My Lost Daughter by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg Read Free Book Online Page A

twenty more would pop up.
    Mary entered her boss’s office and sat down in a chair in front of his desk. As usual, Adams was on the phone and he waved her away. She stood and walked over to the wall where crime scene photos of ongoing cases were posted. Truly a wall of horror, grotesque images of corpses in different poses and in various stages of decomposition stared back at her. They had a sexual predator on the loose in Chicago. The UNSUB (Unidentified Subject) had recently escalated from rape and sodomy to murder. She saw the blood-splattered body of a girl who appeared to be around five and quickly turned away. Mary refused to work cases where the victims were children. Genna Weir had two kids and had no trouble tracking down child killers.
    Mary had been fascinated by death since she was a teenager. Her father had been a police officer in Los Angeles and she used to go to his office and peek at his files. She could thumb through autopsyphotos as if she were flipping through the pages of a magazine in a doctor’s office, but seeing a tiny body that had been brutalized was more than she could handle. Brooks said her sensitivity to wrongs committed against children proved that she’d be a wonderful mother. Mary wasn’t sure she wanted to bring a child into the world knowing the monsters that prowled the streets.
    Her father, Harold Stevens, had risen to the rank of deputy chief at the LAPD before he’d been gunned down by an armed robber at a Quick Mart ten years ago. Her breath still caught in her throat when she thought about it. All he had done was stop after work to buy a bottle of wine for her mother. One of the reasons Adams had recruited her was the hope that she might possess her father’s intuition. According to Adams and the other vets who served in the same platoon as her father, he possessed a sixth sense and could spot friend or foe only seconds after making visual contact. His special talent had failed on the one day it really mattered, the day he died.
    Adams concluded his phone call and leaned back in his chair. “Sit down, Stevens. I hear you have some news on those unusual homicides.”
    Mary returned to her seat, opening the file and balancing it on her knees. “The lab finally confirmed that the same gun was used in the Connelly case in Dallas, the Thomason case in Houston, as well as the San Francisco area cases, Madison and Sherman. The ones in California are the most recent. Maybe our UNSUB didn’t like the heat in Texas.” She despised the use of UNSUB. Police departments used only one word—suspect.
    â€œAre you saying we may have another serial killer at work?”
    â€œThat’s my thinking, sir.”
    He stared at a spot over her head. “It’s brilliant, don’t you see? Our UNSUB has found a way to indulge his bloodlust, and at the same time, reduce his chances of apprehension. The victims were suicidal, right?”
    â€œAll four of them,” Mary told him. “Two of the men even served time in mental hospitals following attempted suicides. You can seewhy the local police didn’t believe they were legitimate homicides. If the medical examiner in San Francisco hadn’t handled the autopsies on both the Sherman and Madison cases, he would have ruled the deaths suicides.”
    â€œHave we linked the gun to any other deaths, suicides or otherwise?”
    â€œNot yet.” Mary swallowed hard. “I want you to hear something. Around the world, over a million people kill themselves every year and another ten to twenty million attempt suicide and don’t succeed. In the United States alone, there were forty-five-thousand suicides last year.”
    â€œJesus Christ! Finding out which ones were homicides will be impossible. The FSRTC is already backed up to China.”
    Adams was referring to the Forensic Science Research and Training Center, which was internationally renowned for the development of new