“Hey!” Detective Del Vernon said, resting a hip on her desk. “Still caught up in the missing girls?”

Here we go again, Portia thought on an inward sigh, expecting a lecture from the ex-military man turned detective. Vernon had the “three-B-thing” going for him: bald, black, and beautiful. Though he was in his forties, he’d never lost his U.S. Marine-honed build. His shoulders were wide and straight, his waist trim, and according to Stephanie, one of the secretaries for the department, his butt was “tight enough to hold in his bad-ass attitude.” And she was right. Vernon had a great body. Portia tried not to notice.

“What’s this?” she asked, picking up the file and flipping it open to a crime scene report and the picture of a dead woman.

“Jane Doe…throat slashed, from the Memphis PD. Looks like it could be the same guy who killed the woman we found last week near River Road.”

“Beth Staples.”

“I want you to check it out.”

“You got it,” she said, and waited for him to remind her that the girls missing from All Saints weren’t known to be victims of homicide and therefore not their concern.

Yet.

But he didn’t. Instead Vernon’s cell phone rang and he thumped his fingers onto her desk before walking back through the maze of cubicles. “Vernon,” he said crisply, crossing the threshold to his private office and kicking the glass door shut behind him.

Portia picked up the Jane Doe file, turning her attention away from the pictures of the coeds. There was a chance that she was wrong, a chance that the missing coeds were, indeed, still alive, just teenage runaways rebelling and getting into trouble.

But she wasn’t laying odds on it.

Two days after Kristi moved in, she landed a job as a waitress at a diner three blocks from campus. She wasn’t going to get rich making minimum wage and tips, but she would have some flexibility with her shifts, which was exactly what she’d wanted. Waiting tables wasn’t glamorous work, but it beat the hell out of working for Gulf Auto and Life Insurance Company, where she’d spent too many hours to count in the past few years. Besides, she hadn’t given up her dream of writing true crime. She figured with the right story, she could become the next Ann Rule.

Or a close facsimile thereof.