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Deborah, a part-time teacher, was near panic. "He basically told us that it was no big deal, that Kristen was just one more runaway, and that postponing the search for another few days wouldn't make a difference." Robert said he felt sick to his stomach. "I just thought, This can't be happening."Driven by the belief that every minute counted, the Modafferis began the search for their daughter on their own. They went straight from the police station to the two-story stucco house Kristen had rented on Jayne Avenue. A family photograph and a letter from Kristen's younger sister sat undisturbed by her bed. Clothes still hung on the line out back where she'd left them to dry. They talked to her housemates, trying to learn what they could of Kristen's routines in her new city. Their daughter had packed her days with mini-adventures. She'd rise early, throw on high-top sneakers, and head out to work, afterward exploring ethnic neighborhoods, beaches, art galleries. She'd registered for belly-dancing lessons at the local YMCA. "She was looking for something bigger than what she had in Charlotte," says Allison, Kristen's older and closest sister. "She would call and tell us she was learning about life. I was jealous. If I'd had the money, I would have gone with her."
Kristen's parents returned to the police station first thing Monday and spent the morning trying to convince detectives that Kristen wasn't some drug-crazed runaway, but rather a hard-working, determined young woman. Their desperate pleas eventually won over Officer Patrick Mahanay, a bear of a man who was new to the department's missing persons division. "It became clear," says Mahanay, who spoke first with Kristen's parents, and later to her sisters by phone, "that she had no reason to disappear on her own. She wouldn't have put her family through that."
By the end of the day, Mahanay had made a number of calls on the case. He interviewed Kristen's housemates. "They were forthright, helpful and all told consistent stories," says Mahanay. The investigator visited Spinelli's, where Kristen, clad in a black T-shirt and khakis, had worked an eight-hour shift, picked up her green Jansport backpack, and walked through the restaurant's doors into the crowded adjacent Crocker Galleria Mall.
Mahanay, assisted by Sgt. John Bradley, a veteran investigator in the division, ran background checks on Kristen's co-workers, who offered as many ideas about where she might have gone that day as Kristen had places to go. One said the bubbly student was headed to the beach at Land's End. Another said she planned to go straight home to Oakland. And a third said he thought he'd seen her outside the restaurant, standing on the second floor of the mall, chatting with a blond woman.
Mahanay brought in a bloodhound, which picked up Kristen's scent at Spinelli's and six miles away at Sutro Baths, a picturesque inlet near Land's End filled with rock formations and caves. Based on the bloodhound's clues, Mahanay followed a trail that placed Kristen at the beach and gave less credence to the possibility that she'd returned home. The only problem was that the beach trail ended on a rocky promenade overlooking the Pacific. Mahanay called in U.S. Parks police and the Coast Guard to scour the area. But they turned up nothing.
"You keep hoping," says Mahanay, "that she's off somewhere trying to find herself. But the circumstances described a girl who had not disappeared willingly." She'd even left behind a $400 paycheck at Spinelli's. "The indication was that there was foul play."
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