Which was exactly the point. What was it about the smaller college that caused it to lose some of its coeds? Portia didn’t say it to Esperanza, but she believed there was a predator at large and his hunting ground was the campus of All Saints College. She’d checked. Lacey was right. Louisiana State, located only thirty minutes from the campus of All Saints, hadn’t reported any missing students. Nor had Our Lady of the Lake, or Southern University, or the community college, or any of the bible colleges or even the beauty schools. Just All Saints.

So far.

Until this monster that Portia believed was stalking the small college broadened his hunting ground. Dear God, she hoped she was wrong.

“Let me tell you,” Lacey rambled on, “I get nearly a hundred e-mails a day and that’s after the spam has been filtered out. Double that many come in over a weekend. I’m pretty damned busy. Let the Feds figure it out. However”—she turned her palms toward the acoustic tiles of the ceiling—“if you want to look in the files, be my guest. I guess it says something about the Homicide Department if you have time on your hands to go rootin’ through our files.”

Lacey turned to a coworker sitting at a nearby desk so clean it looked as if no one actually worked there. Not a photo, dying plant, or name plate on the desk. The in-basket was as empty as the out. “Mary Alice, if Detective Laurent wants anything, you see that she gets it, y’hear. Me, it’s time for my break.”

Lacey scraped her pack of cigarettes from the top of her cluttered desk, then rained a saccharine smile on Portia as she opened the top of the long counter that served as a gate. Squeezing her way through, she walked briskly between the scattered desks to the staircase leading to the front entrance of the station.

Mary Alice, a thin girl with stringy mouse brown hair, looked up at Portia with huge hazel eyes. “I apologize, Detective. Lacey, she’s got herself a passel of trouble at home what with that daughter of hers. Nearly forty years old and the woman can’t seem to hold down a job or get her act together. Sheeeeit, she’s got three kids of her own, for God’s sake, and that oldest one, Lacey’s grandson, he’s already got hisself into trouble with meth. Nasty stuff, that.”

Portia couldn’t agree more. “That’s too bad.”

“Praise the Lord and amen to that!” The small woman pushed on the edge of her desk and rolled her chair backward far enough so that she could stand, showing off her slight figure, slim skirt, and high heels. “So, tell me again, what is it exactly I can get for you?”

Portia slid the list of names across the counter. “Everything you’ve got on these girls.”