Angie frowned at the mug shot. “Molly Collins. Yes, I remember her. Vulnerable kid from a broken home, her mother known to police. Collins left her home after a fight with her mother one night about three years ago, September 2015. She went to buy drugs from her dealer at a gas station down the road from her house; next thing she was found lying concussed in the middle of the road near the waterfront at around 4:00 a.m. She’d been violently sexually assaulted.”
His brows crooked up. “You, like, remember dates and faces of alls your cases and everything?”
“I wish I didn’t.”
“MVPD never nailed the guy,” he said.
Angie studied the image of Molly Collins, her mood darkening. “No,” she said quietly. “We never arrested anyone. Collins had been high at the time of her attack. She recalled little to nothing once she sobered up and came round fully. The only information she could provide was that her attacker was big and had been wearing coveralls with some kind of company logo on the chest pocket. He drove a white van with the same company logo on the side. She was assaulted in the back of the van, and when her attacker started to drive off, she somehow managed to get out of the back doors while the van was moving. Six months after that incident, she was found dead from an overdose.” Angie paused. “Why the questions?”
“Last December Annelise Janssen allegedly vanished from the university campus.”
“Allegedly? It was where she was last seen.”
“Until a call comes into the station yesterday. Some dude says he thinks he saw Janssen around 3:00 a.m.—a full ten hours after the campus sighting.”
Angie listened intently as Holgersen described what the new witness had claimed.
“And now that this dude’s wife has left him anyways,” Holgersen said, “he came forward because what he saw has been haunting him all these months. He feels sick about the idea that had he come forward and said something at the time, it might have helped us find Janssen. Maybe alive.”
“No fucking kidding. You ... think these are connected—Annelise Janssen’s disappearance and the Molly Collins assault?”
Holgersen scraped up the last morsels from his ninja bowl and delivered the dregs to his mouth. “Could be,” he said around his food. “Given the white Mercedes van.”
“There’s a white Mercedes delivery van on every second street corner, Holgersen.”
“Yeah, but there was this other case on the mainland in November 2002. A young woman vanishes off the streets in the Downtown Eastside. Some street worker thinks she saw this woman getting into a white Merc van with a logo on the side. Then in 2009 a young woman vanishes near Blaine in Washington State. Her car had broken down on the highway. The working hypothesis at the time was that she probably flagged down a vehicle for help and was abducted. She was never seen again. Big call for information went out. Cops handed out flyers at road stops. Posters were put up at the border on both the American and Canadian sides. Finally someone who drives that border route regularly comes forward and says he saw the breakdown, and he saw a woman waving down a white van. The vehicle was stopping, so he drove on, thinking she had help. The van model was a Merc, and it had a graphic on the side. The witnessthinksit had BC plates.”
Angie regarded him steadily, a familiar hot rush rising in her chest. “A serial?” she said.
“Maybe.”
“How’d you realize a white Mercedes van was involved in those other unsolved cases?”
“Ran the new Janssen information by our crime analyst. White van pops up as a link. The shit them computers can do these days.”
“You’ve got an analyst?”
“Boss man brought one in to help us look at a bunch of cold cases. Janssen was one of the files I picked up first.”
“So Maddocks has you working cold cases?”
“New focus or something. Part of iMIT. He’s got me and Leo in our own little unit looking at a whole bunch of unsolved shit. The directive comes from brass and police board, and there’s new money for it, apparently. They wants to ramp solve rates. Janssen’s father has also been laying pressure on the new mayor. Daddy Janssen’s got clout.”
“Yeah, money has clout. Fuck all the less privileged women who’ve gone missing. I don’t see why you brought this to me. Apart from being an excuse to check on me.”
And remind me I’m no longer part of the team.
“You remember anything else about the Molly Collins case?”
“I filed all my reports. My notes are there, too. You have access to everything there is at the station.” She pushed her chair back, irritated now because the bug had bitten her, and her hands were tied—she could do nothing about this case. It was like dangling a carrot in front of her nose, just out of reach, before yanking it away again. Just to remind her she once was a cop, and now she was not.
“Thank Maddocks for breakfast,” she said as she came to her feet. She unhooked her coat from the back of her chair and shrugged into it. But as she began to walk away, Angie paused. She turned back to face Holgersen. “Did anyone else give a description of this logo? Was it the same on the other vans?”
“It was a dark, kinda boxy, stylized image is alls I gots. That much seemed consistent. Obviously nothing immediately recognizable like a Coca-Cola or MacD’s logo or anything.”
She held his eyes for a moment. “Good luck, Holgersen. And get some sleep. You look like shit.”
He grinned. “Yeah, you toos, Pallorino.”
