The Last Place You'd Look Read Online Free PDF Page B

late hours, and a rough clientele that drew an unsuspecting Matt and his traveling companion. Matt’s car had given out on him over Thanksgiving while he was on the road for his job. He left it behind on the interstate outside of Des Moines, Iowa, and flew home to Hartland, where he lived with his mother. He planned to return later and pick it up. Matt asked several people to drive with him to get his abandoned automobile, including his brother, Chris, but ended up with a neighborhood acquaintance when no one else could make the trip. The pair left on December 23 and later that day, exhausted by the drive, they checked into a hotel in Dubuque. After having a few drinks at the hotel bar, the two young men crossed the river and hit the bar scene in East Dubuque.
    Some time during the predawn hours of December 24, Matt was relieved of his cash, coat, gloves, and hat by some of the questionable characters that frequented the bar. He’d been carrying $380 and, for reasons no one understands, had not brought along his cell phone. Intoxicated and alone, Matt was ejected from the establishment dressed in a shirt and jeans and wearing a pair of work boots. As he stumbled along in the numbing cold, he was stopped at about 1:10 Christmas Eve morning and questioned by a local police officer. The officer instructed Matt to go back to his hotel and then left the coatless and drunken young man to find his way alone back to that hotel room across the river in Dubuque in seventeen-degree weather.
    He never made it.
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    At 9:30 a.m. on the same day, Bill Kruziki and his current wife, Ellen, who is also a law enforcement officer, received a call from his eldest son, Chris: Matt had not returned to his hotel room. Bill and Ellen went into cop mode.
    “I knew what to do,” Bill says. “I spent the first day on the phone talking to law enforcement agencies, even calling thrift stores to see if they’d sold Matt a coat.”
    The town and its law enforcement nearly ground to a halt on Christmas Day, but on December 26, Bill met with the police chief in East Dubuque.
    Reflecting later on what happened to his son, Bill says he learned that the bar ran a scam that defrauded customers of their cash. He says the traveling companion, who later took a polygraph that came out inconclusive but deceptive, never answered to his satisfaction why he didn’t leave the bar with Matt. But the one answer Bill would like to have is why the police officer that conducted the field interview with Matt after he left the bar did so little.
    “That officer knew what happened in the bar, so why not go back and get him his coat?” Bill asks.
    It is this question and others that prick at Bill Kruziki, who says of local police, “They could have done more, but that, of course, is a parent talking.”
    But Bill Kruziki is no ordinary parent. This one has juice. His connections in Wisconsin and federal law enforcement, as well as his experience on missing persons cases, makes him savvier than most parents whose adult child might be missing. Bill began summoning resources, calling in favors, working the system.
    On December 26, the same day he met with the police chief, the Kruzikis began plastering the area with posters featuring Matt. The posters went on cars, college campuses, restaurants, bars, and hotels. The following day, Bill sought out the media. He didn’t wait for them to come to him.
    The family garnered newspaper, radio, and television coverage—every willing and interested media outlet they could find. A week later, the story went national. Back in Wisconsin, older son Chris worked the phones, calling all of Matt’s friends, acquaintances, and coworkers, hoping they could shed some light on Matt’s disappearance. There were no leads.
    At the scene in East Dubuque and its sister city, Bill and Ellen continued to work their contacts. Not all attempts to drum up interest in Matt’s case were successful. The Coast Guard, with its vast search capabilities,