The 1st Victim Read Free Page A

renewed conviction.
    She had been operating on fear and adrenaline, reacting to circumstances, not taking control of the situation. She needed to shove the fear aside as best she could and come up with a plan. If the police weren’t going to help her, then she needed to think of what she could do on her own to find her daughter.
    Jeannie had co-signed the lease, which gave her the right to enter the apartment. She called the building manager and explained the situation, only to find out that the manager had no keys to the apartments, either, due to liability issues. The manager suggested a locksmith.
    Precious time ticked past. Jeannie squeezed her panic in an iron fist. What else could she do? Where else might she find a clue?
    Rose had a credit card. If she could find a credit card statement in the apartment, get the card number, the credit card company could tell her where the card was being used. That was what the police would have done, if the police had cared to do anything at all.
    “We see these cases all the time, ma’am. Kids on their own for the first time. They want to cut the apron strings. It’s New Year’s. . . .”
    When she finally gained entrance to the apartment, there was nothing to see. There was no blood spatter, no dead body, no evidence of any crime. The apartment looked like any apartment of two young girls living on their own. There were piles of schoolbooks and fashion magazines, clean and dirty clothes draped over the backs of chairs. Neither bed was made. That was no surprise. Rose hadn’t voluntarily made a bed in her life.
    There was no sign anyone had been staying in the apartment recently. The towels in the bathroom were dry. The milk in the refrigerator had gone bad. Both Rose and her roommate had left St. Louis before Christmas.
    There was a half-empty bottle of vodka and a couple of bottles of cheap wine on the kitchen counter. The faint aroma of pot hung sweet in the air like the last half breath of some long-forgotten perfume.
    Great, Jeannie thought. If she could even get the cops to come here, they would see the booze and smell the dope, and become further entrenched in the idea that Rose was just another irresponsible party girl..
    “Has your daughter been in any trouble in the past? Trouble with drugs? Trouble with alcohol?”
    Jeannie straightened up the apartment, tossed out the bad milk, and opened the windows to air the place out. She put the alcohol in a cupboard.
    On the small desk in Rose’s bedroom she dug through the notebooks and mail, scraps of paper and greeting cards. She wanted to find an address book so she could start calling friends, but no girl Rose’s age kept an actual address book anymore. Address books lived inside of telephones now, and Rose had her phone with her. Address books lived in the bowels of laptops and iPads—also with Rose.
    She found her daughter’s bills in a bright-green wire basket half hidden by a pile of art magazines, and sat down at the desk to make the phone calls right away. She punched her way through the automated directions for MasterCard with one hand while scrounging for a clean sheet of paper and a pen with the other. Her sense of hope began to rally only to be crushed again.
    She didn’t know Rose’s social security number off the top of her head. She didn’t know any of Rose’s passwords. No matter how she begged, pleaded, demanded, she got nowhere. Had she contacted the police? more than one representative asked. Had she filed a missing persons report?
    Jeannie found her way back to the tiny kitchen and the vodka bottle she had stashed away. She wasn’t a drinker, but this was what people in the movies always did when faced with trouble. She poured an inch of the liquor into a glass and took a drink, choked and gagged and spat it into the sink. Tears came to her eyes, first from the alcohol, then from the emotions she was trying to keep at bay.
    As she went back into the small living room and sat down on the old