“Wait a minute…” Mai cocked her head. “And you…you…” She turned and faced Kristi again and a look of awe passed over her face. “You were involved, too, weren’t you? Like almost a victim. Jesus! I’m kinda into the whole serial killer thing…. I mean I don’t glorify them or anything—they’re evil—but I find them fascinating, don’t you?”

“No.” Kristi was firm on that. However, there was the true-crime book she was considering. In that way, she, too, held more than a passing interest in the deviants whose number seemed to grow more prolific every day. But she didn’t feel like going into it with a neighbor she’d met less than five minutes earlier. “You said something about being surprised that I rented the apartment.”

“That anyone did.” Mai glanced again at the picture of Kristi and her father.

“Really? Why?”

“Because of its history.”

“What history?”

“Oh…you know.” When Kristi didn’t respond, Mai added, “About the previous tenant.”

“You’re going to have to fill me in.”

“It was Tara Atwater, as in the same Tara Atwater that went missing last spring term?”

“What?” Kristi’s heart nearly stopped cold.

“Tara is the third missing girl. The second one, Monique, is the reason the press kind of started nosing around a little more intently. Last May. But it was the end of spring term and people just assumed she dropped out. The story kind of died until this fall when Monique left school before the end of fall term. Where have you been?”

“In New Orleans,” Kristi said, pretending ignorance. She didn’t want Mai to see how affected she truly was.

“You had to have heard about the missing students.” Without waiting for an invitation, Mai plopped onto the oversized chair, sitting on it sideways so that her feet dangled over one of the arms. “It’s been all over the news…well, at least in the last few days. Before then, the administration acted as if each of them had just dropped out or run off or whatever. No one could substantiate that any of them were really missing. But what’s really weird is that their families don’t even seem to care. Everyone assumes they just took off and poof”—she snapped her fingers again—“vanished into thin air.”

Not everyone, Kristi thought, remembering her father’s worries.

“They turn up missing and it’s a big deal. Then the story gets shuffled off page one and everyone seems to forget, until the next girl disappears.” She frowned, her smooth forehead wrinkling in frustration.

“And one of them lived here.” Kristi motioned to the interior of her new apartment, the “steal” she’d found on the Internet. No wonder it had been in her price range.