Devious - Lisa Jackson [34]
“She was a beautiful woman.”
Slade didn’t respond.
“You tell your wife about it?”
“No.” Slade frowned and Valerie wanted to slide farther away from him. “Not at first.”
“Camille came to me,” Val said. “She swore Slade was trying to get her into bed.”
“A lie.” Slade was stalwart. Didn’t flinch.
“You believed her?” Bentz asked Val as Montoya’s eyes narrowed on Slade.
“I did and I confronted Slade. He turned the story around.”
“I just told it like it was. No, I didn’t run to my wife and whine about her sister. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know what to do. Everything blew up around Christmas and Camille took off.”
“To a nunnery? Seriously? That sounds like something right out of the Middle Ages.”
“Camille was into high drama,” Slade said.
“When was the last time you saw her?” Montoya’s question was directed at Slade, but they both answered.
“The day she left the ranch in Bad Luck, Texas,” Slade said.
Val admitted,”I haven’t seen her since last month, when I stopped by the orphanage where she worked. We barely spoke. Then there was the phone call and finally the e-mail last night.”
“I’d like a copy of it, and any others you’ve got as well.” Bentz made notes and asked a few more questions.
For the most part, Montoya allowed his partner to take the lead. They told her that Camille had fought with her attacker at the scene of the crime but that there was no other sign of a struggle, other than in the chapel at the altar. Camille, it seemed, had gone into the chapel willingly. Val felt a chill again, cold enough to turn her heart to ice as she thought about her sister’s last minutes on this earth, but then all of this horror was strange. Eerie and soul grinding.
By the time they left the hospital, it was after ten and the rain had stopped, the clouds breaking apart, blue sky visible. A thick, dank mist rolled upward from the earth as Valerie walked through puddles to Slade’s old Ford. Slade had insisted on driving to the hospital, and she’d been so hell-bent to get to the morgue she hadn’t cared a whit how she’d gotten there. Now, as she climbed into the beat-up truck, she was acutely aware of the memories it conjured. The smell of old leather, dirt and sweat, the wreckage of a marriage.
The end of a life.
She shivered at the stark, irreversible realization that she would never see Cammie again.
It was an impossible thought. Painful.
And now, after the viewing, a cold, hard fact.
CHAPTER 13
It’s been so long.
And the promise I made myself years ago, the vow, is now broken. From the Moonwalk along the banks of the river, I watch the thick waters of the Mississippi roll past, cloudy and obscure. A freighter churns upriver. The air is warm and heavy with humidity, the sky somber, yet I slip a pair of sunglasses from my pocket and onto the bridge of my nose.
“Hello, Father,” a man says as he passes me quickly, catching sight of my clerical collar.
I smile.
Don’t answer.
He bustles away, and I turn from the river, its dank smell caressing my nostrils. With effort, I make my way over the steep levee, my right leg dragging ever so slightly, the old pain not quite gone and never, ever forgotten.
It’s a pain I can deal with.
And only in the leg.
I’m not winded, not even perspiring. I’ve kept myself fit. Honed.
Except for the right tibia.
Unfortunate, that.
A war wound.
I make my way into the park and keep moving, past a mime who tries silently to catch my attention. I refuse to glance his way, his sad white face of no interest to me. Instead, I stare across the park, past the statue of Andrew Jackson on his rearing horse to the spires of St. Louis Cathedral, rising upward, the cross atop the highest steeple seeming to pierce the underbelly of the dark clouds roiling overhead.
White and looming, the cathedral beckons.
And I, of course, resist.
For now.
Inside the truck, Val kicked against