“I’m tellin’ you that sumbitch is evil, that’s the feel of him he left me with. Shit.” He shot his partner a glance. “Here’s a news flash: Father John wasn’t there at his old cabin. Probably hasn’t been there in nearly a dozen years. So, again, I’m sayin’ a bust, and not in the good, we-got-your-asses prostitution or drug ring bust. I’m talking a bust like in Vegas when you lose everything and get your ass kicked out of a penthouse suite.”

“Sounds like the voice of experience.”

“Maybe.” Montoya rubbed at the welt on his neck, his lips tightening as he eased onto a county road and hit the gas.

“Nothing lost,” Bentz said, staring out the windshield.

“Just a couple hours of my life.” But Montoya was settling down, his volatile anger subsiding. “Hell, I can’t believe the psycho’s back. Why now? And why kill a nun?”

“Who was as bad as he is.”

“Yeah, well, maybe. It still gets my back up. She was unarmed, man. Trusting,” Montoya said as the car’s wheels hummed over the pavement. “I don’t go to mass anymore, and hardly ever pray, y’know, but hell, I was raised Catholic and I hate the fact that the twisted son of a bitch impersonated a priest. What kind of sick bastard does that?”

“He isn’t a man of God.”

“You got that right. Being a priest, a holy man, takes years of study and commitment and dedication and piety and honor, y’know, and a rosary. It’s holy. Sacred.” His hands tightened over the wheel. “It pisses me off.”

“Me too,” Bentz admitted, drumming his fingers against the passenger door. “Me too.”

She would never get the chance to escape again. Chloe knew it, as surely as she was locked in this windowless basement, alone and naked. At least she was no longer hog-tied. Instead, he’d bound her wrists in front of her and left her with a pail to pee in and a night-light that gave off a weird blue glow from a battery-powered disk on his worktable. He’d been bloody and covered in dirt, but had found some clothes, a plaid shirt and old jeans that he’d thrown on.

Then he’d taken off with the final words. “I’ll find her, you know. I’ll find that bitch and bring her back here. And then . . .”

He’d never finished his threat, leaving her to guess at his sick plans. He had climbed the ladder, hauled it up after him, and slammed the trapdoor closed behind him. She had heard his heavy tread cross the floor above, and then silence.

Chloe figured he hadn’t decided what to do with them now that his original plan had been thwarted. She didn’t know what kind of macabre rite he’d dreamed up, but it certainly would have involved pain and the twins’ eventual deaths.