“Oh, wow!” Mai said, eyeing Kristi’s new place. Her hair, chopped into shaggy layers that ended at her chin, gleamed in the lamplight. “This looks great!” She grinned, showing off white, straight teeth rimmed in shiny coral lip gloss. Her dark eyes with their carefully shadowed lids took in the space.

A small kitchen was tucked behind bifold doors at one end of the long room, which was punctuated with dormers that allowed views over the walls of the campus. Kristi had pushed a small desk into one of the dormer alcoves, and a reading chair and ottoman into the other. She’d cleaned the furniture as best she could and scattered a few cheap area rugs over the floor. One of the lamps, a fake Tiffany, was hers. The other, a modern floor lamp with a shade that was seared from being held too close to a lightbulb, had come with the unit. The walls were covered with posters of famous writers and pictures of Kristi’s family, and she’d bought candles and positioned them over the windowsills and scratched end tables. With a mirror she’d purchased at a secondhand store, and a few well-placed pots with growing plants, the place looked as student-chic as she could make it.

“This is great! Geez, you’ve even got a fireplace. Well, I guess all the units on the north end do.” Mai walked to the thick carved mantel and ran her fingers along the old wood. “I love fires. You’re a student here, too?” she added.

“Yeah. A junior. Journalism major,” Kristi clarified.

“I was surprised when I heard this had been rented.” Mai was still walking through the place, glancing at the pictures Kristi had hung on the wall. Squinting, she leaned closer to a framed five-by-seven. “Hey, this is you and that famous cop in New Orleans…wait a sec. Kristi Bentz, as in the daughter of—?”

“Detective Rick Bentz, yes,” Kristi admitted, a little uncomfortable that Mai had recognized her father.

Mai stepped closer to the picture, eyeing the framed snapshot as if to memorize every nuance in the photograph of Kristi and her dad on a boat. The picture was five years old, but one of her favorites. “He cracked a couple of serial killer cases around here, didn’t he? Ones up at that old mental asylum? What was the name of it?” She snapped her fingers and before Kristi could answer, she said, “Our Lady of Virtues, that was it. Oh, wow. Rick Bentz…Huh…He’s kinda like a living legend.”

Well, now, that was stretching the truth. “He’s just my dad.”