“Jesus, Val, that’s not the way it was!” Slade scowled and shook his head. “Camille lied about me. Swore to Val that I was the one who did the pursuing.” He let out a long, disgusted sigh through his nose. “That’s not how it happened.”

“Tell me how it did,” Bentz said.

“After Val and I were married, I don’t know, maybe a year, Camille came to visit for a long time, about a month. She showed some interest then, I think, but it was subtle. The next visit, not so subtle. She’d bump into me. Come up on me when I was alone working with the stock. Always said suggestive things and then laughed it off.” His eyes held Bentz’s. “You know when a woman’s interested. Especially a woman like Camille.”

“She was a beautiful woman.”

Slade didn’t respond.

“You tell your wife about it?”

“No.” Slade frowned and Valerie wanted to slide farther away from him. “Not at first.”

“Camille came to me,” Val said. “She swore Slade was trying to get her into bed.”

“A lie.” Slade was stalwart. Didn’t flinch.

“You believed her?” Bentz asked Val as Montoya’s eyes narrowed on Slade.

“I did and I confronted Slade. He turned the story around.”

“I just told it like it was. No, I didn’t run to my wife and whine about her sister. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know what to do. Everything blew up around Christmas and Camille took off.”

“To a nunnery? Seriously? That sounds like something right out of the Middle Ages.”

“Camille was into high drama,” Slade said.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Montoya’s question was directed at Slade, but they both answered.

“The day she left the ranch in Bad Luck, Texas,” Slade said.

Val admitted,”I haven’t seen her since last month, when I stopped by the orphanage where she worked. We barely spoke. Then there was the phone call and finally the e-mail last night.”

“I’d like a copy of it, and any others you’ve got as well.” Bentz made notes and asked a few more questions.

For the most part, Montoya allowed his partner to take the lead. They told her that Camille had fought with her attacker at the scene of the crime but that there was no other sign of a struggle, other than in the chapel at the altar. Camille, it seemed, had gone into the chapel willingly. Val felt a chill again, cold enough to turn her heart to ice as she thought about her sister’s last minutes on this earth, but then all of this horror was strange. Eerie and soul grinding.