Free Missing Persons by Clare O'Donohue Page B

road. Hearing him again left me shaking.
    I wondered for a moment why his phone was still working. Then I remembered we still shared a plan, so I was the one who would have to cancel it. Vera had the last “I love you” and I had the phone company.
    “This sucks,” I yelled. “This fucking sucks.” I slammed my fists on the steering wheel, accidentally hitting the horn and beeping at a woman walking her dog.
    “I’m sorry,” I said to her. She smiled a little but turned her dog around and started walking in the opposite direction.
    “Why did you leave me, Frank?” I asked the dark sky. Even as I posed the question I wasn’t sure which time I was talking about.

Seventeen
    “I ’m here to see Detective Rosenthal,” I said.
    It was eight fifteen a.m. and already almost eighty degrees. Chicago weather is like that, so cold in the winter that tears freeze on your face, so hot in the summer that everything, including your brain, turns into a puddle. Andres and Victor had picked me up at my house. Driving together would make things easier since we were hitting more than one location in the day. I’d left them to haul lights and other equipment out of the van, while I went from the heat into the overly air-conditioned Ninth Police District. I spent the next several minutes trying to get the attention of a receptionist at the missing persons division.
    “Excuse me,” I said louder. “I’m here to see Detective Rosenthal.”
    “I’ll call her,” the receptionist said, making it clear she was doing me the biggest favor of my life.
    Finally a tall, thin, thirtysomething woman came toward me from another room. “I’m Yvette Rosenthal,” she said. “You must be Kate.”
    When Andres and Victor arrived with the equipment, Rosenthal showed us options for the interview and Andres and I picked the conference room. Technically on a shoot, I’m the boss, but if the camera person is really good, like Andres, it’s a shared responsibility, more like sixty-forty, with the producer in the lead. I get the extra points because, among other things, I decide when to break for lunch.
    “It’s going to take us about an hour,” Andres said to me, which was code for “Kate, get her out of here so we don’t have to chitchat while we work.”
    I touched Rosenthal’s arm. “I’d like to grab a cup of coffee and go over some of the details of the interview while we wait.”
    “Perfect.” She led me toward a small eating area the detectives shared. “The coffee is strong, if you like it that way.”
    “Fine with me.”
    Even when the interview subject isn’t the family member of a victim, the bonding experience is a little awkward. It’s the “I’m a person, you’re a person” part, where they see I’m not intimidating and begin to feel, without my actually saying it, that I will make them look good. I don’t actually say it because I don’t always make them look good.
    Detective Rosenthal would have nothing to worry about, though. True-crime shows are usually tipped in favor of law enforcement. If she was also a mom or had devoted some of her off-hours to the case, it would only sweeten the image I was trying to create.
    We sat at a small orange table with an open package of doughnuts on it. I avoided mentioning the cliché and just sipped my coffee.
    “You must do this all the time,” she said.
    “I work on a lot of different kinds of shows,” I told her. “I’ve done a lot of true crime, but it’s mostly homicides. This is my first missing person.”
    “They’re tough. I came here from homicide two years ago, and I never get used to it.”
    “Theresa’s mom thinks her daughter is being held captive.”
    She nodded. “I think the only way she’s holding it together is because she believes she’ll see Theresa alive again.”
    “She won’t, will she?”
    Rosenthal took a deep breath, slowly letting the air leave her lungs. “I doubt it,” she finally said. “It’s been too long. We don’t