Cold Cold Heart (33 page)

Dana checked her phone, as if a message might have snuck in without the alarm alerting her. Nothing. She glanced at the muted television, looking for a splashy news-bulletin graphic. There was none. There wasn't likely to be one now, she realized, seeing the time. It was nearly midnight.

There wouldn't be any more news tonight. For law enforcement there was no real sense of urgency to identify a victim long dead. A skeleton would still be a skeleton in a day or a week or a month. The urgency came for the loved ones, who, no matter how long their friend or family member had been gone, were instantly transported back in time to the intensity of those first days of the search as they waited for words that would either raise or dash their hopes.

Dana tucked the phone into the pouch of her hoodie and walked away from the desk. Going back into the bathroom, she turned off the faucet she had left running and found tweezers in a cup among her makeup brushes. She grabbed a tumbler off the vanity and went back into the bedroom, on a mission.

Tuxedo appeared from under the bed, bounding out to bat at the necklace as Dana picked it up from the carpet with the tweezers and dropped it in the tumbler. She set the glass on the desk, then scribbled a note and placed it on top of the tumbler:
Send to Mpls PD
.

She would send the necklace back to the detectives, Kovac and Liska, and hopefully, it would be the one small, seemingly insignificant piece that would complete the puzzle for another victim. That small action gave her a welcome sense of accomplishment as a step in the direction of defeating the monster who had occupied her mind all these months.

“One small step for Dana,” she whispered, bending over to scoop up the cat.

Tuxedo dashed away like a crazy thing, white-tipped tail straight up in the air. He stopped short by the drapes, meowing with a question mark at the end of it, arching his back and rubbing back and forth against the draperies.

“You can't go out,” Dana said. “It's late.”

The cat flopped down on the carpet and rolled onto his back, batting at the drapes, purring and chirping. He rolled again and disappeared beneath the curtains.

Dana smiled for the first time in what seemed like days. Silly cat.

She went to the drapes and pulled them apart, expecting Tuxedo to jump up and scurry across the room. But the cat was gone, out the door, which was open just an inch.

“Oh God,” Dana muttered.

She didn't remember having cracked the door open, but then that was the problem, wasn't it? Just like she didn't remember leaving the faucet running or turning the stove on when she meant to use the microwave.

She didn't want to go out after him. Her nerves were still on edge from her encounter with Roger in the hall, and the additional questions that had arisen because of it. The patio lighting was still on, but the timer would cut it off at midnight, just minutes away.

Tuxedo had trotted out to jump up on the little wrought-iron table. Dana called him. He just looked at her, very satisfied with himself and content to stay where he was.

She couldn't leave him out there. Coyotes and foxes roamed the wooded countryside here, happy to make a snack of a little housecat. Cursing under her breath, Dana padded out onto the flagstones, barefoot. The rain had finally stopped, but the stone was still wet and cold. Heavy clouds scudded across the moon, and the wind rattled the trees like giant maracas. She hunched her shoulders against the chill.

“Come on, you.”

The cat arched his back and purred loudly, kneading his paws on the table. Happy to have made his human bend to his will. Dana picked him up and held him close, closing her eyes and burying her nose in his fur for just a second.

In that second she heard the click of the landscape lighting going off. She opened her eyes to absolute darkness. The streetlights from the cul-de-sac didn't reach back here behind the massive house. The land beyond the yard was wild and wooded. Only a sliver of light escaped from between her bedroom drapes.

Dana's heartbeat raced as she turned to hurry back inside. She
felt like the darkness was a living thing behind her that was reaching its bony hands over her shoulders to grasp her by the throat.

At the door, she pulled the drape back with one hand and set the cat down with the other.

“Dana, what are you doing out here at this time of night?”

Dana spun around, her heart in her throat, to see Tim emerge out of the darkness near the family room doors.

Without thought, she launched herself at him, hitting him in the chest.

“Damn it, Tim!” she said, her voice angry but soft, the automatic whisper remembered from her adolescence when she had snuck him into her bedroom on many occasions. “What are you doing here? You scared the hell out of me!”

“Ouch!” he yelped, catching hold of her wrist before she could hit him again. “I told you I'd see you later.”

“And I told you not to sneak up on me!”

“I wasn't. I was coming down to see if your light was still on; then I would have texted you,” he said. “It's late. I thought you might be asleep by now. I didn't want to wake you.”

The adrenaline drained out of her abruptly, leaving her feeling weak.

“I couldn't sleep,” she admitted. “I couldn't even think about it. Come in. It's cold out here.”

“I'm sorry if you were waiting on news from me,” he said. “We're not going to hear anything until tomorrow.”

“I figured as much.”

She sat down on the arm of the upholstered chair and hugged herself. “I keep thinking about her being in that barrel, wondering if she was alive when she was put inside of it. To think of that, of being stuffed inside there in the pitch black with the lid sealed . . . it makes me want to throw up.”

“Don't think about it,” Tim said. “We don't know what happened. Whoever that was, I choose to think was dead first. The
barrel was just a convenient container. Who would ever look at it or give it a second thought? It was tricked out, anyway, rigged so it could hold about fifteen gallons of battery acid in the top third or so of the barrel. The skeleton was below a false bottom. That's why the victim was never found when they executed the search warrants back when. They opened the barrel, saw the acid, closed it up.”

Dana shuddered at the thought. “I so hope it isn't her. Bad enough that she's gone, but I can't stop thinking that if someone killed her, then they killed her baby too.”

“Stop thinking about it,” he said, scowling. “You don't know that she was pregnant.”

“I don't know for a fact, but I think I'm right,” she insisted. “She would have gone to the free clinic in Louisville if she was. That's where she went when she wanted to go on the pill and her mother wouldn't let her.

“There must be some way to look at their records without breaking confidentiality,” Dana said. “Even if you have to get some kind of waiver from her mom or something.”

“You don't think her mother would have told the investigators back then?”

“Casey wouldn't have told her until she absolutely had to. Her mother would have had a fit. She would have hustled her off to have an abortion. Casey would never have gone for that. Not in a million years. She loved kids. She always talked about having her own family one day.”

“Jesus, Dee,” Tim muttered as he settled himself in her desk chair on a long sigh. “You're like a dog with a goddamn bone. You're giving me a headache talking about it. Leave it be for tonight, will you? This has been a hell of a day as it is. If we need to find out, we'll find out.”

“A hell of a day is right,” Dana said. “Roger confessed to me tonight that he was here when Casey came back that day to get her things. He let her in. He says he didn't tell anyone because it would have made him look bad for no good reason.”

“You don't think he was involved, do you? Arrows don't get any straighter than Roger.”

“I don't know what to think anymore. I look at people I've known my whole life, and it's like they're from an alternate universe. Those memories belong to someone else. Before Dana, I call her. After Dana looks at the same pictures and sees everything in a different light. I don't know what's real.”

“I think reality is highly overrated,” Tim said, glancing away. He looked tired. He looked like he had aged as the day had gone on, which was exactly how Dana felt.

“We can't find John,” he said. “He walked out of the interview this afternoon and managed to disappear.”

“Do you think he left town?”

“I don't know. Maybe. Not in his own vehicle. We know that much. No one saw him at the bus depot. But he could have hitched a ride out at the truck stop. Or he's hiding out somewhere. He doesn't have any friends in town that I know of, so I don't think anyone is helping him out.”

“Would he go home?”

“That'd be stupid. The place is sealed as a crime scene. Even after we were done processing it, we had a deputy parked out front for a couple hours, and we've been cruising past all evening.”

“Who knows what might be going through his head,” Dana said.

“We've all been through some crazy shit,” he said, swiveling around to look at the stuff on her bookshelves—the photographs and other things she had collected over their years in school.

He reached out and plucked down the framed picture of the four of them ready for prom and stared at it, frowning, lost in his own memories.

Dana had spent enough time looking at that photo in the last few days to have every detail crystal clear in her mind. The four of them in their best-dressed glory. She and Casey had had their hair and makeup done at the Cutting Edge salon that afternoon. They had
fancied themselves to look like Greek goddesses. Tim was in his rented tuxedo, posing with a James Bond swagger. John stood looking uncomfortable in a suit that didn't quite fit him, looking like he would rather have been anywhere else on the planet.

They seemed so young and so blissfully clueless, so full of the absolute arrogance of innocence. There they were, on the brink of becoming adults, thinking they already had it all figured out. Except for John, Dana thought. John had the troubled look of a boy who had already seen the cruel truth of the real world.

Tim set the photograph aside on the desk and absently toyed with the computer mouse, bringing the screen to life. Doc Holiday smiled at him like a long-lost friend.

He turned to Dana with a questioning look.

“I decided I had to get it over with.”

“And?”

“Turns out he was just a man. He was a man who did monstrous things, not a monster from another world. He was just a bad man who did bad things, and I stopped him. I don't remember it. I don't know how I found the strength to do it. But I killed him. He didn't kill me.”

He stared at her for a long moment, digesting what she had said and what it meant, nodding.

“Are you okay?”

Dana laughed. “No! I'm not ever going to be okay. Not the way people who have never been through what I went through are okay. Whether I ever remember the details or not, that experience is a part of me now. It changed me. But I'm alive. I won. I'll take that over the alternative.”

“You're something special, Dee,” he murmured, getting up from the chair. “I want to hug you for real. Can I?”

Dana nodded, sliding off the chair and into his arms. She pressed her cheek into his shoulder and felt his heart beating beneath her ear. A reassuring sound, she thought.

“Like old times,” he said softly.

She could see their reflection in the mirror above her nightstand. Their eyes met in the glass.

“I'm a little worse for wear,” she said.

He turned her to face the mirror and tucked her back against him, wrapping his arms around her from behind.

“It's a shame,” he said. “I'm sorry, Dee.”

As she looked at his reflection, something changed. Something in his eyes went dark, and an ice-cold rush of fear went through Dana, the emotion coming seconds before her rational brain could understand why.

“I'm so, so sorry,” he said as the crook of his right arm came up underneath her chin and pulled back, and his left hand cupped the back of her head and pushed forward.

Before she could even form the thought to fight, it was too late. The last thing she saw was her own disfigured face, her eyes wide with shock as Tim Carver choked her unconscious.

He was worried
he had killed her, which seemed a stupid thought on the face of it. He was going to kill her. That outcome was inevitable. She knew too much, had guessed too much. She wouldn't let bad enough alone. Her obsessive digging was hitting too close to the truth, and he couldn't have it. He had worked too hard to rebuild his life after Casey had all but ruined it.

Tonight he had the perfect window of opportunity to pull this off, but the timing had to be right. He knew too much about forensic science to fuck this up on a stupid mistake. She needed to be alive going into the house. She needed to die there so there could be no questions about other possibilities.

There could be no questions as to where she had been killed or if her body had been moved. She would be found lying where she died so the patterns of lividity—the settling of the blood in the corpse—would match the position of the body. The inevitable leaking of bladder and bowel content that took place at the time of death would take place at the scene. He had considered every detail.

This was the riskiest part of his plan: getting her from her house to the destination, and so far luck had been with him. The rain had stopped, but the heavy cloud cover remained, allowing him to carry her off the property to the little-used service road that ran behind the low
stone wall on this backside of the development without danger of being seen by any insomniac that might glance out a bedroom window.

He had pulled the cruiser onto the little-used road, lights out, creeping slowly along, knowing that the car was pretty much hidden from view by the wall and the heavy landscaping that bordered it, keeping the riffraff out—symbolically, at least. He had placed a tarp across the backseat of the car and wrapped her in it to contain her DNA and any trace evidence—hair, clothing fibers, and so on. He had left the car running so no one could be awakened by an engine roaring to life. He backed over any tire tracks that might have been left on the thinly graveled trail.

Now he only had to pray he didn't get a callout in the next half hour or so. But nothing much ever happened in Shelby Mills on a weeknight. The murder of one of its best-known citizens would be a rare exception.

*   *   *

S
HE THOUGHT SHE HAD
died. Her body was moving, but she wasn't using her arms or legs. She opened her eyes and saw nothing but blackness.

But she was breathing. Her heart was beating. She was uncomfortable. She tried to move, but her hands and feet were bound.

The sense of panic was immediate and huge, like an explosion going off inside her body. Her heart was galloping. Tears flooded her eyes. Her pulse was roaring in her ears. She wanted to scream, but he had taped her mouth shut.

For a few chaotic seconds, Dana didn't know where she was or who had taken her. She wasn't entirely sure this wasn't a nightmare conjured up by the image of Doc Holiday. She shouldn't have looked at him. This was the thing she had feared, that by looking at his photograph she would give a face to the monster of her nightmares and plunge herself back into an experience best left in the dimmest corners of her memory.

All of the brain chemistry, the hormones and neurotransmitters that create emotion and capture memory, flooded her brain, threatening to drown her. She couldn't capture and hold more than a scrap of a thought or a snippet of a memory. She had to fight to remember the steps she had been taught to tame the storm.

Breathe deep. Four counts in. Four counts out. Concentrate on the individual parts of her body. Be aware of the tip of each finger, the tip of each toe. Breathe deep. Four counts in. Four counts out . . .

Slowly the flood eased and the memory came back to her—the image of her and Tim in the mirror above her nightstand. The way his eyes had suddenly gone dark. The sound of his apology just before he started to choke her.

Dana's heart sank.

Oh my God. Tim.

It had never entered her head that he could do something like this. It had never entered her head that he could have killed Casey. He had only just started to see her— But no, Dana thought, she didn't really believe that was true. For all she knew they had been seeing each other all summer. She had broken up with Tim shortly after graduation. She would have never pegged Casey for a stone-faced liar. She had always been so sweet and kind and honest. But looking at it now, Dana had to believe her friend had been an accomplished liar indeed.

She had to have lied to Tim, as well. She had been on the pill since they were sixteen. And Tim was meticulously careful. He never would have risked unprotected sex, pill or no. He had his whole big future to consider.

Dana's stomach turned.

Tim Carver had had his whole big future ahead of him—his acceptance to West Point, his career in the military. He had been a star. The golden boy of Shelby Mills. The apple of his parents' eyes. He'd had so much at stake. He'd had so much to lose.

Oh my God, Tim.

No one had ever suspected him. They might have—if Dana had given Detective Hardy the one piece of information she had been too embarrassed to give him: the fact that her best friend had asked that fateful day about dating her former boyfriend.

It wasn't his business, she had thought at the time. It wasn't anyone's business. It certainly had nothing to do with Casey's disappearance. Or so she had thought. She had believed Casey had secretly been seeing John. She had been so focused on her disapproval of that relationship. It had never occurred to her that her dearest friend would betray her . . . or that the first boy she had ever loved could be a murderer.