The crime lab techs had already arrived and Bonita Washington, one of the smartest women Bentz knew, was barking out orders, making certain no one disturbed “her” scene. “I mean it,” she was saying, “you all wear booties and you don’t touch anything or you don’t get it. That goes double for you,” she said, her green eyes narrowing on Bentz’s partner, Reuben Montoya. African American and proud of it, Washington was a few pounds overweight and all business. “You signed in?” she asked Bentz.

He nodded as he followed her into the small frame house that had been recently renovated. Just inside the door, he stopped and looked around. Furniture had been kicked back, there were scuff marks on the floor, and in the living room a dark stain, most likely blood.

“We checked,” Bonita said, nodding. “It’s blood all right.”

“But no body?”

“Nuh-uh.”

One of the criminalists was taking pictures, another dusting for fingerprints. The story was that the police had taken a call from Aldo “Big Al” Cordini, owner of one of the strip joints in the Quarter. One of his dancers, Karen Lee Williams aka Bodiluscious, hadn’t shown up for work for a couple of nights and he’d sent someone to her house to check on her. No one had answered the door and her car, which she’d told the owner of the club was inoperable, was still in her garage.

The blood on the floor wasn’t enough to suspect a homicide but the fact that Karen Lee hadn’t shown up in any of the local hospitals or clinics added to the fear that she’d been killed. Or abducted, Bentz thought, his mind returning to the missing coeds at All Saints in Baton Rouge.

Not that whatever happened to Karen Lee had anything to do with the missing girls—there was nothing to link them—but because of his daughter, his mind naturally went there. The coeds at All Saints had disappeared without a trace. Karen Lee obviously went down fighting.

They looked over the scene and started talking to the few neighbors who had returned to their homes in this storm-devastated part of the city. No one had seen anything unusual. All Montoya and Bentz learned was that Karen Lee was a single mom with a kid tucked away with Karen’s mother somewhere in west Texas. The child, a daughter, was nine or ten, or thereabouts, and named Darcy. No one knew of any friends or family nearby, any boyfriends past or present. No one knew what had happened to the kid’s father, as Karen Lee had never talked about him.

“So we’ve got a big zero,” Montoya said as they returned to Bentz’s car. “Not even a body.”

“Maybe she’s alive.”