Devious - Lisa Jackson [140]
For once, thank God, she didn’t argue.
He considered that a minor miracle.
The call came on Montoya’s cell phone just as they were wrapping things up at Grace Blanc’s apartment.
“Let’s roll,” he said to Bentz after giving him a quick rundown of what he knew, that Valerie Houston’s house had been burglarized. They jogged across the parking lot of Grace Blanc’s building to the cruiser they’d taken from the station. Bentz, despite his age and extra pounds, kept up with him, and they climbed inside the Crown Vic, Montoya at the wheel.
Traffic was thinning, but still he darted around slower vehicles.
“Our guy’s busy,” Bentz said.
“Working overtime, it seems.” He cut in front of a low-rider pickup, then headed toward St. Charles, where the dark street cast an eerie glow under streetlamps, the leaves of the large trees lining the avenue seeming to glisten. A solitary streetcar passed, traveling in the opposite direction, few passengers inside.
Straight out of a horror movie.
On either side of the broad avenue divided by the streetcar line were expansive mansions, as architecturally diverse as the city itself, but all grand and huge, with cultured grounds and many with wrought-iron fences.
Definitely how the other half lived.
“So what do a prostitute and two nuns have in common?” Bentz thought aloud as he stared out the window.
“That sounds like the start of a really bad joke.” Montoya scowled as he took the final corner too fast and saw Briarstone House lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree on the left. “The obvious answer is they all knew a priest who was very bad news.”
“The question is, then,” Bentz said as Montoya wheeled into the drive, stopping the Crown Vic a few inches from the bumper of an old, beatup pickup, “who’s the priest?”
“Yeah, that is the question.” Montoya cut the engine and thought of the possibilities: Father Frank O’Toole, the priest who admitted to an affair with Sister Camille but who was not the baby’s father, according to the blood work; Father Paul Neland, the older, tight-lipped priest at St. Marguerite’s; the missing Father Thomas at St. Elsinore’s; or someone else? What about Father John, the would-be priest who seemed to have risen from the dead to kill yet another prostitute? He was a possibility. But what did he have to do with the deaths at St. Marguerite’s? He’d always gone after redheads. And then there was the missing nun, Lea De Luca. So far, the SFPO hadn’t found hide nor habit of her.
He felt like he should be able to pull some mental strings and figure out what the connection was. The orphanage? The religious order? What?
He stepped out of the car and was halfway up the walk when he was greeted by Valerie Houston’s husband, the guy who just happened to have shown up on the night his sister-in-law and would-be lover had been slain.
Coincidence?
Or not?
“Glad you’re here,” the husband said, shaking hands with Bentz, then Montoya. A tall, raw-boned man, he looked worried as hell. “I think my wife told you what happened. Come on inside.”
“Inside” meant inside of the smaller cottage on the property, a building that, because of its tall, narrow build, looked to have once been the carriage house to the main mansion. Valerie Houston was inside, standing in the kitchen, a big dog at her feet. The hound’s eyes followed Montoya and Bentz, and his tail, which had been sweeping the floor, became motionless.
And the husband was packing heat, carrying a weapon in the waistband of his pants.
“You licensed for that?” Montoya asked, motioning toward the gun.
Houston nodded and Montoya didn’t ask to see the paperwork; he’d check himself. Later.
“Here’s the BlackBerry,” Valerie said without so much as a greeting. She’d caught the exchange between Montoya and her husband.
The device was wrapped in a plastic bag that she pushed across the counter. “I don’t know if it’s Camille’s. I assume that it is and that the killer stole it from her on the night