The 1st Victim Read Online Free PDF

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