In a moment of striking clarity, Val knew that Frank had rejected Devota. Sometime, somewhere, she’d been passed over in his affections, just like she’d been passed over and never adopted to a family. Maybe it was real, maybe it was all in Devota’s twisted mind, but the result was the same: one more strike to her battered, malevolent soul.
As if reading Val’s thoughts, Devota shuddered and spat, “But he
liked you
, didn’t he? Frank
lusted
after
you!
”
“No.” This was taking a turn she didn’t understand.
“Just like all those others who twittered and giggled, laughing and sighing at the sight of him, starting with . . . that!” She curled her lips in revulsion as she pointed her knife at the grisly remains of Sister Lea.
Val thought of the heart symbol with the letters inside.
CALLED.
She’d made a mistake. One of the Ls was not Sister Lucia, but Sister Lea. Camille, Asteria, Louise, Lea, Edwina, and Devota . . . How right Camille had been. They all, including Devota, had been in love with the priest.
“Did you see her last moments?” Devota demanded. When Val didn’t respond, she clarified. “I’m talking about that whore of a woman you thought was your sister. The only child of Mike and Mary Brown.”
The BlackBerry. And the horrid pictures of Asteria and Camille dying, struggling for breath, bleeding, their fingers scraping their own bloodied throats . . .
Rage boiled inside Val. “You sick, twisted bitch,” she accused as Sister Charity let out a wheezing, gurgling breath. “Who do you think you are?”
“God’s servant.”
“What?” Val couldn’t believe her ears. “Oh, for the love of—You sanctimonious, self-aggrandizing bitch! You killed those women because they were adopted? Because Frank O’Toole liked them? You’re out of your mind!”
“Oh, but they were happy,” Devota argued. “You should have seen them smile blissfully as they put on their ridiculous gowns.”
“Because they were drugged!”
“High on love.”
“Bull!” Val knew that they’d been drugged. Devota might have been able to get what she needed through the clinic where she worked or from some of the people she was supposed to be helping, some of them drug addicts. Val felt sick when she thought of Cammie and how she’d been duped, used by this twisted, vengeful woman.
In the flashlight’s beam, she caught sight of a glint, a bit of metal. The gun! Fifteen feet away.
“Nuh-uh-uh!” Devota warned, as if reading her mind. She raised her brutal knife high overhead, its dripping blade ready to strike again.
“Go to hell!”
Val rolled toward the weapon.
“Val!” Slade yelled, his deep voice reverberating through the halls.
Surprised, Devota glanced toward the sound.
Val touched the barrel of the gun with the tip of her fingers, but it spun away again, skittering over the stones.
Devota turned back and saw Val’s mistake. “Stupid Jezebel!” With surprising agility, Devota leaped forward, her fingers curled like talons over the knife, her shadow a hideous wraith. “Die!” She thrust her arm out. The wicked blade gleamed steely blue, slashing downward, bits of blood flying.
Val flung herself to one side.
Too late.
Hot pain seared down her shoulder.
“Die! Damned your heathen soul to Satan!” Devota hissed, and jerked her knife upward, determined to plunge it into Valerie’s heart.
“Stop, you goddamned bitch!” Slade yelled from somewhere in the shadows, somewhere behind the killer’s back. “Drop the knife!”
From the corner of her eye, Val saw him step into the light, his face drawn, his eyes blazing, ten feet from Devota’s back. Fury twisted his features, but he didn’t give Devota a second to think.
Throwing himself across the tomb as if to tackle her, he shot forward, airborne.
Devota spun, twisting the knife.
Oh, God!
With insidious delight in her eyes, the she-devil intended to rip Slade from his neck to his crotch, spilling his guts.
“No! No! No!” Val cried, and threw herself toward the gun just as a horrible, wet, rasping scream issued from the bloody lips of Sister Charity.
In one last, desperate act, as if propelled by God, the dying nun flung her body upward, knocking Devota down onto the bed of the tattered wedding dress, Charity’s half-dressed body pinning Devota to the floor as she gasped for breath.
Swearing, Slade skidded across the floor on his shoulder.
Devota reacted. “Why can’t you just die?” she screamed at Charity, then plunged the knife deep, burying the blade between the older woman’s breasts.
Blood from Charity’s neck poured over Devota and dripped onto the wedding dress.
“Get off me!” Devota ordered, trying vainly to free herself. Val reached the pistol just as Charity Varisco, her biological mother, died holding down Camille’s killer.
Slade scrambled to his feet.
“Don’t do it, Val,” he warned, but he was too late.
With dead calm, ignoring the pain in her shoulder and ankle, Valerie crawled over to the two nuns and placed the muzzle hard against the younger woman’s temple.
She would have pulled the trigger, but Slade’s fingers wrapped around hers. “No,” he said, shaking his head, drawing her close. “It’s over.”
The sound of footsteps, thundering wildly, resonated through the tomb.
The police.
Finally.
Val sagged against her husband, her emotions ragged, her heart dark. This, the crumpled form of a woman with scars crisscrossing her back, was her mother, the woman who had given her life and, in the end, saved it. Tears filled her eyes, and she blinked hard, clinging to Slade, wondering how she had ever doubted him, silently swearing she would never let him go again.
“It’s all right,” he said, his voice a whisper in the unused air of the musty room. “It’s all right.” One arm held her fiercely to him, infusing her with his strength.
Flashlight beams wobbled and crisscrossed before landing on the carnage.
“Stop! Police!” Bentz ordered.
“Drop your weapons!” someone else shouted.
“Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Oh, God, what a mess!” Montoya’s voice, seeming to come out of a mist of pain.
With Slade’s help, she let go of the gun. Her fingers unclenched and it fell, slowly. The barrel clanged noisily against the floor.
“Help me!” Devota cried. “Help me. They tried to kill me. Please . . .”
“Don’t believe her,” Slade said to Montoya, his breath ruffling Valerie’s hair.
“I don’t,” Montoya said. “Then again, I don’t trust anyone.”
Slade wrapped his arm more tightly around his wife and said again, “It’s over.”
She clung to him and bit back tears. She knew she’d never let him go again . . . but she also knew he lied.
This horror, the breadth of Sister Devota’s madness and cruelty, wouldn’t be over for a long, long time.
If ever.
“
Y
ou’re sure about this?” Val asked Freya on Monday, after she’d returned from a two-day stay in the hospital. She was sore as hell but glad to no longer be in the care of Our Lady of Mercy’s staff. If she never saw an IV line or a blood-pressure cuff or red jello again, it would be too soon.
Freya, standing in Val’s kitchen, scraped her gaze down Val’s body, taking note of the cast on her leg due to a hairline fracture of her tibia, thanks to Devota, the killer nun. God, that sounded terrible, but at least she was behind bars, unable to hurt anyone else.
And the secrets of Val’s birth were out in the open; she now knew who she was, though it wasn’t a happy thought. How many mothers could she bury before she turned thirty-five? It was hard to think of Sister Charity as her mother—that stern old bat of a nun who turned out to be loving in her own distant way, and Arthur Wembley, her father? The guy had to have been in his sixties when he’d had the affair and ended up fathering a child he didn’t want. Now he, too, was dying. Val didn’t think she’d make the trip to see him in the hospital, nor did she want a face-off with his wife, the elderly woman who had paid off Camille rather than allow details of her husband’s illicit affair to come to light. No scandal at the bridge table for Mrs. Arthur Wembley.
Devota had actually helped out good old Marion by killing Camille and ending the blackmail. That still bothered Val a lot, that Camille would use Val’s birth as a means to extract money—for what?
Probably herself and her child.
As soon as her pregnancy was discovered, Camille would have had to leave the convent and she’d have to provide for her baby . . .
Just thinking of her sister brought a lump to her throat. God, Val missed her. True, Camille hadn’t been the most rock-steady of sisters, but there had been many and variegated shades of gray to Camille. Never black, rarely white, Camille had always been a mystery, but a fun one. Val considered Camille’s child. Who was its father? If not Father Frank, then who had impregnated her? Val decided she would never figure out the answer to that one. As far as she knew, Camille hadn’t divulged the child’s paternity to anyone.
Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she thought the baby could be Frank’s. Maybe the father doesn’t even know about it. . . .
Val wondered vaguely if Sister Lucia, Camille’s best friend, had known the truth. According to the police, Lucia Costa had skipped town. No one believed she was dead, but then, who really knew?
“Yeah,” Freya was saying, nodding, her red curls catching in the sunlight streaming through the windows. “I’m sure. Sarah said she’d come and help me for a while, until you decide.”
“I thought you never hear from your twin.”
“Well, unless I call her . . . and she’s ‘between gigs,’ whatever that means.” Freya’s mouth spread into an easy grin.
Boot steps rang on the porch, and Val looked toward the back of her little carriage house. Slade, Bo following him, walked through the door, the screen slapping behind him. “You’ve made up your mind, right?” he asked her, smokey blue eyes sparking with humor. “We’re giving this pathetic marriage of ours one more shot?”
Val couldn’t help but laugh. “I suppose. If you mind your p’s and q’s.”
“Oh, God, don’t get cute on me,” Freya begged, holding up her hands as if to fend off an attack. “I might just throw up my cheese blintz!”
“We’re never ‘cute,’” Valerie insisted. “I abhor all that kind of stuff.”
“Good.” Freya’s eyes said she didn’t believe a word of it. “Then keep it in mind. And we’ll talk about you selling out your interest at the end of the year—see where you are.”
“Barefoot and pregnant,” Slade said, then laughed and winked at his own joke. “As if that would ever happen.”
“As if you would ever want it to happen,” Val said.
“The pregnant part is good.”
“Hmmm. Maybe. I think I should get out of my cast first.”
“It’s kinda sexy.” Slade was pulling her roller bag from the bedroom. “And I’ve always had a foot fetish—barefoot would be all right.”
Freya looked stricken. “Enough!”
“He’s kidding!” Val said. “See why he drives me crazy?”
“Yeah, and you love it.” He was out the door again, and Val sighed.
“Thanks for everything,” she said to Freya.
“No thanks needed. The added notoriety of what happened here has only helped business. Sick as it is, I’ve had to turn people away. We’re full up for the rest of the summer, which isn’t usually the high season around here.”
“I’ll miss you,” she said, and it was heartfelt.
“Ditto. And I’m leaving everything just as you left it in here. While Sarah’s with me. But”—she wagged a finger at Val—“if you ever say you’re not coming back, I’m putting all your stuff on craigslist and selling it. I’ll turn this room into an apartment for the guests—it’ll make me a fortune.” Her eyes lit up at the prospect.
“I changed my mind. I won’t miss you at all.”
They laughed and hugged, and then Val, with Slade’s help, limped out of her little house and into the truck.
They were going to start over, to pick up the frayed threads of their marriage and weave it back together.
He started the engine and, with Bo between them, pulled into traffic.
They were on their way to the ranch outside of Bad Luck, Texas. She was going to forget that she’d ever mistrusted him, and she had already forgiven Cammie.
Val closed her eyes and prayed it would work out. As she did, she felt Slade’s hand close over hers, as if he’d read her thoughts.
“This is gonna be good, wife,” he said with this cowboy grin. “Just you wait and see.”
And in the distance, they heard the bells, pealing through the summer air, counting off the next few minutes of the rest of their lives.
“So that’s it, case closed?” Montoya asked as he walked into Bentz’s office Monday afternoon, then flopped into one of the chairs in front of the desk.
“It’ll never be closed,” Bentz said, “not as long as Father John is alive.” He was tired, his shoulders ached, and he was pissed off that the fake priest had slipped through their fingers again.
“You don’t know that he is alive,” Montoya said, playing devil’s advocate again. “Grace Blanc could have been murdered by a copycat.”
“Blood type says it’s the same guy.”
“DNA isn’t back yet. Come on, I’ll buy you a beer.”
Bentz shot him a look. He rarely drank.
“Okay, a Diet Coke or whatever it is you like.” Montoya was on his feet again, and Bentz grabbed his jacket as they walked out of the office and down the stairs to the main level.
Outside, the day smelled fresh, the air clean, a breeze tossing around the fronds of a few palms that were planted near the street.
“Grace Blanc won’t be the last one,” Bentz said, irritated.
“But at least the nuns at St. Marguerite’s are safe again.”
“At a price.” Sister Charity Varisco hadn’t made it. From what he’d heard, she’d dived onto the knife-wielding Sister Devota in order to save Valerie Renard Houston, her biological daughter.
But Devota had survived and would go to trial. Her wounds hadn’t been deep, and the DA was putting together a case that would ensure that she be locked up for life.
Which, in Bentz’s estimation, wasn’t long enough. Too many women, good women of faith, had died at her hand. She was, as Montoya had commented, “a real nut job.”
“Hey, wait up!”
He didn’t want to look over his shoulder, knowing he’d see Brinkman jogging up, sweating out his shirt, wheezing.
Montoya turned and frowned as they reached the door to the bar.
Brinkman caught up with them and reached into his shirt pocket for his pack of cigarettes. To Bentz’s surprise, he shook out several and offered them each a smoke.
Bentz shook his head. “No, thanks.”
Montoya hesitated, then said, “Naw, I’m off ’em. The case is over, and Abby’s on to me.”
“Pussy-whipped.” Brinkman snorted, lighting up and shooting smoke through his nostrils.
“Yeah, well, I’m still married.”
Brinkman started to bristle but instead shrugged off the dig at his multiple marriages and divorces. “Lucky you,” he said, and Bentz opened the door.
“I’ll be right in,” Brinkman said as Montoya slid inside. “Order me a light beer.”
“In your dreams, Brinkman. You can order it yourself.”
Bentz let the door close and let the darkness of the bar seep into his bones. He felt the urge for a beer—light or otherwise—but thought better of it and walked up to the bar, where Montoya had already claimed a stool.
The barkeep turned and set two glasses in front of them. A frosted glass of beer for Montoya, a Diet Coke for Bentz. They should be celebrating, the case of the killer who’d stalked the brides of Christ no longer at large, but he was still bothered because of Father John slipping through their fingers.
Then again, Bentz probably always would be. Father John, that bastard, was the one who got away.