The 1st Victim Read Free

would be a fool’s errand. She would get to St. Louis, and Rose would be in her apartment, both embarrassed and secretly glad her mother had come.
    She called her daughter’s cell phone every fifteen minutes.
    The last time she had spoken to Rose, her daughter had stopped for coffee near Columbia, refueling before the last push east on I-70. She was going to meet friends for dinner at a pizza place downtown.
    What friends? What pizza place? Had she even made it into the city?
    The sergeant called and informed Jeannie that officers had gone by Rose’s apartment but found nothing suspicious. What did that mean? Had they gone inside? No, ma’am. They couldn’t do that. Then what good were they? There was no sign of anyone being home at the apartment. There was no sign of anyone having tried to break into the apartment. Her daughter’s car was not occupying its assigned spot behind the building.
    What if the car had been stolen? Jeannie suggested. What if her daughter was lying wounded or worse on the floor of her apartment, and the perpetrator had made off with her car?
    “With all due respect, ma’am, you watch too much television.”
    •   •   •
    The short winter afternoon had gone dark by the time Jeannie made it to her daughter’s apartment building near the campus of St. Louis University. It seemed to take forever to find a parking spot on the street. She had to walk three blocks into a cold wind to get back to the building. And when she got there, then what?
    She didn’t have a key. She had no way to get inside the apartment. The doorbell rang unanswered. Her knocking finally brought an angry neighbor into the hall.
    “What the fuck, lady?” he said, scowling. “No one’s home. Give it up.”
    Jeannie’s heart was pounding like a drum, the sound reverberating inside her head. She paid no attention to the neighbor. It was as if he were nothing but a two-dimensional character in a dream. She wanted to wake with a start and be in her own bed.
    She felt dizzy and short of breath. She had hardly eaten or slept in three days. Fear was like a wild animal inside her, spinning around and around, looking for a way to escape.
    Her legs gave way, and she crumpled to the floor.
    The neighbor called 911.

3
    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