The 1st Victim by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online

ears.
    The DNA match would be a formality.
    On the eighth of February Jeannie flew to Minneapolis.
    The detective who met her at the airport was a blond-haired, blue-eyed pixie who introduced herself, shook Jeannie’s hand, and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Reiser. I’m a mother, too.”
    Kovac met them at the county morgue. He looked like a detective from an old movie, she thought, the idea striking her as funny in that desperate way of someone grasping for anything to distract from the inner pain. He was lean and a little rough around the edges. His brown suit was a little baggy, and his eyes had seen too much death.
    “Do you have children, Detective?” she asked.
    He seemed to hesitate before he answered. “No, ma’am. I’m sorry for your loss.”
    The detectives encouraged her to identify Rose’s body on the video monitor rather than by going in and seeing the actual damage that had been done to her daughter. Jeannie refused. She had seen her daughter into this world. And it would forever haunt her that she hadn’t been there for her as she left it. She wouldn’t detach herself from this duty.
    “She’s my baby” was all she could say as Kovac carefully lifted one side of the white sheet to uncover the left side of her daughter’s face.
    The tears came from a place so deep inside it felt like a crevasse in her soul. She had never felt so completely alone in all her life as she did in that moment. For eighteen years she had defined herself as a wife and a mother. Now she was neither.
    Detective Liska put a comforting hand on Jeannie’s back, and they all just stood there beside the white-draped body of her daughter, three people brought together by violence and grief.
    Outside the morgue the sky was blue, the weak winter sun spilling its thin yellow glow over downtown Minneapolis. Traffic went by. Across the street the Hennepin County Medical Center was doing a brisk business. Life went on.
    It seemed a cruel truth. The most terrible thing that could have happened had happened, and it had no impact on anyone but her. Life would go on. There would be paperwork to fill out. Arrangements would need to be made. She would have to plan a funeral—her second in a year. She would have to decide who she would be now that she could no longer define herself as Rose’s mom. She would have to try to imagine what her future would hold now that it would never bring her daughter’s graduation, her daughter’s wedding, the birth of her first grandchild. . . .
    “Will you get the man who did this?” she asked. “Will you stop him before he can do this to another girl?”
    “We’ll do everything in our power to bring him to justice,” Liska said.
    They all ignored the obvious truth: that it might already be too late for the next girl.
    “Thank you for finding her,” Jeannie said. “Thank you for taking care of her.”
    Liksa hugged her. Kovac looked uncomfortable. Jeannie hugged him anyway.
    Then she did the only thing she could. She pulled herself together and started making plans to take her daughter home.

14
    Kovac bought the drinks that night. Just him and Liska in a booth at Patrick’s, an Irish-named bar owned by Swedes and frequented by cops on the block between the MPD’s and Hennepin County Sheriff’s offices. It was a weeknight, and a quiet time after the change of shift.
    He lifted his glass a couple of inches off the table, tipped his head, and said, “To Rose.”
    They drank, they sighed, they put their glasses down. It was almost like a dance. They had done this so many times, there was a rhythm to it, comfortable and familiar. And even though it was a celebration of sorts, there was a certain melancholy to it.
    They had achieved a goal in a case—reuniting a mother with her child—but there wouldn’t have been a case but for the fact that one human being had ended the life of another. That was hardly a cause for a party. Even when they nailed their bad guy and put him away,