Devious - Lisa Jackson [170]
“I love it when you’re bossy,” he said, and grabbed her, pulling her tight, and there in front of the mirror kissed her hard.
“Uh-uh, you’re not convincing me,” she said with a grin when she pulled her head back and looked him square in the eye. In heels, she was nearly nose to nose with him.
Nearly.
“I’m on to you, Houston,” she warned with a wink, then before he kissed her again slid out of his arms and hurried out of the bedroom. Bo, who had watched the entire dialogue, trotted after her to the living room, where she noticed the rain had begun to fall, thick drops drizzling down the windows. “Summer storm,” she thought aloud.
“An omen.”
She glanced over her shoulder as he walked into the room. “I don’t believe in omens.
“No? Well, I do.” And with that, he found his pistol and shoved it under the waistband of his slacks before throwing on his jacket.
“We’re going to a church auction,” she reminded him.
His smile held no fraction of amusement. “Exactly.”
The call came in just before five.
Cruz’s motorcycle, none the worse for wear, had been located, parked and locked at the bus station in Baton Rouge. A state cop had seen it, called in the plates, and discovered that it had been reported stolen, Montoya’s name listed as the contact person at the NOPD.
“We need it. Part of a homicide investigation,” Montoya told the officer. “The bike was stolen by a witness.”
“Records say it belongs to a Cruz Montoya.”
“My brother.” Montoya sketched out an abbreviated story for the cop and made arrangements for the Harley to be secured and brought into the garage at the crime lab. Maybe there was a clue as to where Lucia Costa had run to left on or around the bike.
He hung up the phone and got online to check the bus company’s routes and schedules. The earliest Lucia could have arrived in Baton Rouge was around three in the morning, so Montoya checked all the buses leaving from two-thirty on. It took almost an hour for the company to double-check records, but there was a bus that left for Houston at 7:00 a.m.
Did he believe she headed west?
Not really.
Her mission was to ditch Cruz, to fool him, so she wouldn’t have played her hand so carelessly. Nuh-uh.
Montoya was sweating as he rolled back his chair, the air-conditioning unit on the fritz again. The St. Elsinore’s auction was scheduled in an hour, and he intended to be there, to look through the crowd, see who was there. Maybe the killer would show his face; then again, probably not, but Montoya had the gut feeling that the homicides of Camille Renard and Asteria McClellan had been conceived earlier, perhaps starting at the first place they had crossed paths, if only fleetingly, and that was St. Elsinore’s orphanage. The connection was there, but not complete, like a train whose cars were on the track, one after the other, but not hitched together.
So some of the women who had been orphans at St. Elsinore’s had ended up as nuns and novitiates at St. Marguerite’s. Was that so odd?
He picked up his paper coffee cup, its few swallows of java staining the inside, cold and nearly congealed from the morning. He tossed it into the trash under his desk and realized that the noise in the department had lessened, most of the staff having left for the day.
But not Bentz.
As Montoya stepped into the hallway, he noticed that Bentz’s desk lamp was glowing through the open doorway of his office, soft light spilling into the corridor.
Montoya poked his head inside and found his partner, shirt-sleeves rolled over his forearms, elbows on the desk, a clump of hair falling over his eyes. He had jotted notes all over a yellow legal pad, but his gaze was focused on his computer monitor, a split screen with two victims visible. Grace Blanc, the prostitute, was on one half, and another, a woman he didn’t recognize immediately, filled the second half of the monitor. She looked familiar in the crime scene and was splayed in the same position as Grace had been left.
Shit, he realized, it was a picture of Cherie Bellechamps, one of Father John