Angel Fire by Lisa Unger

friends to interview. Those people had dropped from the face of the earth, leaving no trail behind them to follow. But Maria Lopez had made sure her departure was not silent like the rest. There had to be something in this mess. Hair, fibers, prints, something—anything. She had to have been cut very deeply with something razor-sharp for that much blood to be spilled, possibly with a surgical implement. Maybe the same type of instrument used to slice up the German shepherd and remove its organs, an act that had been completed with precision.Lopez was the fourth person missing in two months in a sleepy town that saw little violence. Something was definitely going on.
    Morrow still had the crucifix in his hand, was clenching it so hard the edges were hurting him through his latex gloves. He’d found one of these in the home of each of the missing persons—a detailed Christ figure, highly varnished wood. Did it connect them? He couldn’t be sure. People were very religious here—especially those who had little else to live for.
    “Call in Homicide and Forensics from State,” he said to the uniformed officer standing closest to him. “We need to treat this like a murder, with or without a body.” If these cases were connected, he was going to have to call in the FBI. If he did it too soon, he’d look like a yokel who couldn’t handle a few missing persons. If he did it too late, if someone else disappeared …
    He’d had to make this call before and things had turned out badly. When he was the St. Louis police chief, three prostitutes had turned up dead in a five-month period. He had been reluctant to call it a serial murder case, because johns killed whores all the time in big cities. So when Lydia Strong had paid him a visit to inform him of the striking similarities to unsolved cases in Chicago, he’d disregarded her as a flake. She had told him about an alleged white-slavery ring that an escaped prostitute had reported to her and which she was investigating for an article for
Vanity Fair
. But he basically shut the door in her face.
    He had been unaware of her reputation and her connections at the FBI. By the time the Bureau finally got involved, two more women had turned up dead. The early St. Louis cases provided key evidence in solving the crime. It turned out that the Russian mob was bringing girls into the U.S. illegally, promising them careers as models. When the girls arrived, they were held prisonerin whorehouses and forced into prostitution. Morrow’s failure to report the murders to the FBI was a blunder that took on national significance due to the article subsequently published. He resigned from the St. Louis police force.
    He’d been drinking then. Heavily. Maybe that’s why he didn’t pay much attention to the prostitute murders. Maybe that’s why he ignored Lydia’s warnings until it was too late. Maybe. Six months in rehab and some therapy had helped him deal with his mistakes. He’d been the police chief in Santa Fe for over five years now and done a competent job. Of course, nothing ever happened here. Until now.
    Lydia’s presence in town gave him an ugly déjà vu. He hated that she was here now, of all times. It was like some kind of fucked-up karma. He knew once this hit the papers, she’d be all over him.
    He left two uniformed police officers to guard the scene until the detectives arrived. “Nobody touch anything until they get here. Don’t make a sandwich, don’t make a phone call, just stand at the door,” he barked as he put the cross in a plastic bag, careful to note in his log where he found it. “Tell Keane to look for an address book. I didn’t find one.”
    He looked around the tiny apartment again, noting there were no photographs. He was fairly sure that when the detectives started looking through drawers and in closets, they would find no address book, no letters, no photo albums. This was the apartment of someone utterly alone. Someone unconnected. The furniture