Devious (34 page)

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Authors: Lisa Jackson

BOOK: Devious
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“None of the others are adopted.”
“Not that I know of.”
Montoya’s mind was racing. Could this be it? The connection they were looking for? St. Elsinore’s orphanage rather than St. Marguerite’s convent? “Can we get a list of anyone who resides here who came out of St. Elsinore’s?” he asked.
“I . . . suppose. But now we’re stepping into matters of personal privacy.”
“Easy enough to find out through public records,” Bentz pointed out, and she nodded.
“All right. Let me talk to the women first, and then I’ll get a list for you.”
“One more thing,” Montoya said. “Was Sister Asteria involved with Father O’Toole?”
“What? Oh, no! This is a convent, Detective, and though, yes, there have been some . . . well, indiscretions, it’s not as if it’s the summer of love here. Everyone, the priests, nuns, novices, we all practice celibacy, and before you interrupt, yes, I know about Sister Camille and Father O’Toole, and of course I’ll admit that Sister Lea was . . . tempted, as was Father O’Toole, but not Sister Asteria. . . .” But her voice faded, and for a second she turned her gaze from the detectives, staring off to the middle distance. Denial flared in her eyes but quickly died. “There may have been some flirting or, uh, fantasies on Asteria’s part, I suppose, but nothing serious, I assure you.”
Montoya nodded, though he wasn’t convinced. He had to ask something that had been nagging at him. “Sister Camille’s body had some odd marks on it,” he said, testing the waters.
The old nun stiffened slightly in her habit, but she didn’t ask what, just waited him out.
“Kind of crisscross marks.”
“As if she’d been flogged,” Bentz added, and the reverend mother whispered something under her breath.
“Excuse me?” Montoya said.
She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them again, they were focused, clear behind the lenses of her glasses. She stared at him with the intensity of an entomologist dissecting a newfound species of insect. “Sometimes, Detective, when a sinner atones, she takes it upon herself to punish herself physically, for clarity and purification. Though this isn’t a practice I urge, I know it’s done here.”
“You don’t require or urge it, but you condone it?” Bentz said, his eyebrows slamming together.
“I believe that each individual must do what she feels is necessary as penance. It’s between her and the Holy Father.”
“Sister Camille practiced self-flagellation?”
“I don’t know for certain. As I said, there are some practices that might appear archaic such as corporal mortification, but I assure you, Detectives, it’s not something we practice as a whole, or even suggest. Do some practice it?” She nodded slowly. “I suppose. As I think I said before, Sister Camille was a tormented soul.”
She cleared her throat, scooped an excessively large key ring from a desk drawer, and said, “Now, please, if you come with me, there’s something I want to show you.” She waved them to their feet, and they followed her through a private door and along the quiet hallway to a staircase. Holding on to the rail, her steps quick, she led them to the third floor. Once there, she located a small doorway that opened to a musty attic. She snapped on a dim light, hiked up her skirts, and walked inside, passing by old desks and dusty lamps, candle holders and cots, artifacts and picture frames.
Mouse traps were scattered on the floor, and spiderwebs and dust covered the few small windows that let in a dim, watery light. At the end of the littered pathway was another door that reached to the sloping rafters. The reverend mother paused before it, ran her fingers over the grainy wood, then found a key on her enormous ring and inserted it into the lock. With a click and a jangle of the other keys on the ring, the lock sprang open and she pulled on the knob. Creaking as if in protest, the door swung open to reveal a dark empty space.
The reverend mother snapped on a light and stepped inside. Wooden dowels ran the length of the closet. Clothing sheathed in plastic hung on wire hangers from one rod.
To Montoya, it looked as if this was where all the old vestments—cassocks, albs, habits, robes, and items he couldn’t name—hung; all covered in plastic. The other rod was empty.
Sister Charity stared at the dowel from which nothing was suspended and shook her head. “But they can’t be gone. They just can’t be,” she whispered, crossing herself.
“What?” Montoya asked, trepidation plucking at the hairs on his nape.
“The bridal gowns. They’re missing. All of them.” She shook her head in worry, obviously distraught, then turned to the side of the closet holding the vestments and began rifling through the plastic bags. “I was afraid of this,” she admitted, pushing one plastic-encased robe after another to the side, the hangers’ hooks scraping along the rod. She peered between each separate sheathing, as if willing the dresses to appear, then shoved the offensive bag aside. Faster and faster. One heavy vestment after another whipping past.
“You’re talking about gowns like the ones the victims were wearing?” Bentz asked.
She sent him a glance that called him a fool. “Of course! They’re the wedding dresses that were worn in the ceremony for becoming the bride of Christ. We haven’t used these particular gowns for a long, long while. They’ve been stored up here for years. Forgotten, I’d thought.” She turned back to her search.
Zzzip!
Another plastic-covered cassock flew past her, nimble fingers on to the next.
Zip!
One more cassock.
Zip! Zip!
Two habits flew by and then there was none.
“They were all in here.” She was at the end of the dowel and beginning to show signs of panic, a tic evident near the edge of her wimple, just under her eye.
Backing out of the closet, she pushed aside an old table that rolled on squeaky castors; then she scoured the cloth-covered artifacts with her eyes.
“How many were there?” Montoya asked, a cold stone settling in the pit of his stomach.
“A dozen,” she said swiftly, her cheeks infused with scarlet.
“Was that before or after the bodies were found?”
“After, of course!”
“When did you notice them missing?”
“They were here yesterday. . . .” She closed her eyes so tightly her jaw clenched. Her hands, too, fisted, one around her key ring. “I checked just yesterday, and there were eleven dresses hanging right here.” Eyes flying open, she jabbed a long finger toward the empty rod. “Eleven.” The last word was weak. “Only eleven and now all gone.”
“Only eleven?” Bentz repeated.
“Yes.” She made the sign of the cross over her chest. “But there were twelve up here that I remember. I double-checked my notes, and one was missing yesterday.”
Montoya felt a chill as cold as a north wind whisper through his brain. “Sister Camille was wearing the twelfth,” he guessed.
“Yes.”
“And Sister Asteria the eleventh,” Bentz said, his gaze meeting Montoya’s. “Meaning that there are ten left.”
Montoya said, “Ten dresses, ten more victims?”
“Oh, please, no!” Charity gasped, but Montoya could tell the idea had already come to her; he was only reaffirming her worst fears.
“We’ll need that list of names,” he said. “Of anyone who once was an orphan at St. Elsinore’s.”
“And also the nuns who work there now. Some work with the kids and at the clinic, right?” Bentz asked as the reverend mother, in the sweltering quarters of the attic, nervously fingered the cross dangling from a chain at her neck.
“Yes, yes, of course,” she said, still shaken. Then with more conviction than he would have expected, she added, “I’ll get what you need right now.” She blinked and sniffed, as if tears were burning the back of her eyelids.
Anger?
Righteous fury?
Or guilt?
Who knew? And did it matter?
“Come along, then.” Some of the stiffness had returned to her spine, the determined, no-nonsense set of her jaw back again. “If Father Paul gives me any grief, any talk of legal issues, I’ll tell him to take it up with God!”
I
t was late afternoon by the time Slade helped Valerie carry boxes down from the attic. Shadows were stretching long over the grounds of Briarstone, evening fast approaching.
The day had gotten away from her. She’d had some paperwork for Briarstone that couldn’t be put off any longer while Slade had called his brothers, checked on the ranch, then repaired a clog in the sprinkler system and worked on Valerie’s computer, debugging it, adding some memory, cleaning out files with her permission, and getting the damned laptop up to speed. She’d done some digging on the Internet when the computer was up and running and had found several O’Malleys in the phone book, looking for the elusive Mrs. Stan, but so far had struck out.
All the while, she’d been thinking about Camille’s disturbing diary—the images it had evoked and the cryptic messages she’d left for herself.
Which were probably nothing.
Yet they nagged at her, kept scratching at her mind, an itch that couldn’t be relieved.
Now she was at her desk, hanging up her phone after a call from a woman who apologized profusely for canceling her trip to New Orleans and her reservation at Briarstone for the weekend because her husband had been rushed to the hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery.
Slade had spent the last hour working on her laptop at the small table she’d tucked near the kitchen. A warm summer breeze drifted through the screen door, and Bo, making the weird high-pitched whine he always did while sleeping and dreaming, was lying just outside on the porch.
“This should work a lot faster,” Slade said, screwing the computer’s case into place.
“How do you know how to do this?” She motioned toward the laptop.
“What?”
“Fix the damned thing? Add memory? All of it?”
His grin was lazy and amused, his thin lips twisting. “You don’t think we have computers on the ranch?”
“Yeah, I know, but, I mean—”
“I told you that Bad Luck’s in the twenty-first century, right? And I’ve been a closeted geek for years,” he teased, glancing up from the screen. He slid his chair back and stood, still holding the screwdriver, stretching his arms high enough over his head to nearly touch the ceiling while listening to his spine pop.
“Really?” She tried not to notice that his shirt hiked up as he stretched, exposing those lean, hard muscles of his abdomen, the trail of dark hair that slipped beneath the waist of his jeans.
“You don’t remember?” He cast a surprised look down at her, one of his eyebrows arching.
“That you were into high tech?” she asked. “No.”
“I said ‘closeted.’ ”
She rolled her eyes up at him. “So it’s true. The wife is the last to know.”
“ ‘The wife’ hasn’t been around much lately,” he reminded her, and the barb was as sharp as the Pomeroy utility knife she was planning to use on the wide tape that sealed the five boxes she’d found in the attic over her small garage.
There it was between them.
The marriage.
The impending divorce.
She didn’t want to think about that, not right now. “So you really are the computer-genius cowboy?”
“Yes’m,” he drawled, twirling the screwdriver like it was a six-shooter, then holstering it into his jeans pocket. “Here at the BS Ranch—and that
BS
stands for Briarstone, don’tchaknow—we do it all. Everything from pulling calves to restoring laptops.” His crooked, decidedly sexy smile stretched wide.
“BS is right,” she said, and laughed for the first time in what seemed like eons. She also remembered why she’d fallen so hard and fast for him.
Oh, Slade,
she found herself thinking,
if only we could start over—wipe the slate clean.
She realized then that she’d never stopped loving him.
Her throat caught for a second. What an idiot.
You can never go back.
Didn’t she believe that old axiom? Her smile faded as she saw the empty years stretching out before her. Her parents and sister dead, her husband an ex and living at the Triple H, far, far away in a long-distant past. Oh, God, now she was getting maudlin.
Fool!
She felt her cheeks burn and prayed Slade had no idea what she was feeling.
“Let’s see what you think.” Slade carried the laptop to her desk, where he set it down. He was standing so near her she smelled a hint of his aftershave, and it brought back memories of lying in bed, his scent still lingering on the pillows long after he’d gotten up to feed the livestock. Irritated, she pushed the wayward memory aside.
He was standing half behind her, one shoulder nearly brushing her back, his face even with hers as he pushed a few buttons on the keyboard. “Try something.”
“Such as?”
He slid a glance at her from the corner of his eye. “Well, I was talking about a program on the computer, but if you have something else in mind . . .” His voice was low and suggestive.
“In your nightmares, Cowboy.”
“And yours, I’ll bet.”
“I’m not having this discussion with you!” She sounded tough, but inside she was melting.
His laugh was low. Mocking. As if he knew what she was thinking. She turned her head and noticed his belt buckle, right at eye level, the faded fly of his jeans, right above the top of her desk and slightly rounded.
Oh, great!
He was getting aroused, too?
Not good! Not good at all.
Quickly she turned her attention back to the computer screen. “Okay, hotshot,” she said, hating that she sounded slightly breathless. “Give me a demonstration.”
There was a pregnant pause, and she felt her cheeks burn.
“You can be such a bastard!” she said.
“And you love it.” His laugh was deep and rich, the timbre familiar.
“God, what an ego!”
Ignoring his amusement and his eye-level, jean-covered crotch, she reached for the computer’s mouse, plugged it in, and with a few clicks located the program she used for booking reservations at the inn. “Let’s see if I can cancel Mr. and Mrs. Miller’s rooms for the weekend.” She turned her mind away from the slight bulge at the front of Slade’s jeans and began working.
“You’re a tease, wife,” he said.
That makes two of us.
“And you’re always thinking with your—Oh, never mind.”
“You were gonna say ‘heart,’ right?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” she joked.
He leaned closer and whispered into the shell of her ear, “You’re right. I am.” His breath was warm against her skin. Inviting. A second later, he brushed his lips across the crook of her neck, and she shivered inside, feeling a little tingle deep inside, right between the juncture of her legs, that sweet itch that always signaled the start of her sexual arousal, the beginning of a pulsating, hot throb.
Trouble.
If she turned her head, he would kiss her. And from there . . . oh, sweet God . . .
“I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“You’re right.”
“Slade . . .” She closed her eyes.
Don’t do this!
She turned her head and felt his lips against hers, but he didn’t kiss her, didn’t press his mouth more urgently to her own suddenly willing lips. She opened her eyes and found him staring at her, pupils dark with desire, blue irises so thin they were barely visible. The pores on his skin, the stubble of whiskers starting to grow, all so close, and the scent of him, of aftershave and desire almost palpable.
She swallowed against a mouth as dry as an East Texas canyon in August.
Slowly he pulled his head away. “You know, Val,” he said, his voice a low whisper, his expression as serious as death, “I would never have cheated on you. Never.”
Tears sprang to her eyes.
“Not with Camille. Not with anyone.”
Her throat closed and she fought the urge to break down completely.
“I was tempted. Oh, man. I was tempted. But it wasn’t worth it.” He let out a long breath. “Nothing was. Because I knew that I’d lose you. If I would have done it, slept with her, it would have been just sex. Maybe even good sex. But with you . . .” He looked away, to the doorway where Bo was now standing on the other side of the screen. “Well, you know. We both do.”
“Oh, God, Slade . . .” A tear tracked down her cheek, and she dashed it away with the back of her hand. She couldn’t go down this path right now. She was too broken inside. Dealing with Camille’s death—no, her
murder
—learning that her parents might have kept secrets of her birth from her, that her entire life might have been built on stones that were crumbling, and having Slade return now, it was all too much.
Pull yourself together! Don’t be a whimpering, simpering weakling!
“I, uh . . . I think we should look in the boxes now,” she said, reaching for her utility knife and kicking back her chair. Trying to calm her wildly beating heart, she walked to the stack of boxes they’d brought into the living room from the garage.
Covered with a fine sheen of dust, taped and labeled, the five cartons represented all that was left of Camille’s life.
Of course, her sister had gotten rid of most of her things when she’d entered the convent, but still, these few boxes seemed a pitiful legacy for Camille’s vibrant life.
She knelt beside the first carton, noticed Camille’s bold, whimsical scrawl on one side, and read
Bedroom.
“This looks like a good place to start,” she said, and flicking open the razorlike blade, sliced through the tape.
In her apartment, Constantina Rubino hung up the phone on her no-good daughter, then crushed out her cigarette. Ever since Giovanna—oh, excuse me, Jean—had taken up with her sorry excuse of a husband, her fifth, no less, and the worst in a long, unending line of pathetic excuses for men, she’d had little time for an aging, arthritic mother. At least this one had some money, or so Giovanna insisted, and the way she was flashing around gold and diamonds the last time she’d visited, maybe she was telling the truth.
For once.
At least she had Enzo and Carlo, two of the most wonderful sons in the universe, neither of whom had changed their names. And though they were married to gold-digging Protestants, they had both borne her grandchildren, a total of five, the precious darlings! It was true Enzo had divorced and married again, but who could blame him? His first wife was nothing better than a fancy-priced whore. If only he’d had the marriage annulled. She worried about that, the getting into heaven part. With a sigh, she made the sign of the cross over her ample breasts.
Unfortunately, Enzo and his wife lived in that hellhole New York City, and Carlo sold real estate in the desert, Scottsdale, Arizona.
Only Giovanna—well, whatever she wanted to call herself, the ingrate—was nearby.
With a groan, Mrs. Rubino hefted herself from her favorite chair and, using her walker, headed slowly into the kitchen where her sauce was simmering. Her bad hip pained her, but she ignored it and refused to take any of the drugs that the doctor prescribed. She didn’t want to get hooked on any of that poison. Oh, she took an Aleve now and again, and sometimes washed it down with a drop of wine, but nothing more.
Wincing at the pain, she stopped by the mantel of the electric fireplace Carlo and that wife of his, Misty—what kind of name was that?—had sent last Christmas. On the vinyl mantel—oh, it looked good enough to be real walnut—she had pictures of the darling grandchildren, and she smiled at them all. Of course, there was the 8 x 10 of her wedding day and her beloved Silvio, rest his soul. She was dressed in a white gown with a handmade lace veil, and he wore his dark suit. His eyes had been such a rich, rich brown, and his mustache, trimmed to perfection, had been as black as night in the photo. She touched his face and told him, in Italian of course, how much she loved him.
“Io l ’amo per sempre.”

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