“It’s just a damned beer, Jay.”

“A beer and a favor,” he reminded her. “You want me to help you with something.”

“Call it whatever you want,” she said, a tinge of exasperation in her voice. “How about tonight? Around ten? I’ll meet you there. It’s not far from where I work.”

He knew he was asking for trouble just seeing her again. Big trouble. The kind he didn’t need. Just having her in his class caused him to have nightmares. Anything more intimate was bound to spell trouble.

He hesitated.

Who was he kidding? He couldn’t resist. Never could, when it involved Kristi. “Ten it is,” he said, and as the words spilled out of his mouth he was already giving himself a hard mental shake. Idiot! Lamebrain!

“Good. I’ll see you then.” She hung up and he drove into the driveway with the cell phone still clasped in his hand. What the hell could she possibly want from him? He slammed the truck into park and sat behind the wheel. “Whatever it is,” he said to the dog, “it’s not gonna be good.”

Kristi untied her dirty apron, dropped it into the hamper near the back door of the restaurant where she worked, snagged her pack from a hook, then headed toward the restroom. Inside the cramped room she stripped off her grimy skirt and blouse, then stepped out of the black flats she wore on the job. With a spritz of perfume in lieu of a shower, she glanced at her reflection in the mirror, groaned, and pulled on her jeans and a long-sleeved T. In one motion she yanked the band holding her ponytail to the back of her head and shook her hair loose. Half a second later, she laced up her running shoes and stuffed her dirty clothes into her backpack. She was late, as usual.

It was already ten and she didn’t want to stand Jay up. She was bugged that she had to ask for his help, but she’d been butting her head against the wall when it came to getting more information on the missing girls. Kristi needed someone with connections, though asking her father for help was out of the question. But Jay was on campus, available in Baton Rouge part of the week, and since he was a professor he had access to records at All Saints. Her six hours a week working for the registrar weren’t enough to open the locked doors and filing cabinets she wanted to search. Nor had she been given a password to the most private and sensitive information stored in the school’s database.

So, she was forced to turn to someone on staff.

She’d thought about Lucretia and discarded the notion; her former roommate wasn’t the most trustworthy or helpful person on the planet.

So she had to find a way to persuade Jay to get involved.