Cold Cold Heart (32 page)

“Jesus,” Tim muttered, driving a hand back over his thinning hair. “I don't understand you, Dee. You don't have enough bad shit in your life with everything that just happened to you? You have to
go and stir all this up from the past, and guess that it was even worse than it really was? Stop it!”

He took hold of her by the shoulders and said it again for emphasis. “Stop it. Casey loved you. Don't think ill of her because she made a mistake. We were all human, Dee. Even you. Let it go.”

He checked his watch and heaved a sigh. “I have to go. I'll see you later. In the meantime, please don't torment yourself. There's no good going to come of it. The story is sad enough the way it is. Leave it be.”

Dana turned away as he went to kiss her cheek. He gave her a long look, but whatever he might have been thinking, he kept to himself.

She watched him dash through the drizzle to his county cruiser and waved at him as he backed out of the driveway.

“I'm going to go take a nap,” she said, sticking her head into the kitchen, where her mother had started gathering ingredients to make dinner.

But when she went downstairs she didn't go to bed. She stopped in the hall and stared at the timeline, then took a marker and ran the line backward from the day Casey had disappeared. She wrote
June
and
July
a few feet apart on the line. She made notations referring to things she had read in her journal, things she had looked at one way when she was eighteen and the center of her own universe, things that looked different to her now. Things that Casey had said, times when she hadn't seemed herself. She went to the other end of the line and noted the discovery of the barrel in the Villantes' shed and the discovery of Casey's friendship necklace in the house—half of a heart, incomplete without its partner.

Dana went into her bedroom, to the shelves behind her desk, and started poking through mementos accumulated since childhood—odd little trinkets and toys from county fairs and family vacations, renaissance festivals and high school fund-raisers. She went through her desk drawers and the cupboards in her closet.

She found it, finally, in a small, shell-encrusted jewelry box in the bottom drawer of her nightstand. With great care, she extricated the chain from a tangle of other necklaces and held it up to watch the pendant twist and turn, catching the light. Half a heart, incomplete without its partner. Half a heart with half an inscription.

She imagined Casey sitting beside her, shoulder to shoulder, as close as sisters, sharing everything, including a heart. She imagined them fitting the pendants together and reading the inscription out loud.

2 Lives

1 Heart

4-Ever

As girls they had believed their friendship would transcend everything, that nothing would ever come between them, not time or distance, not parents or boys. Friends forever. Pinky swear it. And dot their i's with hearts.

Dana touched the pendant to her lips and closed her eyes and saw them as they had been—two little girls, one light haired, one dark, hand in hand, smiling the secret smile of friends.

What could matter more than that? What could she need more than that now, when she felt that so much had been taken from her—her innocence, her youth, her optimism, her career, her beauty, her
self.
The friend she needed now would never be with her again. The hole in her heart felt a mile wide.

With the necklace wrapped around one hand she dug her phone out of the pouch of her sweatshirt with the other, opened her contacts, and touched a name.

The call went straight to voice mail. “Hardy.”

John made his way
home in the rain, taking alleys and back streets, avoiding people in general and sheriff's deputies in particular. He kept his head down and his collar up, shoulders hunched against the miserable drizzle. His pace was slow, every step jarring, setting off explosions of pain all through his body.

He felt sick, the specific kind of sick that comes after a hard physical beating, when the body is trying to process and dispose of the toxins of tissue breakdown and internal bleeding. Every cell ached with it, and his head just kept pounding and pounding and pounding. He stopped a couple of times to puke up the meager contents of his stomach—bile and water. He stepped once behind a shed to take a piss and watched the rusty stream of blood-tinged urine exit his body, draining his damaged kidney.

He approached his home from the woods behind the property, moving quietly among the dark trees and rain-softened brush. He had spent many hours back here as a boy, exploring, pretending he was in a faraway world, avoiding his father. He would watch from the cover of the woods as the old man worked on cars and bottles of bourbon in the backyard, getting drunker and louder and more belligerent as the afternoons wore on. John would wait until he had gone back into the house, knowing just how long it would take for
him to pass out, and that it would then be safe for him to slip unnoticed into his bedroom.

Finding a vantage point, he hunkered down, sheltered by a thick tangle of blackberry bushes, and waited. From there he could see the forensics people and the deputies swarming over the yard like ants, going in and out of the house and the garage and the shed, back and forth to the big mobile crime scene unit.

He could see a section of the road that led back toward town, crowded with news vans with rooftop satellite dishes, people in rain gear walking up and down. The Villantes were big, bad news today. He could only imagine what they were saying about him. John Villante Jr., once and future murder suspect with a psych discharge from the army. The deranged PTSD poster boy, so violent and unstable his own father had felt compelled to shoot him, then got his brains beat in for defending himself.

That was how the story would go. That was how the old man would spin it as soon as he had the chance.

The media might put a sympathetic slant on it. The sad plight of the forgotten veteran: good enough to send to war, then cast aside like everything else that was disposable in American society. But in the end he would still be considered violent and crazy no matter how many medals the army had pinned to his chest.

All his life he had wished he could be someone else, somewhere else, never more so than now, as he sat alone in the woods in the rain contemplating a future with nothing good in it.

He needed a plan, but he couldn't focus on the task for the pain in his head. He had to live from one moment to the next moment to the next moment. Breathe in, breathe out. He dug his good hand through the pockets of his coat, searching every crease and corner, praying to find what he eventually found—the short end of a joint. He had a bottle full of pain pills but nothing in his stomach to help keep them down. A couple of hits might help the pain subside a bit for just a little while.

He fixed the joint between his lips, flicked his lighter, and hoped that he could take a deep enough breath to get it going.

The dog found him as the gray of afternoon darkened from battleship to charcoal. It approached him with caution, head lowered, tail down, belly skimming the ground. John just watched. He had nothing but time. But it wasn't until he turned his attention back to the goings-on in the yard that the animal settled on the ground beside him.

The forensics people were packing up and clearing out, apparently satisfied that they had examined, bagged, and tagged everything of interest to them. The TV newspeople followed suit. Vehicle by vehicle, the crowd dispersed until the road was empty, yellow barrier tape and the mud-churned yard the only remaining signs that anything had happened here at all.

Still, John waited—just to be sure no one had forgotten something. He didn't want to be caught because of an afterthought. The last shade of darkness fell, and Mack's security lights popped on. There were no lights on in the house. If the sheriff's office had posted a deputy, John couldn't see him. And if John couldn't see a deputy, then the deputy, if there was one, couldn't see him.

Bent in a low crouch, he hurried as best he could from the woods to the back of the shed. He made his way around the side, scanning the yard for danger, seeing nothing. Still wary, he made his way from the shed to the old cars that had sat there for years, forlornly awaiting refurbishing. From the cars he made it to his truck.

The doors were locked. That wouldn't be a deterrent to him when he wanted to leave. He had learned long ago how to pop a lock on a car door and how to hot-wire an ignition, when it came to that. All he wanted now was a place to lie down, a hot shower if he could manage it, and a dry change of clothes. To the latter end, his duffel bag was gone, confiscated for no good reason he could imagine. Of what possible interest could his meager belongings be to the Liddell County Sheriff's Office?

No matter, he decided. He could steal a change of clothes from the old man. As long as he had a belt to hold up his pants he would be fine.

As he suspected, the back door to the house was still broken. The deputies had pulled it shut and run three long pieces of
DO NOT CROSS
tape from one side of the frame to the other, but John could see the hinges were still broken and the door was hanging so it couldn't latch properly even if the frame wasn't splintered.

He ducked under the tape and shoved the door open with his good shoulder. The dog refused to follow him, sitting just outside the door, softly crying its dismay.

“Suit yourself,” John muttered. But he left the door ajar in case the animal changed its mind.

He turned on no lights. He didn't need them. He had found his way around this house in the pitch dark many times. The backyard security lights gave plenty of illumination through the window above the kitchen sink for John to see his way to a spoon and a jar of peanut butter, which he stuffed into a coat pocket. In the refrigerator he found a deli package of lunch meat. He tossed the meat out the door for the dog, then grabbed a jug of water and made his way to his father's bedroom to steal a blanket.

The shower would have to wait. He needed sustenance and rest.

He went to his own room, toed off his boots, and carefully lowered himself to the bed, propping himself up against the headboard. He was exhausted; just lifting the spoonful of peanut butter from the jar to his mouth seemed like a Herculean effort.

He forced the issue because it was necessary. He had learned in combat to eat what he could when he could because his body needed fuel to function. So he choked down the peanut butter and washed it down with water. He was going to need his strength later.

Dana picked at her dinner,
a casserole that had been her childhood favorite. Comfort food. But there was no comfort to be had. Her stomach was in knots as she waited for the phone to ring with news of the identity of the skeleton found in the Villantes' shed.

Despite her mother's protests, she begged off after a few bites, pleading exhaustion. Her mother let her go with a kiss and a concerned frown, wishing her a good night's sleep.

Dragging, Dana trudged down the stairs to the lower level, pausing in the hall to look again at the timeline and the madly scribbled notations and arrows. All that mess boiled down to one likely, sad truth: that Casey was probably dead, and no one would ever be able to bring her back.

“Dana?”

Heart in her throat, she spun around to see Roger filling the end of the hallway.

“Can I have a word?” he asked.

“Can I stop you?”

He huffed a sigh and tipped his head, silently acknowledging that he would take that one on the chin and not lash back at her. The muscles in his jaw flexed.

“I want to apologize,” he said.

Dana doubted he wanted to apologize. It was probably more a case of her mother telling him to apologize. She said nothing, waiting.

“I'm sorry,” he said, coming toward her. “I've had a short fuse with you since you've been home. I probably don't have a clear understanding of your brain injury, and I need to adjust my expectations.”

“Maybe if you had come to any of the family sessions at Weidman you would have been better prepared,” Dana said quietly. “I guess you didn't feel obligated to do that, but it would have been nice.”

Temper flashed in his eyes. He tried to keep it out of his voice. “Dana, I'm a busy man—”

She nodded. “I get it. I do. You married my mother and you got a pretty, perfect stepdaughter in the deal. You didn't sign up for Brain-Damaged Barbie. I'm a disappointment now, and I do things that embarrass you and piss you off because I can't always think before I act. I'm sorry for that.”

“Dana . . .”

“I wish I didn't have to be here, you know,” she said. “I wish I could go back to the life I had and live in my own apartment and have my career back, but I can't do that right now. I don't know if I'll be able to have a job again. I don't know who will want me. You're certainly off that list.”

He looked away, hands on his hips, unable to contradict her. At least he had the grace to look embarrassed.

“I'm sorry I'm a problem for you,” she said.

“It's just that there's so much at stake,” he said. “But you know now I didn't do anything to hurt Casey.”

“I don't know that. Nobody knows what happened to Casey. That might not even be her in that barrel. Even if it is, we don't know how she came to be there. Did John kill her? Was it his dad?
For all anyone knows, Mack Villante might have killed her for someone else or hid the body for someone else. He's a bad man who's done a lot of bad things.”

Roger's expression darkened as his temper strained its boundaries. She wasn't cooperating. She wasn't reciting the lines he had played out in his head.

She turned back to her timeline, reached up, and tapped a finger on the note indicating that Casey had come back to this house the day she went missing.

“I don't understand how she could have come into this house to get her things without you being here, or without being seen if you were here. Please explain that to me in a way that makes sense.”

Roger groaned and turned around in a circle, his hands clamped to his head, and gritted out her name between his teeth. “Dana—”

“I'm not going to let it go,” she said. “No one should have let it go.”

He had never been considered a serious suspect. While the sheriff's office had conducted a search of their home, nothing had come of it, and Roger's name had never been a part of the larger conversation regarding Casey's disappearance. Dana wondered how he had managed to pull that off, then remembered Sheriff Summers was Roger's old friend.

He rubbed a hand across his mouth as he tried to decide what to say. “All right,” he said. “All right. Maybe the door wasn't locked—”

“Bullshit,” Dana said, locking her eyes on his. She saw a flash of anger in his, then something like fear.

“Fine,” he said as his resolve crumbled. “I let her in.”

A chill swept over Dana from head to toe.

“I let her in,” he confessed. “But that was all I did. I let her in to get her things, and I went back to bed. I never touched her.”

“Why did you lie about it?”

“Come on,” he said, giving her a look. “You worked in news. A grown man home alone opens his door to a teenage girl who then
goes missing? I didn't do anything to her. I don't know what happened to her. There's no way I'm saying I might have been the last person to see her alive when it would serve no purpose.

“You have to let this go, Dana,
please,
” he said. “At least until after the election. If not for my sake, for your mother's. Do you want to see the press go after her? Because you know they will. And there's nothing to be gained by it. After the election, we can quietly go to the sheriff and set the record straight. I promise.”

Dana considered the options. He had told her something he could have continued denying. Out of frustration? To shut her up? To stop her digging at the question? All of the above? She thought about her mother and how upset she would be with the press tearing at her with questions and accusations. Dana didn't want to be the cause of that.

“Do you really think I could have hurt Casey?” Roger asked softly.

That was the trouble, right there. She didn't know what to think he might be capable of. After Dana didn't have a good impression of him. Before Dana had never said a word against him.

“All right,” she said. She wasn't at all sure she was doing the right thing. The thing she was sure of was that she wanted to get away from him, and telling him what he wanted to hear seemed a good way to do it. She would talk to Hardy about it the next day.

Roger breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you. Truce?” he asked with a contrived hopeful look.

Dana nodded, quite sure she didn't look overjoyed. Roger seemed not to notice. As usual, the thing that mattered to him was that he had gotten what he wanted.

“Can I give you a hug?” he asked, as if he'd ever been that kind of parent.

“No.”

He didn't press it. “Good night, then,” he said, and left her.

Dana watched him disappear up the stairs, then went into her room and locked the door behind her.

For the first time she wondered if there might be some connection between Roger and Mack Villante. The idea that John's father might have killed or hidden Casey for profit had just fallen out of her mouth with no forethought whatsoever. Was it a possibility? She didn't know. All she knew was that someone in the Villante household had had something to do with Casey the day she disappeared.

Even if the call came and the dental records didn't match, that wouldn't change the fact that Casey's necklace had been found in the Villante house. There was no innocent explanation for that. Casey wouldn't have given the necklace to John. She couldn't have left it at his home if she wasn't seeing him anymore. She had been wearing the necklace the last time Dana had seen her.

A shudder passed through Dana as she remembered her collision with Mack Villante on the porch at the Grindstone—his battered, angry face looming over her, his big, meaty hands grabbing hold of her.
I caught a feisty one!
She could hear his rough voice, his crass laughter. She remembered the feeling of her foot connecting hard with his shin, and his instant fury as he cast her away from him.
Fucking little bitch!

There was no reason for Casey's necklace to be in the Villante house other than someone had kept it as—what did the detectives call it? A token? A silver? A reminder? Her tired brain searched for the word, finding words that were similar in sound or similar in meaning until the right one finally tumbled out—
souvenir
. A souvenir, something the killer kept to remind him of the victim and the crime. A thing to trigger the memory and allow him to relive every detail.

A chill went through her as she looked over at her nightstand, at the butterfly necklace she had sorted out of her jewelry pouch the other day. She picked it up and let the delicate filigree butterfly hang down. Her mother said she must have been wearing it when she was brought into the ER that terrible night in Minneapolis. One of the emergency room personnel had cut the chain to remove it from around her neck.

The tremors of fear started deep inside her and worked to the surface until the hand that held the necklace was shaking and tears blurred her vision of the butterfly.

This wasn't her necklace. This was something meant to evoke a memory. A souvenir of her experience with a madman.

Something Hardy had said the night she had gone to his house came back to her now—that cases get broken all the time on small details that might seem to mean nothing . . . a photograph, a cigarette butt, a piece of jewelry . . .

This wasn't her necklace. This was a piece of evidence from some other young woman's death. This was something Doc Holiday had taken from one victim and gifted to another victim. She could imagine his sick amusement at the idea that the necklace would be nothing more than an insignificant oddity to her or to the family that survived her had she died.

A vague memory floated at the back of her mind: photographs of jewelry being shown to her by the detectives. Did she recognize this, had she ever seen that . . . ? She hadn't understood the significance at the time. Now she did.

Dana flung the necklace away as if it were a live snake, a sound of distress tearing up her throat. She ran into the bathroom and turned the faucets on full blast and started washing her hands with the fervor of a zealot, scrubbing and scrubbing until the skin was red.

She had touched something
he
had touched. He had taken that necklace from around the throat of a dead girl and put it on her, giving her a souvenir of what had happened. His own sick joke. He was probably in hell laughing as she tried to wash away the idea of his touch.

Dana turned off the hot-water faucet, bent over the sink, and splashed cold water on her face to cool the flush of rage and wash away the tears that came with anger and fear. The water went everywhere, soaking her hair, soaking the sleeves and the front of her sweatshirt.

She stood in front of the mirror, faucet still running, and stared at herself, at the face a demon had carved for her.

“You son of a bitch,” she muttered. “You son of a bitch! How dare you do this to me?”

Furious, she yanked her sweatshirt over her head and tore the wet garment off, flinging it aside. Her chest rose and fell as she gulped air and huffed it out. She stared at the mark he had etched into her flesh, the number nine carved below her collarbone, the tail of it dipping between her breasts. She was his ninth victim by the count of law enforcement, though they suspected there were many more.

She was nothing more than a number to him, one of many. Yet this number was the souvenir he had given her to remind her every day of her life of what he had done to her, so that even if her memory didn't allow her to recall the horror in detail, she still had something tangible to tie her to him forever. The skin across her chest was tissue-thin and nearly transparent. The plastic surgeons had been unwilling to even attempt to remove or minimize the scar, saying they would only make a worse mess. Dana didn't see how anything could be worse.

She went to her closet and pulled on another of her endless supply of hoodies, this one soft black velour that swallowed her up, the sleeves falling nearly to her fingertips. She shoved the sleeves up as she went to her desk and woke up her computer. Her heart was pounding as she typed the name into the search engine:
Doc Holiday.

She hit enter before she could think twice and held her breath as she stared at the screen, waiting for his face to appear. Her heart was pounding like a trip-hammer.

“You can't own me anymore,” she said. “I won't let you.”

When the photo came up, she expected to scream, to run backward in horror. She gripped the arms of her chair to hold herself in place. Then there he was, and she didn't move, and she didn't cry out.

She was struck by how much he resembled the man she had photographed in the Grindstone. He was pudgy, balding, in his mid- to late thirties. He wore a beard and a pleasant smile that made him look like some lovable cartoon hobo. He didn't have horns or fangs. He wasn't frothing at the mouth.

No one would have looked at him and thought he might be evil incarnate, yet that was exactly what he had been. And at the same time, he was just a man, like Hardy had said. He was just a man who had gotten up in the morning and put his pants on one leg at a time . . . and then he'd gone out into the world and kidnapped young women and tortured and killed them. This ordinary man.

There was no telling, looking at them, the dark thoughts that lurked in the hearts and minds of men like Doc Holiday. By all accounts he had been a friendly sort, always upbeat, the kind of guy who talked to everybody. Dana had been that person too. Friendly, outgoing, happy to engage in conversation with anyone. She had been told she had met him the day before her abduction at a convenience store. There had been video surveillance tape of them exchanging pleasantries by the coffee station.

No woman went willingly with a man she believed might kill her. Not Doc Holiday's victims, not Casey Grant. And yet it happened all the time.

Most murders were committed by people known to the victim—a spouse, a lover, a brother, a friend. It was only after the fact that anyone claimed they saw it coming. No one expected to die at the hands of someone they knew, but it happened every day, everywhere. It had probably happened to Casey, whether her demise had come at the hands of John Villante or his father.