The 1st Victim by Tami Hoag Page B

was difficult to get his brain to accept that this was a real human being he was looking at and not some Halloween prop. She lay like a broken doll, limbs at unnatural angles to the body. Young, he thought, looking at her arm and hand—the smooth skin, the blue nail polish. Several of the fingernails were broken. A couple were torn nearly off. There were cuts and scrapes on the knuckles, indicative of defensive wounds. She had fought. Whoever had done this to her, she had fought.
    Good for you, honey,
he thought.
I hope you did some damage.
    She was naked from the waist down. The left leg was badly broken. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and throat. The top she wore was torn and drenched in blood.
    Who hated you this much?
Kovac wondered.
Who did you piss off so badly that they would do this to you?
    “Any ID on the body, Steve?” Liska asked.
    “Nope.”
    “Great.”
    Kovac straightened to his feet, knees and back protesting. Even the fluid in his joints was freezing.
    “What time is it?” Liska asked.
    He checked his watch. “Eleven fifty-three. Why?”
    “I want this year to be over.”
    They had started the year just a few miles from where they were standing, New Year’s Day, on a callout to a dead body, a young woman who had been brutally murdered, her body chucked out of a vehicle into a ditch. No ID. A Jane Doe. Their first of the year. The press had dubbed her “New Year’s Doe.” It had taken weeks before they were able to match their unidentified body with a missing persons report out of Missouri. The case remained open.
    And here they were, twelve months later, standing over the body of a murdered female with no ID. The ninth Jane Doe of the year.
    Doe cases generally got names fairly quickly. They often turned out to be transients, people on the fringes of society, people who had minor criminal records and could be ID’d from their fingerprints or were matched to local or regional missing persons reports. Their deaths were related to their high-risk lifestyles. They died of drug overdoses or suicide or because they pissed off the wrong thug. But this year had been different. This year, of their now nine Jane Doe victims, three had fit a very troubling pattern.
    Jane Doe 01-11 had turned out to be an eighteen-year-old Kansas girl, Rose Ellen Reiser. A college student, she had been abducted December 29 outside a convenience store in Columbia, Missouri, just off Interstate 70 while on her way back to school in St. Louis.
    Jane Doe 04-11—found on the Fourth of July—had eventually been identified as a twenty-three-year-old mother of one from Des Moines, Iowa, who had gone missing while jogging in a park near Interstate 35 on July first.
    A Jane Doe found Labor Day weekend had yet to be identified. The body had been found near the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, making it a case for the St. Paul PD, but the obvious similarities to the two prior cases in Kovac’s jurisdiction had earned him a phone call to consult.
    He had dubbed the killer Doc Holiday, a name that had stuck not only with the Minneapolis cops but also with detectives in agencies throughout the Midwest where young women had been abducted or their bodies had been found—always on or around a holiday, always near an interstate highway. Over the months, it had become clear that the Midwest had a serial killer cruising the highways.
    “She came out of the trunk of a car,” Liska said.
    The prevailing theory was that Doc Holiday was a long-haul trucker. The serial killer’s dream job. His chamber of horrors ran on wheels. He could snatch a victim in one city and dump her in another with no one questioning his movements. Victims were readily available all along his route.
    “So he’s a traveling salesman,” Kovac said. “I don’t care what he’s driving.”
    He cared that he was standing over another young woman who would never have the chance to become an old woman. Whoever this girl was, she would never have a career, get