Cold Cold Heart (20 page)

“I think we can chalk this evening up as nothing more than an
unfortunate miscommunication—or lack of communication,” Sheriff Summers said. “Let's just be grateful Dana is home safe, and we can call it a night—except you, Deputy Carver,” he said, turning to Tim. “I believe you've got a shift to get back to.”

“Yes, sir,” Tim said. He went to Dana and bent down close, resting a hand on her shoulder. “I'm glad you're safe, Dee.”

“Thanks.”

He leaned in closer as if to kiss her cheek and whispered in her ear, “I'll see you later.”

Dana stared at him, confused, as he gave his regards to her mother and Roger, then followed the sheriff out the front door. The tension in the room dispersed as Roger and Wesley walked out after the other men.

Frankie clapped her hands. “Well, that was fun,” she said sarcastically.

“You were out of line saying that to Roger,” Dana's mother said, but without much force, as if she'd said the same line so many times over the years it had become nothing more than a token objection.

“I don't care,” Frankie said. “I didn't say anything that wasn't true. I'm not going to stand around and let him bully Dana. Fuck him. I don't owe Roger Mercer a damn thing.”

“Roger was upset because he saw how upset I was.”

“Don't make excuses for him, Lynda.”

“But you're never fair to him, Frankie! Roger has been very good to us—”

“Oh, for Christ's sake! You make it sound like he took you in off the street! You didn't need him. Eddie left you the house, half the business, insurance. Roger made out like a fucking bandit!”

“Frankie, that's enough.” Maggie put a hand on her partner's arm. “It's probably time for us to go.”

Frankie made a face. “That's code for ‘Shut up now, Frankie.'”

“Yes. Shut up now, Frankie,” Dana's mother said.

“I'm sorry,” Frankie said. “I didn't want to upset you, but you
know I'm not going to stand by and let him yell at Li'l Dee. Not happening.”

“I'm sorry I ruined everyone's night,” Dana said, getting to her feet.

Frankie gave her a hug. “Don't beat yourself up, Dee. You didn't mean to do anything bad. We just love you so much we couldn't cope with the idea of losing you again.”

“I love you guys too,” Dana said, swiping at a stray tear on her cheek.

“Are you all right, sweetheart?” her mother asked.

“I'm fine,” she said, almost laughing at the absurdity of the statement. “I'm a brain-damaged idiot who sparked a manhunt by forgetting to turn off a faucet. It's all good.”

“Dana . . .”

“Really, Mom, I just want to go to bed. I'm sorry for all the confusion.”

She'd had enough of people, enough of the day. Her head felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. She didn't want to think about the mess she'd made on her first foray toward independence. She wanted to be alone in the quiet sanctuary of her bedroom, shutting out her own thoughts one by one.

She was so tired she made two wrong turns getting there.

She put her notebook on the desk and went into the bathroom, where she had to stand at the sink and read the note cards she had taped to the mirror to remember her bedtime rituals.
Wash your face with cleanser. Brush your teeth WITH TOOTHPASTE. TAKE YOUR MEDS!

Too tired to even decide which of the steps she could leave out, she performed the tasks with as little thought as possible. Her hoodie smelled of nervous sweat. She went into her closet, pulled it off and dropped it on the floor with her jeans, and replaced the outfit with a big Indianapolis Colts T-shirt and a pair of plaid flannel pajama bottoms.

As she emerged from the closet, she stopped dead, then ran backward, gasping for air, reacting in fear before her conscious mind even realized there was a man standing outside her patio doors.

Her brain scrambled to process what it was taking in.

A man at the door.

Waving.

Smiling a sheepish smile.

Tim.

Her heart was pounding so hard Dana thought it might explode in her chest and drown her in her own blood.

“Oh my God!” she said, opening the door. “What the hell are you thinking? Don't ever do that to me again!”

“I told you I was coming,” he said without apology.

“No, you didn't!”

“I said, ‘I'll see you later.' Just like old times.”

“What?”

“When I used to bring you home from a date and say good-bye in front of your folks, then sneak around down here.”

“That was years ago!” Dana said, even as pieces of those memories came back to her. “I didn't remember that! I didn't know what you were talking about!”

He made a pained face. “Ouch. That's a blow to the old ego.”

“Screw your ego!” Dana snapped. “You scared me. Don't ever do that again!”

“I'm sorry! I'm sorry!” he said, holding his hands up in surrender. “I'll never do it again. I promise. Let's calm down and have a seat.”

“What do you want, anyway?” Dana asked, too agitated to sit. She paced back and forth beside the upholstered chair, arms wrapped tight across her chest. “I'm tired.”

“I want to talk to you about Dan Hardy.”

“What about him?”

“You shouldn't have gone out there by yourself, Dee,” he said. “That guy ain't right in the head.”

“Now you tell me.”

“He didn't retire because he wanted to go fishing,” he said. “It was suggested to him by the sheriff. There were rumors about him and an underage girl over in Clarksville. Nothing ever came of it, but still . . .”

“What kind of rumors?”

“The kind that don't end well.”

Dana sank down on the chair, pulling her legs up, wrapping her arms around her knees. She thought of the sick feeling of dread she'd felt, trapped in Dan Hardy's office as he seemed to delight in frightening her.

“Tell me what that means,” she said quietly.

Tim took a seat on the ottoman in front of her, forearms resting on his thighs. “There used to be a . . . place . . . over that way, out in the sticks . . .”

“What kind of a place?”

He glanced away, looking uncomfortable. “A . . . uh . . . a whorehouse, for lack of a more genteel word. A girl known to have been working there disappeared, then turned up a couple of days later wandering naked down a dirt road, beat to hell. She wouldn't talk. Never did talk. She OD'd on heroin as soon as they let her out of the hospital.”

“What did Hardy have to do with it?”

“He knew the place, knew the girl, had developed an obsession with her, according to the woman who ran the place. He had tried to physically remove her from the house against her will at one point a month or so before. No one ever knew if he had anything to do with what happened to her, but when she died, he lost it. He had a breakdown. That was pretty much the end of his career.”

“He wasn't prosecuted?” Dana asked.

“Nope. There was never an arrest. There wasn't any evidence against him—or anyone else, for that matter. What happened to that girl was a straight-up mystery. Still is.”

“Do you think he did something to her?”

He shrugged. “Doesn't matter what I think. All that matters is what can be proved, and nobody could prove anything. But what I can tell you is Dan Hardy is not a stable individual. We're going to have to look at him for what happened to that waitress last night.”

Dana felt sick to her stomach to think that she might have put herself in jeopardy going to see a man she had thought of as above reproach because of his profession. She didn't want to think about what could have happened. Doc Holiday had been a peddler of antiques and junk. People who had known him had described him as jovial, friendly, kind. No one had suspected him of being a monster. They didn't come with labels.

“So how is there a whorehouse operating in the county without getting shut down?” she asked. “And if this girl was underage, why didn't anybody remove her and put her in the child welfare system?”

“Nobody knew how young she really was until late in the story. As for the whorehouse, it's gone now. It's not like it was a storefront business. It was sort of . . . unofficial, you might say.”

“I might say that's a load of crap,” Dana said with disgust. “It existed because men allowed it to exist. Men are unbelievable. Everything in your lives is about sex and control and power.”

“You can't judge—”

“A man beat my head in with a hammer because it got him off,” she said. “I think I'm a pretty good authority on the subject.”

He looked away from her and sighed, as if her statement had hit him physically. “I'm sorry, Dee. I'm real sorry. But he wasn't me. You can't lump us all together.”

Can't I?
Dana thought, suddenly remembering the feeling of a hot surge of jealousy and anger toward him. He had been a notorious flirt back in high school. She had confronted him once about rumors he was fooling around with a girl from Levine.

“What did Hardy have to tell you?” he asked.

“He told me you flunked out of West Point,” she said bluntly, in part to punish him for the memory she'd just had.

He looked down at the floor, the muscles in his jaw flexing. He had never taken it well when someone called him on his shit, she remembered. The happy-go-lucky Texas-country-boy facade could disappear in the snap of two fingers.

He swallowed back his temper and nodded. “My grades weren't what they should've been,” he admitted. “My head wasn't in my studies. I didn't want to be there and, consequently, they didn't want to have me.”

“It all worked out.”

“That's the way I look at it,” he said. “What else did Hardy have to say? You didn't go out there to talk about me.”

“No,” Dana said. “He has everything about Casey's disappearance tacked up on a wall in his office—timelines and notes and questions, and all these old pictures of Casey.” A shudder went through her at the memory. “It's creepy. He's obsessed. He said he has a copy of every single piece of paper from the case.”

“I can't say I'm surprised,” Tim said. “He's like a crazy old dog with a bone. He worked that case for five years and never got an answer. That has to grind on him like nothing else.”

“I asked him for a copy of my statement from when he interviewed me,” Dana said. “I thought reading it might open up those memories.”

“Did he give it to you?”

“Yes. But he said I didn't tell him the whole truth. He thinks I held something back,” she confessed. “I argued with him. I would never have held back anything that could have helped Casey.”

“No, you wouldn't have.”

“Even if Casey and I were fighting, I loved her,” she said, tears rising. “I would never have done anything that could have hurt the chances of finding her.”

“No,” Tim said. “You were like sisters. You could get pretty cold
when you were angry, but I don't think you would have done anything to hurt Casey, directly or indirectly.”

“I wouldn't have!” Dana said, offended at the tiniest sliver of possibility left in his statement.

“No. Don't mind Hardy,” he said. “He's a jacked-up old lunatic. All he ever lived for was mind-fucking people, if you'll pardon my language. Don't take anything he says to heart, Dee. Christ only knows what kind of toxic mind-altering substances he's using out there in the boontoolies. There's no telling what's going on in his head. He's fixing to die, is what I hear. Too bad he doesn't just get on with it.”

Dana shrugged and picked at a loose thread on the hem of her pajama bottoms, frowning. “I don't know. We were kids when Casey disappeared. We thought we knew everything. What if I decided it wasn't important to tell him some detail, and it turned out to be the one thing that could have meant everything?”

“Like what?”

“I don't know,” she whispered. Tears came in a sudden flood, filling her eyes, spilling down her cheeks. “I wish I knew. I wish my brain worked. There are things I remember clearly, and other things not at all.”

“Hey,” Tim said softly. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “Don't cry, Dee. It's not worth it. If you'd known something, you would have said something.”

She deftly shrugged his touch away like a cat slipping out from under a hand, her intolerance stronger than her need for comfort. He pulled his hand away and sighed.

“It's not worth tormenting yourself that some minor detail could have turned the tables,” he said. “Real life isn't an episode of
CSI.

“
Casey's gone. She isn't coming back,” he said. “Whatever happened back then, whatever you said or didn't say, isn't going to change that. Let it go. You said yourself, that's why everyone wants to know if Doc Holiday took her. Everyone just wants to put it to rest. There's no good outcome to be had at this late date.”

Dana wiped the tears from her cheeks with the tail of her T-shirt. “And if it wasn't Doc Holiday? Then what? Someone took her away from us, Tim. If she's dead, then someone killed her, and that person is walking around having a life, and Casey isn't. Don't we owe it to her to do something about that?”

“If I thought there was a hope in hell,” he said.

“That's a great attitude from law enforcement.”

“I'm just trying to be practical here with regards to what you're putting yourself through, Dee. The case has been open and active for seven years, and it hasn't been solved yet. Short of finding Casey herself or Casey's body, or getting a confession from someone who might have done her harm, there's no reason to think it's going to be solved. We don't always get an ending with these things, let alone a happy one. You know better than me; your personal story is a rare exception.”