The 1st Victim by Tami Hoag Page B

it in and just kept going.”
    “And left her there alone?” Frank Fitzgerald shook his head. “People shouldn’t die alone. I don’t want to die alone.”
    “She was already dead.”
    “I don’t want to be left dead, either,” Fitzgerald said. He pointed a stubby, gloved finger at a photograph taped to the dashboard. A blond girl in her late teens smiled shyly at the camera. “I’ve got a daughter, myself. Melissa. If something like that happened to her, I’d want someone to stop. I’d want someone to care. Wouldn’t you?”

2
    No one cares,
Jeannie Reiser thought, astounded. She was living in a nightmare, screaming for help, with no one seeming to hear her. She held the phone away from her head and stared at it, incredulous. Maybe it wasn’t working. Maybe the person on the other end of the line in St. Louis literally hadn’t heard her.
    “I don’t think you understand, Sergeant,” she said, struggling to stay calm. “My daughter is missing. I need to file a missing persons report. I need you to
do
something.”
    “How long did you say it’s been since you heard from her?”
    “Three days, but—”
    “And your daughter is how old?”
    “Eighteen, but—”
    “She’s a legal adult, ma’am.”
    “She’s just eighteen,” Jeannie said. “She’s a freshman at SLU. She calls me
every
day. If not every day, every
other
day,” she corrected herself. “I didn’t hear from her on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. She would never
not
call me on a holiday.”
    The cop on the other end of the line was unmoved. “It’s not against the law not to call your mother, ma’am.”
    Jeannie wanted to reach through the telephone all the way to St. Louis and slap him. Tears rose up in her eyes. Fear rose up in her throat.
    She knew what he was thinking: that she was an overprotective mother, that she was being ridiculous. An eighteen-year-old college girl living in the big city, out from under her mother’s thumb for the first time in her life, was probably out partying with her friends, having fun, or sleeping it off. She was probably more likely
not
to call her mother, just to prove her independence. He was probably thinking
Girls Gone Wild
.
    He didn’t know her daughter. He didn’t know their relationship. He didn’t know their family.
    On the table in front of her, photos from Christmas lay scattered like playing cards. They had tried hard to have a happy holiday—their first since Dean had lost his battle with cancer. But there had been more sad moments than happy ones. Too many memories that, at this stage of grief, brought more pain of loss than remembered joy.
    Unwilling to take the one-two emotional punch of back-to-back holidays without her dad, her daughter had decided to go back to St. Louis early, to spend New Year’s with her new friends from school.
    When Jeanie didn’t hear from her daughter during the evening on New Year’s Eve, she hadn’t really worried about it. The kids would be going out, heading to a party. When no call came on New Year’s Day, she tried to talk herself out of the fear that was beginning to stir inside her. New Year’s Eve parties meant New Year’s Day hangovers, or just sleeping the day away. When no call had come by the evening of New Year’s Day, every rationalization that began to form in her mind was quickly cut off by her growing panic.
    Calls to her daughter’s cell phone had gone directly to voice mail—her daughter’s happy, giggling voice telling callers she would get back to them as soon as she could. And when the mailbox filled with Jeanie’s increasingly frantic messages, only the anonymous voice of the phone company answered her, informing her that there was no more room for her pleas to be recorded, then called back as soon as possible.
    “Have you spoken to any of your daughter’s friends?”
    Jeanie had been so lost in her own thoughts, she startled at the voice.
    “Her roommate is out of the country.” On a cruise someplace