By the time the missing girl emerges from her best friend's bathroom, the sun is up and the coffee's cold.
Jason Ryan
Before Mackenzie Foss moved from Minnesota to Flower Mound, she and the missing girl were best friends. Their friendship continued in Texas until Foss' dad, Shelby, unearthed the truth.
Mark Kartarik
Kenzie was staying with her aunt Lisa (above) when she disappeared for the last time.
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The pale 16-year-old is skinnier than in the photos, and her long, blonde-dyed-brown hair is now bright purple and tied in pigtails that fall over the shaved sides of her scalp. She's wearing a black tank, tattered Vans and flared jeans. She strides to the door of her friend's tony home in Flower Mound, clenching the day's first Marlboro Red.
I spring from the red ottoman into a half crouch, mirroring the 100-pound greyhound beside me. The girl — everyone calls her "Kenzie" — stops, turns, nods. She's made me.
"How's it going, journalist?"
Her drawl is surprisingly deep, confident.
"How're you doing?" I answer.
It's been just over a month since I got the email from the panicked Minnesota dad: His little girl was missing, he said. Had been since December. She was with a 27-year-old man from the Dallas area, he said, and he could prove it 10 times over. But while his daughter's face had been plastered on missing posters and there was an outstanding warrant for the arrest of the man she was with, no one, the dad said, was looking for her. Could you please help?
It didn't take long to realize the dad was right — no one was looking — and that given the dad's history with his daughter, maybe there was a reason the girl ran. Then, a month later, in the middle of a Wednesday night during the first week of May, I received a text message. It was from the father of the missing girl's best friend, who happened to live in the suburbs of Dallas. He'd picked up Kenzie in the middle of the night — found her at a Home Depot in Irving with two bags of clothes, a cat she found on the side of the road and a puppy she found on Craigslist. Now she was at his house in Flower Mound.
He planned to drive her to the Flower Mound police station first thing the next morning, he said. But first he wanted to tell someone that she was alive. Knowing I'd been looking into the girl's whereabouts, he decided to tell me. Which is why I'm here, not long after sun-up, sipping coffee on his ottoman as the missing girl emerges from his bathroom.
Kenzie moves toward the door. In about five minutes she'll climb into the family SUV and light one more cigarette, her last as a runaway, and surrender herself to the authorities, most likely to be sent back to the family from which she fled. But for now, she's free.
"I'm all right," she says. Smirking, she turns again, opens the front door, and walks out.
Nine hundred and twenty miles directly north of Flower Mound is Marshall, Minnesota, a small town of about 13,500 people. The closest true city, Sioux Falls, is two hours away, in South Dakota. An ocean of corn and soybean laps against Marshall's borders, inside of which are the bare essentials: one elementary, middle and high school, a 24/7 Walmart, a small movie theatre, Varsity Pub, ubiquitous fast-food chains, a bowling alley and the Mustangs of Southwest Minnesota State University.
The town also is home to Schwan's Food Company, a $4.2 billion corporation that employs a large chunk of the population, including for a time Kenzie's father, 37-year-old Jeremy. He made his life in the small town, as did his parents before him and their parents before them. The town mourned when his wife, a local girl herself, took her own life several years back, leaving him alone with his daughter, Kenzie.
Kenzie was outgoing but also an outsider, never belonging to a clique, friends and family say. She played the cello and was friends with the gay boys and anime geeks. She was rebellious, but she hadn't taken to the alcohol or cigarettes that were pandemic among the Marshall youth. She was pretty, with icy blonde hair and blue doe eyes peering from behind glasses, but she deflected boys' advances, which were rare.
"She was like me, I guess," says her best friend, a fellow Mackenzie who, to avoid confusion, went by her last name, Foss. They met in eighth grade and discovered they had the same sense of humor and both listened to obscure metal bands such as Birthday Massacre. They also spent a lot of time online. By the summer before high school, they were holding regular sleepovers, during which they amused themselves by co-hosting live Internet shows on blogTV.
"We did musical shows and kind of sang," Foss recalls. They took requests, often Eminem songs, and they were a relative hit, sometimes attracting 1,000 viewers at once. They even had subscribers.
One of those subscribers was named Kristopher Crawford. The three of them bonded and sometimes video chatted. "He was funny," Foss says. "He was just a strange character. Just the tone of his voice. He added 's' to the end of everything. Even when he was speaking to one Mackenzie, he would say Kenziessss." It was a child's syntax, weird for a 27-year-old man, although Crawford told Kenzie he was younger.
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