Now, Jay McKnight had finished college and a master’s program. He was working for the New Orleans Police Department in the crime lab and Bentz would defy his daughter to think of Jay as “boring” or “homegrown” any longer. A little turn of the screw was that Jay was going to teach a night class up at All Saints. Maybe Kristi would run into him.

And maybe he could be convinced to check in on Bentz’s daughter….

He inwardly groaned. He didn’t like going behind Kristi’s back, but wasn’t above it, not if it meant her safety. He’d nearly lost her twice already in her twenty-seven years; he couldn’t face it again. Until the Baton Rouge Police figured out what was happening with the missing coeds, Bentz was going to be proactive.

Easing off the freeway, he headed for the waterfront. In the moonlight, the decimated parts of town looked eerie and foreboding, abandoned cars, destroyed houses, streets that were still impassable…. This part of New Orleans was hardest hit when the levees gave way and Bentz wondered if it could ever be rebuilt. Even Montoya and his new wife, Abby, had had to abandon their project of renovating their home in the city, two shotgun row houses that they had been converting into one larger home. The house, which had survived over two hundred years, had been in its final phase of reconstruction when the wind and floodwaters of Katrina swept through, destroying the once venerable property. Montoya, pissed as hell, was commuting from Abby’s cottage outside the city.

They were all tired. Needed a break.

He sped to the crime scene, where two units were already in position, lights flashing around a roped off area where officers were keeping the onlookers at bay. Montoya’s Mustang was parked half on the sidewalk, and he, dressed in his favorite leather jacket, was already talking to the officer who’d been first on the scene.

The body was lying face up on the sidewalk. Bentz’s gut clenched and the taste of bile climbed up his throat. The woman was Caucasian, in her early forties. Two gunshot wounds stained a short red dress. There were signs of a struggle, a couple broken fingernails on her right hand and several scratches across her face. Bentz stared at her long and hard. She wasn’t one of the missing women who had disappeared from All Saints College. He’d memorized the faces of Dionne Harmon, Tara Atwater, Monique DesCartes, and now Rylee Ames. Their images haunted his nights. This unidentified woman was none of them.

He felt a second’s relief and then a jab of guilt. This victim belonged to someone, and whoever it was—mother, father, brother, sister, or boyfriend—would be devastated and grief-stricken.

“…so I’m thinkin’ it was probably a robbery gone bad. No wallet or ID on her,” the officer was saying.

Jane Doe.