The convent sat quiet and dark in the early morning before prayers. Dressed like a thief, with her head bandaged, and smelling like sex and death, Dada slipped inside, closed the door silently behind her.
“Sister Dee.”
Ah! Dada spun, grabbing hold of Sister Angelica as a matter of reflex. “I’m sorry, Sister. I’m not used to being snuck up on.”
“I didn’t sneak.” She briskly brushed down her tunic. “I was standing here when you came inside, but you didn’t see me.”
Well, that didn’t usually happen. A long night was no excuse. She’d gotten sloppy.
“Sister, I am very sorry to be breaking the rules like this. I can assure you—”
Sister Angelica turned on her heel. “Follow me.”
Stupendous. Looked like Sister Angelica had reached the limit on her patience. Seemed her line was with her nuns sneaking out at night, disappearing during the day, avoiding chores, prayers, and church.
Dada followed Sister Angelica into a large office, well-stocked with books and a gorgeous cherry red Ukrainian desk. Four small statues were gathered on one corner, huddled together. Each one was a woman at a different age. From child to teen to young woman to nun.
Sister Angelica stood by her desk. “I can’t have this, Sister Dee.”
Dada felt her stubborn rise. She had a mission. Women were disappearing. Dying. “Sister Angelica, I am undercover. Surely you want me to find Rosa. Surely, you knew when Momma asked you to allow me to come here, that I’d be doing things that weren’t very nun-like.”
The older woman shook her head and met Dada’s eyes with something that looked very much like disappointment. “Don’t assume. It’s an annoying American trait.”
Dada huffed. She hadn’t been born in America. But rather than follow Sister’s assumption with impatience, she waited.
And waited. Sister Angelica’s rapidly tap, tap, tapping foot against the tiles seemed to drag on and on. Dada’s gaze slipped over the words of St. Catherine of Sienna’s stenciled on the wall, In the end, nothing that ever caused one pain will exist. No one will begrudge me.
She hoped that was true. Hoped that all the pain of this world, all her pain, would one day be erased.
Finally, the older woman pushed her black-rimmed glasses up her nose. “I’d been going to say that I can’t have you running around—”
“Sister—”
Sister Angelica snapped her cane against the tile floor. Dada had heard less concussive gunshots. “I can’t have you running around trying to solve a puzzle when I have part of the answer.”
The nun let that seep its way through the pores of Dada’s overstressed brain before continuing. “Yesterday, when you told me you would search for Rosa, I should have said something, but I didn’t want to break a confidence. I now believe it is the right thing to do.”
“You know something about the disappearances?” Dada asked.
The woman leaned against her desk and angled her cane to the side. “Yes. There was a man who was accused of making his fiancée disappear. Geraldo Gonzalez.”
Ugh. She already knew this. Hope disappeared into disappointment.
Sister Angelica watched her, a look on her face that was as old as it was wise. “The man who calls himself Geraldo Gonzalez isn’t who he says he is.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Dee said. “He’s been here for decades, knows many in town. They know him. His fiancée.”
“All true. What is not true is that his name is Geraldo Gonzalez. That is his adopted name.”
Lord and ladies, no one in this town was who they say they are. “How do you know this?”
“I know because he was left here with us. We found him twenty years ago, a toddler abandoned on the steps of the convent.”
Again, her hope for a clear answer disappeared. “Left by whom?”
“I have no idea. The note with him said he’d been rescued from his mother and needed a new home. We searched for the woman, but when she couldn’t be found, we reached out to an older woman in town. She had money, owned apartments, and, at the time, was healthy and active.”
That made more sense. Yolanda had seemed a bit old for a son Geraldo’s age. “You’re saying that the women who have disappeared... this has gone on for decades?”
“Yes. I believe it started with Geraldo’s mother, but from then on one or two women a year would go missing.”
“Before or after Walid and his people came into the area?”
“Before. Maybe ten years before.”
“And the police?”
“They’ve never solved the crimes or found answers. Although some have tried, including a female mayor who later also went missing.”
“But the comandante didn’t hesitate to blame Geraldo, even though this had been happening for years.”
“Yes. And Geraldo did everything in his power to clear his name from the comandante’s accusation. It cost him.”
So unfair. “Thank you for sharing Geraldo’s secret. Is he aware of his adoption?”
Sister Angelica shook her head. “He used to know, but he seems to have lost this with his head injury.”
Dada’s skin ran cold. Poor Geraldo. A baby separated from his mother through some horror, maybe murder. And then, when he grew up, separated from another woman, his fiancée, also probably murdered. Bad luck? Or had someone hated his mother enough to torture the man?
Chapter 19
Sion had met a lot of men in his quest to find Sophia that he hated on contact. Men who gave him the creeps or made him feel like beating the shite out of them, but he’d never met anyone he detested as completely as Armand Stoker.
The flick, flick of the steel against Armand’s dry cuticles echoed across a large, nearly empty room, containing a huge safe, the table he and Sion sat at, and the two guards.
Knowing Armand was good with impatience, hatred, jealousy—any emotion other than happiness which he saw as weakness—Sion sneered at the men by the exit. Though, in truth, their unusual presence had him sweating. “Why the goons?”
Armand, whose crooked nose and caved in cheek told a story, examined his nails, then took steel to them again. “They are here to stop you from leaving.”
Sion shifted his gaze again to the guards. Big. But he could take them. Well, he could if they weren’t armed. He relaxed his shoulders and tried to keep things light as his mind sorted through ways to get out without getting killed. “What’s this about?”
Armand’s eyes became slits. “The nun, Sister Dee. You spend a lot of time with her.”
Dread snaked over Sion’s skin, raising the hair on his arms and neck. The device Dada had given him burned against his pocket. “She’s running an art therapy class. She asked me to teach it.”
Armand stopped digging at his nails. The room went so quiet, Sion could hear the pounding base from the club downstairs. “You do art?”
Sion glared at the man. “Yeah. That’s how I have the skills to do what I do.” He raised his hands and flicked them front to back. “Steady hands.”
“Does Sister Dee appreciate those steady hands?”
“She’s a nun, you daft prick.”
“She’s a whore!” Armand yelled, slamming his fist onto the table. “And the woman who killed my mother.”
Sion grabbed the side of the table in order to keep from flying over it and strangling this man until his foul tongue stopped moving. It took everything in him to sit still and speak. “Sister Dee killed you
r mother?”
“That was not her name when we lived in French Guiana.”
Sion’s gut tightened. Dee had mentioned that region, but not her name. What did he know of her?
Enough. He knew enough.
But not her name.
Armand sneered. “Now I have your attention. You didn’t know what had crawled into your bed.”
Choices, choices. Slam the guy’s face into the table a few good times before his goons shot and killed him or get this idiot to talk and figure the rest out later. “Why tell me this?”
“I require your help to trap her.”
Fucker. “That’s not what I do. I do papers for your boss. That’s it.” He pointed back at these goons, a taste like vomit lining his throat. “That’s what you have these goons for. You don’t need me.”
Armand shrugged. “Sadly, these are Catholic goons. Now, if I needed them to chop the dick off a priest, no problem, but a nun? They’d sooner harm their own mothers.”
Sion didn’t buy it. It was more than that. This was punishment. Armand wanted Dee. He thought Sion had had her. He thought both she and Sion belonged to him. Time to press his buttons, then act like the guy had won something. The best way to get Armand to talk.
“How much do I get paid?”
Sion could practically see the drawbridge rolling back up on Armand’s mood. Any minute now the guy would call the archers. “I will not pay you, but I will make it simple for you. Your choice is to help me or die here. Tonight.”
He had a third choice: get this guy to tell him the plan and then use it to trap him. “What do you need me to do?”
Chapter 20
Dressed all in black, Dada climbed the fire escape. She stopped by Sion’s window, pressed on the wood frame, and opened it with a shove. Ducking low, she swung inside.
Dropping her backpack on the floor, she began to pace the dark apartment, her tears as silent as her boots on the pitted wood floor. Armand Stoker was Miles Stoker. Though she’d used a listening device and it had been a fuzzy connection, she knew it was him.