Again the male voice.

Arguing?

Explaining?

Coming up with excuses?

Kristi’s heart was pounding, her nerves strung tight. She was about to risk it and climb up the steps when she felt it again—that eerie sensation that she was being watched. Slowly she dragged her gaze up the side of the building, past the kitchen and second floor to a window high above, shadowed by heavy eaves. Her blood ran cold as she saw a face…a girl’s face…white as death, taut with fear.

Ariel O’Toole?

Or someone else. The image was too blurry.

Kristi blinked and she was gone, the window empty.

CHAPTER 20

“S unday morning, not even noon, and how did I know that you’d be here?” Del Vernon asked as, holding a manila envelope, he rested a hip against Portia Laurent’s desk at the station.

“Are you insinuating I don’t have a life?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Nah. Just that you’re a workaholic.”

“It takes one to know one.” She leaned back in her chair and stared up at him. Lord, he was a handsome man. Eyes as dark as midnight, long straight nose, a shaved head that seemed flawless, and a mouthful of white straight teeth.

“Possibly.”

“So what brings you in here? It is Sunday morning.”

“Thought you might want to see this.” He handed her the envelope. “I think you might just have your body.”

“My body?”

“Well, part of one anyway.”

She opened the flap and slid out an eight-by-ten photograph. “Sweet Jesus,” she said as she stared at the picture of what appeared to be a slightly decomposed arm. Female arm. Left hand. Polished fingernails.

“Where did you find this?”

“In the stomach of an illegally caught alligator. We’re lucky the hunter, a yahoo named Boomer Moss, had the smarts to turn it in. We’re searching that part of the swamp where the gator was caught, but don’t have a whole lot of expectations. The animal could have moved from one spot to the next, the body drifted down there…. From the looks of it, we’re guessing the arm was in the water less than a week, but the ME isn’t certain, at least not yet.”

Portia was rapidly getting up to speed. She’d come into the department on a Sunday to catch up on paperwork, which she instantly shelved. “So you think it’s one of the girls from All Saints? That our perp captures them, keeps them alive, then finally kills them and gets rid of the bodies,” she said, feeling vindicated, excited, and sick inside all at once. She, too, had held out hope that the girls had run off, left town, hoping to disappear, but as she stared at the picture of the severed arm, she knew better. She could only pray that if the scenario she’d just outlined was the truth, some of the missing coeds were still alive.

Tortured, maybe.