Missing Mark by Julie Kramer Read Free Book Online

sniffing and pawing on a wooden sewing cabinet marked NOT
    FOR SALE.
    “I’m allergic to dogs,” George said.
    I apologized, explaining that Shep was living with me temporarily, and wouldn’t it be nice to have a watchdog in the neighborhood?
    “I don’t like barking.”
    “He’s very quiet,” I said, “unless he smells trouble.”
    Shep continued pawing at the cabinet. It didn’t look the least bit fragile, but George appeared nervous just the same.
    “Better get him out of here,” he said. “Don’t want him breaking anything.”
    Like we were surrounded by valuable inventory. A plastic bench held a collection of VHS action movies from the nineties. A cardboard box overflowed with stuffed animals that looked overloved and under-washed. And a dusty aquarium, now empty except for a few plastic plants and a fish cave, sat next to a box of faded National Geo-graphics .
    No price tags. George preferred to wheel and deal depending, I suspected, on the type of vehicle the shopper drove. Owners of rusted-out clunkers seemed to get better prices than carpool moms with Lincoln Navigators.
    That was the mystery. Regular foot traffic paraded up and down his yard and he didn’t even advertise beyond the homemade sign. I attributed it to location, location, location and wondered if George might sell some of my castoffs for me on consignment. But now seemed a bad time to ask since Shep had made such a poor first impression. So I pushed the big dog back over to my side of the property line and told him to stay while I grabbed the morning newspapers.
    Without Shep, I’d still be sleeping in, though not for long. Spring wasn’t a season to be cherishing Saturdays for those of us who work in television news. May loomed like a vulture. Not that I was comparing journalists to scavengers, but I enjoy thinking both play a crucial role in cleaning up the world.
    Speaking of which, like a good dog owner, I cleaned up after Shep, making an earthly deposit in the garbage can by my garage. Then the two of us played newspaper tug-of-war for a minute before going inside. Both daily papers were thin, evidence of the cut in manpower and newsprint. And since I don’t read sports, I finished them quickly.
    As I boiled some water for instant oatmeal, I pulled out a notebook to chart clues in the missing-groom story.
    One angle I deliberately didn’t bring up with Noreen (because I didn’t want my boss thinking I see serial killers behind every corner) was the fact that several young men have been reported missing in Minnesota and Wisconsin over the last few years. A map of the missing eerily follows a path along Interstate 94. La Crosse. Eau Claire. The Twin Cities. St. Cloud. Conspiracy theorists even include cases from Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan to raise the tally of the missing to dozens.
    Some of the men have never been found, including one whose abandoned car was discovered four years ago on the side of a freeway three miles from where Mark was last seen.
    Others were found drowned. Their bodies recovered weeks or months later not far from where they disappeared in water that had seemingly been well searched. Rumors of a serial killer targeting drunken college men in La Crosse, Wisconsin, became so frenzied that an FBI task force reviewed the cases and concluded the victims became intoxicated at bars or campus parties and stumbled drunkenly into the Mississippi River.
    Their families don’t accept that explanation: they believe the men were pushed or thrown while incapacitated. Mainstream media, including Channel 3, has generally discounted these cases as coincidence. An Internet blog disagreed, saying coincidence phooey—drowning in coincidence, maybe. One of our broadcast competitors floated a theory that an organized pack of roving murderers killed the men, leaving smiley-face graffiti behind to taunt police.
    During a news conference, authorities pronounced the conjecture unfounded and announced they’d found the real