Cold Cold Heart (19 page)

“It wasn't like that,” Dana protested.

“Wasn't it?” Hardy arched a brow. “You were quite a bossy little thing.”

“You didn't know me,” Dana said, irritated by the picture he was painting of her.

“You were supposed to go off to college together, right?”

“Yes. So?”

“So it's a lot more fun going to college as two single girls than having one of you tied to a boyfriend,” he said. “Especially a boyfriend like young Villante. Maybe that's what the two of you argued about. Maybe you were pressing her to break up with him. Maybe she was telling you to go fuck yourself. Or maybe that's why she wanted to see him that night—to tell him it was over.”

That was the theory most people had latched onto at the time. But nothing had ever come of it.

“But seven years later he's still walking around free.”

“Like I said before, we never had any evidence he did anything to her. Was an angry eighteen-year-old boy smart enough to pull off the perfect crime? That doesn't seem very likely. Did he seem like a criminal mastermind to you?”

She thought about John Villante, about the boy she had seen in the yearbook photos. Overly sensitive, easily offended, often brooding, sometimes angry. Casey had helped him to keep his grades high enough to stay in sports.

“No.”

“Now we hear about Doc Holiday,” Hardy said. “We weren't looking for a serial killer back then, so we didn't see one.”

Once again he took a big breath and blew it out slowly, looking away from her. He pulled open a desk drawer and came up with a pack of Marlboros and a lighter.

“Should you be smoking?” Dana asked.

He hung a cigarette on his lip and gave her a sardonic look as he lit up.

“I'm gonna die, little girl. I might as well enjoy myself while I can.”

He pulled a document out of the folder he had opened and handed it to her. “Here's a copy of your statement, for what it's worth. Read it over. Maybe you'll remember the answers you should have given me.”

Dana took the report and tucked it into her notebook without looking at it.

“Seven years after the fact,” Hardy said. “People forget things—faces, names. Waitresses at the Grindstone have come and gone. Is anybody going to remember seeing Doc Holiday? Maybe only somebody who has a reason to—like you.”

*   *   *

T
HE TROUBLE WAS,
D
ANA
thought as she drove away from Dan Hardy's property, while she might have been the one person with a reason to remember Doc Holiday, she was also the one with every reason to forget him.

Her head was throbbing as she tried to focus on the road and on the voice of the navigation app. She wanted to blink her eyes and be magically back home and not have to wonder if she had turned left instead of right. The up and down and twist and turn of the country roads were making her nauseous. And suddenly there were lights behind her.

She couldn't have been much more than a mile gone from Hardy's cabin in the woods. She hadn't seen another vehicle on the drive out here. The way the woods closed in on the sides of the road made her feel like there couldn't be another human being for miles, and yet, she knew there were others. One was right behind her.

It was a truck, she thought. The headlights seemed to loom over her little Mini. Too close. Much too close.

The speedometer told her she was going thirty miles an hour. It felt like she was doing seventy. She was afraid to step on the gas. It had been too long since she had driven on gravel, too long since she had driven at all. Yet the bigger vehicle behind her seemed to want to push her along—or push her over.

If she went in the ditch, what could she do? Nothing. She had no weapon. She had nowhere to run. She had no idea where she was or if there might be anyplace to get help. The idea of running back to Hardy's place—and Hardy's dogs—was as terrifying as any other option in the pitch-black night. For all she knew, Hardy was in the
truck behind her. She tried to remember another vehicle in his yard, but she couldn't.

She jumped as the navigation voice said, “In three hundred yards turn right.”

The voice was so calm. Dana's heart was racing. She was trembling. Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel in a death grip. She jumped again as the phone rang, the musical ringtone interrupting another instruction from the faceless female directing her.

She let it ring. She couldn't take her hands off the wheel to pick up the phone. She couldn't take her eyes off the road or the rearview mirror to see who was calling. What difference would it make who was calling if she crashed and died, or crashed and was taken by whoever was in the pickup behind her?

She turned at the intersection and held her breath, eyes on the rearview mirror. For a moment it seemed the other vehicle would go in a different direction. She had been panicked for no reason. She would have to learn not to be so paranoid, she told herself.

And then the headlights turned in her direction, and the truck came roaring up behind her, so fast Dana thought it would hit her.

Tears spilled down her cheeks as she stepped on the gas. She began to hyperventilate as the car seemed to lose purchase on the loose gravel and started to skid into the next curve in the road.

“In point five miles turn right,” the voice said.

“How can you be so fucking calm?” Dana shouted, straightening the wheel.

Behind her, the truck moved to the left, as if to come alongside her. On the seat beside her, her phone rang again.

“Shut up!” Dana shouted. It was all too much—too much happening at once, too much sound, too much movement, too much pressure.

“In three hundred yards turn right.”

She hit the gas, sobbing now, desperate to get to the intersection. The next road was paved. There would be streetlights soon, and houses.

She barely slowed down to make the turn, her tires squealing as she straightened onto the new road.

The pickup stopped at the intersection.

Eyes on the rearview mirror, Dana drifted into the other lane. The blast of a horn brought her attention back just in time to miss hitting an oncoming car head-on.

She looked in the mirror again. Nothing. No lights behind her. No truck following her.

She immediately told herself she had probably never been in danger. It was just her imagination conjuring a bogeyman out of the shattered remnants of her memory.

But she was still shaking as the sign for the Bridlewood development came into view.

The flood of adrenaline gone,
Dana wanted to curl into a ball and go numb.

Almost home. You're almost home
 . . .

She would park her car and slink into the house and downstairs to her room and her bed . . .

But as she turned onto her street, it looked like there might be a party going on at the end of the cul-de-sac. Cars choked the driveway and lined the curb. A news van sat cockeyed. People were milling around in the street.

It probably had to do with Roger and the fund-raiser he and her mother had attended, Dana thought, annoyed as she abandoned her car in front of a neighbor's house. She pulled up her hood and walked toward her house, head down, eyes up, notebook clutched to her chest.

Two of the cars near the driveway were sheriff's cruisers. Deputies were trying to control the scene. She recognized the blonde from the local news trying to set up a shot in the front yard, and she felt both irritated and anxious. She was exhausted. Her brain felt like it had been wrung out like a sponge. All she wanted was to go to bed, but she was going to have to run a gauntlet to get there.

She looked around for Roger or his campaign manager so she
could give someone the evil eye. Before she could find him, she spotted Tim Carver in conversation with another deputy. Head down, she went to him as the other deputy turned away.

“Can I get a police escort to my door?” she asked.

He started to dismiss her with the wave of a hand, then did a double take, eyes wide. He glanced around to see who might be looking, then leaned down toward her and spoke to her in a harsh whisper. “Jesus, Dee! Where the hell have you been?”

Dana took a step back. “Excuse me?”

He glanced around again for witnesses as he herded her off to the side of the street, then leaned down and all but stuck his face inside the hood with her. “Every deputy in the county is out looking for you.”

“What? Why?”

“The order came straight from the sheriff himself. Your aunt Frankie came by to check on you and found the garage wide open. Your car was gone, there was food left out in the kitchen, the stove was on, there was a faucet running. No sign of you—”

“Oh no,” Dana groaned, a sick feeling of embarrassment and failure churning in her stomach.

It would have looked like she had been taken.

She had thought she could slip out of the house, see Hardy, come back, and have no one the wiser, that she could just come and go from her home like a normal human being. But she wasn't a normal human being. Sidetracked by her thoughts, she forgot about things like running faucets and dinner half started. She hadn't thought to close the garage door because she had needed all her attention on backing out of the driveway.

“And why the hell haven't you answered your phone?” Tim asked.

Because she couldn't concentrate on driving and her phone at the same time. And she had forgotten her phone in the car when she went into Hardy's house. When she had come back out, all she
wanted was to leave. She hadn't checked the phone for voice mail or text messages.

“Where were you?”

“I had to go see someone,” she said.

“Well, you might have thought to tell somebody.”

But who would she have told? Her mother would have stopped her going. Frankie was busy teaching classes. Hardy had told her she had to come see him tonight. In her too-literal brain with her fresh obsession on what had happened to Casey, she hadn't considered other options. Impulsivity was a side effect of her brain injury. She often spoke and acted long before the logical part of her brain could think things through.

“Deputy Carver?” a woman's voice called. “Could we get a moment with you on camera?”

From the corner of her eye Dana could see the blonde coming toward them with purpose. She turned her back to the woman, hunching her shoulders, wishing she could disappear.

Tim held a hand up to ward the reporter off. “Not just now, Miss Kirk. I'll be with you in a minute.”

“Is the sheriff coming?”

“He's on his way with the Mercers.”

“Oh God,” Dana groaned again. She felt like she was fourteen and caught out after curfew. Now she would have to face her mother and Roger with news cameras capturing every moment. She wanted to pull her hood over her face and disappear for real.

Another cruiser came roaring down the street, lights rolling. The car pulled over behind the news van, and a dark SUV—Roger's SUV—pulled up hard beside it.

Wesley Stevens came out of the driver's side and made a beeline for Kimberly Kirk. Roger came out of the passenger's side looking grim and angry, demanding to know who was in charge.

Tim clamped a hand on Dana's shoulder and moved her with him as he stepped forward.

“Everything's all right, Senator Mercer. Everything's under control.”

The back passenger's door of the SUV opened and Dana watched as her mother scrambled out, tripping and falling to her hands and knees as she tried to rush forward.

“Dana! Dana!”

Dana stepped toward her, then froze as the scene began to overwhelm her—the lights, the cameras, people shouting, people rushing toward her.

Tim let go of her and hurried to help her mother up from the pavement.

Crying, disheveled, hands dirty, skirt torn at the hem, Lynda accepted his hand up but immediately pushed past him.

“Dana! Oh my God! Oh thank God!”

Sobbing, she threw her arms around Dana and squeezed so hard Dana thought she might suffocate. The earth seemed to tilt beneath her feet, and the crowd pressed in on them. She had to close her eyes tight against the harsh glare of handheld lights as a television camera zoomed in on them.

“Mom, I'm so sorry!”

“Thank God you're safe!” her mother said over and over, touching her face, brushing back her hair, then hugging her tight again and again.

Dana tried to lean back out of her mother's death-clutch embrace just to gasp for air. A cacophony of sound assaulted her eardrums—the roar of her pulse, her mother's sobbing voice, Kimberly Kirk's insistent questions, the general din of the crowd around them. And then she found herself moving, swept along with her mother, up the driveway, surrounded by uniformed deputies.

A wave of people followed them into the house and into the formal living room—Roger, Wesley Stevens, Frankie, Maggie, Tim, the sheriff.

“I was worried sick!” her mother said, pursuing her, reaching out for her again.

“Mom, please stop,” Dana said, twisting away. “Please stop touching me. I feel like I can't breathe.”

Still in panic mode, her mother looked stricken. “Do we need an ambulance?” She looked to her husband, wild-eyed. “Roger, she can't breathe!”

“No! No!” Dana said. “That's not what I meant! I—I just n-need . . . um . . . um . . .”

Overwhelmed, she couldn't find the word. Not finding the word only added to the flood of anxiety and frustration. She clamped her hands on top of her head as if she might be able to squeeze the rest of the sentence out of her brain.

“This wasn't supposed to happen!” she said, tears rising, the pressure in her head building as she tried to hold them back.

“Dee, we were all worried,” Frankie said, perching herself on the fat rolled arm of the sofa. “I got here and I didn't know what to think. Your car was gone, the garage was open, the house looked like you left in a hurry. You didn't answer your phone. I texted your mom to ask if you had told her you were going somewhere. She said no.”

“We all jumped to the worst conclusion,” Maggie said.

“I was only going to be gone for a little while,” Dana said. “I never thought anyone would know, let alone send out a search party. I'm so embarrassed.”

“Sheriff Summers was at our table at the dinner,” her mother said, lifting a hand in the direction of Summers, a lean, middle-aged man in a pressed uniform. “He saw how upset I was. You never said anything about going out. What were we supposed to think?”

They weren't supposed to think anything because Dana had never imagined them knowing she was gone.

“We just got you back, Dee,” Frankie said. “You really can't blame us for freaking out.”

“Especially after that waitress was attacked last night,” Maggie added. “There is a rapist running around loose. Isn't that right, Tim?”

Tim crossed his arms over his chest and nodded solemnly. “That is true. At the moment, we have no strong suspects. And it was a brutal attack on that girl. I have to say, Dee, I got here and had a look around, and I was concerned too.”

“I've got extra manpower on the case,” Sheriff Summers said. “But until we have a suspect in custody, I would advise women to be cautious going out alone at night.”

“Where the hell were you?” Roger demanded, unable to contain his temper another minute. He had jerked his tie loose and stood with his hands on his hips, his suit jacket open.

“I had to see someone,” Dana said weakly, dreading the can of worms that was about to get opened and spilled out in front of all these people.

“Who?”

She didn't want to say, knowing Hardy's name would only open another line of questioning, and she was already exhausted and embarrassed and wanted nothing more than to go crawl into bed and pull the covers over her head.

“Am I supposed to be a prisoner here?” she asked. “No one told me. Maybe you should have left a guard.”

“How dare you cop an attitude with me?” Roger's face was red with temper. He seemed big and imposing as he took an aggressive step toward her. “You scared your mother sick!”

“I'm sorry! I said I was sorry!” Dana cried. She sat down on the large leather ottoman and curled over, covering her face with her hands.

“Roger, that's enough!” her mother snapped, coming to sit beside her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Dana made no objection to her touch this time.

“Jesus, Roger,” Frankie grumbled. “Could you be a bigger dick?”

He blew out a breath. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I shouted. I'm upset.”

“That doesn't give you the right to shout at Dana,” Frankie lashed out. “Why don't you go back outside and talk to the press. That should brighten your spirits.”

“Frankie, that's not fair,” Dana's mother said.

“Don't defend him, Lynda. I'm not going to stand here and listen to him browbeat my niece. It's not Dana's fault she can't remember to shut off the stupid faucet. I'm sure it wasn't her plan to create a panic tonight.”

“But she did,” Roger said.

Dana glanced up to see Roger plow his hands back through his thick hair, his eyes closed as if against some internal pain. Behind and around him stood the sheriff and Tim and Wesley Stevens, all looking uncomfortable to be witnessing the family drama.

“I'm sorry,” Roger said again. “But you're not living through this in the same way Lynda and I are, Frankie.”

“If there weren't cops here right now, I would come over there and kick you as hard as I could,” Frankie said, offended. “She's my flesh and blood.”

“You weren't sitting at that table tonight watching your wife go from zero to full-blown hysteria because she didn't know where her daughter might be,” he said. “You didn't see the panic grow with every unanswered phone call and text. That's upsetting to me, Frankie. And what could I do about it besides ask Sheriff Summers for help? Not a damn thing.”

“Oh, well,” Frankie grumbled. “I guess that should give you license to be a complete and total asshole to Dana. Forgive me. What was I thinking?”

“I don't need you coming into my house and insulting me,” Roger said. “Maybe you should go now, Frankie.”

Frankie advanced on him, looking like she was ready for a fistfight. Dana wouldn't have bet against her despite the almost comical difference in their sizes.

“Don't threaten me, Roger,” Frankie said. “As far as I'm concerned, this isn't your house. This was my brother's house. Eddie's house, Eddie's wife, Eddie's daughter. You just happen to live here. So back off my niece.”

Roger gave her a cold glare and turned away, throwing his hands up as if to signal he was done with the conversation, conceding the fight to Frankie.

“What was so urgent that you ran out like that, Dee?” Tim asked, turning the attention back to Dana.

“It wasn't urgent. I just left,” Dana said, miserable. “I decided I had to go and I left. I didn't mean to leave the stove on or the faucet or whatever. I didn't think of any of that stuff. I'm sorry, I just didn't.”

“Who did you need to see?”

She sighed, resigning herself to the idea that she wasn't going to get out of having to explain and weather their reactions. Everyone was looking at her, waiting for the big revelation.

“Detective Hardy,” she confessed. “I wanted to ask him some questions about when Casey went missing. I'm trying to piece together my memories and fill in the blanks. I thought he might be able to help. I left my phone in the car when I went in his house.”

“That couldn't have waited until tomorrow,” Roger said. He shook his head in disbelief at what he clearly viewed as impulsive, irresponsible behavior.

Dana didn't try to answer him. He wouldn't understand that when Hardy had told her she had to come tonight, her brain took that literally. She hadn't meant to be irresponsible.

“Casey Grant?” Wesley Stevens asked. “The girl that disappeared back when?”

“She was Dana's best friend,” her mother said, giving her a little squeeze around her shoulders.

“I know the story,” he said, dismissing her and turning to his boss. He spoke softly. “I don't see any reason to bring that up in our statement to the media. We'll just say she took a drive and didn't realize people were looking for her.”

Roger nodded.