The 1st Victim Read Free Page B

tweed sofa, an overwhelming sense of emptiness closed in on her. The silence pressed against her eardrums.
    Her daughter was bright and bubbly, the embodiment of light and life. She lit up a room with her smile, charged the air with her energy. She was a happy human tornado leaving a mess in her wake—shoes discarded at the door, jewelry forgotten on a table, purse tossed on a chair, a trail of clothing dropped on the floor on the way to her closet to suit up for her next adventure.
    If Rose had made it back to St. Louis, she had not unloaded one item from her car, not a Christmas gift, not a suitcase. She hadn’t changed her shoes or coat.
    There is no life here,
Jeannie thought.
    Her daughter had never made it back to this apartment.
    Please, God, let my child be safe wherever she is,
she prayed silently. But even as she thought those words, all she felt was dread.
    She found the Yellow Pages on the kitchen counter and looked up the numbers for the local television stations. If the police wouldn’t look for her missing daughter, she would bypass the police and go straight to the media.
    “My daughter—a student at SLU—has gone missing, and I can’t get anyone to help me.”
    “Do you have a case number from the police department, ma’am?”
    “No. They won’t take my statement.”
    “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we can’t run a missing persons story without an official police report to back it up.”
    “Oh my God,” Jeannie said, hysteria building inside her like steam. “That
is
the story!”
    “I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s station policy. If the police won’t take your statement, they must have a reason.”
    “Yes,” Jeannie said, then screamed into the telephone:
“They don’t fucking care!”
    •   •   •
    The desk sergeant was busy with a man who was complaining loudly about his neighbor blowing snow onto his property. Half a dozen despondent-looking citizens waited in a row of chairs. Uniformed officers came and went through the room. Telephones rang.
    No one seemed to notice Jeannie when she came in. She stood in the center of the space looking around. People waited in their own little bubbles, worrying about their own problems, wondering if anyone would help them, not caring what the next person might be there for.
    Jeannie had waited long enough. It was time for everyone to care about her problem.
    “My daughter is missing!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “And I’m not leaving here until somebody does something to help me!”

4
    “How can a girl like that go missing and nobody in her life notices or cares?” Liska asked, twisting around in her desk chair. “If one of my boys is twenty minutes late, I’m ready to call out the National Guard.”
    “Not all mothers are you, Tinks,” Kovac said, not taking his eyes from his computer screen.
    He had called her that from her first days in Homicide. The nickname started out as Tinker Bell. He had declared she was like Tinker Bell on steroids: tiny but tough as nails. Over the first few weeks of working together he had shortened it to Tinks.
    “I know that,” she said. In this line of work it became too easy to believe that fewer mothers were good mothers than bad. “Still . . .”
    It broke her heart. That went unsaid. Kovac knew. They had been friends for a lot of years now. They were practically siblings. Cops made their own families.
    Kovac had sort of adopted her when she came to Homicide. He was already a veteran. Cynical and sardonic, he had a kind of a poor man’s Harrison Ford quality about him—the beat-up tomcat looks, the world-weary eyes, the wry intelligence. He knew more about her private life than he wanted to, as she delighted in embarrassing him with the details. And she was the only one who knew just how soft his heart really was under that crust of sarcasm.
    The image of Jane Doe 01-11 lying flat and dead like a cardboard cutout in the snow haunted them both. They had both attended the autopsy. The