The 1st Victim Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 witnesses. 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.