She loved it here and, damn it, so did her husband.

So it was time he quit chasing after ghosts and come home where he belonged.

Before some other innocent woman was killed.

Montoya couldn’t believe his eyes. He stared at the computer screen on his desk and whispered, “Gotcha.”

“Got who?” Brinkman asked on his way to the kitchen with his empty coffee mug. He paused at Montoya’s desk, his interest piqued.

“Nothing.” Montoya wasn’t going to confide in the one detective he despised—Brinkman, with his thick glasses and a horseshoe of dark hair around his freckled pate. The guy did his job, but he was a pain in the butt know-it-all. One of those guys who had all the answers. Montoya couldn’t stand him. “It’s personal.”

“Yeah, right. Probably has to do with Bentz getting himself into trouble in L.A.” Brinkman’s eyebrows arched above the rims of his glasses. “Oh, you didn’t think I knew about it? It’s all over the department.” He snorted in his irritatingly supercilious way, then took the hint and strolled toward the kitchen. No doubt to bug the living shit out of the next person he ran into.

Montoya watched him leave, then cooled off slightly as he looked back at his monitor. There it was, the answer to the puzzle, or at least the start of the answer. Hopefully this was the tiny thread that, if tugged gently, would cause the whole carefully knotted mystery to unravel.

After days of fruitless research, following up on the information Bentz had gathered and looking for a lead, he had caught a break. Court records indicated that Ramona Salazar’s next of kin was her brother Carlos.

Carlos Salazar…now Montoya just had to find the guy. He checked Salazar’s address of record and, when that didn’t work, he started sifting through phone and address records. After five calls to people who told him he had the wrong number, he hit pay dirt.

“This is Carlos,” a man answered in a thick Spanish accent.

“Do you know a Ramona Maria Salazar?”

“Yes, I was the brother of Ramona, rest her soul,” Carlos said without a second’s hesitation. “Who wants to know?”

Montoya almost came out of his desk chair. He identified himself, then spoke in Spanish for a few seconds, assuring the man he was a police officer with the New Orleans Police Department. He told Salazar that he was working with the LAPD on a case involving a 1999 silver four-door Chevrolet Impala. That was a bit of a stretch, but the old man seemed to buy it, especially when he gave him the license number. “So, what I need to know is, did you inherit this car from your sister?”

“Sí, I did.”

“And do you have that car with you now?”

“Oh, no, I sold it to my cousin’s son, Sebastian. For his wife,” the old man said.