The 1st Victim Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 watching 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.”
    “How was she killed?”
    “Stabbed in the chest and throat. She’d been raped and tortured. The