“Either Dr. Pratt or Dr. Crane. They both offer their services to the center.”

Petal the pit bull got to her feet and began to growl in earnest. The back door of the cottage opened and Frank Farman stepped out.

“I’ve got two units here to start knocking on doors,” he said. He looked at Jane Thomas. “You’d better have a leash on that dog, ma’am. That’s a dangerous animal.”

Jane Thomas took hold of the dog’s pink collar. “Only to people she doesn’t like.”

Farman frowned at her.

“Thanks, Frank,” Mendez said. “Can you send a unit over to the Warwick woman’s residence? We’ll canvass that neighborhood as well. Hicks and I will be heading over there next.”

“They’re already there.”

“Great. Thanks.”

Farman shot another disapproving glance at the still-growling dog and went back into the cottage.

Petal settled on Jane’s feet, grumbling. Thomas patted her big square head. “Good girl, Petal.”

Mendez raised an eyebrow. “You know Frank?”

“I know his wife, Sharon. She’s a secretary for Quinn, Morgan-the same firm Karly was going to work for. In my humble opinion, her husband is a condescending, misogynistic ass.”

He dismissed the remark. Frank being a chauvinist was not news. Farman was old-school and had been vocal in his objection to the idea of hiring female deputies. He had hardly been alone in his opinion. Law enforcement was traditionally the bastion of men. A lot of them wanted to keep it that way.

He left Jane Thomas with Petal the pit bull and drove with Bill Hicks a mile or so across town to the home of Lisa Warwick for their second search of the day.

The address they had been given by the personnel office at Mercy General was a beige stucco side-by-side duplex a few blocks from the hospital in one direction, a few blocks from the college in the other direction. The landlord met them with the key.

“I can’t believe Lisa is the woman those kids found in the park,” the man said as he opened the front door.

Donald Kent, professor of economics, was a neat, distinguished gentleman with a Colonel Sanders goatee and a blue-striped yellow bow tie at the throat of his buttondown shirt.

“How well did you know Miss Warwick?” Hicks asked.

“Enough to say hello, to chat about nothing.” He had the kind of well-modulated voice that belonged on public radio. “A very nice young woman. Never a problem. Always pays-paid-her rent early, if you can imagine that. She told me she had family in Sacramento.”

“They’ve been contacted,” Mendez said. “They’re driving down today. In case they contact you, they won’t be able to come in here until we’re through with the investigation. The place will be sealed.”

Kent seemed troubled at the idea. “I’m sorry for them. I think if I lost someone so suddenly, I would take some comfort being in their surroundings at least.”

“I think it’s going to be difficult for them to take comfort in much of anything, considering,” Mendez said.

“How did she die?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Were you aware of Miss Warwick dating anyone, having company over?” Hicks asked.

The professor shook his head. “I didn’t see her that frequently. I live in another building on the next block. She wasn’t one to talk about her private life, though, and I’m not one to ask.”

He glanced at his watch. “Unless you gentlemen need me, I have a faculty meeting at nine.”

Mendez thanked him and let him go.

“Our job would be so much easier if our victims were loud, obnoxious, and talked incessantly about their sex lives,” Hicks said as he browsed the contents of Lisa Warwick’s bookshelf in the living room. “Like my wife’s sister, for instance. Every person who has ever been within earshot of that woman knows all the details about every guy she’s ever slept with.”

Mendez chuckled. Hicks was a little older than him. Tall, lean, and red-haired, he was a cowboy in his free time. He had an easygoing way about him, and never had a problem with someone else being lead on an investigation. That was not the case with everyone in the department. There were guys with more years on the job who openly resented Mendez for being Dixon’s chosen one. All Hicks cared about was working at a case until it was solved. They worked well together.

“Glad I’m not one of them,” Mendez said, snooping in a buffet drawer.

“You fail to meet her low standards,” Hicks said. “You’re employed and have all your own teeth.”

They searched in a comfortable silence for few minutes before Hicks went back to his original point.

“We have to have two vics that never said boo to anybody.”

“I’m betting that’s not a coincidence,” Mendez said. “Just like it’s not a coincidence they both had some connection to the Thomas Center. I don’t think they were random victims, do you?”

“Nope. What’s the statistic? Most victims of murder know their killer. Makes you want to put the steak knives away when your relatives come to visit, doesn’t it?”

“I wonder,” Mendez said, going to the tiny kitchen that was separated from the dining area by a counter. “Did this girl even get a look at him? Or did he grab her from behind and get the glue in her eyes first thing?”

“If he glues their eyes shut to keep them from seeing him, what’s that all about? If he knows he’s going to kill them, and it seems pretty clear that’s his intent, why bother to keep them from seeing him?”

“I don’t think he does it for practical reasons.”

As they made their way through her house, it seemed Lisa Warwick was private about her private life even with herself. They found no diary, no journal. Her travel plans for her wine country weekend were carefully noted in her day planner on the dining room table, but with no annotations as to a traveling companion.

“Even shy girls doodle hearts on their calendars,” Hicks said, paging through the book. “There’s nothing in here.”

The only photograph they discovered on the first floor showing Lisa Warwick with a man was a framed snapshot of her with her parents at her graduation from nursing school.

Mendez stood in the middle of the living room and took in the space. Lisa Warwick hadn’t been as tidy as Karly Vickers. She had clutter, but her clutter was loosely organized all around the place: A pile of magazines on the ottoman, a stack of books on the end table, a bag of knitting on the floor next to the sofa. There was no sign of a struggle, no sign anyone else had been in the house.

“Somebody had to see something,” Hicks said. “We just have to find that somebody.”

On the other hand, Mendez recalled, Bundy had abducted two of his victims in broad daylight from a crowded lakeshore state park-one within feet of her friends-and no one had noticed anything out of the ordinary.

In the blink of an eye a woman could be gone, sucked into a terrible alternate universe where existence meant unspeakable torture and unbearable pain, a world beyond the darkest imagining, unseen by everyone but the killer and his victim.

They went up the stairs to check out the two bedrooms and the bath. The smaller of the bedrooms was undisturbed. In the bathroom, someone had left a towel on the floor next to the tub. Makeup and costume jewelry littered the vanity. She had been getting ready for something.

In the master bedroom the bed was unmade. Clothes had been tossed over a chair. A framed photo sat on one of the nightstands. Lisa Warwick posing with a small group of people, Jane Thomas among them. Three women and a good-looking man in his mid-thirties, all in business attire, each with a glass of champagne in hand.

A celebration, Mendez thought. A happy moment. But it didn’t strike him as the sort of photo a woman would keep on her night-stand. Except for one thing: the way Lisa Warwick was looking up at the man on her left.

“Ten bucks says this is the guy she was having the affair with,” he said. “Look how she’s looking at him.”