The 1st Victim Read online

  “How was she killed?”

  “Stabbed in the chest and throat. She’d been raped and tortured. The killer bashed her head in with a forty-two-pound rock—a weapon of opportunity, left at the scene.”

  “Halloween, Thanksgiving, New Year’s.” Liska ticked off the holidays. “What about Christmas?”

  “He seems to have taken Christmas off. Maybe he’s religious.”

  “You think our bad guy is a serial killer?”

  “You know how I feel about coincidence,” Kovac said. “I think if I was young woman living in the Midwest I would be spending Valentine’s Day at home with the doors locked and a gun handy, in case Doc Holiday came calling.”

  “Makes me glad I have boys,” Liska said.

  “Where are they tonight?”

  “Speed took them to a hockey game.”

  Kovac arched a brow. “He actually showed up?”

  His low opinion of Liska’s ex was well known. It hadn’t improved any since Liska had moved from St. Paul to Minneapolis and Speed Hatcher had found even more excuses not to make the short drive across the river to see his kids.

  “Sure. Because it’s something he wanted to do.” She picked at her kung pao chicken, frowning. “Asshole. He calls the other night to say he saw me on the news with the New Year’s Doe story—just to make the statement that I’m not aging well. Like I didn’t already know I look like I haven’t slept in a month.”

  Kovac got his back up. “Fuck him!”

  “I’ve been staying up nights looking at the missing persons websites,” she confessed.

  “Me, too.”

  “Yeah, but you already looked like hell,” she said, mustering her sense of humor.

  “Hey, I hear chicks go for the Wounded Warrior.”

  “Yeah? Well, you’re here with me, so . . .”

  He conceded the point. “Have you seen anything promising on the sites?”

  “I ran across one last night. A girl out of Missouri.”

  “I saw that one. The date’s way wrong.”

  “And the clothes are wrong, too,” Liska said. “Our girl was wearing a red coat. This girl was supposed to be wearing a black coat.”

  “The face isn’t quite right, either,” Kovac said, bringing the image up on his computer screen.

  They both stared at the photograph of eighteen-year-old Rose Ellen Reiser. She looked so happy and full of life. Kovac didn’t want to think that a vicious predator might have snuffed out that bright life.

  “You know, if we could just get these mutts to kill each other, that would work out for everyone,” Kovac said.

  “Evil isn’t attracted to evil,” Liska pointed out. “Darkness only wants to destroy light.”

  10

  The darkest days of Jeannie Reiser’s life had been those last two weeks before her husband’s death. Watching him suffer and struggle had seemed unbearable. But those days had been bright compared to the endless limbo that came after Rose’s car had been discovered.

  At least there had been an end in sight with Dean’s illness. They had known what to expect. The mother of a missing child had no such comfort. There was no way of knowing if her daughter was living in terror or dead and at peace. And the torment of trying to decide which answer would be worse was a living hell in and of itself.

  The imagination went to terrible places, unspeakable places. She had read enough books and watched enough crime shows on television to know that men who kidnapped young women were capable of depravity that knew no bounds. How could she hope her daughter was alive but in the hands of a madman? Yet how could she hope that her daughter was dead?

  Hope was just another word for purgatory.

  She went back to Wichita because, after the initial searches turned up nothing, there was no real reason to stay in Missouri. She maintained daily contact with the Missouri State Highway Patrol, checking for any bit of progress in the case, making sure they didn’t let it go. She tried to keep Rose’s name in the press but never got the national attention she’d hoped for.

  The fact that Rose had once run away, that she had gone through a dark period of rebellion, made her less than desirable to the media. There was a sense that perhaps she had put herself at risk, or maybe rendezvoused with some bad boyfriend and had simply taken off. It didn’t help that another recent case of a missing college girl had ultimately turned out to be a hoax, making everyone involved—including the media—look foolish.

  Jeannie did what she could. She put up a website and social media pages. Most of the comments came from Rose’s friends and from people who seemed to make an unnatural hobby of following cases like this. Lots of well-wishers. Lots of religious people sending prayers, for all the good they seemed to do. But as the days slipped by, she found it harder and harder to go to those pages.

  One evening she turned her computer on and went, not to her own pages in search of encouragement, but to the pages of the unidentified dead to search for her daughter.

  Guilt pressed down on her like a leaden weight. She felt like she was giving up, but she also felt like she had to go on with it. As much as she didn’t want to find Rose among the thousands of unclaimed dead across the country, neither could she stand the idea of her daughter lying on a slab somewhere or being buried in a potter’s field, alone and forgotten.

  She could hardly look at the screen, watching almost out of the corner of her eye. Face after face after face passed by, each one tearing at her heart. So many young lives lost for no good reason—if there was such a thing.

  Overwhelmed, she had to stop and cry, and she gave up for the night. The next night she came back and tried again. And the next night. And the next. And her heart would stop from time to time as she stared at one composite sketch or another, thinking maybe . . .

  Maybe . . . if the eyes weren’t quite so round . . .

  Maybe . . . if the face was more heart-shaped . . .

  Maybe . . . if this one wasn’t so tall . . .

  Time seemed to stop as she looked at a sketch out of Minneapolis. Jane Doe 01-11.

  Maybe . . . if the nose was shorter, more turned up . . .

  Maybe . . . but the jaw wasn’t quite right . . .

  Maybe . . . but that wasn’t her daughter’s thick wavy hair . . .

  The Minneapolis authorities were calling her New Year’s Doe. The girl had been found dumped on the side of a highway, the body found New Year’s Day. She had been murdered. She was found wearing a red wool coat and size nine boots.

  Rose had been wearing a black wool coat. Her feet were size eight.

  This couldn’t be her, and yet Jeannie continued to stare.

  If the nose was a little shorter . . .

  If the jaw was a little narrower . . .

  11

  Halloween Doe (Melissa Romey) had disappeared near Milwaukee. Last seen at a big Oktoberfest celebration at a fairground near a major highway, she had turned up on Halloween—two days later—dead in a ditch off Interstate 80 on the outskirts of Omaha, Nebraska. Raped, tortured, stabbed, bludgeoned.

  Thanksgiving Doe (still unidentified) had been found off Interstate 280 near the Quad Cities airport. Raped, tortured, stabbed, bludgeoned.

  New Year’s Doe had been found off a smaller highway that fed into Interstate 35W. Raped, tortured, stabbed, bludgeoned.

  Kovac sat in a chair staring at the white board where he had scrawled out all the key points. Unable to sleep, he had come in to the station around two a.m. and set himself up in this conference room. On the long table beneath the white board he had laid out the crime scene photographs collected from the other cases.

  Three brutal murders. Bodies found in three jurisdictions, hundreds of miles apart. All dumpsites near major interstate highways.

  The red flag went up for a long-haul trucker. The serial killer’s dream job. He was transient. His torture
chamber was portable. There was a ready victim pool available at all the places truckers routinely cruised. He could pick up a victim in one location, keep her as long as he liked, and dump her somewhere else.

  Over the last few days Kovac had spoken with detectives on the other two cases. They had commiserated over their collective lack of evidence. They had all come to the same conclusion: They were probably dealing with the same killer. They had unofficially christened him Doc Holiday.

  Halloween, Thanksgiving, New Year’s.

  Valentine’s Day was fast approaching.

  Of the three victims, the only story they had with a beginning and an end was Halloween Doe’s. Melissa Romey had been identified by her fingerprints several days after the discovery of her body. The Omaha detective had tossed in one odd point toward the end of their conversation: The victim hadn’t been wearing her own clothes when the body was found.

  One of the points Kovac had against matching his Jane Doe to the girl from Missouri was the red coat and the size nine boots. Rose Ellen Reiser was last seen wearing a black coat. She wore size eight shoes. The thing that made New Year’s Doe stand out in his memory was the red coat. But who was to say the coat was hers? Sexual sadists did things like that—like keeping the victim’s clothing and dressing up in it themselves after the fact to relive the thrill—or putting their girlfriends in the clothes of the dead girl.

  That still didn’t discount the discrepancy in the dates. His Jane Doe had been found on New Year’s Day. The date on Rose Ellen Reiser’s NCIC file was 1/7.

  Rose Ellen Reiser had gone missing from the Columbia, Missouri, area. Last seen at a convenience store off Interstate 70. She fit the victim profile. The age was right; the general look was right. The specific details were wrong.

  The date was wrong.

  Kovac continued to spend his evenings looking at pictures of dead girls on the Internet. Every night the last girl he looked at was Rose Ellen Reiser.

  12

  Was she seeing the resemblance because she wanted it to be Rose? Or was she noticing the discrepancies because she didn’t want it to be Rose?

  Jeannie found herself sitting at her computer at three in the morning, staring at the composite sketch of New Year’s Doe. If hell would be defined as finding out her daughter had been murdered, then surely this was purgatory.

  Around five A.M. she went into her daughter’s bedroom, sat on the bed, and held Rose’s big teddy bear as she looked all around. Her child’s childhood was all around her. Photographs. Figurines. A trophy from a spelling bee. So many memories.

  She didn’t want to know her child was dead, but the idea of Rose all alone, her body lying in a morgue somewhere surrounded by strangers . . .

  At eight A.M. she picked up the phone with a trembling hand and a heavy heart, and dialed the number for the Minneapolis Police Department, Homicide Division, and asked for Sergeant Kovac.

  13

  The NCIC missing persons report for Rose Ellen Reiser had been made on the seventh of January, the day Jeannie Reiser had been passed off from the St. Louis PD to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. That date had mistakenly been entered as the date of the last known sighting of Jeannie Reiser’s daughter. Jeannie Reiser had never seen the report because it went to a website accessed by authorized personnel only.

  A clerical error had left a mother in limbo for more than a month. That was Kovac’s way of looking at it.

  Jeannie looked at it and saw a month of unnecessary torment, but also as a month without the absolute finality of death. As much as she had wanted to know what had happened to her daughter, the deepest truth was that she hadn’t truly wanted to know this, that Rose had been tortured and abused, that she had died terrified and alone with her murderer.

  Detective Kovac had initially tried to give Jeannie reasons his New Year’s Doe probably wasn’t Rose. But those reasons had quickly eroded in the face of the truth. His victim and her daughter had suffered the exact same two injuries as children. They had the exact same body piercings. They each had the exact same tiny mole behind their left ears.

  The DNA match would be a formality.

  On the eighth of February Jeannie flew to Minneapolis.

  The detective who met her at the airport was a blond-haired, blue-eyed pixie who introduced herself, shook Jeannie’s hand, and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Reiser. I’m a mother, too.”

  Kovac met them at the county morgue. He looked like a detective from an old movie, she thought, the idea striking her as funny in that desperate way of someone grasping for anything to distract from the inner pain. He was lean and a little rough around the edges. His brown suit was a little baggy, and his eyes had seen too much death.

  “Do you have children, Detective?” she asked.

  He seemed to hesitate before he answered. “No, ma’am. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  The detectives encouraged her to identify Rose’s body on the video monitor rather than by going in and seeing the actual damage that had been done to her daughter. Jeannie refused. She had seen her daughter into this world. And it would forever haunt her that she hadn’t been there for her as she left it. She wouldn’t detach herself from this duty.

  “She’s my baby” was all she could say as Kovac carefully lifted one side of the white sheet to uncover the left side of her daughter’s face.

  The tears came from a place so deep inside it felt like a crevasse in her soul. She had never felt so completely alone in all her life as she did in that moment. For eighteen years she had defined herself as a wife and a mother. Now she was neither.

  Detective Liska put a comforting hand on Jeannie’s back, and they all just stood there beside the white-draped body of her daughter, three people brought together by violence and grief.

  Outside the morgue the sky was blue, the weak winter sun spilling its thin yellow glow over downtown Minneapolis. Traffic went by. Across the street the Hennepin County Medical Center was doing a brisk business. Life went on.

  It seemed a cruel truth. The most terrible thing that could have happened had happened, and it had no impact on anyone but her. Life would go on. There would be paperwork to fill out. Arrangements would need to be made. She would have to plan a funeral—her second in a year. She would have to decide who she would be now that she could no longer define herself as Rose’s mom. She would have to try to imagine what her future would hold now that it would never bring her daughter’s graduation, her daughter’s wedding, the birth of her first grandchild. . . .

  “Will you get the man who did this?” she asked. “Will you stop him before he can do this to another girl?”

  “We’ll do everything in our power to bring him to justice,” Liska said.

  They all ignored the obvious truth: that it might already be too late for the next girl.

  “Thank you for finding her,” Jeannie said. “Thank you for taking care of her.”

  Liksa hugged her. Kovac looked uncomfortable. Jeannie hugged him anyway.

  Then she did the only thing she could. She pulled herself together and started making plans to take her daughter home.

  14

  Kovac bought the drinks that night. Just him and Liska in a booth at Patrick’s, an Irish-named bar owned by Swedes and frequented by cops on the block between the MPD’s and Hennepin County Sheriff’s offices. It was a weeknight, and a quiet time after the change of shift.

  He lifted his glass a couple of inches off the table, tipped his head, and said, “To Rose.”

  They drank, they sighed, they put their glasses down. It was almost like a dance. They had done this so many times, there was a rhythm to it, comfortable and familiar. And even though it was a celebration of sorts, there was a certain melancholy to it.

  They had achieved a goal in a case—reuniting a mother with her child—but there wouldn’t have been a case but for the fact that one human being had ended th
e life of another. That was hardly a cause for a party. Even when they nailed their bad guy and put him away, there was satisfaction, but happiness . . . ? Not really.

  Liska raised her glass again. Kovac did the same. “To Rose’s mom.”

  They drank, they sighed, they set their glasses down.

  “I’ll stay in touch with her,” she said.

  They shared a macabre bond now with Jeannie Reiser. Like a mother shared a bond with the doctor who brought her child into the world, she now shared a bond with the cops who were working her child’s homicide. That was a club nobody wanted to join.

  The experience would set Jeannie Reiser apart from everyone she knew in her normal life. The average person knew nothing of murder except that they wanted no part of it. They would look at Rose Reiser’s mother differently now, as if she had been exposed to a deadly disease that might possibly be contagious. But she would be able to turn to them—Liska and him.

  She had been thankful to them today for reuniting her with her daughter. In a day or two or ten, she would start calling to see if they had apprehended the killer. With every successive call her thankfulness would decline toward frustration. If they didn’t find the man who had killed her child, the frustration would become anger, then resentment. It wouldn’t occur to her that they wanted to close the case almost as badly as she did.

  Kovac raised his glass one last time. “And to the bastard who did this—”

  “We’ll see you in hell,” Liska said.

  They drank, they sighed, they set their glasses down.

  Kovac pulled a few bills from his wallet and dropped them on the table. They walked out of the bar and stood on the sidewalk, hunching their shoulders against the cold.

  “Hug your kids tonight, Tinks,” he said, his breath like a cloud of smoke in the night air. “You’re lucky to have them.”