Heart of Ice (29 page)

Allison knew that some people needed you to be strong for their own reasons. And many wouldn’t—or couldn’t—give you room to be weak.

And that’s where she and Cassidy could come in. As true friends who offered compassion and understanding, and who were willing to acknowledge the moments when it seemed impossible to go on. Just as Cassidy and Nic had done for Allison when she lost the baby, or Nic and Allison had done for Cassidy when she got caught up with the wrong man—and then the wrong prescription.

Allison wanted to caution Cassidy against suggesting some funky healer or aura masseuse, but she couldn’t think of a tactful way to do it. Besides, Nicole had already told both of them that she wasn’t looking for that kind of advice. For herself, it would be all too easy to answer Nicole’s fears with platitudes, to say, “They have so many treatments now” or “Everything will be fine” or even “I’ll be praying for you.” But as the Bible said, faith without works was dead. She could and would pray for Nicole, but she would also prove the truth of her belief that God was in even this by the help she gave Nic, the ear she offered.

Nicole came back to the booth. “We’ve got an ID on the body,” she announced. “The fingers on his left hand were pretty useless as far as prints were concerned. But they managed to get a match off his right. So we know who he is. Joseph—Joey—Decicco. And Leif went over his records with me. They’re pretty interesting. How this guy got to be a hired killer is a puzzle. He’s got an arrest record dating to his teens— all for the same thing. And it’s not murder.”

Allison thought of the burn scars. “Arson.”

“Right. It’s true that he’s caused three deaths in the past. When he was fourteen, he was playing with a lighter in the basement of his house, and the resulting fire got out of control. That’s where he got those scars. The fire killed his family—his mother, stepfather, and a younger half brother. Decicco himself suffered severe burns. And guess where he ended up after he was discharged from the burn unit.”

Allison shrugged. “No idea.”

“The Spurling Institute. Didn’t you tell me once Lindsay was there?”

“Yeah, for nine months, when she was sixteen.”

Lindsay had been a chronic runaway. Before she was sentenced to Spurling, she had been shacked up with some fifty-year-old, boosting stuff to feed her drug habit. Really, Allison thought, maybe Lindsay
had
come a long way.

“Your sister’s three years younger than we are, right?” Nicole looked up, thinking. “That would put her there at the same time as Decicco. I’ll try to get my hands on his records, but as I’m sure you know, Spurling was closed a decade ago.”

Guilt washed over Allison, as it had so many times before. After two months at Spurling, Lindsay had managed to slip a letter out with a sympathetic staff member, begging Allison to help get her released, or at least transferred. She claimed that physical and mental abuse was rampant. But when Allison and her mother had talked to the director of Spurling, he had smoothly explained Lindsay’s claims away. They were lies, he said, lies meant to manipulate them into letting her out into the world where she could continue down her destructive path. They followed his advice and did nothing. Believed the director’s own manipulative lies.

Four years later the school was shut down by the state of Oregon. The allegations were hair-raising. And when Allison tried to stutter out an apology to her sister for not having listened, all Lindsay had said was, “Whatever.”

“So could you talk to your sister?” Nicole asked now. “See if she remembers him? See if there’s more about him than the records we can get?”

“Sure. You said it’s Joseph . . . what?”

“Joseph—Joey—Decicco.” Nicole spelled it, then shot Cassidy a narrow-eyed glance.

Cassidy gave her a lopsided smile. “Don’t worry. I know not to say anything until it’s public information. But Allison—ask Lindsay if she wouldn’t want to be on TV.”

Allison’s first impulse was to do no such thing. Lindsay loved reality TV. She didn’t see how it reduced everyone until they were small enough to fit inside a plastic and metal box. Allison couldn’t see how being on TV would benefit Lindsay at all. Then again, Allison had promised herself that she would start letting her sister make her own decisions. Let her figure out how to stand on her own two feet. Or how to fall.

“What we need to figure out is how a guy like that became a hired killer,” Nic said. “I mean, how many unsolved murders are there on the books? Maybe there’s more to this Decicco than we know about.”

“Yeah, but he
didn’t
kill this woman and her kid,” Cassidy said. “So you don’t know that he’s a killer.”

Nicole blew air out between pursed lips. “Maybe he just took a look at the child and decided he couldn’t do it. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been successfully killing adults for years. I’ve met killers who would make a point of stepping over an ant on the sidewalk and then gut someone’s grandma without even blinking.”

“Yeah, but a firebug?” Cassidy picked up a crust from Allison’s plate and began to nibble on it.

Allison didn’t even blink. Cassidy had few scruples when it came to food.

“People like that, it’s fire that turns them on. Not killing people.”

“But people who like to start fires also like to control things,” Nicole said, her face animated.

Allison wondered if she welcomed the chance to think about something other than her cancer.

“That’s one reason they like fire so much, because they can control it. And there’s nothing bigger than controlling life and death.”

“Maybe this Decicco guy tried to burn down her house.” Cassidy spoke around another mouthful of crust. “You know, Jenna covered that arson fire. Maybe she figured out this guy was behind it and contacted him. She was hoping it would be a story. Only he killed her. And then maybe Decicco snapped and decided to kill anyone who might know that he was behind the arson. It makes a lot of sense.”

It did and it didn’t, Allison thought. Pyromaniacs loved fire in and of itself. They weren’t criminals so much as mentally ill. Why would a guy with a history of arson suddenly switch to killing people—even if he was worried about going back to prison? That was a big step. But it was hard to argue with Jenna’s death or with Sara saying Joey had stuck a gun in her face.

“But didn’t you say Jenna called in sick?” Nicole asked. “Or at least a woman claiming to be Jenna?”

Cassidy nodded.

“Do you think it was really Jenna?”

“The weekend receptionist probably doesn’t know Jenna well enough to be able to tell her voice. But she didn’t seem to have any doubts that it was a woman.”

“This Decicco sounds like he didn’t have any friends,” Nicole said. “So one question is—who called in?”

Cassidy shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe he just pitched his voice higher. Or heck, my phone at home came with a button that lets you make your voice higher or lower.”

Allison added, “The other question is—if Joey killed Jenna, then who killed Joey?”

“Could he have killed himself?” Cassidy asked.

“No.” Nic grimaced. “Close-range shot to the head—but the bullet didn’t come from the gun they found at the scene. And no gunshot residue on his hands.”

The waitress came up. “Are you ladies going to want dessert?”

“Of course we are, right?” Cassidy looked around the table. Nothing ever dampened her appetite. “How about that brownie sundae I saw on the menu. Didn’t it say it was organic?”

The waitress smiled. “The brownie, the vanilla ice cream, the whipped cream, the chocolate and caramel sauces, and the walnuts.”

“Organic means no calories, right?” Cassidy winked at the waitress. “And since we’ll be splitting it three ways, I think it will actually end up being negative calories. We’ll probably lose weight eating it.”

“Your math sounds pretty good to me.” The waitress grinned back as she tucked her order book back into her apron pocket and picked up their now empty plates.

O
n the drive home Allison had a lot on her mind, but not so much that she couldn’t spend the drive praying out loud for Nicole. She prayed for Nicole’s health and her healing, for her doctors, for her daughter and her family, and for her friendships. Prayed that she would know what to do to help her friend.

When she walked in the door, she smelled cookies baking. She went back into the kitchen.

“Lindsay, can I ask you something in confidence?”

“Of course.” With a smile, Lindsay slipped off the oven mitts.

Allison realized she rarely asked her sister anything—just told her. “When you were at Spurling, do you remember a guy there named Joseph Decicco?”

“Joey?” Lindsay look up and then to the left, her eyes unfocused. “Yeah. We called him Joey Cheeks. Because of his name, and because of what had happened to, well”—she touched her own relatively smooth skin—“his face. He had scars on his face from burns and skin grafts, and his left hand didn’t really work.”

It was definitely the same guy.

Lindsay tilted her head. “Why do you want to know?”

“This is the part you have to keep in confidence. Joey was found murdered yesterday in Forest Park.”

“Oh no.” Lindsay put her hand over her mouth.

“The thing is, it looks like he might also be connected to at least one murder.”

“Murder?” Lindsay’s eyes widened. “Joey Cheeks?”

“So that surprises you?”

Lindsay’s face softened. “Actually, it does. I mean, sure, he was in Spurling for killing his family. But he didn’t mean for it to happen. Did you know about that?”

“Nicole told me a little bit about it. He was playing with fire, and it got out of control.”

“Yeah, it was an accident. There were only a couple of real killers at Spurling.”

“There were killers there? Real killers?” Despite the sweet smell in the air, Allison felt a little sick to her stomach. “What do you mean— like they killed someone in a fight over drugs? A robbery gone bad?”

Lindsay pursed her lips. “There were some like that, sure. But there was one girl who took Joey in as her pet, and she was a real killer. An on-purpose killer. Her name was Sissy. She killed two little kids when she was thirteen.”

“Thirteen?” Allison tried to picture it. Were you even capable of understanding murder when you were that young? “What happened?”

“She said her four-year-old cousin had come to live with her and her grandma. Sissy didn’t like him getting all the attention, so she killed him and made it look like an accident. Except that same day, the day she killed her cousin, she was babysitting another little kid, a three-year-old. And Sissy started worrying that the girl was going to tell on her when she got older. So a couple weeks later she killed her too.”

“How did she kill them?” Allison asked. Thinking smothering. Or some kind of poison.

“She drowned them. She drowned them both.”

Allison was horrified. “And this Sissy just told you all this?”

Sending Lindsay to Spurling had been like sending her to a hardcore prison. The only life lessons she had probably learned there were to be a better criminal.

Lindsay shrugged. “She told everybody. It was part of the therapy. You had to talk about what you had done and show how sorry you were. But Sissy? It was always a lie when she said she was sorry. She never meant it. Really, she
liked
to talk about how she had killed those kids. She wanted to keep us all in line. Everyone there knew that Sissy would do whatever she wanted. She messed a couple of people up pretty bad while she was at Spurling. Some she hurt physically, and some she hurt”—Lindsay tapped her temple—“up here. Played with their heads. She lied all the time. Sissy always had these big stories about how she was related to royalty, how she had been in a movie, how she had almost died. She had Joey thinking that she loved him, but then she’d tell on him when he broke a rule, or make fun of him behind his back. Everything was like one big game to Sissy.”

“Really?” Despite herself, Allison was fascinated by this digression. A thought nagged at her, but she was too worn out from the long day to follow it. She forced herself to refocus on the question. “So when you think about the Joey you knew, does it surprise you to think that he grew up to be a killer?”

“Well, it was a long time ago,” Lindsay said. “But the Joey I knew only loved two things in this world. Fire. And Sissy.”

CHAPTER 50

Channel Four

T
he police had already taken away Jenna’s computer, but that didn’t mean that her files were gone. Staff at Channel Four shared a server where they were supposed to back up their work every night. But as with the phone system, Cassidy had discovered that there were varying levels of compliance. Jenna, however, seemed to have backed up her files religiously.

Cassidy had already taken a quick look through Jenna’s computer the morning before it was seized. But now she had a better idea what she was looking for: any connection between Jenna and this dead guy, Joseph—Joey—Decicco.

Searching the server for the name Decicco turned up nothing. But the word
arson
turned up dozens of files—including the draft of a script Jenna had been working on only the day before she was killed.

Studio—OC—Jacobs. Fire officials now say the fire that destroyed this home in Southwest Portland was intentionally set
.

VO—server video: swfire.01—More than forty firefighters battled the flames that erupted two weeks ago, but the house was a total loss. But this fire turns out to be more than just a case of arson. Instead, it’s a twisted tale of revenge—and murder. And we caught the would-be killer on camera
.

=============

Server—video+

audio (file: swfire.07
)

(In cue: “Burning down the house was supposed to teach her a lesson . . .”)

(Out cue: “. . . and tonight, she is in fear for her life . . .”)

Caught on camera? If Jenna had gone to the motel alone, then how had she planned to get footage?

Andy said Jenna had been asking about hidden cameras. When Cassidy finally tracked him down, she found him outside, loading camera equipment into one of the station’s vans.