Читать книгу Lost Souls - Lisa Jackson - Страница 10

“…No loud music, no pets, no smoking, it’s all here in the lease,” Irene Calloway said, though she herself smelled suspiciously of cigarette smoke. In her early seventies with a few short wisps of gray hair poking from under a red beret, Irene was as thin as a rail beneath her faded baggy jeans and oversized T-shirt. Her jacket was a man’s flannel shirt and she peered at Kristi through thick glasses. She and Kristi were seated at a small scarred table in the furnished studio apartment on the third floor. The place had a bit of charm with its dormers, old fireplace, plank floors, and watery glass windows. It was cozy and quiet and Kristi couldn’t believe her luck in finding the place. Irene jabbed a long, gnarled finger at the fine print of the lease.

“I read it,” Kristi assured her, though the copy she’d been faxed had been blurry. Wasting no more time, she signed both sets of the six-month lease and handed one back to her new landlady.

“You’re not married?”

“No.”

“No kids?”

Kristi bristled as she shook her head. Irene’s questions were a little too personal.

“No boyfriend? The lease stipulates only one person up here.” She motioned to the small loft that had once been an attic, possibly servants’ quarters of the grand old house now chopped into apartments.

“What if I decide I need a roommate?” Kristi asked, though whoever that might be would be relegated to the tired-looking love seat or an air bed.

Irene’s lips thinned. “Lease would have to be rewritten. I’d want to run a security check on any prospective tenants and, of course, the rent would go up along with another security deposit. And no subletting. Got it?”

“So far, it’s just me,” Kristi said, somehow managing to hold her tongue. She needed this apartment. Housing was hard to find in the middle of the school year, especially any apartments close to campus. A stroke of luck helped her discover this loft on the Internet. It had been one of the only units she could afford within walking distance to school. As for a roommate, Kristi would rather fly solo, but finances might dictate trying to find someone to share the rent and utilities.

“Good. I’ve no use for nonsense.”

Kristi let that one slide. For now. But the older woman was beginning to bug her.

“You don’t have any other questions?” Irene asked as she folded her copy crisply with her fingernails and slid it into a side pocket of a hand-crocheted bag.

“Not yet. Maybe once I move in.”

Irene’s dark eyes narrowed behind her glasses as if she were really sizing Kristi up.

“If there are any problems, you can also call my grandson, Hiram. He’s in One-A.” She waved her fingers as she explained, “He’s kind of the manager on duty. Gets a break on his rent to fix things and take care of small problems.” The furrows over her eyebrows deepened. “Damned parents of his split up and forgot they had a couple of kids. Stupid.” She fished into the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a business card with her name and phone number along with Hiram’s, then slid it across the table. “I told my son he was making a mistake taking up with that woman, but did he listen? Oh, no…Damn fool.”

As if realizing she was saying too much, Irene quickly added, “Hiram, he’s a good kid. Works hard. He’ll help you move in, if you want, does all the fix-up. Learned it from my husband, may he rest in peace.” Pushing to her feet, she added, “Oh, I’m having Hiram install new dead bolts on all the doors. And if you have any window latches that aren’t solid, he’ll take care of those, too. I suppose you’ve heard the latest?” Her gray eyebrows shot up over the tops of her rimless glasses and she scratched at her chin nervously, as if she were weighing what she was about to reveal. “Several students have disappeared here this school year. No bodies found, y’know, but the police seem to suspect foul play. If ya ask me, they’re all runaways.” She glanced away and muttered, “Happens all the time, but you can never be too careful.” She nodded, as if agreeing with herself, tucking her bag under her arm.

“I saw the news coverage.”

“Things were different when I grew up here,” Irene assured. “Most of the classes were taught by priests and nuns, and the college, it had a reputation, but now…ach!” She waved one hand into the air, as if brushing aside a bothersome mosquito. “Now it seems they hire all sorts…weirdos, if you ask me, anyone who has a damned degree. They teach classes about vampires and demons and all kinds of satanic things…religions of the world, not just Christianity, mind you, and…then there are those ridiculous morality plays! Like we’re still living in the Middle Ages. Oh, don’t get me going about that English Department. A nutcase is in charge of it, let me tell you. Natalie Croft has no business teaching a class, much less running a department.” She snorted as she opened the door. “Ever since Father Anthony—oh, excuse me, it’s ‘Father Tony’ because he’s so hip I guess, everyone’s best friend—ever since he took over from Father Stephen, all hell has broken out. Literally.”

Lips compressed, Irene shook her head as she stepped over the threshold onto the porch with its poor lighting. “How’s that for progress? Morality plays, for crying out loud? Vampires? It’s like All Saints stepped back into the Dark Ages!” She grabbed hold of the railing and headed down the stairs.

Open-minded, Irene Calloway was not. Kristi neglected to mention that some of the classes the old woman had disdained were already on her schedule.

Locking the door after her new landlady, Kristi checked all the windows, including the large one in the bedroom leading to an ancient, rusted fire escape.

The latch on every window in the small apartment was broken. Kristi figured she wouldn’t mention the lack of security to her father. Immediately, as she headed down the exterior staircase for her things, she called Hiram’s cell. Irene’s grandson didn’t answer, but Kristi left a message and her phone number, then began hauling her few belongings to her new home, a crow’s nest overlooking the stone fence surrounding All Saints College.

Seated at her desk at the Baton Rouge Police Department, Detective Portia Laurent stared at the pictures of the four coeds missing from All Saints College. None of the girls had resurfaced. Just disappeared, not only from Louisiana, but, it seemed, the face of the earth.

As computer keyboards clicked, printers hummed, and an old clock ticked off the final days of the year, Portia eyed the pictures for what seemed to be the millionth time. They were all so young. Smiling girls with fresh faces, intelligence and hope shining from their eyes.

Or were their expressions masks?

Behind those practiced smiles was there something darker lurking?

The girls had been troubled, that much had been ascertained. So they’d been written off. No one, not the other members of the police department, not the administration of the college, not even the missing girls’ families seemed to think that any serious foul play was involved. Nope. These smiling once-upon-a-time students were just runaways, headstrong wild girls who had, for one reason or another, decided to take a hike and not reappear.

Had they been into drugs?

Prostitution?

Or were they just tired of school?

Had they connected with a boyfriend who had whisked them away?

Had they decided to hitchhike around the country?

Had they wanted a quickie vacation and never returned?

The answers and opinions varied, but Portia seemed to be the only person on the planet who cared. She’d taken copies of these girls’ campus ID pictures and pinned them to the bulletin board of her cubicle. The originals were in the general file of all the recent missing persons, but these were different; these photos connected every girl who had attended All Saints College, disappeared, then left no trail. No credit cards had been used, no checks cashed, no ATMs accessed. Their cell phone usages had stopped on the evenings they’d gone missing, but not one of them had turned up in a local hospital. None of them had bought a bus or plane ticket, nor had there been activity on their MySpace pages.

Portia stared at their pictures and wondered what the hell had happened to them. Deep inside, she believed them all dead, but she hoped against hope that her jaded cop instincts were wrong.

None of the girls had owned a vehicle, and none had called the state of Louisiana home until they’d enrolled at the small private school. The last persons known to have seen each of them hadn’t noticed anything strange, nor could they give the police even the tiniest hint of what each girl had in mind, where she could have gone, whom she might have seen.

It was frustrating as hell.

Portia reached into her purse for her pack of cigarettes, then reminded herself that she’d quit. Three months, four days, and five hours ago—not that she was counting. She grabbed a piece of nicotine gum and found little satisfaction in chewing as she gazed from one picture to the next.

The first victim, missing nearly a year since last January, was an African-American student, Dionne Harmon, with dark skin, high cheekbones, a beautiful, toothy grin, and a tattoo that said “LOVE” entwined with hummingbirds and flowers low on her back. She hailed from New York City. Her parents had never married and were now both deceased, the mother from cancer, the father in an industrial accident. Her only sibling, a brother by the name of Desmond, already had three kids of his own, had skipped on his child support, and when Portia had tried to reach him he’d told her he wasn’t interested in “what had happened to the ‘ho.’”

“Nice,” Portia remembered aloud, recalling the phone conversation. None of Dionne’s friends could explain what had happened to her, but the last person to admit seeing her, one of her professors, Dr. Grotto, had at least seemed concerned. Grotto’s specialty was teaching classes on vampirism, sometimes using a Y in the spelling—like vampyrism—which was a little odd, though people could become intrigued and inspired by the strangest things sometimes. In his midthirties, Grotto was sexier than any college professor had the right to be. The old Hollywood description of “tall, dark, and handsome” fit him to a T, and he certainly was far more interesting than any of the old dusty profs who had been her teachers in her two years at All Saints over a decade earlier.

The other missing girls were Caucasian, though they, too, had disjointed, uninterested families who had written them off as irresponsible runaways, “always in trouble.”

How odd they had all ended up at All Saints and subsequently disappeared within eighteen months.

Coincidence? Portia didn’t think so.

The media had finally noticed and was adding some pressure. The public was now nervous, the police department receiving more calls.

Since Dionne had disappeared over a year ago, Tara Atwater and Monique DesCartes had also vanished, Monique in May, Tara in October, and now Rylee Ames. All of them took some of the same classes, primarily in the English Department, including the class on vampyrism taught by Dr. Dominic Grotto.

Slap!

A file landed atop her photos.

“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.

Twilight had settled as she crossed campus, her backpack slung over one shoulder, her head hunched into her shoulders as the first drops of rain began to spatter the ground on this, the day before New Year’s Eve. A gust of winter wind stole through the quad, rattling the branches of the oak and pine trees before brushing the back of her neck with a frosty kiss. She shivered, surprised at the drop in temperature. She was tired from the move and her legs felt leaden as she angled past Cramer Hall, where she’d lived her freshman year of college nearly ten years earlier. It hadn’t changed much, certainly not as much as she had, she thought ruefully.

Her breath fogged in front of her, and from the corner of her eye she thought she saw a movement, something dark and shadowy, in the thick hedge near the library. Gaslights glowed blue, casting watery light, and though she squinted, she saw no one. Just her overactive imagination.

But who could blame her? Between her own experiences at the hands of predators, her father’s warnings, and her landlady’s remarks, she was bound to be jumpy. “Get over it,” she admonished, cutting past Wagner House, a huge stone edifice with dark mullioned windows and black iron filigree. Tonight, the grand old manor seemed foreboding, even sinister. And you think you can write true crime? How about fiction? Maybe horror? Or something equally creepy with your imagination! Geez, Kristi, get a grip!

Hurrying as the rain began to pour, she heard footsteps on the walk behind her. She hazarded a quick glance over her shoulder and saw no one. Nothing. And the footsteps seemed to have stopped. As if whoever was following her didn’t want to be discovered. Or was mimicking her own hesitation.

Her stomach squeezed and she thought about the can of pepper spray in the backpack. Between the spray and her own skill in self-defense…

Dear God, get over yourself!

Hoisting her bag higher, she started off again, ears straining for the scrape of leather against concrete, the whisper of heavy breathing as whoever it was gave chase, but all she heard was the sound of traffic in the streets, tires humming over wet asphalt, engines rumbling, an occasional squeal of brakes or whine of gears. Nothing sinister. Nothing evil. Still, her heart was hammering and despite her mental berating, she unzipped a pocket of the leather pack and fumbled for the canister. Within seconds it was in her hand.

Again she looked over her shoulder.

Again she saw nothing.

Half running, she cut across the lawn and through the gate nearest her apartment. She’d reached the street when her cell phone jangled. Jumping wildly, she cursed softly under her breath as she reached into her coat pocket. Her father’s name lit the screen. Clicking on, and grateful, for once, that he had called, she greeted, “Hey, don’t you ever work?”

“Even cops get breaks every once in a while.”

“And so you decided to take one and check up on me?”

“You called me,” he reminded her.

“Oh, right.” She’d forgotten…one more little reminder that she wasn’t a hundred percent—her damned faulty memory. Every once in a while, she totally blanked out on something important. “Look, I wanted to tell you my new address and that I got a job at the Bard’s Board. It’s a diner and all the food is named after Shakespearean characters. You know, like Iago’s iced latte and Romeo’s Reuben and Lady Macbeth’s finger sandwiches or something. It’s owned by two ex-English teachers, I think. Anyway, I have to learn them all by Monday morning when I start. I guess it’ll get me back into the swing of the whole memorizing thing again.”

“Romeo’s Reuben sounds sexual.”

“Only to you, Dad. It’s a sandwich. I might not mention it to your partner.”

“Montoya will love it.”

She smiled and, as she reached the apartment house, asked, “So how’re you feeling?”

“Fine. Why?”

She thought of the image of him fading to gray as she’d driven away the other day. “Just checkin’.”

“You’re making me feel old.”

“You are old, Dad.”

“Smart-ass kid,” he said, but there was humor in his voice.

She almost said, “A chip off the old block,” but curbed the automatic response. Rick Bentz was still a little touchy when reminded that he wasn’t her biological father. “Listen, I’ve got to run. I’ll talk to ya later,” she said instead. “Love ya!”

“Me, too.”

She started up the exterior stairs only to meet a petite girl at the second-floor landing who was struggling with what appeared to be a leaking garbage bag.

The dark-haired Asian girl looked up and smiled. “You must be the new neighbor.”

“Yeah. Third floor. I’m Kristi Bentz.”

“Mai Kwan. 202.” She gestured widely toward the open door of the nearest unit that occupied the second floor. “Are you a student? Hey, give me a sec while I take this to the Dumpster.” Moving lithely, she eased around Kristi and hurried down the remaining stairs, her flip-flops clicking loudly in the rain.

Kristi wondered if she wasn’t some kind of kook with her sandals and dripping bag. And anyway, Kristi wasn’t about to wait in the cold and rain. Reaching the third floor, she heard the snap of Mai’s flip-flops hurrying up the staircase below her. Kristi had just unlocked her door and stepped inside when Mai called out from the darkness. “Kristi, wait!”

For what? Kristi thought, but stood just inside the door as the scent of rainwater swept through her apartment. Mai appeared at that moment and didn’t wait for an invitation, just waltzed right in, her sandals making puddles on the old hardwood floor.

“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.”

“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.

“Yeah. Tara. From Georgia. Southern Georgia, I think, yeah, some tiny podunk town. A Georgia Peach, whatever that means. I don’t know much about her. No one did. I mean I saw her a few times, but never thought twice. Then she ended up missing; no one really realized she was gone, for a while.”

“So that’s why no one rented the place?”

“Mrs. Calloway put it on the Internet and stuck the FOR RENT sign up, then Rylee Ames disappears. Now the missing girls are big news again—I can’t believe you didn’t know!—but by then, you’d rented the place.” She plucked a tiny feather off the overstuffed arm of the chair and let it drift to the floor.

The hairs on the back of Kristi’s neck raised as she thought about Tara Atwater. Had she really rented a space most recently occupied by a girl who was missing, who could have ended up the victim of foul play? Damn, what were the chances of that? Kristi observed her studio with new eyes. She asked, “And the police, they’re sure she disappeared…that the others disappeared, too? That they weren’t just runaways?”

“‘Just runaways,’” Mai repeated. “Like that’s okay.” She lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know what the police think. I really don’t think they put the whole thing together until recently.” She let out a disgusted sigh. “What’s that saying about our culture, huh? Just runaways.”

Kristi thought about the latches and locks in her apartment that didn’t work. “So tell me about Hiram.”

“Irene’s grandson?” Mai shrugged. “Major geek. Into all things technical.”

“He’s supposed to fix the latches on my windows and install a new dead bolt.”

“In which century? He’s like a ghost, you never see him.”

“A techno-major geek ghost?”

“Exactly. Hey, if you’re not busy on New Year’s Eve, some of my friends and I are going to hang out at the Watering Hole. You could join us and y’know, ring in the new year. ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ funky little hats, confetti, champagne, and crap. The cover’s really cheap. Just enough to pay for the band.”

“Maybe,” Kristi said, acting as if her social calendar wasn’t completely empty. “I’ll see.”

The first notes of a classical piece Kristi couldn’t quite place erupted and Mai reached into her pocket for her cell. She glanced at the screen and grinned. “Gotta run,” she said quickly as she climbed to her feet. “Nice to meet ya.”

“You, too.”

“Seriously. Call me if you want to party and kick in the new year.” She pushed a button on her cell phone as she eased to the door and opened it with her free hand. “Hey! I was wondering when I was gonna hear from you. A text? Nah, I didn’t get it….” She was out the door and wrapped in her conversation with the person on the other end of the call.

Kristi closed the door behind her and, alone in the apartment, was left with a creepy feeling. “Don’t let it get to you,” she told herself. The building was centuries old, people could have died here, been killed here. All sorts of atrocities could have occurred here over the years. Tara Atwater’s disappearance wasn’t even necessarily a crime. She eyed the cozy room but couldn’t fight a sudden chill. What had happened to the girl? Was her disappearance really linked to the others? What had happened to all of them? Had they all met some horrid fate as her father seemed to think?

Find out, Kristi. This is the story you’ve been looking for. Here you are in the thick of it, in the very damned apartment from which one of them went missing. This is it!

She picked up her purse and dialed Hiram. True to the history of her previous three calls, she was sent directly to voice mail. “Great,” Kristi muttered, grabbing her purse. She wasn’t waiting for the dweeb. How tough could it be to install a damned dead bolt? She’d go to a hardware store, buy the hardware she needed, and put it in herself. She figured she’d take the expenses off the next month’s rent and Hiram could explain it to his granny himself.

Locking the door behind her, she headed to her car. No one followed her. No dark figure lurked in the shadows. No sinister eyes trailed her every move. At least none she could distinguish in the thick, shimmering, rain-washed shrubbery surrounding the pock-marked parking lot. She climbed into the Honda without incident, and after turning on the headlights and wipers, stared through the windshield, again seeing nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe Mai was just messing with her, jerking her chain.

Why? Sooner or later she’d be found out. No, Mai Kwan was telling the truth as she knew it.

“Wonderful,” Kristi groused to herself as she backed up, then rammed the car into drive. No one was about but a man walking his dog near the gaslight, and a biker pedaling fast enough to keep the beam of his headlight steady. No criminal was waiting for her. No deranged psycho hiding between the parked cars on the street. All was quiet. All was normal.

But as she drove onto the street, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to go wrong.

So she’d returned.

Like a salmon drawn from the sea to a creek to spawn.

Kristi Bentz was a student again at All Saints.

It was fitting somehow, he thought, from his rooftop viewpoint. Through the skeletal branches of the trees near the thick stone wall of the campus, he focused his binoculars at the attic loft she’d rented.

Where one of the others had once lived.

A sign from the Almighty?

Or from the Prince of Darkness?

He grinned as he watched her check her window latches, make small talk with the Asian girl, then fly down the exterior steps to that pathetic little car she’d parked beneath a security lamp in the nearest lot. His view was cut off, of course, once she was down the stairs and below the wall, but he knew what she was doing.

The sound of the Honda’s engine firing up was barely audible over the drip of rain and swoosh of traffic on the side streets, but he heard it. Was tuned to it. Because it was she, the prodigal daughter. How perfect.

His throat went dry at the thought of her: long dark hair streaked with red, pert nose, intelligent green eyes, and wide mouth…. Oh, what she could do with those lips! He imagined them trailing down his body as she let her tongue slide across his flat abdomen, her breath hot and anxious as she undid the fastening to his jeans.

His groin tightened and his cock grew thick and he knew a minute of regret. He had to deny himself, at least for now. There was another…

He slid through the darkness and inside the fortresslike structure within the campus walls. Without turning on any lights, he made his way to the stairwell and eased down the steps, quiet as a cat. His gift was his vision, a gaze that could penetrate the darkness when others couldn’t. He was born with the ability, and even in the thick Louisiana nights, when low-lying fog clung to the cypress trees and oozed over the water of the bayou, he had vision. Enough that he could see prey and hunt without the use of night goggles or flashlights.

His ability had served him well, he thought, as he slipped outside and took in a deep breath of the fresh scent of rain…and more. He imagined he smelled the salty scent of Kristi Bentz’s skin, but he knew the aroma to be an illusion.

The first of many, he imagined, as he jogged silently and easily through the night. His body was in perfect shape. Honed. Ready.

For the ultimate sacrifice.

She wouldn’t be taken easily.

But she would be taken.

And, at first, willingly.

He just had to plant the seeds to pique her curiosity.

And then she wouldn’t be able to stop herself.