The 1st Victim (2 page)

She lost precious time that first night in St. Louis in an emergency room overflowing with drunks, addicts, and the victims of a food poisoning epidemic at a seafood restaurant. Dizzy and dehydrated, she lay for hours on a gurney in the hallway with an IV saline drip in her arm. Exhaustion swam over her, and she fell in and out of sleep.

When she was finally released, she used her cab voucher to go to the nearest police precinct . . . for all the good that did her.

She tried to file her missing persons report with the jaded desk sergeant. He said her daughter was probably with a boyfriend somewhere. She’d probably gone off with friends for the long weekend. College girls were flighty; they liked to party. Classes at her school didn’t resume for another few days, did they? She would probably turn up by then.

Angry and frustrated, Jeannie called the cop she had spoken to initially when she had called from home—the man who had already told her all the same things the desk sergeant was telling her. Someone else answered his phone. He was off duty, she was told, but she should be talking to campus police, anyway. But she knew campus police wouldn’t want to deal with her because, while Rose was a student at SLU, Rose’s apartment wasn’t on campus.

Exhausted, she took a cab back to her car in Rose’s neighborhood to find a parking ticket on the windshield. Defeated and half frozen, she checked into a hotel for what was left of the night. She dozed fitfully between fruitless attempts to call her daughter. In the back of her mind she began chanting,
Baby, where are you? Baby, where are you? I’ll find you, Rosebud. I promise, I’ll find you.

The following morning she began with strong coffee and renewed conviction.

She had been operating on fear and adrenaline, reacting to circumstances, not taking control of the situation. She needed to shove the fear aside as best she could and come up with a plan. If the police weren’t going to help her, then she needed to think of what she could do on her own to find her daughter.

Jeannie had co-signed the lease, which gave her the right to enter the apartment. She called the building manager and explained the situation, only to find out that the manager had no keys to the apartments, either, due to liability issues. The manager suggested a locksmith.

Precious time ticked past. Jeannie squeezed her panic in an iron fist. What else could she do? Where else might she find a clue?

Rose had a credit card. If she could find a credit card statement in the apartment, get the card number, the credit card company could tell her where the card was being used. That was what the police would have done, if the police had cared to do anything at all.

“We see these cases all the time, ma’am. Kids on their own for the first time. They want to cut the apron strings. It’s New Year’s. . . .”

When she finally gained entrance to the apartment, there was nothing to see. There was no blood spatter, no dead body, no evidence of any crime. The apartment looked like any apartment of two young girls living on their own. There were piles of schoolbooks and fashion magazines, clean and dirty clothes draped over the backs of chairs. Neither bed was made. That was no surprise. Rose hadn’t voluntarily made a bed in her life.

There was no sign anyone had been staying in the apartment recently. The towels in the bathroom were dry. The milk in the refrigerator had gone bad. Both Rose and her roommate had left St. Louis before Christmas.

There was a half-empty bottle of vodka and a couple of bottles of cheap wine on the kitchen counter. The faint aroma of pot hung sweet in the air like the last half breath of some long-forgotten perfume.

Great, Jeannie thought. If she could even get the cops to come here, they would see the booze and smell the dope, and become further entrenched in the idea that Rose was just another irresponsible party girl..

“Has your daughter been in any trouble in the past? Trouble with drugs? Trouble with alcohol?”

Jeannie straightened up the apartment, tossed out the bad milk, and opened the windows to air the place out. She put the alcohol in a cupboard.

On the small desk in Rose’s bedroom she dug through the notebooks and mail, scraps of paper and greeting cards. She wanted to find an address book so she could start calling friends, but no girl Rose’s age kept an actual address book anymore. Address books lived inside of telephones now, and Rose had her phone with her. Address books lived in the bowels of laptops and iPads—also with Rose.

She found her daughter’s bills in a bright-green wire basket half hidden by a pile of art magazines, and sat down at the desk to make the phone calls right away. She punched her way through the automated directions for MasterCard with one hand while scrounging for a clean sheet of paper and a pen with the other. Her sense of hope began to rally only to be crushed again.

She didn’t know Rose’s social security number off the top of her head. She didn’t know any of Rose’s passwords. No matter how she begged, pleaded, demanded, she got nowhere. Had she contacted the police? more than one representative asked. Had she filed a missing persons report?

Jeannie found her way back to the tiny kitchen and the vodka bottle she had stashed away. She wasn’t a drinker, but this was what people in the movies always did when faced with trouble. She poured an inch of the liquor into a glass and took a drink, choked and gagged and spat it into the sink. Tears came to her eyes, first from the alcohol, then from the emotions she was trying to keep at bay.

As she went back into the small living room and sat down on the old tweed sofa, an overwhelming sense of emptiness closed in on her. The silence pressed against her eardrums.

Her daughter was bright and bubbly, the embodiment of light and life. She lit up a room with her smile, charged the air with her energy. She was a happy human tornado leaving a mess in her wake—shoes discarded at the door, jewelry forgotten on a table, purse tossed on a chair, a trail of clothing dropped on the floor on the way to her closet to suit up for her next adventure.

If Rose had made it back to St. Louis, she had not unloaded one item from her car, not a Christmas gift, not a suitcase. She hadn’t changed her shoes or coat.

There is no life here,
Jeannie thought.

Her daughter had never made it back to this apartment.

Please, God, let my child be safe wherever she is,
she prayed silently. But even as she thought those words, all she felt was dread.

She found the Yellow Pages on the kitchen counter and looked up the numbers for the local television stations. If the police wouldn’t look for her missing daughter, she would bypass the police and go straight to the media.

“My daughter—a student at SLU—has gone missing, and I can’t get anyone to help me.”

“Do you have a case number from the police department, ma’am?”

“No. They won’t take my statement.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we can’t run a missing persons story without an official police report to back it up.”

“Oh my God,” Jeannie said, hysteria building inside her like steam. “That
is
the story!”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s station policy. If the police won’t take your statement, they must have a reason.”

“Yes,” Jeannie said, then screamed into the telephone:
“They don’t fucking care!”

•   •   •

The desk sergeant was busy with a man who was complaining loudly about his neighbor blowing snow onto his property. Half a dozen despondent-looking citizens waited in a row of chairs. Uniformed officers came and went through the room. Telephones rang.

No one seemed to notice Jeannie when she came in. She stood in the center of the space looking around. People waited in their own little bubbles, worrying about their own problems, wondering if anyone would help them, not caring what the next person might be there for.

Jeannie had waited long enough. It was time for everyone to care about her problem.

“My daughter is missing!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “And I’m not leaving here until somebody does something to help me!”

“How can a girl like that go missing and nobody in her life notices or cares?” Liska asked, twisting around in her desk chair. “If one of my boys is twenty minutes late, I’m ready to call out the National Guard.”

“Not all mothers are you, Tinks,” Kovac said, not taking his eyes from his computer screen.

He had called her that from her first days in Homicide. The nickname started out as Tinker Bell. He had declared she was like Tinker Bell on steroids: tiny but tough as nails. Over the first few weeks of working together he had shortened it to Tinks.

“I know that,” she said. In this line of work it became too easy to believe that fewer mothers were good mothers than bad. “Still . . .”

It broke her heart. That went unsaid. Kovac knew. They had been friends for a lot of years now. They were practically siblings. Cops made their own families.

Kovac had sort of adopted her when she came to Homicide. He was already a veteran. Cynical and sardonic, he had a kind of a poor man’s Harrison Ford quality about him—the beat-up tomcat looks, the world-weary eyes, the wry intelligence. He knew more about her private life than he wanted to, as she delighted in embarrassing him with the details. And she was the only one who knew just how soft his heart really was under that crust of sarcasm.

The image of Jane Doe 01-11 lying flat and dead like a cardboard cutout in the snow haunted them both. They had both attended the autopsy. The preliminary report from the medical examiner declared their victim a Caucasian female between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. She had been healthy and well nourished. What teeth had been left intact had been well cared for. She had no tattoos but several body piercings—ears, nose, navel. She had not been wearing jewelry at the time she was discovered, which suggested the killer might have kept her various ornaments as souvenirs.

She had broken her collarbone sometime in her past and had once fractured her left arm—both bones—just above the wrist. Liska could imagine a little girl tumbling from a tree limb or falling from a pink bicycle with sparkling streamers on the handlebars.

The injuries inflicted on the young woman just prior to her death had been enough to turn Liska’s stomach at the thought of them. Cigarette burns. Broken ribs. Multiple stab wounds to the chest, head, and neck. She had been beaten about the head and face with a blunt instrument—possibly a hammer—shattering her right eye socket, cheekbone, nose, and jaw with such force that bone shards had penetrated the brain, and teeth had been broken and displaced from the smashed jawbone.

She had still been alive at the time of the beating. Teeth had been found in her stomach and lodged at the back of her throat.

She had been sexually assaulted with force. Possibly with a foreign object. No semen had been left behind.

The short of it was that this girl had suffered horribly at the hands of her killer, and they didn’t even know who she was, let alone who had done this to her.

Her fingerprints were not in the system, meaning she had no criminal record and had never served in the military. They had found no missing persons reports in a five-state area that matched the description of this girl.

Liska had filed the case with NCIC (the National Crime Information Center). The report was then entered into the national database available to all law enforcement agencies nationwide to be compared to missing persons reports. The information had also gone into the NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) database, and into ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), so the crime itself might be matched to similar crimes in other parts of the country.

Unfortunately, ViCAP was their only success so far. Violent homicides with young female victims were far too common. Young women brutalized, murdered, and discarded like trash seemingly littered the nation. Kovac had taken the job of comparing the crimes. He stared at his computer screen, eyes bleary behind his reading glasses. Too many murders. Too many forgotten women and girls.

“We need to get the composite sketch out there,” Liska said. She had already said it five times in the last two days.

They didn’t have a sketch yet. The forensic artist had already warned them that the likeness he was going to come up with was going to be a guesstimate of what their victim must have looked like in life. He had less than half of a face to work from.

Once they had a sketch, it would go to local media outlets. Great—if the girl was local. If her loved ones lived in Kansas, they would never see the story.

The sketch would also go everywhere the report had gone—websites to which only law enforcement agencies had access. The mother of a missing child would never see those. There were several websites to which citizens could go to search for missing loved ones, but how did the average mother know about them? And if this girl’s mother somehow found her way to www.doenetwork.org and put herself through the hell of scrolling through pages of unidentified dead bodies, would she recognize a sketch created primarily by the imagination of a forensic artist working from a shattered skull?

Liska glanced from the autopsy photos of Jane Doe 01-11 on her desk to the Web page on her computer screen and felt a tremor of hopeless dread slice through her mother’s heart as the thought went through her mind:
Needle, meet Haystack.

Her interview with the detective was contentious and adversarial. He threw up every roadblock Jeannie had already encountered. Rose was a legal adult, free to go where she wanted and do as she pleased, and was not obligated to tell her mother about anything. He didn’t want to hear that her daughter was different. He didn’t believe it. He had undoubtedly heard other parents say the same thing.

He argued that there was no evidence a crime had been committed. Jeannie argued that her daughter’s absence was evidence enough.

“Has your daughter run away before, Mrs. Reiser?”

“She hasn’t run away,” Jeannie said. “She’s missing.”

“Has she
been missing
before?”

“No,” she lied, knowing that if he wanted to bother he would find out that she and Dean had indeed reported Rose missing that summer when she had taken off with her friends.

“What do you think has happened to your daughter, Mrs. Reiser?”

“I don’t know what happened,” Jeannie returned. “That’s your job, isn’t it? To find out what happened? She could have been in an accident. She could have been abducted.”

“Do you have some reason to believe your daughter has been abducted?”

“She’s
missing
.”

“But you haven’t had a ransom call or anything like that.”

His attitude made Jeannie want to slap him. “How dare you patronize me! My daughter is missing. I’ve come to you for help. Do you have children?”

“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.