She wanted to tell him about the voice, about her fear, about how she was compelled to do its bidding, whatever it was, but she couldn’t—didn’t want to sound as if she’d totally gone off her rocker.

Cruz knew enough about her ESP, or curse or whatever you wanted to call it, as it was.

“You found the bodies?”

She nodded.

“How?”

“I . . . I was up. I guess I heard something. I can’t really say. I just know that I sensed something was wrong.” That was downplaying the urgency she’d felt, the compulsion to go where her mind led her, the urgency with which the hiss had prodded her.

“You’re the one who sent Camille Renard’s prepaid cell phone to the police, right?”

“Oh. You . . . you know about that?”

“Put two and two together. Found you near the post office, then overheard my brother telling someone on the phone about the phone showing up.”

She nodded, couldn’t lie. “She’d left it with me. For safekeeping. She was afraid Sister Charity might find it, and she had the BlackBerry . . . then . . . then she was killed and . . . I didn’t know what to do.”

“You were close to her.”

She thought of Camille, and a great sadness swept through her. “Yes.” She met his inquisitive gaze. “The world isn’t all in black and white, not colored like a nun’s habit or a priest’s vestments. There are shades of gray in it, and Camille, she was all about those hues. Sometimes pure as snow, other times black as sin, most often somewhere in between. But, yes, I was close to her, and I miss her like crazy.” She fought a spate of tears and blinked hard.

Cruz shifted his gaze away, then downed the rest of his beer.

“I made a mistake in keeping it, so I sent it to the police department.” She shook her head, looked at the door. “I should have given it up immediately.”

“It probably would have made things easier.”

Five more customers arrived, and unlike Cruz and Lucia, who spoke in soft tones, they were loud, probably half-drunk, and fell into a booth near the front of the building. There were three muscle-bound guys with shaved heads and skintight, sleeveless shirts to show off their tattoos and two women. One in a short skirt, tights, and cropped T-shirt, the other in a sundress and cowboy boots.

Reluctantly, the waitress sauntered up to them and scribbled down their orders in between questions and jokes, laughter, and, from one of the men, a demand for a “round” of beer.

“Make it light beer,” Cowboy Boots insisted, and her friend laughed as the guys shook their shiny pates.

“So why me?” Cruz asked once he’d swung his attention back to Lucia. “When you were pretty damned sure you never wanted to lay eyes on me again.”