Devious - Lisa Jackson [39]
Bentz clicked his phone shut as they slowed for a red light. “That was the ME’s office,” he said, his voice low and angry. “Preliminary report on Camille Renard. Looks likes asphyxiation due to strangulation, which we figured. And, yeah, she was pregnant. It’s a double.”
Montoya’s hands tightened over the steering wheel again. He thought of Camille in the chapel, the way her body was displayed, the rosary beads threaded through her fingers. “So who, besides Valerie Renard, knew she was pregnant?”
“Most likely the father of the kid. Maybe a friend or two. Maybe even the mother superior or a priest, other than O’Toole. Someone like that, who she might confess to.”
Montoya had already thought of them. “But the secret was probably confined to the convent and her sister.”
“Unless people talked—they tend to do that.” Bentz glowered out the window. “The lab’s checking blood types now—Camille’s and the fetus’s. We’ll need a sample from O’Toole, too, or rule him in or out.”
“And anyone else who knew her.”
“You mean in the biblical sense.” Bentz slid a glance in Montoya’s direction, unasked questions hovering in the warm interior of the car.
“She was a nun, for Christ’s sake.”
“And knocked up.”
The light changed and Montoya hit the gas.
“Wouldn’t be surprised if the captain yanked you off the case,” Bentz thought aloud. “It’s not often an investigating officer knows the vic and one of the suspects as well as the person who found the body and reported the crime.” He nodded to himself. “Nah, the captain’s not gonna like it.”
“I don’t like it,” Montoya said.
“What about that Sister Lucy?”
“Lucia,” Montoya corrected, taking a corner too fast, tires screeching. He felt the weight of Bentz’s gaze, recognized the questions forming in his partner’s eyes.
God, what a mess. He couldn’t imagine Frank O’Toole as a murderer ; then again, he’d never have guessed the soccer star would end up a priest, even with the near-death experience of O’Toole’s sister.
Stranger things have happened.
“Guess you’ll have to ask him.” Montoya braked, allowing a slow-moving minivan filled with half a dozen kids to roll past. Balloons fluttered from the windows, catching the wind, delighting the grade-schoolers and causing ripples of giggles and squeals of laughter to rise from the van. After the noisy vehicle passed, he wheeled into the lot and pulled his car into a safe spot.
“The odd thing about this case is that it seems to center around you,” Bentz prodded, and straightened his leg, wincing a little from an injury that had once sidelined him while he worked a case in Baton Rouge, an injury that nearly cost his older daughter, Kristi, her life.
“There are lots of odd things about this case.” For the first time in months, Montoya craved a smoke. He’d given up the habit years before, but when things were tense, he found himself reaching into his pocket for a nonexistent pack of cigarettes.
The hell of it was that Bentz was right about the high school reference.
Montoya felt a weird sense of déjà vu, as if he’d been thrown back in time to take a long look at his own life, the images of his youth parading by like his own personal krewe at Mardi Gras.
He only hoped that no one else he knew turned up.
“I’m telling you, he was involved with her,” Sister Charity said angrily. So irritated she had to pace from one side of Father Paul’s small office to the other. Books lined the shelves, stained-glass windows filtered the light, and Paul sat behind a huge desk of dark mahogany. The wood shined so glossy that light reflected off it.
“We don’t know it for certain.”
“I’ve seen them!” Sister