“Amen,” Paulina said, crossing herself as he did.

He reached for his fork but felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. He grabbed it to silence it.

He groaned at the sight of the number. Katherine again.

“You can answer it,” Paulina said.

“It can wait.” Everything could wait when he was with her.

“A priest is dead, a priest I cared about. Table manners can take the day off.”

“I love you.”

She winked at him as he rose from the table. He went outside to the sidewalk, where he called Katherine back. He wasn’t about to talk to a woman he’d slept with while standing in his own fiancée’s house.

“Secretary swears up and down Father Murran never put in for a transfer anywhere,” Katherine said without preamble.

“And she would know,” he said.

“She handles all the paperwork. Did you hear different?”

“He came to our engagement party in June,” he told her. “When I asked him if he’d help perform our wedding Mass, he said he wouldn’t be around for the wedding because he was being transferred.”

“He wasn’t.”

“Yeah.”

“He lied to you.”

“He did.”

“Maybe he was already planning on killing himself?”

“Maybe,” Cyrus said. “He also asked me to pray for him.”

“Did he say why?”

“No.”

“Did you pray for him?”

“Kind of forgot to,” he confessed.

“Take the case, Tremont,” Katherine said. “Please? You already have a lead.”

Cyrus remembered the river, the gut-churning feeling of seeing Ike with the rifle in his hand. He would have tried to stop it if he’d been there. He wasn’t there then, but he was here now.

“I’ll look into it. Just in case there’s more going on here.”

Katherine exhaled so hard the phone rattled in Cyrus’s ear. “Thank you,” she said with obvious relief. “I’ll sleep better tonight knowing somebody’s looking into this. The Church has way too much power in this town.”

Cyrus agreed, but he didn’t say that aloud. Not with his Catholic saint of a fiancée inside the house waiting on him to come finish breakfast.

“What about those digits on the red card?” Cyrus asked. He dug his reporter’s notebook out of his pocket.

“The previous address associated with the number is just a P.O. box, no longer Sutherlin’s. But our dominatrix friend has a file. A big one.”

“Criminal record?”

“Nothing in Nola. All in New York, mostly Manhattan. Plus a sealed juvenile record.”

“What’s in the file?” Cyrus asked, scribbling everything down she told him.

“Arrests. Lots of arrests. Now, the last arrest was years ago, but there was a period from about 2004 to 2008 she was arrested over ten times.”

“Prostitution?”

“Two arrests, yes. But mostly assault,” Katherine said. “But hey, that’s kind of what dominatrixes do, right? How’s a cop to know you’re slapping Joe Blow around by request?”

Cyrus could picture that scene playing out, a nosy neighbor calling the cops on suspicious noises from next door. He’d seen stranger things back in his days on the force.