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thing.
    “Not tonight, boy,” Slade said as he fiddled with the radio, which crackled from interference. He found a station playing an old Johnny Cash song, but the lyrics couldn’t keep his mind from returning to his reason for driving in the middle of the night. A fool’s mission, at least according to his brothers, Trask and Zane, who’d let him hear it while he was packing up the Ford just before dusk.
    “Why the hell you want anything to do with that woman is beyond me,” Trask, his middle brother, had muttered under his breath. “Only gonna bring you grief.”
    “More grief,” Zane, the youngest, had added.
    Not that Slade had asked for any advice as he’d loaded his pickup with a sleeping bag and duffel before whistling for Bo.
    “Just take care of things. I shouldn’t be gone long,” Slade had said as the dog, with his perpetual limp and gnawed ear, leaped into the cab. Slade had slammed the door shut and felt the heat of his siblings’ sullen glares.
    “How long?” Zane had asked.
    “Don’t know yet. It depends.”
    “Just be smart,” Trask had advised.
    “Why start now?” Slade had flashed a grin to lighten things up, but the joke had fallen flat. Neither brother had cracked the hint of a smile; they just glared at him with their jaws set.
    Great.
    That hadn’t been too much of a surprise. Neither one of them had liked Valerie before the marriage, and their opinions hadn’t changed much over the years.
    Slade had tried to let it drop as he climbed behind the wheel. Through the open window, he heard that crickets had taken up their evening chorus and saw the western hills had been silhouetted by the brilliant shades of orange and gold.
    Trask hadn’t been ready to give up the fight. “You plan on bringing her back here with ya?”
    “Valerie?” he said, just to get under his brother’s skin. As if there was anyone else. “Don’t know yet.”
    “If ya do hook up with her again,” Trask said, “then you’re a bigger fool than I took ya for.”
    “She wouldn’t be willing, even if I asked.” That was the truth.
    “She’s bad news,” Zane reminded him.
    “Don’t I know it.” But he’d cranked on the engine of the dusty rig anyway, executed a three-point turn in the gravel drive without a second look at the weathered two-story ranch house he’d grown up in, and hit the gas. He didn’t bother watching the setting sun light the sky ablaze behind the barns with their creaking wild-mustang weather vanes. His old Ford had bounced down the rutted lane, dried sow thistle and Johnson grass scratching the underbelly of the truck as it rolled past acres upon acres of fields dotted with cattle and horses, land he and his brothers had inherited from their father.
    A red-tailed hawk had swooped through the darkening sky as he drove past the old windmill that sat solitary and still in the dead air. A good omen. Right?
    He’d snapped on the radio, then turned the truck past the battered mailbox onto the county road. He drove through the small town of Bad Luck until he came to San Antonio, where he cruised onto I-10, the long strip of asphalt cutting dead east. He’d left his brothers, Texas, and the sun far behind him.
    To chase down a woman who didn’t want him.
    He had the divorce papers in the glove compartment of his truck to remind him of that sorry fact.

CHAPTER 5
    T he call came in not long after midnight.
    Montoya groaned as he rolled across the bed and answered his cell. While his wife, Abby, burrowed under the blankets, he kept his voice down and slid out of bed as he had a hundred times before. He was a detective with the New Orleans Police Department. Odd hours and late-night calls were part of his job.
    “What now?” Abby asked, her voice muffled before she tossed the blankets off and shoved a tangle of hair from her eyes as he hung up.
    “Dead woman. A nun. Possible homicide.”
    Abby pushed herself upright, propped her back against the pillows, and clicked on the