“They’re not victims until we prove that some crime has been perpetrated against them,” Del Vernon had insisted, but Portia knew better. Those girls had been victims from the day they were born. That much they had in common. Along with the fact that they had been English majors at All Saints College and as such, had taken some of the same required and elective courses.

Coincidence?

Portia doubted it.

A cold wind blew across the grounds, rattling the branches of the pines and causing the Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks to dance and sway, like ghosts in the lamplight.

If Portia had been a superstitious woman, she might have felt a chill in her soul or cared when she spied the black cat scurrying across her path. However, she didn’t believe in ghosts or demons or vampires. She wasn’t even really sure about God, though she prayed regularly. But she did believe in evil. The dark rotting of the soul where malevolence and cruelty resided in a human form.

And she was scared to death that the four girls missing from All Saints had encountered a homicidal maniac of the worst order.

She hoped to God that she was wrong.

Kristi couldn’t stand it. So what if it was New Year’s Eve? So what if everyone she knew was out celebrating. She’d had offers, of course. From Mai, just yesterday, which she had no intention of accepting, but also from friends in New Orleans, friends she’d grown up with, friends she’d worked with, and even from her newfound sister, Eve. She’d turned them all down. She wanted to get settled, here, in Baton Rouge, and when it came to the woman who was her half-sister, that was just too weird to think about. For most of her twenty-seven years she’d thought she was an only child and then…out of the blue, Eve Renner turns out to be related to her. It was just too bizarre to be contemplated and all wrapped up in a time she’d rather forget.

“One step at a time,” she told herself as she lit a few candles and turned on her notebook computer. Besides, she was on a mission. She had no intention of schlepping tables at the Bard’s Board forever and she was back at school for a reason—to hone her craft.

She’d found some success writing for Factual Crime magazine and had done a few articles for a similar e-zine, but she wanted to write a full-blown book. Since her father had refused to give her access to any of his cases, she’d have to locate her own.