“You know, the whole crime scene was wrong,” Bentz finally said, staring out the window.

“Staged.”

“Nuns don’t wear bridal gowns or jewelry.”

“Actually, O’Toole said they wear the gowns when they take their vows. And they have a ring, too. But I get what you’re saying. The wedding gown. The way her body was laid near the altar with the drops of blood around the gown’s neckline . . .”

“Ritualistic,” Bentz observed.

“Sick.”

Bentz’s cell phone chirped. As he answered, he rolled up the window, cutting down the ambient noise.

Montoya tuned out Bentz’s one-sided phone conversation as he passed a carriage pulled by a gray mule. Driving along the river, he tried to piece the disjointed bits of the investigation together. Camille as the victim, dressed in a frayed wedding dress, strangled, apparently. Who wanted her dead? Who would go to such bizarre lengths to kill her and display her body? The father of her unborn child?

Seemed unlikely.

Someone else, then. Someone who lived at the convent? An outside enemy? What about the brother-in-law, Houston? Montoya’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. Slade Houston seemed an unlikely candidate as the killer, but then, so did Frank O’Toole. As for the paternity of the unborn child—assuming Sister Camille really was pregnant—was O’Toole the father, or someone else? Montoya felt a pang of remorse, his own involvement with Camille a very painful sticking point.

Bentz clicked his phone shut as they slowed for a red light. “That was the ME’s office,” he said, his voice low and angry. “Preliminary report on Camille Renard. Looks likes asphyxiation due to strangulation, which we figured. And, yeah, she was pregnant. It’s a double.”

Montoya’s hands tightened over the steering wheel again. He thought of Camille in the chapel, the way her body was displayed, the rosary beads threaded through her fingers. “So who, besides Valerie Renard, knew she was pregnant?”

“Most likely the father of the kid. Maybe a friend or two. Maybe even the mother superior or a priest, other than O’Toole. Someone like that, who she might confess to.”

Montoya had already thought of them. “But the secret was probably confined to the convent and her sister.”

“Unless people talked—they tend to do that.” Bentz glowered out the window. “The lab’s checking blood types now—Camille’s and the fetus’s. We’ll need a sample from O’Toole, too, or rule him in or out.”

“And anyone else who knew her.”

“You mean in the biblical sense.” Bentz slid a glance in Montoya’s direction, unasked questions hovering in the warm interior of the car.

“She was a nun, for Christ’s sake.”

“And knocked up.”

The light changed and Montoya hit the gas.