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Kovac had spoken with detectives on the other two cases. They had commiserated over their collective lack of evidence. They had all come to the same conclusion: They were probably dealing with the same killer. They had unofficially christened him Doc Holiday.
    Halloween, Thanksgiving, New Year’s.
    Valentine’s Day was fast approaching.
    Of the three victims, the only story they had with a beginning and an end was Halloween Doe’s. Melissa Romey had been identified by her fingerprints several days after the discovery of her body. The Omaha detective had tossed in one odd point toward the end of their conversation: The victim hadn’t been wearing her own clothes when the body was found.
    One of the points Kovac had against matching his Jane Doe to the girl from Missouri was the red coat and the size nine boots. Rose Ellen Reiser was last seen wearing a black coat. She wore size eight shoes. The thing that made New Year’s Doe stand out in his memory was the red coat. But who was to say the coat was hers? Sexual sadists did things like that—like keeping the victim’s clothing and dressing up in it themselves after the fact to relive the thrill—or putting their girlfriends in the clothes of the dead girl.
    That still didn’t discount the discrepancy in the dates. His Jane Doe had been found on New Year’s Day. The date on Rose Ellen Reiser’s NCIC file was 1/7.
    Rose Ellen Reiser had gone missing from the Columbia, Missouri, area. Last seen at a convenience store off Interstate 70. She fit the victim profile. The age was right; the general look was right. The specific details were wrong.
    The date was wrong.
    Kovac continued to spend his evenings looking at pictures of dead girls on the Internet. Every night the last girl he looked at was Rose Ellen Reiser.

12
    Was she seeing the resemblance because she wanted it to be Rose? Or was she noticing the discrepancies because she
didn’t
want it to be Rose?
    Jeannie found herself sitting at her computer at three in the morning, staring at the composite sketch of New Year’s Doe. If hell would be defined as finding out her daughter had been murdered, then surely this was purgatory.
    Around five A.M. she went into her daughter’s bedroom, sat on the bed, and held Rose’s big teddy bear as she looked all around. Her child’s childhood was all around her. Photographs. Figurines. A trophy from a spelling bee. So many memories.
    She didn’t want to know her child was dead, but the idea of Rose all alone, her body lying in a morgue somewhere surrounded by strangers . . .
    At eight A.M. she picked up the phone with a trembling hand and a heavy heart, and dialed the number for the Minneapolis Police Department, Homicide Division, and asked for Sergeant Kovac.

13
    The NCIC missing persons report for Rose Ellen Reiser had been made on the seventh of January, the day Jeannie Reiser had been passed off from the St. Louis PD to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. That date had mistakenly been entered as the date of the last known sighting of Jeannie Reiser’s daughter. Jeannie Reiser had never seen the report because it went to a website accessed by authorized personnel only.
    A clerical error had left a mother in limbo for more than a month. That was Kovac’s way of looking at it.
    Jeannie looked at it and saw a month of unnecessary torment, but also as a month without the absolute finality of death. As much as she had wanted to know what had happened to her daughter, the deepest truth was that she hadn’t truly wanted to know
this
, that Rose had been tortured and abused, that she had died terrified and alone with her murderer.
    Detective Kovac had initially tried to give Jeannie reasons his New Year’s Doe probably wasn’t Rose. But those reasons had quickly eroded in the face of the truth. His victim and her daughter had suffered the exact same two injuries as children. They had the exact same body piercings. They each had the exact same tiny mole behind their left