Six years ago, joggers in St. Paul’s Crosby Farm Park found the body of Eleanora Abrams floating at the edge of the Mississippi River, snagged in a fallen cottonwood tree. She had been missing for three days, having disappeared from a bar on Halloween night. Still wearing the sexy nurse costume, she was assumed to have gone into the river on the same night that she disappeared. The lead detective from the case had retired, so Niki sat alone in the St. Paul Homicide Unit as she culled through the reports.

Abrams had been a sophomore at the University of Minnesota, living in an apartment with Paula Schmidt, her best friend from high school. The two women had gone out dancing the night that Eleanora disappeared, getting into a club using doctored IDs because they were only twenty years old at the time.

Just before midnight, a camera at the entrance showed a man dressed in a pirate costume escorting a tipsy Eleanora out of the club, his broad-brimmed hat covering his face as he passed. Footage from earlier in the evening caught a glimpse of the man’s face, but it had been at such a distance that all they could ascertain was that the man was Caucasian and had a beard—whether that beard was real or part of the costume, they couldn’t tell.

Paula swore that Eleanora wasn’t the type of girl to wander off like that. She would never just up and leave a club without telling someone. And she wouldn’t go off with a man she had just met. Yet Paula didn’t report Eleanora missing until the next day, just in case she had done one of the very things that Paula swore she wouldn’t do.

The medical examiner didn’t rule the case a homicide at the time because she found no clear evidence of foul play. There had been sexual activity with borderline trauma, but there was no way to know whether the sex had been consensual or not. The lead detective had the foresight to request a screen for date-rape drugs, and they found GHB in her system, levels on the cusp of what could occur naturally in a dead body. The roommate swore that Eleanora—Ellie, as Paula called her—never took liquid ecstasy. Still, the medical examiner concluded that the GHB levels proved nothing definitive.

They found no defensive wounds, no ligature marks, and she was fully dressed. The cause of death was drowning, and the water in her lungs came from the river. Her body had been badly damaged postmortem, which led to the belief that she had gone into the river upstream of St. Anthony Falls. Interviews with friends, classmates, and family found no enemies or suspicious stalking activity. And none of them could identify the man in the pirate costume.