When he was about to argue, she arched a brow, reminding him of their argument several nights earlier—the one about his responsibilities of being a father and husband as opposed to being a cop. “Damn,” he muttered.

“Right,” she agreed, with more than a hint of sarcasm. “Damn.”

He gave her a quick buss on the cheek, then answered. “Montoya.”

“We got a hit,” Bentz said, his voice rough, as if he’d just been awakened.

Montoya’s muscles tensed. All of his attention was on the phone. “Yeah?”

“The maintenance guy. Clifton Sharkey? Seems as if he’s had a prior. Assault.”

“How’d we miss that?”

“Twenty years ago, in Canada. It’s not enough to do anything but haul his ass in for more questioning, but it’s something.”

Finally! A break.

Maybe.

He felt a rush of adrenaline stream through his blood, that familiar buzz he loved when a case was beginning to fit together. Yeah! He was already heading down the hall toward the bathroom. “I’ll be at the station in twenty,” he said.

“But, Montoya,” Bentz said through the receiver, “just for the record?”

“Yeah?”

Montoya kicked the bathroom door closed and twisted on the faucet.

“My money’s still on O’Toole.”

“We can’t ignore our responsibilities, even though we’re all still in mourning,” the mother superior said during another meeting after breakfast, the third this week. Lucia, seated with the rest of the nuns and novices, sat in the stiff-backed chairs of a room down the hallway from the cathedral, a room used for seminars, meetings, or prayer groups. It smelled slightly stale, the windows closed, the whiteboard behind Sister Charity wiped clean.

Father Paul and Father Frank stood near the door as the reverend mother spoke, the older man forcing a smile that had all the warmth of a Siberian snowstorm. His hands were folded, soft, his pink fingers laced.

Father Frank seemed to have aged ten years in the past week. His dark hair, usually combed and clipped, was disheveled, showing a few strands of gray, his jaw colored by a dusting of beard shadow, his eyes hollow and sunken, as if the life, and perhaps even his faith, had been sucked from his soul. His fingers moved constantly. Nervously. Evidence of a man haunted by his own sins.

Sister Louise, her eyes sad, tried to meet his gaze, Lucia noticed, but he was a man caught in his own world. He was in the room physically, but his heart and soul were somewhere far, far away.

It wasn’t just the priests. Everyone at St. Marguerite’s was on edge, Lucia surmised, second-guessing their appointments to the parish. And not just those who wore the holy garb. The lay workers, too, were affected.

The janitor, Elwin Zaan, now leaning on his broom, was as somber as death.