Excerpt from Winter Flower
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General) North American (US Midwest- Chicago, Great Lakes)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Brenna would be 18 soon if she was alive. I finally made my way into the shower. I thrust the past out of my mind, trying to concentrate on nothing more than the water beating against my skin head finally clear, I stepped out of the shower and write off, then dressed in jeans and a T shirt. I wouldn't be going out today. Honestly, I hadn't worked that hard to find a job, because every day after Colin Sam left, I worked on the computer searching. Today, I would push that off a little because I planned to get a look at Sam's computer. I was no technophile, but I'd learned enough about computers to check his history and cookies. I didn't find anything. No cookies on the computer, no history in the Web browser, which meant that Sam had cleared everything before leaving for school. Not a good sign. If I had found some random websites in there, I guess that would be fine. But nothing that meant he was hiding something. I sighed, shut the computer down and walked out into the living room, still broiling in there. I sat down on the couch and opened my aging laptop. The battery no longer functioned, so I had to keep it plugged in all the time and one of the keys had broken off, but it still worked. We weren't likely to be able to afford another one for a long time. Once it booted up, I started my daily search. I started with public arrest records. After two years, the Onley way I could stay alive was to have hope she was still alive. But I have learned so much, so many horrible things about what happened to 16 year old girls who ran away or were abducted. If she still lived one day, she might turn up in these records, arrested for jaywalking or theft or worse. Ah, thin hope. But it was hope. Not long after she disappeared, I'd learned of the teeming markets that existed online for women, dozens of sites where you could pick a city, any city and shop for a woman or a girl. Men who called themselves mongers or hobbyist, even operated review websites and discussion boards where they would discuss how a particular woman behaved or what she was willing to do. Today I found nothing. No new records nothing with her name on it. Earlier this year, I'd had a terrifying moment when an arrest record for prostitution turned up in Detroit with her name on it. I had contacted the National Crime Information Center and the Detroit Police Department. It turned out to be another girl, a different girl, someone else's child, someone else who was lost from there. I moved on. This was the difficult part. Every day I picked a different city, mostly focusing on the larger ones, because that's where the market for young teenage girls existed. Craig's list Once and back page and worse. I read the headlines and looked at the pictures, toe curling. Highly skilled, $60 in call. 18 years old. Busty, tantalizing blonde out calls 20 Brunette college girl. Let me be your fantasy. 1 80 an hour. Scanning through the pictures, I saw hundreds of girls and women. Some of them were undoubtedly still Children, though all of them claim to be a least 18. I looked into their faces and their eyes, and whenever I came across one close to my daughter's age and build, I'd peer into their faces if they weren't blurred out. This one was it her? I tried to picture her at 18 and match her features up to the pictures. I'd learned the patterns in the big cities like Atlanta and New York and Washington. The girls were younger, dressed more provocatively and charged less. The Asian girls worked in massage parlors mostly, and the young white girls worked hotels and out calls and sometimes the street. I spent two years researching the fates of missing girls, and I still couldn't look at it. Think about it. Envision it without horror, catching my throat. The statistics were harsh, horrifying, impersonal until you realized each one was a person. 2300 Americans reported missing every day, and all but a small fraction were Children. Half of those were family abductions. Many more were runaways. Only a tiny fraction were stranger abductions. But the stranger abductions had a pattern. Ah, few 100 Each year, nearly all were young women ages 12 to 17. Just like Brenna, most were abducted by men, virtually all of them sexually assaulted. I knew the numbers. Far too many of these girls ended up abused or dead