A Profiler's Case for Seduction - By Carla Cassidy Page 0,82

clothes and then focused his attention on the closed bathroom door. Was she running late? Still doing makeup or finishing up a shower?

It was completely out of character for her to be late. Heart thudding an anxious rhythm of dread, he advanced on the closed door.

He knocked on the door, a firm rap that would wake the dead. When there was no immediate response he flung open the door and gasped a sigh of both relief and alarm as she wasn’t there.

The room held the trace of her in the lingering scent of her perfume, but other than a damp towel that spoke of an earlier shower or bath, there was nothing to tell him what had happened to her.

He raced back down the stairs, his brain firing on all cylinders. The half-empty glass of tea, the clothes ready to wear and the purse on the table...all were indications that Dora had left the house unexpectedly.

Gone. But where? And why? She had no friends and she certainly wouldn’t have left the house on her own volition with the door open and her purse on the table. She knew he’d be here at seven, and there was no way she’d left the house and stood him up.

He looked around the middle of the living room. When he spied the poppy-colored vase half-hidden at the foot of the sofa he realized there had been some sort of struggle and that she’d been taken from here. For a moment he was frozen, his brain not working like a seasoned FBI agent, but rather like a man missing his mate.

Panic set in. Where was Dora? Something bad had happened here. He could smell the evil in the air, as the hairs on the nape of his neck raised in fear.

Do something, Mark, a voice screamed inside his head. That scream snapped him into action. He quickly checked all the windows on the ground level and found them locked and intact. She’d known whoever had come in. She’d apparently opened her door to the person, allowed them into her living room.

Failu.

The letters on the small card he’d found in the bottom of Melinda’s drawer suddenly flashed in his head, like a neon sign blinking over and over again. Failu.

Failure. Maybe he’d been wrong in thinking the card was meant for him. Maybe somebody who knew about Dora’s past had just been waiting to label and get rid of her.

The great Melinda would see the sister who had stayed behind, who had become an alcoholic, as a failure. Although she’d helped Dora escape from Horn’s Gulf, she might only hold disgust and embarrassment for Dora.

And what better night to murder again? With the throngs of people on campus, with the law and security on babysitting duty for the students and out-of-town guests, it would be easy for two people to disappear for a night of murder and madness.

Amanda. She held some of the answers, and without full knowledge of what the assistant knew, there was no way for Mark even to begin to know where to look for Dora.

As he ran down the stairs to his car at the curb, he pulled out his cell phone and called Richard. With clipped, terse words he told his boss what was happening, what he believed and that he was on his way to Amanda’s place for a shakedown.

“I’ll send Albright and Thompson to Dora’s place to check for forensic evidence. Lori and Joseph are already somewhere on the campus. I’ll tell them to keep an eye out for both Craig and the professor. If we have them in our sights, then they can’t be committing murder.”

“Get somebody to find Andrew Peterson, just in case my first instincts are wrong,” Mark said as he got into his car.

“I’ll take care of it,” Richard replied. When the two men had disconnected, Mark started his engine and the resulting roar of the engine mirrored the roar of terror that shot through his heart.

Dora was the next victim. She would be found somewhere with a note card placed on her body that read Failure. He had to stop it. He couldn’t let this happen.

He pulled to the curb in front of Amanda’s apartment building and parked with a screech of tires. He was out of the car like a flash.

Somehow he felt Amanda was his only hope. He believed the young woman knew a lot more than she’d told anyone. Mark needed any and all information she had about Melinda. Dora’s life