She waited until she heard the door at the top of the stairs open and close, then she didn’t waste a second. She pulled the lock off the security cage, flung open the door, and started opening the boxes within. Clothes, CDs, candles, pictures in frames, books, and various personal items. Too much to fit into the laundry bag in one trip and she didn’t dare carry the boxes upstairs. As quickly as possible, she grabbed up some small items, intending to come back for the rest later.

Then she took off the lock and replaced it with the one she’d purchased earlier today, the one with a combination she knew. It clicked into place. Until someone came down here and tried to get into the storage unit, no one would be the wiser.

CHAPTER 15

K risti, damn her tight little ass and sassy in-your-face attitude, had gotten to him.

No two ways about it, Jay thought, disgusted with himself.

Maybe Gayle had been right all along.

Maybe he’d never gotten over Kristi Bentz.

“Fool,” he muttered as he sat in his desk chair in the lab in New Orleans. Ever since leaving her apartment last night, he’d been thinking about her, worried that she was getting into something dangerous. So he’d had to do something.

Instead of tearing out the old bathtub and starting to fix the plumbing at Aunt Colleen’s house, Jay had rolled out of bed at the crack of dawn Saturday and, with Bruno at his side in the pickup, had driven like a bat out of hell back to his house in New Orleans. Once he’d dropped the dog off, he’d driven to the crime lab and the computer at his desk, where he’d sifted through all of the police databases he could, accessing information on the missing coeds.

And he hadn’t stopped there.

Over the course of the day, he’d called a couple of friends who worked for the Baton Rouge Police, a sheriff for the parish of East Baton Rouge, and even an old college buddy who was working for the Louisiana State Police. If they were off duty, he then tracked them down by their cell phones, interrupting their days. He figured it didn’t matter. He was going to get to the bottom of Kristi’s obsession come hell or high water.

Because she’s yours, his mind taunted. You’ve been obsessed with that woman from the first time you set eyes on her, and if you think you’re doing this for any reason other than to score points with her, guess again.

His jaw tightened and he pushed the thought aside. Besides, it wasn’t true. He would have checked into any of his students’ concerns. Maybe not with quite so much fervor, or he might have passed the information along to the proper authorities and then stepped back, but he would have taken some action.