The Christmas gifts Mary Jane McCann bought for her 16-year-old daughter remain unwrapped in a cardboard box under a small billiard table in the basement: The Office DVD game. An iTunes gift card. A doll based on the children's Madeline book series - her secret bridge between youthful innocence and fledgling adulthood.
Annie McCann isn't here to see her presents, or to help set up the tree, or help her mom make the turkey stuffing.
The Virginia teenager was found dead in Baltimore on Nov. 2 in a lot by a trash bin in a public housing complex between the Inner Harbor and Fells Point. Her car was parked five blocks away. Three days before, police found a note on a pile of books in her bedroom saying she had run away, pleading "to please let me be free."
More than a month later, the case remains a mystery. Her mother, Mary Jane, and father, Daniel, say they have no idea why their daughter left home. They use the words "apparently ran away" or "allegedly ran away" - unconvinced she left of her own volition and convinced she was killed.
"Somebody got to my daughter," Daniel McCann says.
An autopsy has failed to reveal a cause of death, and more tests are pending. She had a bruise on her forehead, but police say it wasn't enough to kill her.
Her cell phone had only a handful of calls - to her father, her brother in college in Ithaca, N.Y., and to a friend who lived down the street. Police are still analyzing her computers for clues.
There are too many unanswered questions.
The McCanns have hired a private investigator. They search the Internet looking for clues. They discovered that another teen ran away from Fairfax County and was found dead in Burtonsville. A coincidence? Probably. But a father wonders. "I've solved this case five times," he says. "You wouldn't believe the suspects I've rounded up."
He is hesitant about disclosing what he's been told by authorities - his wife calls city homicide detectives "angels disguised as police" - and they would only say they learned encouraging news from investigators on the evening I visited last week.
Police told me later they still have no idea how Annie died or what she was doing in Baltimore.
