Like a student fretting over a blackboard math problem, she stepped back and studied the squares, first taking in each victim’s story as she read from top to bottom, and then working across to compare each girl. Did they all share the same major? No, some hadn’t even declared one. Did they go to the same clinic? No, some had never been treated.

“This is depressing,” she said as she stood in front of the wall.

Creed peeked at her from behind his computer screen. “What are you doing?”

“Organizing my notes. Waiting for them to speak.”

“So what do the Post-its say to you?” he asked.

She blinked. “They don’t literally talk to me. You know that, right?”

He hesitated, then said unconvincingly, “Yeah. I know that.”

“This time they don’t tell me shit about shit,” she said, more to herself than to Creed. She sat back down at her desk and picked up a single slip of paper, a photocopy of something the first victim had penned:

Dear Mr. Underwood: I hate you. I can’t stand seeing your ugly face anymore. When you put on that stupid grin, it reminds me of the way you smiled while you were doing those sick things to me. All the crap you put me through, and I was just a little kid! Tell my mom thanks for looking the other way and doing nothing to help me. I’m leaving for good. When you drop dead, I’ll come back to take a dump on your grave.

Corrine

Bernadette found no evidence in the file that Corrine had ever pursued charges against the man. The girl had probably doubted that anyone would take her seriously, especially with her history of emotional problems. In addition to being treated for depression at the time of her death, she’d been hospitalized twice for anorexia nervosa. A slew of different doctors and clinics.

Police had labeled the letter a suicide note, but Bernadette thought it read more like a goodbye letter fired off by an angry runaway.

She repeated the words out loud: “‘When you drop dead, I’ll come back to take a dump on your grave.’”

Across the room, Creed stopped his typing. “What’re you reading?”

“A suicide note, supposedly.”

“Sounds more like something one Mafioso would say to another.”

“It was found resting under a bottle on the Washington Avenue Bridge after the body of the first victim was fished out of the river.”

“What was the gal’s name?”

“Corrine Underwood. No … wait …” She flipped to the front of the file. “Correction. Corrine Randolph. She hated her stepfather and never accepted his last name.”

“His future burial spot was the one threatened with desecration?”

“Yeah. He’d sexually abused her as a child.”

“Poor Corrine Randolph.”

Bernadette got up from her desk and went back to the yellow notes. Seven vertical stripes representing seven unhappy women. She ticked them off by order of death. “Then in May we had poor Monica Taratino. June was poor Alice Bergerman. July, poor Judith Powers-Nelson over in Wisconsin. August, poor Laurel McArthur in Wisconsin again. Back to the Twin Cities in September with poor Heidi DeForeste.”

“That’s quite a roll call.”

She stepped in front of the last column. “I don’t have a full file on her yet, but let’s not leave out poor Shelby Hammond. Miss October.”

“The girl killed over the weekend, in the bathtub.”

“The biggest oddball, really, because of where she drowned. Otherwise we’ve got seven women with similar, but not identical, profiles. All college students at one of two universities. All female. All messed up emotionally.”

“All dead by drowning,” said Creed.

She walked back and forth in front of the wall. “The two big connections are the colleges and their problems.”

“So the killer is a college prof who’s good at picking out fragile students.”

“Except we’re dealing with two different universities and students who run the gamut in terms of majors and years in school,” she said. “Undergrads. Grad students. I rounded up their class schedules and haven’t found any intersections. At no point were two of these girls in the same classroom at the same time. Nor did any of them share an instructor.”

“A medical professional who treated them. A doctor. A therapist. A pharmacist. Hospital orderly even. They were all treated in some way, shape, or form, right?”

“Wrong.” She ran her eyes over the columns as she paced. “Some of them, their files indicate their parents wanted them to get help for their head or health problems, and they refused, or just never got around to it.”

“The ones who did have contact with a medical professional, was it the same clinic or hospital or whatever? Did the same doctor treat two different girls?”

“Not all the girls who got help had a doctor’s name or clinic in their file. We’ll have to get family members to cough up some medical info, if they even have it.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” he asked.

“Some of these ladies were not on good terms with their folks,” she said.

“Of the ones that did mention a specific health provider …”

“None named the same shrink or clinic. I would have picked up on that immediately.” She stopped pacing and turned to look at her office mate. “What if it’s simply someone who favors troubled chicks, chicks who need to be saved, and he’s got a talent for picking them out of a crowd? He talks to a lot of different people. Listens.”

“A priest?” Creed offered.

“We’ve got a mix of religions and at least one atheist. Plus college kids aren’t the biggest churchgoers. I think that theory goes out the window.”

“A bartender?”

She smiled. “I like how you’re thinking, partner, but not all of them were into the club scene. Plus, he’d have to be a traveling bartender. Remember we’re dealing with drownings in two states.”

“Whoever he is, he prefers troubled women. Why?”

“How about because they’re easy to seduce or trick or overpower? Some of them had eating disorders. A lot easier to toss a skinny woman overboard than a chubby chick.”

“Since we’re on the subject of chubby, come over here and take a look at what I’ve come up with.” He checked his computer’s clock. “You missed lunch, I see, and that’s a good thing.”

“Forget about lunch,” she said, eyeing the office wall clock. “It’s almost time for dinner.”

“I’d wait until after the show,” he said, and tapped some keys. “This is not what I’d call good dinner theater.”

She stood behind him and gawked at what was playing on his screen. A plump blond woman was on her knees on a cement floor, her hands tied behind her back, while a power spray alternated between pummeling her breasts and her face. “Nasty,” said Bernadette.

“Revolting,” contributed Creed.

“Do people really get off on this stuff?” she asked.

“Apparently so,” he said as he called up yet another porn video.

A color image filled the computer screen. At first the only thing pictured was an outdoor hot tub with steam rising from the surface of the water. In the background were scraggly palm trees.

“Another fine art-house film from California,” Creed commented.

A curvaceous brunette wrapped in a towel walked onto the wooden deck surrounding the tub, her back to the camera. She dropped the towel and stepped naked into the water. Turning around, she faced the camera. The cameraman closed in for a tighter shot, eliminating the background and showing the woman lowering herself into the water up to her breasts.

“Those aren’t real, you know,” said Bernadette.

“How do you know?”

“They’re as round and overinflated as a couple of party balloons,” she said. “If you took a pin, you could probably pop them.”

A nude man stepped into the tub with the woman. He had a big gut and was hairy everywhere except for the top of his head.

“Now that’s disgusting,” said Creed.

Bernadette said, “The male leads all look like that, don’t they?”