Cold Cold Heart (30 page)

I just came
to get my stuff,” John said. He couldn't tell if he was whispering or shouting. His ears were still ringing from the noise of the gun in the close quarters of the shed.

He sat on the tailgate of his truck, watching as the EMTs loaded his father into the ambulance. John had tried to minimize the severity of his own wounds. While he was pretty sure the bullet had fractured his collarbone and had drilled a nasty trench through the flesh and muscle along the top of his shoulder, he told the EMT it was “just a graze” and could wait for attention. The wound was ugly but not fatal. He held a thick gauze pad against it to absorb the last of the blood. The pressure kept the throbbing to a minimum.

Unable to quite take a deep breath, he knew his ribs were badly bruised if not broken. He thought his nose was busted and possibly the orbital bone around his right eye where his father had backhanded him with the gun. The eye was nearly swollen shut. The cut the gun's sight had sliced across his cheek would need glue.

But worst was the constant pounding inside his skull from the blows he had taken, jarring his already damaged brain. He had to fight to keep his focus on the task at hand. Nausea curdled his stomach.

“You're sure you want to do this now, John?” Tim Carver asked
again. “I can run you to the ER and we can take your statement later.”

“I'm fine.”

Carver's eyebrows sketched upward. “Fine might be a stretch. But you've still got all your teeth in your head, which is more than we can say for your old man.”

John wanted this interview over before anything else happened. He wanted the cops to hear it from his lips before they heard his father's version. He would walk them through it step-by-step and blow by blow if he had to because he could already imagine his old man fabricating a tale of his own self-defense with his son as the aggressor. He was going to end up wishing he'd killed the son of a bitch after all.

The yard was lit up like Christmas with the strobe lights on the ambulance and half a dozen Liddell County Sheriff's Office cruisers and unmarked cars. They had already set up a bunch of portable halogen lights on stands in and around the shed. John had told them about the skeleton in the barrel. They would probably be here for a day or more to process the scene.

The dog lay right beside him on the bed of the truck, big head down on his outstretched front legs, watching the scene with intelligent eyes.

“I thought you said that wasn't your dog,” Carver said.

John shrugged with his good shoulder. “Guess I was wrong.”

“So you came to get your stuff,” the detective prompted. Tubman. Wrapped against the night chill in a heavy trench coat, he was the size of a small refrigerator. He swiveled his belly in John's direction, turning away from the scene in the yard. He looked over at the house, at the back door, which was hanging cockeyed on broken hinges, the wood doorframe splintered. “And the old man wouldn't let you in?”

“He wasn't here. He was at the Roadside drinking his dinner. That's why I came back when I did. He had locked me out.”

“So you kicked the door in. That's breaking and entering.”

“I just wanted my stuff.”

“You could have asked us to help you with that, John,” Carver said.

“Well, I didn't.”

“So how did you end up in the shed?” Tubman asked.

“My stuff wasn't in the house. I figured he locked it up in the shed, 'cause that's what he'd do.”

“So you broke into the shed, too.”

“I just wanted my stuff!” John said again, aggravated. “It's okay for him to steal from me, but I can't take my own stuff back?”

“You can't destroy property to do it,” Tubman said.

“He fucking tried to kill me!”

“He shot at an intruder,” Tubman countered.

“He knew it was me!”

“In a dark shed?”

“With my truck sitting right here,” John said. “And him knowing he locked my shit up in that shed. He knew damn well it was me! He said, ‘I told you never to come in this shed.' Who else would he say that to?”

“And we saw the other night how the two of you treat each other,” Tubman said. “I would have taken a gun with me, too, if I was him.”

“And shot your own kid for going in a shed to get his own stuff?”

“Him being your father didn't stop you beating his face in with a spade.”

“He shot me!” John shouted, incredulous, pain exploding through his head. “And if I'm the bad guy, why didn't I finish him off?” he asked. “Why didn't I just fucking kill him and be done with it? Then my story would be the only story. Why didn't I do that?”

Christ knew he had wanted to. If he'd had a dollar for every time in his life he had wished the old man dead . . .

“'Cause I'm
not
him—that's why!” he shouted, as much for himself as for the detective. “I'm
not
him!”

Tim Carver intervened. John hadn't realized he had moved toward the detective until Carver's palm hit his chest and stopped him, keeping him from coming off the tailgate of the truck.

The dog jumped to its feet, growling.

“Let's all calm down here,” Carver said, one eye on the dog as he took a step back. “It's pretty clear to me John didn't shoot himself. He didn't pistol-whip himself in the face. I think we can all agree a struggle ensued. Right?”

“He knew I saw what was in that barrel,” John said. In his mind's eye flashed the image of the skull staring out at him through the ragged side of the rusty steel drum, the crowning piece on a pile of bones that had once been a human being.

“Any idea who that might be?” Tubman asked.

John didn't answer. He knew the only name that came to their minds was Casey Grant. And they already believed he had killed her. It was his luck that he might have just given them the evidence to prove them right.

Dana stared at
the television screen, riveted to the scene. Tim had gotten the call while they stood on the porch at the Grindstone—reports of a shooting at an address he had recognized as the Villante residence. The blond girl, Kimberly Kirk, was reporting, standing out at the edge of the road in front of the Villante property. Behind her, the scene was a circus of lights and activity. Sheriff's office vehicles were parked everywhere. Deputies in uniform and other personnel crisscrossed the yard, going back and forth to a long shed in the background.

“Sources close to the investigation are reporting the discovery of a human skeleton found inside a barrel in the building at the back of the property,” Kirk said. “Liddell County deputies first responded to a 911 call from the residence regarding a shooting, and we have confirmed that one person has been transported to Liddell Regional Medical Center, while a second man is being questioned in relation to the incident. The property is owned by John Villante Sr., a local mechanic.

“While it is, of course, too soon to speculate as to the possible identity of the skeleton, viewers may well remember the prime suspect in the disappearance of Shelby Mills High School graduate Casey Grant, seven years ago, was her onetime boyfriend and Shelby Mills High School standout athlete, John Villante Jr.”

“Well,” Roger said dryly, “looks like I'm off the hook for one murder, at least.”

Dana shot him a glare. “That isn't funny.”

“Roger,” her mother said with disapproval.

They stood in the kitchen, Roger and her mother just back from their evening festivities. Dana sat on the long table with her feet on a chair and her arms wrapped around herself against the internal chill of fear. Her mind was racing—thoughts, questions, and emotions tumbling over one another in a tumult. She kept trying to remind herself of the steps to take to slow it all down, but she couldn't seem to pass the second step before the emotions overwhelmed her.

A skeleton in a barrel. The idea brought a rush of terrible questions. Was it Casey? Casey, who was supposed to have met up with John the evening of the day she disappeared. He swore he hadn't seen her. He swore he hadn't hurt her—the girl he said had been cheating on him.

Dead inside a barrel in some long-forgotten shed. Had she been dead when she was put in the barrel? Or had she died inside of it? Had hours or days gone by with her awake and aware in the terrible stifling blackness, waiting for someone to save her? Waiting for death. Praying for death.

The mental images seemed to open a door on memories that consisted entirely of emotion: panic, terror, dread, desperation. Tears flooded her eyes and she began to shake.

Her mother was beside her in an instant, arms wrapped around her.

“That's enough! Roger, turn that off!”

Her voice sounded far away.

Dana felt as if the essence of her being had shrunk down to a small sphere floating deep inside the shell of her body. She was aware of her body climbing down from the table, walking beside her mother, still wrapped in her mother's embrace. They went together down the stairs, down the hall, past the crazed graffiti of the
timeline she had scribbled over the wall trying to answer the questions of her best friend's disappearance.

All for nothing,
she thought. The answer to the question was in a barrel in a shed a mile away. And she didn't have to wonder what her friend had suffered, because she knew firsthand. Even if she couldn't see the details in her memory, she felt them. She had survived them. Casey had not.

“We don't know that it's Casey,” her mother said. “We don't know that it's her.”

They sat on the bed in Dana's room. Dana curled into a ball against her mother's side, trembling violently, holding on to her mother as if she was her only anchor to reality, terrified that if she let go her mind would take her to a place she might not escape a second time—the madness that had tried to seduce her away from the pain and terror of her ordeal at the hands of a killer.

Nothing and no one had saved Casey.

An enormous wave of guilt came with that thought.

She cried for her friend. She cried for herself. She cried, lost in a sea of emotion, until she couldn't cry anymore.

Exhausted, she lay still, her head on her mother's shoulder, her mother's arms around her, her mother's voice coming to her as if from far away, singing a song from long, long ago.

“
Blackbird singing in the dead of night. Take these broken wings and learn to fly . . .
”

*   *   *

S
HE SLEPT THE SLE
EP
of the drugged. Her body felt too heavy to move even a finger. Even the images in her mind drifted in slow motion through a fog. Casey smiling. Casey crying. Casey dead, her face decaying bit by bit, the flesh turning gray and sliding off the bone, the eyes dissolving. As badly as Dana wanted to turn away, she couldn't move her head because it felt as heavy as the earth itself. There was no escape.

There was no escape from truth. There was no escape from reality. There was no escape from the images conjured by her mind.

She woke more exhausted than she had been when she had finally fallen asleep. Her mother lay asleep beside her on the bed, both of them covered with the soft pink blanket, both of them still wearing the clothes they had had on the night before.

Dana slipped from the bed and padded across the room, shivering. She grabbed a thick chenille throw off the back of a chair and wrapped it around her.

The light that seeped in around the draperies was the gray of predawn on a day that promised gloom and rain. Fitting, Dana thought as she pushed back the drapes at the French doors.

Someone had written in the moisture on the glass panes:
Hugging U, T.

Tim. He had to assume she had watched the news. He must have stopped by on his way home or back to the sheriff's office at the end of his shift.

A sad mix of emotions stirred through her as she unlocked the door and slipped outside onto the patio. The flagstones were cold and wet beneath her bare feet. She climbed onto the small wrought-iron table, put her feet on the seat of a chair, and rearranged the thick throw around her like a cocoon.

A thin fog shrouded the yard and the field beyond that rolled down to the woods. In the absence of sunshine, the leaves were a muted palette of muddy browns, dull gold, and maroon. There was no sign of the buck deer she had seen in the field before. For a moment it seemed to Dana she was the only living thing awake on the planet, sitting alone in the cold and damp.

Tuxedo emerged then from the open door and trotted over to join her, jumping up onto the table and rubbing against her, purring. Dana snuck her fingertips out from under the throw and scratched his head absently as her mind wandered.

Every murder had a motive, sometimes known to the victim,
sometimes known only to the killer. Doc Holiday had tortured and killed his victims for reasons that existed only in his cold, dark heart. If the body in the barrel was Casey, she had died for a reason known to her, whether it was John's jealousy or his father's sick attraction to his son's girlfriend. Either was possible.

Mack Villante had provided an alibi for the night Casey went missing. He was supposedly with a girlfriend in another town. The girlfriend had corroborated his story, though Dan Hardy hadn't been convinced. Casey had been supposed to meet John that night. Her car had been parked along the wooded lot that bordered the truck-stop complex. Mack Villante worked right there at Silva's Garage, not more than fifty feet from her abandoned vehicle. Had he seen her there and grabbed her? Dragged her into the woods or thrown her inside his truck?

Or it was possible John had been lying when he said she hadn't shown up. Casey had been cheating on him, he said. Cheating on him with Tim.

Cheating on me, too,
Dana thought, although she supposed that wasn't strictly true. She and Tim had already broken up. But if Casey had thought she wasn't doing anything wrong, why hadn't she brought it up?

Even though Tim said nothing had come of it, that Casey had gone missing before their relationship could begin, Dana wondered how long it had been going on. Casey had asked her that last day if she would mind her going out with Tim, but John said Casey had been cheating on him—past tense—as if it had been going on for some time. Dana had broken up with Tim shortly after graduation—the first of June. Casey had gone missing the ninth of August.

Casey had been Tim's friend, too. Had she offered him comfort in the wake of the breakup, and one thing led to another? Tim had told Dana he might have wanted to hurt her for hurting him, and what better way to do that than sleeping with her best friend? Had
he been taking his revenge all summer? Had Casey been seeing him all the while she pretended to want Dana to take him back?

It had never occurred to Dana at the time. In reading her journal entries leading up to that day, she had never suspected anything between Casey and Tim. She had suspected Casey of secretly seeing John—as if she had no right to make her own choices independent of what Dana had wanted for her. Had she been seeing Tim all that time, while Dana, the imperious teen princess, had been busy thinking she was in charge of everyone in her circle?

A mix of amusement and shock and embarrassment had tumbled in an endless loop through Dana's mind as she had read the journal of the girl she had once been. That Dana, Before Dana, had a good heart ruled by the naïve, self-absorbed brain of a pampered, privileged, well-loved child. Her world, and everyone in it, had revolved around her. She was the beautiful, benevolent monarch manipulating her subjects as she thought best for them. Meanwhile, her real-life Barbie and Ken dolls had been mounting an insurrection, with her none the wiser.

That wasn't entirely true, she thought now. She had suspected Casey was hiding things from her. She had suspected her friend was secretly seeing John again. In the days leading up to her disappearance, Dana had even begun to suspect Casey might be hiding something else from her. Casey suddenly wasn't feeling well. She would never quite look Dana in the eye when she said it was nothing.

Dana looked into her memory now and recalled once more the image of Casey walking toward her that morning at the nursery, coming from the ladies' room with a funny little smile on her face . . .

She felt sick in the pit of her stomach as she considered the possibility. If she was right, the tragedy doubled.

Casey had made a plan to meet John that night to tell him something. Had John been building a rage all summer that might have spilled over that hot August night? It wasn't difficult to imagine him
that angry. He had always been a boy with a chip on his shoulder the size of Ohio. He had always resented Tim's golden-boy status. But Casey had been his prize. Regardless of his troubles and his faults, having Casey for his girlfriend had meant something to him. Dana remembered thinking of them as Beauty and the Beast. Sweet, beautiful, kind Casey and brooding, tormented John from the wrong side of the tracks.

If Casey told him she was dumping him forever for Tim Carver . . .

It wasn't all that hard to imagine him putting his hands around her throat and choking the life out of her. He had a violent temper.

Last night someone had found a skeleton in a barrel in the back of a shed at the back of the Villante property.

The rest of that story had still been a jumble at the time of the eleven o'clock news. Someone had been shot. Someone had gone to the hospital. Someone was being questioned. Too much was left to the imagination. Dental records would solve the biggest part of the mystery. They would likely know today whether or not the body in the barrel was Casey's.

“What are you doing out here?” her mother asked, padding across the damp flagstones in her bare feet.

“Thinking,” Dana said.

Her mother wrapped her arms around her and kissed her cheek. “Come do that inside before you catch pneumonia.”

Dana climbed down from the table and they went back into the house together, Tuxedo tagging along at their heels.

“You should go back to bed,” her mother said. “You're not getting enough rest.”

“I can't. I'm awake now. I can't stop thinking. It's all going around and around in my head like a swarm of bees. I can't make it stop.”

Her mother's face was a mask of concern. She started to fuss, touching Dana's hair, damp from the fog, trying to rearrange the
throw wrapped around her, her hands fluttering like the wings of a small distressed bird.

“You should take your anxiety medication.”

“No,” Dana said, shrugging off her touch. “I don't like how it makes me feel. I know you gave me some last night. I feel like I'm walking through molasses.”

“You were so distraught—”

“I had good reason to be. That might be Casey, dead in a barrel for seven years. That's horrible! I
should
be upset.
Everyone
should be upset.”

“Of course we're all upset.”

“I don't want to take a pill to make it stop. Because it
doesn't
stop. The truth doesn't go away because you take a pill. It all just keeps happening in slow motion, and I can't feel it, and that's wrong. I don't want to go through life as a zombie.

“That's what he wanted me to be, isn't it?” she asked, the memory striking her hard.

Her mother looked stricken. Tears filled her eyes. She put her hand across her mouth to keep the pain from escaping as a sound.

“Doc Holiday,” Dana said. “He didn't want me to die. He wanted to leave me a zombie. Is that what you want, too?”

“No!” her mother said. “I want you not to hurt. I want you not to have to remember it or feel it. I want none of it to have ever happened!”

“But it did happen, Mom. It did happen, and here we are,” Dana said. “I'm not a broken doll you can glue back together and pretend I'm the same as before. I'm not the same. I'm never going to be the same. But I have to accept that and go on the way I am; otherwise, he might as well have killed me.”