“Yeah,” Montoya said, “real fuckin’ lucky!” He was out of the office first, returning the way he came, his boots clattering down the steps. He nearly ran into a cop urging a man in handcuffs down the hallway to an interrogation room. The guy smelled like he’d slept in his own vomit, and his hair was matted, his face scratched and pimply, his eyes blinking, his teeth clenching and grinding.

Definitely tweaking. Probably meth.

Montoya signed for a car and walked outside again. The sun was shining, but a thickening layer of clouds was beginning to cluster, the humidity already intense. What was with the nuns at St. Marguerite’s? He thought of the missing bridal dresses and the list of novitiates and nuns who had at one time in their lives lived in the orphanage at St. Elsinore’s.

Sister Louise Cortez’s name was on the list.

Sister Lucia Costa’s was not.

Lucia was alive.

He had serious doubts about Louise.

“We gotta get this guy,” he said as Bentz slid into the Crown Vic’s already-warm interior and buckled his seat belt.

“The sooner the better.”

Montoya lead-footed it across town. Traffic was light, as it was Saturday morning, and the trip fairly easy. Bentz told him that he’d caught the report on Grace Blanc’s family—a brother in Duluth, Minnesota, her mother, finally giving up the cold northern winters, now lived year-round in Miami. Both Grace’s relatives seemed shocked and saddened at the horrid twist of events.

Montoya pulled into a parking spot near the back door of the cathedral. He noticed the spires stretching upward, seeming to puncture the gray bellies of the clouds rolling over the city. The cathedral was dark and somber, no parishioners scurrying in and out, no nuns making their way to the garage to pick up a car and drive to the hospital or St. Elsinore’s, no priest stopping to chat with pedestrians as they strolled by.

No, the huge edifice looked dark and foreboding, an empty fortress that was unwelcoming, hardly a sanctuary for those with troubled souls.

This morning, he observed as he walked across the lawn to the back gate, there was no yellow tape strung across the entrance, no news vans parked nearby, no one from the medical examiner’s office, no crime scene investigators.

At least not yet.

No telling what they would find when they started searching.

Would they locate the body of Louise Cortez, or would she, like Lea De Luca and now, perhaps, Lucia Costa, disappear forever?

Montoya had a bad feeling about Louise.

A real bad feeling.