Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery by Lisa Pulitzer, Cole Thompson

cold slap.
    “What do you mean she didn’t get on the plane?”
    Jodi related what the chaperones down on Aruba had told her. Natalee hadn’t returned to her hotel room after a night out at a bar. Her three roommates were frantic. Natalee was missing.
    “Pull over!” Beth directed. She needed to call Jug. George “Jug” Twitty was Beth’s second husband, and Natalee’s stepfather. The couple had married in 2000, when Natalee was in the eighth grade.
    Twitty was a large, rugged man with bushy salt-and-pepper hair and a cleft chin who looked like he could have played college football in his youth. He was the manager of an Alabama metals company that distributed steel and other materials used in construction, and had invited his pretty strawberry-blond bride and her two children, Natalee and Matt, to move in with him after the wedding.
    Jug had two children of his own, George Jr. and Megan, who were several years older than Natalee and her brother. The four children got along well, and there was plenty of room for everyone in his stately red brick Mountain Brook home. While Jug was a successful businessman, his home was modest compared to some of his neighbors.
    The nearly all-white bedroom community was a maze of streets lined with grand homes and carefully manicured lawns. People who lived outside the wealthy enclave jokingly referred to it as “the tiny kingdom” because of the disparity of wealth between Mountain Brook and the rest of Birmingham.
    “Jug, something’s happened to Natalee. I need your help,” Beth pleaded. She told her husband she wanted to get down to Aruba immediately and asked if he could arrange a charter flight.
    At first, Jug thought his wife was overreacting, just being a nervous mother. “She probably just missed the flight,” he told her.
    But Beth was insistent. “You know Natalee, she’s never been late for anything. Something’s wrong.”
    “I’ll see what I can do.”
    Hanging up with Jug, Beth and her two friends dialed anyone they could think of who might have access to a plane. But it was Monday of Memorial Day weekend and many of the private pilots had already had a few beers at backyard barbecues, rendering them unable to fly. As the women made their calls, Linda continued to drive but was so upset that her driving was becoming erratic.
    “Let me take the wheel!” Beth insisted. Ignoring the posted speed limits, Natalee’s mother raced toward Birmingham. The crumbling red soil of cotton and soybean fields filled the side windows, the few trees along the shoulder a tangle of green, strangled by kudzu, an invasive Asian vine. Steering wheel in one hand, cell phone in the other, Beth fielded calls from Natalee’s friends who were at the airport and about to board their flight. She learned that her daughter was last seen at a bar called Carlos’n Charlie’s.
    Hearing that, Beth grew even more alarmed. She had spoken to Natalee about this very place in the days before her departure. Beth had been told by one of the Mountain Brook students who had been on a previous trip to Aruba of local men who trawled the bar, targeting tourist girls and luring them out of the nightspot.
    Beth listened in horror as one of the students told her that Natalee had climbed into a silver or gray Honda with a person from Holland whom she had met at a casino. It was almost too much to process. She needed to get to that island. Pressing harder on the gas pedal, Beth gunned the engine. Not wanting to endanger anyone else on the road, she dialed 911 and asked for a police escort. “I’m doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour in the left lane,” she said, reading out her location to the dispatcher.
    Natalee’s brother, Matt, had received the news as well. Convinced that something horrible had happened to his big sister, he called his mother and advised her to call the FBI, feeding her telephone numbers for the various offices as she raced down the highway.
    Dialing number after number, Beth