Refocusing on the laptop he’d bought that afternoon, he cleared the screen saver with a swipe of his finger. The Dell had only civilian speed and memory, but then again, it wasn’t like he was going to be commanding satellites off its keyboard—and the Caldwell Courier Journal Web site had come up easily enough.

As he returned to the archives, that picture of the girl was a raw wound on his brain. Dead bodies were nothing new to him, and yet that one had burrowed into his brain stem and set up shop in the heart of his CPU.

He wished he could have at least given her a proper burial. But when he’d entered the room, he’d broken the spell that had protected Devina’s sacred mirror so they’d had to leave. After that, the remains of the girl had disappeared.

Which was what brought Jim to the newspaper. Somebody would be looking for their daughter, and the body—or at least pieces of it—would eventually be found: Adrian maintained that Devina usually just dumped what was left as opposed to destroying it because that would cause more pain to the family and friends.

Such a peach that female was.

And it made him wonder whether permanently missing was better than defiled and destroyed. Hell of a choice.

In the search box, he entered things like “blond woman found dead” and “blond woman homicide” and “blond female killed.” Nothing—well, a lot of somethings, just none that fit what he was looking for. The results were too old either in age, because his victim had looked to be only about eighteen/nineteen, or the articles were from six months to a year ago whereas his girl had been killed very recently: The blood had been fresh, and her body, though mutilated, had appeared to be in relatively good health, which made him assume she hadn’t been tortured or starved for a period of time prior to her death.

When the CCJ didn’t give him what he wanted, his next stop on the information superhighway was the national database of missing persons. He searched the state of New York.

Oh . . . man. So many.

So much damn suffering out there in the world: nights that were filled with parents or husbands or wives or sisters and brothers wondering if the one who had been taken from them was dead or alive or in agony caused by another.

“Christ,” he whispered.