“I’m on to you, Houston,” she warned with a wink, then before he kissed her again slid out of his arms and hurried out of the bedroom. Bo, who had watched the entire dialogue, trotted after her to the living room, where she noticed the rain had begun to fall, thick drops drizzling down the windows. “Summer storm,” she thought aloud.

“An omen.”

She glanced over her shoulder as he walked into the room. “I don’t believe in omens.

“No? Well, I do.” And with that, he found his pistol and shoved it under the waistband of his slacks before throwing on his jacket.

“We’re going to a church auction,” she reminded him.

His smile held no fraction of amusement. “Exactly.”

The call came in just before five.

Cruz’s motorcycle, none the worse for wear, had been located, parked and locked at the bus station in Baton Rouge. A state cop had seen it, called in the plates, and discovered that it had been reported stolen, Montoya’s name listed as the contact person at the NOPD.

“We need it. Part of a homicide investigation,” Montoya told the officer. “The bike was stolen by a witness.”

“Records say it belongs to a Cruz Montoya.”

“My brother.” Montoya sketched out an abbreviated story for the cop and made arrangements for the Harley to be secured and brought into the garage at the crime lab. Maybe there was a clue as to where Lucia Costa had run to left on or around the bike.

He hung up the phone and got online to check the bus company’s routes and schedules. The earliest Lucia could have arrived in Baton Rouge was around three in the morning, so Montoya checked all the buses leaving from two-thirty on. It took almost an hour for the company to double-check records, but there was a bus that left for Houston at 7:00 a.m.

Did he believe she headed west?

Not really.

Her mission was to ditch Cruz, to fool him, so she wouldn’t have played her hand so carelessly. Nuh-uh.

Montoya was sweating as he rolled back his chair, the air-conditioning unit on the fritz again. The St. Elsinore’s auction was scheduled in an hour, and he intended to be there, to look through the crowd, see who was there. Maybe the killer would show his face; then again, probably not, but Montoya had the gut feeling that the homicides of Camille Renard and Asteria McClellan had been conceived earlier, perhaps starting at the first place they had crossed paths, if only fleetingly, and that was St. Elsinore’s orphanage. The connection was there, but not complete, like a train whose cars were on the track, one after the other, but not hitched together.

So some of the women who had been orphans at St. Elsinore’s had ended up as nuns and novitiates at St. Marguerite’s. Was that so odd?