stomach cancer, and Dennis was declining so rapidly that the wedding date had been moved, so he could be there. John and Hillary had wanted a summertime wedding, but it was more important to them to have John’s father there. Dennis was in hospice and not expected to live long.
Cari and her father were very close, and it hurt her to see him so sick. She took Max to see his grandfather as often as possible, and they put on cheerful faces to make the visits pleasant for the dying man. Everyone knew that this wedding could be the last time the family was together.
After the Tuesday text announcement about Cari changing jobs, there was no more word from her. Nancy repeatedly tried to call her. “We needed to know when she was going to pick up Max.” Cari and Max had planned to drive to Des Moines, Iowa, for the wedding. They were to go to the rehearsal dinner Friday, spend the night in the hotel Cari had reserved, and attend the wedding on Saturday. “I was getting really concerned,” Nancy says. “Friday came, and we hadn’t heard from her.”
While Cari’s father made it to the rehearsal dinner, he was too sick to attend the wedding. Both Dennis and Cari’s absences were disturbing to the family. Dennis’s absence they understood, but Cari’s made no sense. Where was she? Had she been in an accident? Max was especially troubled, and throughout the wedding and reception, he found himself repeatedly turning to look at the door, willing his mother to walk through with a reasonable explanation as to why she was so late and why she hadn’t been in touch.
Not only did Cari miss the wedding, she didn’t show up for a baby shower she was expected to host and failed to alert the expectant mother, her close friend, Amber Jones. She’d said nothing to Amber about postponing or canceling the shower. All that week, Nancy waited near her phone. Surely, she would hear from Cari any minute. But the minutes dragged on, melting into hours and then days. “I had feelings all that week that something was terribly wrong. By Friday, I decided something was definitely wrong, and we reported her missing.”
An officer from the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office came to Nancy’s house and took down the information, but it was obvious he didn’t share her sense of urgency. The fact Cari had missed a baby shower and wedding and hadn’t talked to her mother for a few days didn’t register as serious as far as he was concerned. He pointed out she was a grown woman and didn’t need to check in with her mother. If Cari chose to take a trip without telling anyone, then that was her choice. Nancy told him that of course she knew Cari had a right to take off, but she hadn’t done that. “It was really frustrating,” Nancy stresses. “I knew something had happened to my daughter, but the police wouldn’t believe me.”
While maternal instinct is the most powerful of intuitions, it’s not unusual for a mother’s concerns to be ignored. Cari’s mother was not the first woman in the throes of panic to be politely dismissed by those in a position to help. Nancy could tell by the way the officer’s eyes glazed over that he thought she was paranoid, and maybe a bit of a nut. She wished it were true. She would have given anything to be proven wrong.
CHAPTER SIX
IT WOULD BE A VERY LONG TIME before investigators seriously considered Nancy’s fears, and a very long time before they scrutinized Cari’s Facebook activity and became aware of the significance of the message exchange between the missing woman and Sam Carter’s pages. In the interim, the conversation might as well have taken place in a vacuum. It unfolded in private mailboxes and couldn’t be viewed by Facebook “friends.”
At first glance, it appeared so ordinary it sounded like a million other Facebook exchanges. In answer to Cari’s November 12 question asking if she knew him, Sam Carter’s message two days later explained they’d attended Iowa Western Community College together. The response from Cari’s page said simply, I remember you. Despite his alleged college education, Sam’s reply contained a blatant grammar error: You still as pretty.
His spelling was as bad as his grammar, investigators would note when they saw the misspelling of Macedonia. Detectives would also notice that Cari had rejected a friend request from someone named Amber Mildo, just a week