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media. There was a sense that perhaps she had put herself at risk, or maybe rendezvoused with some bad boyfriend and had simply taken off. It didn’t help that another recent case of a missing college girl had ultimately turned out to be a hoax, making everyone involved—including the media—look foolish.
    Jeannie did what she could. She put up a website and social media pages. Most of the comments came from Rose’s friends and from people who seemed to make an unnatural hobby of following cases like this. Lots of well-wishers. Lots of religious people sending prayers, for all the good they seemed to do. But as the days slipped by, she found it harder and harder to go to those pages.
    One evening she turned her computer on and went, not to her own pages in search of encouragement, but to the pages of the unidentified dead to search for her daughter.
    Guilt pressed down on her like a leaden weight. She felt like she was giving up, but she also felt like she had to go on with it. As much as she didn’t want to find Rose among the thousands of unclaimed dead across the country, neither could she stand the idea of her daughter lying on a slab somewhere or being buried in a potter’s field, alone and forgotten.
    She could hardly look at the screen, watching almost out of the corner of her eye. Face after face after face passed by, each one tearing at her heart. So many young lives lost for no good reason—if there was such a thing.
    Overwhelmed, she had to stop and cry, and she gave up for the night. The next night she came back and tried again. And the next night. And the next. And her heart would stop from time to time as she stared at one composite sketch or another, thinking
maybe
 . . .
    Maybe . . .
if the eyes weren’t quite so round . . .
    Maybe . . .
if the face was more heart-shaped . . .
    Maybe . . .
if this one wasn’t so tall . . .
    Time seemed to stop as she looked at a sketch out of Minneapolis. Jane Doe 01-11.
    Maybe . . .
if the nose was shorter, more turned up . . .
    Maybe . . .
but the jaw wasn’t quite right . . .
    Maybe . . .
but that wasn’t her daughter’s thick wavy hair . . .
    The Minneapolis authorities were calling her New Year’s Doe. The girl had been found dumped on the side of a highway, the body found New Year’s Day. She had been murdered. She was found wearing a red wool coat and size nine boots.
    Rose had been wearing a black wool coat. Her feet were size eight.
    This couldn’t be her, and yet Jeannie continued to stare.
    If the nose was a little shorter . . .
    If the jaw was a little narrower . . .

11
    Halloween Doe (Melissa Romey) had disappeared near Milwaukee. Last seen at a big Oktoberfest celebration at a fairground near a major highway, she had turned up on Halloween—two days later—dead in a ditch off Interstate 80 on the outskirts of Omaha, Nebraska. Raped, tortured, stabbed, bludgeoned.
    Thanksgiving Doe (still unidentified) had been found off Interstate 280 near the Quad Cities airport. Raped, tortured, stabbed, bludgeoned.
    New Year’s Doe had been found off a smaller highway that fed into Interstate 35W. Raped, tortured, stabbed, bludgeoned.
    Kovac sat in a chair staring at the white board where he had scrawled out all the key points. Unable to sleep, he had come in to the station around two a.m. and set himself up in this conference room. On the long table beneath the white board he had laid out the crime scene photographs collected from the other cases.
    Three brutal murders. Bodies found in three jurisdictions, hundreds of miles apart. All dumpsites near major interstate highways.
    The red flag went up for a long-haul trucker. The serial killer’s dream job. He was transient. His torture chamber was portable. There was a ready victim pool available at all the places truckers routinely cruised. He could pick up a victim in one location, keep her as long as he liked, and dump her somewhere else.
    Over the last few days