The 1st Victim Read online

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then I’m done speaking to you.” She got up from her chair and said loudly to the entire room of detectives, “Which one of you is a parent? Which one of you is going to take me seriously?”

  She was moved to another desk and another detective, and had to begin her story all over again, and argue the same points all over again. At least this detective had, if not a sympathetic ear, at least a neutral one.

  “When was the last time you spoke to your daughter?”

  “The twenty-ninth, around five. She had stopped to get gas and coffee near Columbia.”

  “What kind of car is she driving?”

  “A 2006 blue Ford Focus.”

  “Do you know the license plate number?”

  “No. It’s a Kansas plate.”

  “Is the car registered in your daughter’s name?”

  “No. In my husband’s name. Dean Reiser.”

  “Would you like to report the car stolen?”

  “Stolen?”

  It seemed inconceivable to Jeannie that not only was it easier to report a stolen car than a missing person, but that a stolen car would attract more attention than a missing adult.

  Adult. It was so hard for her to wrap her head around the idea that her baby was considered an adult, and even harder to accept that if Rose had been but a few months younger, her case would have been considered differently.

  There was no Amber Alert for eighteen-year-olds. But even if there had been, Jeannie was informed that law enforcement had to confirm an abduction had taken place before issuing the alert. It seemed the closest she was going to get to an alert was a “Be On the Look Out,” which simply didn’t carry the same sense of urgency.

  Somehow she had expected to feel stronger and more hopeful, empowered by the act of filing the report and getting the police to listen to her. But that wasn’t the case. She left the station feeling drained and frightened. She went back to Rose’s apartment and spent the rest of the day making phone calls.

  She called every hospital in the greater St. Louis area and every hospital between Columbia and the city. She called every police department. She called everyone she could think to call, and when she had run out of people to call, she mentally called to her husband in heaven, begging him to look out for their little girl.

  She spent that night in her daughter’s bed, hugging her daughter’s pillow and breathing in the scent of her child.

  6

  Nothing calmed a mother’s nerves like watching her children sleep, Liska thought. Awake, her sons might drive her to tear her hair out. Asleep, they were her little angels, as sweet and innocent as the day they were born, and she was free to feel the fullness of her love for them.

  She stood in the doorway of her youngest son’s bedroom. Somehow R.J. had gone from baby to boyhood to the brink of puberty overnight. He was the spitting image of his father: blond hair full of cowlicks, blue eyes full of mischief, a grin that meant nothing but trouble. He wore his heart on his sleeve, was too easily hurt and too quick to lose his temper. Unlike his father, he was loyal to a fault.

  She loved him so much it hurt.

  Across the hall slept her oldest. Kyle shared his brother’s looks but little else. He was the quiet one, internalizing everything, giving away nothing. He was the sensitive one, the deep thinker. Two years older than R.J., he had been old enough to understand the tension and hostility between his parents at the end of their marriage. Where his brother would bluster and blow up and act out his frustration, Kyle retreated within himself and shut the door behind him.

  Even though he was the more responsible of the two boys, he was the one Nikki worried about most. When R.J. got in trouble it was open and obvious. But with Kyle, she worried that she wouldn’t know, wouldn’t see until it was too late.

  In her mind’s eye she saw the dead girl in the snow. “New Year’s Doe,” the press was calling her. Unknown. Unclaimed. She had a mother somewhere. Was that mother awake tonight, standing in a doorway, looking at an empty bed, wondering why she hadn’t seen trouble coming?

  Liska had been a cop for a lot of years. Her father had been a cop. Her ex-husband was a cop. She knew better than to let a crime become personal. She knew better than to sink too deeply beneath the surface of a victim. There were too many of them. They all had stories. They all had families.

  But that was the trouble with this one, Jane Doe 01-11. Until they could find out who she was, she had no one except them.

  Liska thought of what the truck driver, Frank Fitzgerald, had said, that if something so terrible had happened to his daughter, he would want someone to care.

  She looked at her sleeping son and thought the same.

  Back in her living room she looked at the paperwork she had spread out over the coffee table. She had printed out a copy of the composite sketch. She sat down on the sofa and picked it up now, wondering if this face really looked like the young woman they were putting it to.

  The artist had given her a straight, generic nose. What if her nose had turned up at the end? What if it had a bump or a hook? Would the difference be enough to make her unrecognizable to someone who might have known her? Her hair was straight in the sketch. It had been wet with blood when they’d found her. Washed clean at the morgue, the color was reddish blond. But how were they to know how the young woman had worn it? Did she wear it down? Up? Pulled back? Blown out?

  The facial expression was flat and blank. Had this girl been serious? Unhappy? A smiler? And was her smile wide and even, or did it turn up more on one side than the other? Did her eyes light up? Did she squint? Did her smile produce a dimple in her cheek?

  So many little components went into who a person was and how the world perceived them. If a composite artist made a rendering of her own face with no life and no expression, and a plain, straight nose, Liska wondered, would she even recognize herself?

  More to the point, would someone she loved recognize her?

  7

  Kovac lived alone. Like many cops he knew, he had been married twice and divorced twice, and had had a couple of failed near misses. The job was hard on relationships.

  Somewhere in the greater Seattle area he had a daughter he hadn’t seen since her infancy. He had trained himself long ago not to think about it. Truth to tell, he hadn’t been entirely convinced the child was his. At least that was what he had told himself as he worked not to think about it. When the divorce had become final, his ex-wife had remarried with embarrassing haste, and the happy new family had split to the west coast, never to be seen again.

  It was strange to think of as he worked this case. He had lost a daughter. He had no idea where she was or what she was doing, or if she was well, or if she was alive, even. His own daughter could have been dead in a ditch somewhere, and he wouldn’t know, and no one would bother to tell him. Meanwhile, he was investigating the death of a girl with no family and no name.

  Fucking irony.

  He hated irony almost as much as he hated coincidence, and the only thing he hated more than coincidence was authority.

  His lieutenant was growing impatient with the amount of time he and Liska were devoting to their Jane Doe. The unwritten rule of the homicide division was three days dedicated to a new case. If the case wasn’t solved in three days, it got shoved to a back burner as they moved on to a fresher crime, and they continued to work it as they could, when they could. Every day that a homicide went unsolved, the odds of ever solving it got longer.

  Homicide lieutenants lived to clear cases. They counted crime statistics instead of sheep to fall asleep at night. They had to answer to deputy chiefs and chiefs, and chiefs had to answer to politicians, the city counsel, and the mayor. Lieutenants didn’t like their detectives spending man hours on lost causes, and Jane Doe 01-11 was looking more and more like just that. They had no crime scene, just a dumpsite. They had no witness
es. They had nothing. They were now three weeks into the investigation and no further along than they had been on day one.

  The composite sketch had gone to all the usual news outlets. The story had yet to produce a hot lead. Precious time went by as they chased down dead ends and proved potential IDs to be false.

  And how fucking depressing was that? That there were parents in five states and two provinces of Canada waiting every day for daughters who were probably never coming home. And those were just the ones who had called. Those were just the ones living close enough to have heard of New Year’s Doe in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  Kovac poured himself another cup of coffee strong enough to peel paint, and settled himself at his desk. He cleaned his reading glasses with the loose tail of his shirt and shrugged his shoulders back like a man preparing himself for physical labor. In the background the travel channel featured tropical getaways while outside the wind howled and the snow fell hard and fast.

  His computer was a few incarnations past obsolete, but he didn’t care about the bells and whistles of the latest technology. The thing did what he needed it to do.

  With a couple of mouse clicks he began what had become his evening ritual: trolling the websites of the missing, looking for a name to give his Jane Doe.

  There were over eighty-five thousand active missing persons records on file with NCIC. Juveniles under the age of eighteen accounted for nearly half that number. Subjects between eighteen and twenty made up another ten thousand. Even when Kovac narrowed the parameters by sex there were too many. Even when he narrowed the search yet again by race there were too many. One was too many.

  There was no way of knowing when his Jane Doe had gone missing. She had appeared too well cared for to have been homeless or a runaway who had been on the streets for any length of time. She hadn’t shown signs of long-term abuse, which made him think the circumstances that had led to her death had probably taken place over a couple of days at most.

  Two possibilities were strongest in his mind. One: that she was a local killed by someone she knew, either a partner or a parent, which was why no one had reported her missing. Or two: that she was abducted elsewhere and dumped in Minneapolis just for kicks.

  The former was more likely. The latter was more dangerous. Statistically, people tended to be murdered by someone they knew. Despite what the media would lead the public to believe, stranger abductions were rare—0.1 percent of all missing persons cases by NCIC’s reckoning. Serial killers were even rarer.

  And yet, as Kovac browsed the photos from the New Year’s Doe scene that lay off to one side of his desk, a very uncomfortable feeling scratched through him. Their killer was a sexual sadist. The victim’s body was discarded off a feeder road to a major freeway. Kovac could think of at least half a dozen serial killers with that MO.

  If anyone had put that theory forward to him publically, he would have scoffed. This was one homicide, one victim, without enough evidence to patch together a viable case. But he was alone, and he’d seen a lot of shit in his day.

  He had also gone over enough ViCap reports in the last three weeks to see the possibilities. There was scarcely a state in the nation where some scumbag hadn’t dumped the body of a murdered girl off the side of a road. And the fact that this killer had dumped this girl within the city limits made him extra twitchy. Why do that? Why risk that? For the thrill. For the notoriety. Because it was a game.

  He scrolled through the NCIC cases looking for a photo to match the composite sketch he had framed and placed beside his monitor. Like Liska, he worried that the sketch was too generic, but there was nothing to do about that. He glanced from screen to sketch, back and forth, dismissing most photos, taking a harder look at others. Nothing ever quite clicked.

  The one that made him look the longest had come out of Missouri: an eighteen-year-old girl of about the right size. But the face was more heart-shaped than oval. The hair was a thick, unruly cloud around her head. His Jane Doe had less hair, straighter hair, and the color was darker. The eyes looked almost almond-shaped in the photograph. But she was smiling in the photo, which changed the shape of a face. No one died smiling.

  The date was wrong. That was what ultimately made him move on to another page. The date the girl had last been seen was January 7. His Jane Doe had already been on a slab in the morgue on January 1.

  He was disappointed for his dead girl. He wanted her to have a name. And this name would have suited her so well.

  Rose.

  He wanted her to have a family, people who would come and claim her and take her home. On the flip side of that, he supposed the family of Rose Ellen Reiser had just dodged a bullet. If their daughter wasn’t in cold storage in Minneapolis, there was a chance she was still alive. Somewhere.

  8

  Everything took too long. Everything took too much effort. Jeannie felt like she was living in one of those terrible dreams where she was running and running but going nowhere. Everything around her moved in super–slow motion. Her nerves were stretched to the breaking point on a daily basis.

  Getting Rose’s phone records had taken longer than seemed necessary, as she once again ran into the issue of Rose being an adult and entitled to privacy. The phone company didn’t want to release the information directly to Jeannie. What if Rose was at risk from a domestic abuse situation? The phone company couldn’t be responsible for putting her in further danger. They wanted an official request with a case number.

  When the records were finally released it was discovered that Rose’s last phone call had pinged off a tower near Columbia. Her last call had been the last time Jeannie had spoken to her on December 29.

  At that point the St. Louis police declared the situation out of their jurisdiction and handed Jeannie off to the state highway patrol, and more hours went by as she retold her story and repeated all the information needed to fill out the endless reports.

  She was so sick of the bureaucracy, sick of the world-weary attitudes and the patronizing platitudes of law enforcement personnel. All they did was talk and ask questions to which they believed they already knew the answers, because, while they had never met Rose and knew nothing about Jeannie, they were sure that Rose was just another irresponsible teenager and Jeannie another overprotective mother.

  Jeannie wanted someone to physically do something. If they could find Rose’s car, they would have a starting place for a search. But days went by with no sighting of the Ford Focus. Jeannie spent hours driving up and down Interstate 70 looking for it herself in the ditches, in parking lots, at rest stops and gas stations. She left “Missing” fliers at every gas station and convenience store from St. Louis to west of Columbia.

  Rose had been missing twenty days when her car finally turned up in Columbia. It had been parked in a seldom-used driveway off the backside of a large parking lot, hidden by trees and covered with snow. At the opposite end of the parking lot, fronting the highway, was the FastLane convenience store.

  Hearing the news made Jeannie physically ill. It was the break she had both prayed for and dreaded. Her daughter had stopped at the convenience store to get coffee—then vanished. Someone had moved her car from near the store to a place it wouldn’t be found quickly or easily.

  Someone had taken her daughter.

  Surveillance video showed Rose getting her coffee and a candy bar. It showed her speaking to several people as she cruised the aisles. That was Rose—she never met a stranger. Outgoing and curious, she struck up conversations with anyone. Had one of those people taken advantage of that instant connection?

  The last view of Rose on the video was of her exiting the store and turning left. The store’s exterior video camera was not functional that night.

  Up to that point in time Jeannie had gotten herself through the ordeal of Rose’s disappearance on strength, determination, and a sense of purpose. She had held herself together admirably, she thought. But watc
hing her daughter walk out of that store, imagining what must have happened when she walked out of camera range, was Jeannie’s undoing.

  She imagined Rose encountering someone, thinking this might be yet another of her many instant friends, then realizing something wasn’t right. The terror she must have felt as it hit her that she was in danger flooded through Jeannie so strongly she felt she might drown in it.

  Gasping for air, she shot up out of the chair and turned as if to run from the room. But where would she go? While she might have escaped the stares of the two Missouri troopers watching the video with her, she couldn’t escape what was happening. There was no place on the planet where she could escape the fact that her daughter had been abducted. There was no way to escape the horrible images that flashed through her mind, or the phantom cries of her daughter calling to her for help.

  Suddenly weak, she dropped to her knees, folded over in half, and held herself in a ball, sobbing.

  9

  “We’ve done everything we can do. She’s in all the databases, on all the websites, and her DNA profile has gone to CODIS.” Liska sighed and arched a brow at her partner. “What do you know?”

  They sat in their cubicle sharing Chinese takeout. Their shift had ended hours before. Neither of them was on call. They could have been home doing whatever so-called normal people did in the evening. Instead, they were at the office, trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

  “I know that a twenty-one-year-old girl named Melissa Romey went missing from Oktoberfest in Milwaukee,” Kovac said, dipping his fork into the moo goo. “I know that her body was found along a highway outside Omaha on Halloween. She’d been raped and bludgeoned to death. It took eight weeks to put the name to the body. I know that the body of a young woman was found Thanksgiving weekend near Moline, Illinois. She has yet to be identified.”