He took in all the information. The overlapping data, where the colored lines converged, aside from a few stray friends or places, was the missing girls’ class schedules. Every one of them had been English majors and they all had taken classes from a handful of professors here at the university.

Kristi said, “These girls didn’t have a lot of friends and their family life was negligible. I tried to reach the parents and pretty much came up with nothing. They had the attitude of ‘no news is good news.’ All the girls had been in some kind of trouble. Drugs or alcohol or boyfriend problems, and their families gave up on them.”

“What about girlfriends? You know, the BFF thing on all text messages?”

“If any of them had a Best Friend Forever, I have yet to locate her. Even Lucretia wouldn’t cop to being close to any of them.” Kristi frowned, puzzled, little lines forming between her eyebrows. “I’ve tried to call Lucretia a couple of times since then, and she hasn’t called back.”

“Why?”

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Kristi said, picking up a pen and twirling it in her fingers as she thought. “It’s almost as if she felt like she had to do something, so she told me about it and that was the end of it.”

“She passed the ball. Got rid of feeling guilty for thinking something was wrong, and then put it on you.”

“Or she regrets even mentioning it to me.”

Kristi had set the bowl back on the desk and now Jay absently reached for it. “So these girls were basically loners. Or, at least alone in the world.”

“I’ve talked to people in their classes and some coworkers, and what they said over and over again was, ‘I didn’t really know her,’ or ‘she was pretty closed off,’ or ‘she kept to herself,’ that sort of thing.”

Jay studied her charts again, focusing on the areas where the lines met and intertwined. He pointed to the class schedules. “Each of them took writing from Preston, Shakespeare from Emmerson, journalism from Senegal, and The Influence of Vampyrism from Grotto?” He felt a chill slide through him. “Christ, Kristi, this is your schedule.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

She shrugged. “It’s really not that odd. Or unique. The college curriculum is set up through computers, right? Block scheduling. Depending upon your major. So these aren’t the only students who had this curriculum, not by a long shot. And there are some variables. For example, Tara took forensics from your predecessor, Dr. Monroe, and both Monique and Rylee took a literature class from Dr. Croft, the head of the English Department, just before they went missing. Oh, and here…” She pointed to Dionne’s schedule and tapped the notation. “Dionne took religion from Father Tony and Introduction to Criminal Justice from Professor Hollister along with the other classes.”

“Heavy schedule.”