Traumatized, certainly.

But alive.

Del frowned, his jaw set and hard. “We don’t have many answers yet. There’s a chance this doesn’t belong to any of the girls from All Saints.”

She snorted. Her gut told her this belonged to Tara, Monique, or Rylee. The only missing coed excluded was Dionne, because of her race. The arm in the photo belonged to a white girl. A girl who liked plum-colored fingernail polish.

“If he doesn’t keep them alive, then why wouldn’t the arm show more signs of decomposure?”

“Don’t know, but it doesn’t look like he cut the limbs. It’s ripped and bitten, consistent with the alligator’s jaw.”

Her stomach clenched. None of the scenes running through her mind were good.

“The ME thinks the gator did it. But there wasn’t any more of the body in his digestive system. We checked.”

“So what finally convinced you that this arm belongs to one of the girls from All Saints?”

“Missing persons says no other white girl has been reported missing recently, at least not up here; New Orleans has a few. I’ve already checked with the local hospitals and no one’s shown up missing an arm, from an accident with a hungry gator or otherwise. But here’s something odd: the first thing the ME noticed was that there was no blood in the arm.”

“Maybe it drained out when it was severed.”

“Uh-uh. ME says the severing occurred post mortem.”

“Drained in the gator’s stomach? Degraded by the time in the water or with stomach acid?”

“The ME’s double-checking,” Del said, but he sounded doubtful.

“What about distinguishing marks?” Portia said. “Monique had a broken finger, left index, an old softball injury. If the fingers are intact that should show, and Tara, I think, had an arm tattoo.” Portia scooted her chair closer to the computer monitor and her fingers flew over the keyboard as she pulled up her files on the missing girls. A second later, she was reading the information she’d gathered on Tara Atwater. “Yeah, here it is, a broken heart, but damn, the tattoo is on her right arm.”

“What about the others?”

“I’m looking.” Portia had already started searching all of the notes and documents she’d collected. “You’d think there would be something,” she said, anxious for a clue, any clue as to the girl’s identity. “I assume you’ve fingerprinted it.” She hitched her chin toward the picture of the severed arm.

“Tried. But even if we get a decent print, there’s a chance the girls weren’t fingerprinted.”