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“Yeah, I bet there are. If it comes to it, maybe, but either way, it costs. Whoever killed him’s Catholic enough to be compelled to confess to his priest. I don’t know, I don’t know, that says older to me. That says it’s not some kid, but someone mature. Yeah, Mira said mature,” she said half to herself. “Mature enough to pull this off, mature enough to feel guilt over it. Not for gain, not for gain, that angle’s bullshit. If the killer was looking for gain, knife the bastard.”
She tapped her fingers on her knee as she ran it through, imagined it. “If it’s just gain, even the most simple kind of revenge or survival instinct, you’d work with Penny and lure him, hack him up like he and Penny hacked up her father. Make it look like a mugging—you’re smart enough to do that.”
“But you don’t,” Roarke put in, “because it’s not simple.”
“It goes too deep for that. Penny, she’s in this for gain. That’s all she’s in it for. But you? It’s not about that. It’s about payment and penance. An eye for an eye. Who’d he kill or harm? One of yours. But you don’t confront him, you don’t report him, you don’t point the finger.”
She slowly straightened. “Because it didn’t work before. He got away before. No payment, no penance. It has to be done, and it has to be done in God’s house. You’ve held on to your faith all these years. You’ve been faithful, even though you lost something so vital. And here he is, back again, blaspheming, defiling the church, running free, every day. In your goddamn face. Doing it for five years, and you had no way of knowing. Not until Penny told you.”
She frowned down at the holo, could almost hear the conspiratory whispers. “Why, why, what’s the angle there? Gotta get back to that. Because that has to be it. Penny ratted him out to you, and you had to act. You had to balance the scales.”
She stepped back. “Damn it. There’s this, and this and that. And I can see it. I can see each point, but how do they come together?”
“Keep going. If it’s an eye for an eye, who did Martinez kill?”
“Soto. Nick Soto because of what he’d done and was doing to Penny. And thinking of her, of what it was like for her, he beat the crap out of Solas. But nobody gave a shit about Soto, nobody looked at a couple of kids, fourteen, fifteen years old to rip a man to pieces like that. Probably a lot of people had several small, private celebrations when he was offed. It may have been his first kill—Lino’s first kill. Made his mark with it. The timing’s about right, and the cop I talked to from back then remembers him as a troublemaker, as a badass, but they never hauled him in for questioning on murder—not for Soto, not before. After . . .”
She went back to check her notes. “Gang-related violence, questioned numerous times regarding the deaths or disappearances of several known members of rival gangs. No evidence, alibied.”
“Members of the parish?”
“No. But there’s those blurred boundary lines.” She moved back to the holo. “Could be friends, family along that blur, connections who were in the parish, were members of the church. But . . . Catholic question.”
“I don’t know why in hell you’d ask me.”
“Because. Could it be eye for an eye—payment, penance—if the past vic was a known gang member—out there doing pretty much what Lino was doing? If he was killed or harmed during a gang altercation?”
“If it was a loved one I don’t see why it would matter. Love doesn’t qualify.”
“From the Catholic angle,” Eve insisted.
He sighed, sipped brandy, and tried to put his head into it. “It seems, if we follow your way of thinking through this, that to justify murder—as it bloody well was—the act should have been in reciprocation for the death of an innocent. Or at least someone who was minding his own at the time, and hadn’t done murder himself. But—”
“That’s what I’m thinking. I get the but,” she added, waving a hand in the air. “Murder isn’t logical, it doesn’t follow nice clean lines. Those who set out to kill make their own rules. However, butting your but—”
“Christ, no wonder I love you.”
“This was logical, and it does follow lines. Kill priest in church with God’s blood. Well, technically wine because Lino wasn’t ordained and all so he couldn’t actually do the transubstantiation.”
“And you have the nerve to ask me Catholic questions when you can spout off transubstantiation.”
“I studied up. The point is the motive’s going to fit the method. I think—”
She broke off when her computer announced, Task complete.
“I think,” she continued, “that the killer is a core member of the church. One of those who never misses Sunday Mass, and goes to confession . . . How often are you supposed to go to confession?”
Scowling, he jammed his hands into his pockets. “How the bloody, buggering hell should I know?”
She smiled at him, very sweetly. “What is it about asking you Catholic questions that gets you all jumpy?”
“You’d be jumpy, too, if I asked you things that make you feel the hot breath of hell at your back.”
“You’re not going to hell.”
“Oh, and have you got some inside intel on that?”
“You married a cop. You married me. I’m your goddamn salvation. Computer, display primary data, screen one. These are the owners and/or tenants of the properties along Lino’s jogging route.”
