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“Okay, what’s up?” he asked as he slid onto the bench opposite his partner. “You hear from your brother again?”
“Cruz?” Montoya gave an irritated shake of his head. “Nah. No one’s heard from him. It was almost as if the call was a prank.” He frowned, dark eyes worried. “But it was him. I know it and he wouldn’t have made a joke of it.”
“What then?”
“You.”
“Me . . . ?”
“Yeah, you. You’re taking the case too seriously.”
“Hold on.” Bentz lifted his hands, palms out. “You’re saying I’m taking the murder of my son-in-law and the attack on my daughter too seriously? Are you kidding? We’re talking about my kid.”
“I know. And you’re losing your perspective.”
“What?”
“You’re all over this Father John angle, but there’s more to this case than the obvious,” Montoya said. “You’re so laser focused on him that you’re not seeing the big picture.”
“Oh, Jesus, are you going to try and convince me that there’s two killers again? We’ve already been over this.” His temper was rising, but before he could say anything further, a waiter, a scrawny kid of about eighteen or so with a bad case of acne, picked up the plastic placard indicating their table was #43 and left two large glasses filled with ice and soda and a couple of red plastic baskets lined with paper and filled with po’boys and piles of steaming French fries.
Montoya dug into his sandwich while Bentz, simmering, snagged a bottle pressed to the wall at the end of the table, shook it, then squirted a thick stream of ketchup over his fries, nearly smothering them. Who was Montoya to tell him how to run an investigation—a case involving his own kid? He ate half the order of fries in silence, then tore into his po’boy.
Montoya had been wet behind the ears when they’d first teamed up. A hotshot, show-off, with little experience, lots of bravado, way too much testosterone and, Bentz admitted grudgingly, good cop instincts that Montoya had honed over the years.
Of the two of them, Montoya had been the one to go off half-cocked, to run on emotion rather than rationality, and Bentz had always had a cooler head and been able to rein him in.
Not so anymore it seemed.
When had that happened?
When a maniac killed your son-in-law and tried to slice your daughter’s throat, that’s when.
He took a long swallow of Coke. “So what are you suggesting?”
“I just think it might be smart,” Montoya said after swallowing another large bite, “if we broke the case up. Think of it as two cases, okay? You work on the Father John angle because we know he, or a dead-ringer copycat, killed Teri Marie Gaines and Helene Laroche.”
“And what? You’ll concentrate on Jay’s homicide, is that it?”
“That’s exactly it.” Montoya’s gaze was hard, piercing. “You’re too close to it and you know it.”
He did. But he didn’t want to think about it. He ate another handful of fries and seriously considered a beer.
“Come on, man, you won’t be out of the loop, but you need to step back, okay?” Montoya wasn’t giving up. “We’ll discuss all the cases. Yeah, of course, but we treat them separately. For now. Until there’s a stronger connection.” He finished his sandwich and wiped his fingers with a napkin.
Bentz didn’t like it—not one bit. The whole idea made him twitchy inside.
“If this wasn’t personal, you’d suggest the same thing. Hell, if it was my family we were talking about, you’d lobby to get me thrown off the case for ‘my own good’ or to ‘keep the case clean, not compromise it with personal bias.’” He leaned back and met Bentz’s gaze. “Right?”
Bentz hesitated.
“Right?”
“Maybe.” He hated to admit it, but if he did force his emotions to a dark corner of his brain and examined the case with clear mind and unjaundiced eye, he had to concede that Montoya was right. He was too close to the case; he knew it. But that didn’t stop him from wanting to chase down Jay McKnight’s killer.
Despite all that logic and conforming to police procedure, he couldn’t help but feel deep in his bones that Father John was the murderer who had taken Jay’s life.
And despite all protocols, he had to step over the line.
