None of the girls had owned a vehicle, and none had called the state of Louisiana home until they’d enrolled at the small private school. The last persons known to have seen each of them hadn’t noticed anything strange, nor could they give the police even the tiniest hint of what each girl had in mind, where she could have gone, whom she might have seen.

It was frustrating as hell.

Portia reached into her purse for her pack of cigarettes, then reminded herself that she’d quit. Three months, four days, and five hours ago—not that she was counting. She grabbed a piece of nicotine gum and found little satisfaction in chewing as she gazed from one picture to the next.

The first victim, missing nearly a year since last January, was an African-American student, Dionne Harmon, with dark skin, high cheekbones, a beautiful, toothy grin, and a tattoo that said “LOVE” entwined with hummingbirds and flowers low on her back. She hailed from New York City. Her parents had never married and were now both deceased, the mother from cancer, the father in an industrial accident. Her only sibling, a brother by the name of Desmond, already had three kids of his own, had skipped on his child support, and when Portia had tried to reach him he’d told her he wasn’t interested in “what had happened to the ‘ho.’”

“Nice,” Portia remembered aloud, recalling the phone conversation. None of Dionne’s friends could explain what had happened to her, but the last person to admit seeing her, one of her professors, Dr. Grotto, had at least seemed concerned. Grotto’s specialty was teaching classes on vampirism, sometimes using a Y in the spelling—like vampyrism—which was a little odd, though people could become intrigued and inspired by the strangest things sometimes. In his midthirties, Grotto was sexier than any college professor had the right to be. The old Hollywood description of “tall, dark, and handsome” fit him to a T, and he certainly was far more interesting than any of the old dusty profs who had been her teachers in her two years at All Saints over a decade earlier.

The other missing girls were Caucasian, though they, too, had disjointed, uninterested families who had written them off as irresponsible runaways, “always in trouble.”

How odd they had all ended up at All Saints and subsequently disappeared within eighteen months.

Coincidence? Portia didn’t think so.

The media had finally noticed and was adding some pressure. The public was now nervous, the police department receiving more calls.

Since Dionne had disappeared over a year ago, Tara Atwater and Monique DesCartes had also vanished, Monique in May, Tara in October, and now Rylee Ames. All of them took some of the same classes, primarily in the English Department, including the class on vampyrism taught by Dr. Dominic Grotto.

Slap!

A file landed atop her photos.