Blood Red by Heather Graham Page A

then asked, “Are you okay?”
    â€œJust tired,” Deanna said.
    â€œWell, you were rather active in the middle of the night,” Lauren reminded her.
    Deanna took a cup of coffee and sipped it. “I have never, ever, done anything like that before in my life.”
    â€œAlcohol,” Lauren suggested.
    â€œSadly, I have been a bit wasted before,” Deanna admitted.
    â€œYou don’t remember anything at all?”
    Deanna shook her head, but her eyes were lowered. Lauren thought there was more, but she couldn’t force Deanna to tell her what it was. She could only hope that Deanna would explain more when she was ready.
    Lauren walked to the door and moved the chair she had set against it. “Well, let’s see what unlight streaming on the pool does for the day, huh?” She opened the door.
    A newspaper was lying on the mat.
    She stooped down to pick it up and couldn’t help but read the huge headline immediately.
    Headless Female Corpse Found in Mississippi.

3
    M ark sat in the courtyard, dark sunglasses in place, drinking his coffee and reading the newspaper. He felt a sense of bitter fatality at the headline blazing at him, and nothing in the story that followed surprised him.
    The headless woman was being called Jane Doe. The coroner estimated that she’d been dead a week to ten days, and she might have been disposed of at almost any point up to a hundred miles upriver. White, approximately five-feet-seven inches, one-hundred-and-thirty pounds, her remains had been badly assailed by the river and the creatures that lived in it. The coroner had nothing else to say for the moment, other than that additional tests were being performed on the victim.
    The head had yet to be discovered.
    Mark put down the paper and sipped his coffee, staring at the door to the cottage the three women had taken. Someone had taken in the newspaper, but they had yet to emerge for the day.
    He was seated at a table behind a pleasant elderly couple from Ohio. There was a pair of honeymooners to his left, Bonnie and Ralph, and a few of the other guests had come by, all cheerful, friendly and wishing him a good morning. Some of them hadn’t read the paper. Some had, and been appalled at what they read. But they all seemed able to distance themselves from the story. A lone young woman, attacked and killed. Yes, it was easy for a pretty girl to be in danger, to become a victim. From the conversations he overheard, most of them also wanted to believe that she had been a drug addict, as well, or a prostitute. Anything to ensure that whatever violence had touched her would never touch them.
    That was the same sentiment he heard when the door to cottage number five opened at last and the three young women appeared. An even greater sense of unease surged through him at the sight of Lauren Crow, the woman with the auburn hair and extraordinary green eyes who reminded him so vividly of Katie. The dark haired girlwas stunning as well, exotic and sleek. He decided that she had to be Deanna. The little blonde who looked like a petite princess had to be the one named Heidi.
    Last night he had thought of them as bait, but the article in the paper forced him to think in far more brutal terms. They were targets.
    Beautiful, all of them, and young. The perfect age. Pure temptation for the killer who had coldly thrown that poor girl’s corpse into the Mississippi.
    â€œPoor thing,” Heidi was saying as the women approached an empty table.
    â€œHorrible,” Lauren concurred.
    â€œYes, but please, let’s not obsess about it,” Deanna said. “I forget the statistics, but just in the United States there are dozens serial killers at work at any given time. But we’d go crazy if we worried about them all on a daily basis. Right?”
    â€œOf course. It’s just…it’s just a really big headline,” Lauren said.
    â€œWell, sure. The corpse was headless,” Deanna