn out to be the impossible but saying the words anyway. He caught a warning glance from Bentz but ignored it as he scooped the BlackBerry into his pocket and headed out the back door and into the night.

  They asked more questions, checked the grounds, talked to Valerie Houston’s business partner, Freya Martin, and five groggy guests. A married couple from Maine were in their seventies, and the wife claimed she never heard anything but her husband’s snoring as he had dozed off. Three women from Oregon, all in their late forties, were on a “girl-cation away from the husbands and boyfriends” and hadn’t noticed. Freya had heard the dog bark, but that was it. No sound of footsteps, revving engine, screaming . . . no one looking out the window and seeing someone dash across the lawn.

  All in all a bust, Montoya thought as he returned to the Crown Vic. Over the echo of his own promise to “nail the bastard” who had killed Camille Renard rattling through his brain, he heard the eerie peal of distant bells, the midnight chimes tremulously counting off the hours.

  CHAPTER 42

  Like the calm before the storm, for the next few days, things were quiet. Too quiet, Montoya thought as he jogged through the streets at dawn. His legs were beginning to cramp, evidence that he’d pushed aside his exercise regimen in the last two weeks. The five miles he usually jogged seemed longer today, his breathing more difficult, though Hershey ran along beside him effortlessly.

  Montoya, to keep up with the dog, would have to give up even his occasional smoke. Besides, Abby was on to him, not saying a word, just giving him the evil eye and wrinkling her nose when he came in from his “walk” and probably reeking of smoke. Normally she would tell him exactly what she thought, but when he was eyeball deep in a case, she usually gave him a little leeway. And he took advantage of it.

  “The price of being a hotshot detective’s wife,” she’d tease. Although, since the birth of Benjamin, she’d been a little more cutting with her remarks, more fearful for his life. “It’s not just you and me, anymore, Detective,” she’d remind him.

  As if he didn’t know.

  He rounded a corner, running through the Quarter, the chocolate lab beginning to lag a bit as they passed the buildings with their wide second-story balconies decorated in intricate patterns of wrought iron. Steam seemed to escape from the manholes, and he passed few people at the street, saw only a smattering of lamplights in the windows of the apartments over the storefronts at street level.

  He pushed it, kicking up his pace a bit.

  Reaching the river, he ran on the sidewalk flanking the water and took in deep breaths of the air, which was thick with the scent of the Mississippi. A flock of pelicans rose before him as his feet slapped the ground, and Hershey, though he looked longingly at the birds, didn’t stray.

  “Good boy,” Montoya said with more than a little effort as he turned his mind to the case and the fact that the killer, thankfully, hadn’t struck again.

  At least not that anyone knew about.

  The Feds were sniffing around, the task force pulled together, the press demanding answers, and everyone in the department on edge, expecting yet another homicide, another novitiate found with her throat garroted, or another prostitute strangled with a rosary, raped and left with a defaced C-note.

  Yet, so far, there had been no reports of any such thing. Bentz had questioned Dr. Sam, the psychologist with the radio program Midnight Confessions on WSLJ, the target of Father John during his original rampage a few years back. She’d sworn that she’d had no out-of-the-ordinary calls or requests to the station, which was saying something, because Montoya thought anyone who picked up a phone and called a psychologist who was on the airwaves had a serious screw loose. Who in his right mind would talk about the most intimate of problems while all of New Orleans could listen in? Then again, weren’t there a plethora of shows like Jerry Springer or even Judge Judy where people came forward with their most private matters?

  “I don’t get it,” he admitted to Hershey as the dog loped at the end of his leash.

  Montoya jogged through the dawn light, the fog rolling in from the river, his thoughts jumbled, sweat running down his body.

  Sister Camille Renard’s diary had been eye-opening, but other than offering up a few notes that didn’t make any sense and describing her sexual encounters—all with anonymous partners—hadn’t held much else. He’d winced when he’d read about her first experience, especially when she’d admitted to the diary that it had been less than what she’d anticipated; at the time, she’d expected so much more than a horny high school boy had given her.

  It seemed that her other lovers had been more to her liking. He’d sifted through the diary, trying to place names with events, linking several experiences, because of the dates, to Brandon Keefe, a man to whom she’d once been engaged and who was now married with a couple of kids in California, and another to a man who had become a parishioner at St. Marguerite’s, Joshua Lassiter, but that had been before she’d taken her vows. There were others still unnamed, then more recently, the entries that were most recent, Father Frank, certainly. Could there possibly be someone else?

  Who, they didn’t know.

  The BlackBerry that had belonged to Camille Renard had not given up any clues that were easily evident, but the techs weren’t finished with it, even though all of the messages, contacts, and old calls had been erased. Except for the last audio message and the two videos of the dead nuns.

  The son of a bitch had been careful, and he was irritating the hell out of Montoya.

  The lab was still trying to match blood types and so far hadn’t come up with a serious candidate for the baby’s father. Even the men who worked at the parish—Elwin Zaan, the janitor; Clifton Sharkey, a maintenance man; and Neron Lopez, the groundskeeper—were being checked.

  The one glaring omission was Father Thomas. No blood had been taken from the priest, as he’d been away from St. Elsinore’s more often than not.

  Odd, that.

  Still, Montoya thought wryly, he was doubting Thomas as the fathe
r. He smiled at his own little joke, then angled off toward the coffee shop where he usually picked up his regular cup of joe. At the coffee stand, he paid for his black coffee, got a cup of water for the dog, and left change in the tip jar for Jessica, the barista, a pillowy African American woman with silver hair. He sipped from the steaming paper cup as he walked back to the house and stretched his muscles. Hershey, finally tired, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, followed.

  All part of his usual routine.

  Except that now a killer was stalking the streets of New Orleans, his town, once again.

  First Sister Camille and then Asteria McClellan. The two, as far as Montoya could tell, were only linked because of two parishes: St. Elsinore’s, from which they’d both been adopted, and St. Marguerite’s, where they lived and planned to take their vows.

  As different as night and day, his mother would have said. Sister Camille, outgoing, spontaneous, a flirt, and, it turned out, someone who didn’t take her vows of chastity seriously. Sister Asteria had no tell-all graphic diary. No pregnancy. Was still, according to the ME, a virgin.

  Both women, though, had been drugged, traces of Rohypnol in their bloodstream. The date-rape drug—used on nuns. What the hell was that all about?

  There wasn’t any info yet on Grace Blanc, and the testimony of the old Italian lady, Mrs. Rubino, about seeing a priest through her fish-eye peephole was sketchy at best. She was partially deaf, and her eyesight wasn’t near 20/20, so if she were ever put on the witness stand, assuming the police made an arrest, her testimony would be torn up by any defense attorney worth the cost of the ink on his diploma.

  What a mess! Montoya drank his coffee and cut across the lawn to the house. On the porch, he stretched his hamstrings and quads, then finished the last swallow before crushing his cup. The neighbor’s dog, Apollo the dalmatian, whined from the front porch, wriggling at the sight of the Lab.

  “No!” Montoya said before Hershey even looked up at him or dashed inside. “Sit!”

  He stripped out of his T-shirt, then wiped the Lab’s paws with it while Hershey wiggled impatiently on the porch. “Hey! Give me a break.” Once the Lab’s feet were a little cleaner, he opened the door and the dog streaked inside.

  “Trying to win brownie points?” Abby asked. She was in her bathrobe, her hair piled onto her head, standing at the kitchen sink and cutting up fruit while the coffee brewed and Benjamin slept in his infant seat on the counter.

  “With you?” Montoya asked, then winked at her. “Always, baby.”

  “Oh, jeez, Montoya, so smooth! Be still my heart.” Using her fingers, she made a fanning motion near her face, as if she were suddenly so hot she might faint; then she giggled and went back to slicing up strips of cantaloupe and watermelon. The baby let out a soft little sigh that touched Montoya’s heart. He grinned and placed a finger on Ben’s chubby cheek, watching as his son’s tiny lips moved.

  “Is Cruz around?”

  “Still sleeping,” she said, casting her husband a knowing smile. “It is only six-thirty. The only sane people awake are nursing mothers and type-A detectives.”

  “Yeah, right.” His brother had crashed there for the better part of a week, spending time with Abby and Reuben, visiting their mother and other siblings, and generally hanging out. He hadn’t said as much, but Montoya thought that Cruz might be trying to find a way to see Lucia Costa again, the girl he’d known in high school and someone the department was interested in; after all, she’d somehow discovered both Sister Camille and Sister Asteria as they’d died.

  Montoya thought Lucia wasn’t being completely truthful, but so far, he hadn’t figured out what she could be holding back. Cruz’s interest in her wouldn’t help the investigation; in fact, it could bloody well harm it.

  “I’m serious. It’s too early to be up and around.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But you know how it is.”

  “When you’re wound up in a big case, you can’t sleep. So that means neither can I.” Sighing, she sliced another cantaloupe in half, then started digging out the seeds.

  Montoya, on his way to the back of the house, paused to snap his sweaty, now-dirty T-shirt against her buttocks.

  “Hey! You’re asking for trouble,” she warned, waggling the knife.

  “Oh, I like the sound of that.”

  “Really?” She was smiling as she twisted her head to look at him.

  He couldn’t resist and wrapped his arms around her, the cotton of her robe shifting beneath his fingers. “Really.”

  She glanced at the baby sleeping on the counter, as if considering. “I thought you had to be to work early.”

  “I think you could change my mind.” He kissed her full on the lips and felt that hot, familiar rush, the liquid fire in his blood just as he did every time her mouth opened to him. Sometimes he wondered if it were possible to get enough of her.

  He slid his tongue between her teeth and slipped one hand into the folds of the robe, searching out her breast, full and hard, filled with milk, covered in lace.

  “Mmmm . . . ,” she murmured just as his damned cell phone rang.

  He ignored it, but she pulled away. “Duty calls.”

  When he was about to argue, she arched a brow, reminding him of their argument several nights earlier—the one about his responsibilities of being a father and husband as opposed to being a cop. “Damn,” he muttered.

  “Right,” she agreed, with more than a hint of sarcasm. “Damn.”

  He gave her a quick buss on the cheek, then answered. “Montoya.”

  “We got a hit,” Bentz said, his voice rough, as if he’d just been awakened.

  Montoya’s muscles tensed. All of his attention was on the phone. “Yeah?”

  “The maintenance guy. Clifton Sharkey? Seems as if he’s had a prior. Assault.”

  “How’d we miss that?”

  “Twenty years ago, in Canada. It’s not enough to do anything but haul his ass in for more questioning, but it’s something.”

  Finally! A break.

  Maybe.

  He felt a rush of adrenaline stream through his blood, that familiar buzz he loved when a case was beginning to fit together. Yeah! He was already heading down the hall toward the bathroom. “I’ll be at the station in twenty,” he said.

  “But, Montoya,” Bentz said through the receiver, “just for the record?”

  “Yeah?”

  Montoya kicked the bathroom door closed and twisted on the faucet.

  “My money’s still on O’Toole.”

  “We can’t ignore our responsibilities, even though we’re all still in mourning,” the mother superior said during another meeting after breakfast, the third this week. Lucia, seated with the rest of the nuns and novices, sat in the stiff-backed chairs of a room down the hallway from the cathedral, a room used for seminars, meetings, or prayer groups. It smelled slightly stale, the windows closed, the whiteboard behind Sister Charity wiped clean.

  Father Paul and Father Frank stood near the door as the reverend mother spoke, the older man forcing a smile that had all the warmth of a Siberian snowstorm. His hands were folded, soft, his pink fingers laced.

  Father Frank seemed to have aged ten years in the past week. His dark hair, usually combed and clipped, was disheveled, showing a few strands of gray, his jaw colored by a dusting of beard shadow, his eyes hollow and sunken, as if the life, and perhaps even his faith, had been sucked from his soul. His fingers moved constantly. Nervously. Evidence of a man haunted by his own sins.

  Sister Louise, her eyes sad, tried to meet his gaze, Lucia noticed, but he was a man caught in his own world. He was in the room physically, but his heart and soul were somewhere far, far away.

  It wasn’t just the priests. Everyone at St. Marguerite’s was on edge, Lucia surmised, second-guessing their appointments to the parish. And not just those who wore the holy garb. The lay workers, too, were affected.

  The janitor, Elwin Zaan, now leaning on his broom, was as somber as death.

/>   Neron Lopez, the usually happy-go-lucky groundskeeper, hadn’t been able to scare up a smile this past week. Lucia had caught him continually crossing himself and glancing up at the church spires, as if expecting to be struck down as he raked the gardens and pulled weeds.

  Regina, the sour-faced cook, had quit yelling, keeping to herself, the cross at her neck more visible in the past few days, glinting on its chain as she’d rolled out pie crusts and ladled soup. Her barking of orders in the kitchen had become less pronounced, and there was talk, scuttlebutt, that she was considering resigning. Eileen, the receptionist with frizzy blue hair and color-coordinated pantsuits, had spent most of the past week dabbing at her eyes. Only Clifton Sharkey, the maintenance man who went about his job repairing everything from shoes to machinery, seemed mostly unaffected, though he was sweating a lot. Lucia glanced his way and saw him mopping his brow yet again.

  “It’s a time for us to unite and band together. Do not let fear into your soul . . . ,” the mother superior was intoning, all eyes on her as she walked past a desk near the windows.

  All of the nuns at St. Marguerite’s had been nervous and on edge, the feeling of safety within the hallowed walls of the convent shattered.

  They had talked when they’d been gardening or driving to St. Elsinore’s or while doing their chores. All the time between their scheduled prayers, meditation, and services to the needy, they had whispered their own fears. Just yesterday, in the garden, just before vespers, several of the women had met. Lucia had stood in the group, felt the nervousness of all the nuns, and carefully studied the glinting streaks of gold as the fish in the pond darted beneath the water’s surface.

  “Why Asteria?” Sister Dorothy had asked, worrying the beads of her rosary with her pudgy fingers. “She was so . . . good, so pure.”

  “Oh, please. Really?” Sister Maura had whispered, skewering the shorter nun with a dark stare. “Do you think that’s what it’s all about, that she was killed because she was impure?” She had shuddered, as if a cold breeze had swept through her, though the heat of the day had lain heavy on the gardens, where honeybees droned and a hummingbird hovered near the fragrant blooms of a magnolia tree. “No way.”