Cold Cold Heart (23 page)

She could see Roger in some of those bits and pieces. Roger the
chaperone, the chauffeur, the surrogate father. He had never had that ease around kids that had come so naturally to her father. Her dad had effortlessly balanced the authority aspect of parenthood with a sense of camaraderie that made all of Dana's friends love and respect him. Roger's attempts at connecting with the kids had always seemed fake and forced. Dana had appreciated his efforts and cringed at the same time.

Now as she looked back on those memories, she felt uncomfortable thinking about her stepfather. But according to her mother's theory, those feelings were attached to an event that had nothing to do with him.

Head throbbing from the effort to sort it all out, she went back downstairs to her room and opened the French doors to the patio, letting in the crisp, clean air. The sky was the incredible electric blue that seemed unique to fall. The colors of the grassy field and the woods beyond seemed extra-saturated.

Tuxedo immediately trotted outside to lie in the sun on the flagstone, purring and trilling as he rolled and stretched.

Dana walked out onto the patio, the stone warm beneath her bare feet, while the breeze was just cool enough to make her wrap her oversize cardigan around her slight frame. The day was so beautiful it was hard to imagine there could be evil in the world. As she looked past the low stone wall, down the grassy hill to the woods painted with the brilliant shades of autumn, she tried to recall the feeling from her first night home when she had the feeling there was someone watching from the woods. It seemed ridiculous in the light of a picture-postcard-perfect day.

But the day Casey had disappeared had been a beautiful day too. A hot summer day with fluffy white popcorn clouds floating in the sky. And at some point during that day someone had taken Casey Grant away from everyone who loved her. Dana wanted to know who and why.

Mind fixed on her goal, she went back into the bedroom, then
remembered Tuxedo. The cat was running along a row of chrysanthemums, leaping in the air every few strides, trying to catch a butterfly.

“Tux!” Dana called and clapped her hands to get his attention. He paid her no mind, continuing in his pursuit of the butterfly.

Dana went back out on the patio and had no more luck catching the cat than the cat had catching the butterfly. Playful, he dashed from one part of the patio to another, to another, trilling and chirping, his tail straight up in the air, daring her to chase him.

Winded and dizzy, Dana finally gave up and went inside, leaving the door ajar just enough for Tuxedo to slip through, hoping his curiosity at where she had gone would quickly get the better of him so she could close the door again.

She sat down at her desk and woke the computer up. Next to the keyboard was the notebook she had taken with her into Detective Hardy's house the night before. She pulled out the copy of her statement that Hardy had given to her and read it over, start to finish.

There wasn't much to it. Casey had spent the night. They had gone the next morning for breakfast at the Grindstone, then continued on to the nursery. She said Casey had left because she wasn't feeling well. Dana hadn't seen or heard from her again. Ever.

There had to be so much more to the story than a few dry paragraphs, a collection of dull declarative sentences—
we went here, we did this, she did that
. What had they been thinking? What had they said to each other? Hardy claimed a witness had seen them arguing. Dana swore she had no memory of it. Was that just another piece of her past her brain had decided to delete for her own good? Or was there truly nothing worth remembering? In the seven years since Casey had gone missing, she hadn't come up with any relevant information. No one had.

She thought about Hardy's office—the timeline, the notes, the photographs. It was like having his memory pulled out of his head and tacked to the wall. He didn't have to dig for the details stored
in the far corners of his troubled mind. He could just look at the wall and see them.

Dana looked around her room at the built-in bookcases and the big upholstered headboard, the framed artwork on the walls and the interruption of doors. She went out into the hall and looked at a long stretch of uninterrupted wall directly across from her room. No one came down this hall but her for the most part.

She went back to her desk and dug a fat black marker out of a drawer, went back to the wall, and starting at the door to the utility room, drew a thick black line at eye level all the way to the door of the powder room, a good ten feet from end to end. At the starting point she wrote
DAY BEFORE
on the line, then a few feet to the right wrote
DAY CA
SEY DISAPPEARED
. Perpendicular to the horizontal line, she drew vertical lines above and below and scribbled what information was readily available in her memory—that she and Casey had gone to breakfast at the Grindstone, that Casey had come with her to work at the nursery, that Casey had left the nursery—adding the question:
sick?? or fight???

When her memory ran out of information, she got her iPad and started going through the articles about Casey's disappearance, noting details on the wall. She used different colored markers for details given by different people—blue for John Villante, red for Tim Carver, green for Casey's mom, purple for her own statements.

She had no idea how long she'd been at it when she finally stepped back and looked at what she'd done. The clean, smooth beige wall had gone from blank slate to a chaotic work of art, a spiderweb of lines punctuated by bubbles of words, statements, and questions. She felt exhausted from the effort but lighter for having taken her memories and put them up where they could be seen, where they couldn't slip away into a dark, hidden cranny in her brain.

She was sweating. She was breathing hard, as if she'd been through a strenuous workout, but she felt good. She had accomplished something.

Hands on her hips, she started at the beginning of the timeline and read each notation slowly. Casey had spent the night. Dana had noted that her mother had been out of town, gone to Florida to help Grandma after her gallbladder surgery. Roger had been their chaperone. The next day she and Casey had left the house a little after nine and gone to the Grindstone for breakfast, then on to the nursery. Roger had stayed home with a migraine. Casey had left the nursery after an employee witnessed her having words with Dana. Casey had later called and spoken to Tim. She had also called John to set up a time to meet that evening. He claimed she was a no-show. Her car had been found in the parking lot at the truck stop on the far side of Silva's Garage, along the edge of the wooded lot that bordered the property.

There was too much open space on the wall, Dana thought. The picture painted by the lines and words was lopsided, weighed down at the beginning of the timeline. After that last day she had seen Casey, the line stretched on and on with the occasional notation of a supposed sighting that had dissolved into the nothingness of wishful thoughts.

Too much blank wall, she thought again. Then a dark stain appeared, growing slowly up the wall toward the far end of the timeline.

Dana's heart seemed to stop, then pound against the inside of her chest like a fist on a door.

Not a stain, she thought as her brain scrambled to make sense of what she was seeing. All in a matter of nanoseconds, recognition went from stain to not a stain to like a stain to the word that made her blood run cold.

Shadow.

The shadow of a man standing in her bedroom.

Have you solved it,
little girl?”

Dana spun around and ran backward, banging hard into the wall.

Dan Hardy stood in the doorway to her bedroom, his dark eyes shining bright with some kind of fever.
Madness,
Dana thought. He seemed bigger than he had last night, too large for the space, his broad shoulders threatening to strain the doorframe. The smile that turned the corners of his mouth was the smile of a cat with a cornered mouse.

“What are you doing here?” Dana asked. She wanted to sound outraged but knew she sounded exactly how she felt—terrified.

“I came to see you,” he said. His tone was low and dark, the seductive purr of a predator enjoying the fear he was stirring in his prey.

“How did you get in the house?”

“I rang the doorbell upstairs. Nobody answered. Thought I'd have a walk around. See what I might see. You left your patio door open. You should be more careful. When you open the door to let the breeze in, anything might follow.”

Afraid to move, afraid to turn her head, Dana glanced to her right. The hall ended in a utility room. No escape route. Even if she could get into the room and shut the door, there was no lock to keep
him out. She tried to think of the things that might be in the room that she could use for a weapon. Christmas decorations. Maybe some hand tools. He would be on her before she could get to them. He would be on her before she could get to the door.

“You're a skittish little thing,” he said. “I suppose you have more call than most. How many days did he keep you?” he asked. “Two? Three? I forget.”

Meaning he knew her story. He had given it thought. Dana didn't answer. If he wanted to fantasize about her captivity and torture, she wasn't going to participate willingly.

Every cell in her body was trembling. Her fear was like a band around her chest. She couldn't seem to get a deep breath.

She glanced to the left, to the family room with its big stone fireplace and iron fireplace tools, a wall of doors that let out onto the patio, the stairs leading to the main floor of the house. All of it might as well have been a mile away. She would have to get past Hardy to get to any of it. He had only to step into the hallway to block her path.

She didn't have a choice. She had to try to run.

Her fingers closed tight around the marker in her hand. It wasn't much of a weapon, but it was all she had.

As if he had read her mind, Hardy stepped into the hall, trapping her.

“Did you follow me last night?” Dana asked.

“Why would I bother to follow you? I already knew where you live.”

“To scare me,” she said. “You seem to enjoy that.”

Her mind flashed back to the story Tim had told her about Hardy and a young prostitute, how he had physically removed the girl from the house she had worked in, how she had disappeared and shown up days later, beaten and bloody.

“You caused quite a fuss last night,” he said. “I saw it on the news.”

“Everyone knows I went to see you,” Dana said. “I told them. The sheriff was here.”

“And Carver, your old boyfriend. He likes to get in front of a camera, that one,” he said. “He'll make a politician one day.”

“He knows I went to see you. If something happens to me, they'll go straight to you.”

“Ah,” he said, smiling. “Young Carver's been telling tales out of school. He told you a few stories about me, didn't he?”

Dana didn't know if it was better to mention the girl or not. She had no idea what might trigger him. She wondered what her chances were of getting past him. If she could kick him in the balls hard enough to double him over, maybe . . . Or he would get hold of her before she could land a kick, or kicking him would only enrage him . . .

“Why would I want to hurt you, little girl?” he asked. “You're gonna help me solve my case. I need you to come with me.”

“I'm not going anywhere with you,” Dana said.

He chuckled at that.

“You've got spunk. I'll give you that,” he said. “Better to be smart, though. If I'm a bad guy, I'll do what I have to do to get you out of this house—knock you out, choke you out, tie you up. Or I'll decide you're not worth the bother, and I'll just do what I want, then kill you here now. It's all about risk versus benefit. If I can get you away from the house and control you, I get more of what I want, but is the risk greater getting you out of the house or doing you here? That's how a predator thinks.”

Dana wanted to cry. Wave after wave of emotion washed through her, emotions attached to memories she couldn't access, memories of what another madman had done to her. Her instinct to flee had died with her opportunity to do so. Now she felt frozen in place, waiting. How would he kill her? With his hands? With a knife? How long would he play with her first? Would she be able to shut her mind down and escape the reality of what he was about to do to her?

“Hypothetically speaking,” he said. “If I was a bad guy, you should pretend to be cooperative and compliant long enough to get me to step out of this hallway. Come along like a meek little lamb until we're out of this house. Then you bolt and run like hell.

“If I was a bad guy,” he reiterated.

He let the possibility hang in the air for what seemed like minutes. Then he sighed and took a couple of steps back, releasing some of the pressure of the confrontation.

Dana was shaking like she had hold of a jackhammer. She wrapped her arms around herself and held on tight. The relief that he might not have come here to kill her was at least as draining as the fear had been. Her legs turned to jelly, and she slid down with her back against the wall until she was sitting on the floor.

“Please go,” she whispered. “Please just go away.”

“I need you to come with me.”

“You're not a cop anymore. I don't have to go anywhere with you. I'm
not
going anywhere with you.”

“You want to know what happened to your friend, don't you?”

Dana said nothing for a moment. The answer was more complicated than a simple yes or no. Did she want to know that her friend had died the same horrible death she herself had somehow managed to escape? No. Did she want to know that angry words she had spoken might have sent Casey away and into the direct path of a killer? No. Did she want a resolution and answers to the questions? Yes. Did she want justice for her friend? Yes. Was she afraid of where those questions would take her? Very much so. Was she afraid of Dan Hardy? Absolutely.

“We have a common goal, you and I,” he said, looking at her timeline. “That's why you came to me. Now I'm coming to you.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want you to retrace your steps that day.”

“I've been trying to do that. I close my eyes and I try to remember—”

“No,” Hardy said. “I mean we go everywhere the two of you went that day. We go through it step-by-step.”

“I'm not getting in a car with you,” Dana said.

“If I wanted to kill you, I could have done it by now.”

“Maybe you don't want to kill me,” Dana said. “Maybe I'll be found naked and beaten, wandering down a dirt road in a couple of days.”

His expression hardened. Dana wished she had at least gotten to her feet before sending him into a homicidal rage. She would have liked one last chance to at least try to get away.

“You only know what you've been told, little girl,” he said, his voice a low growl, his dark eyes boring into hers. “You don't know me. You don't know anything about me. And you don't know anything about what happened.”

Dana was afraid to blink. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was so dry she nearly choked.

“You don't need to be afraid of me,” Hardy said.

“Why not?” Dana asked bitterly. “You're a man, aren't you?”

He looked at her for a long moment, his expression softening to something like sympathy. “You more than earned the right to think that way,” he said quietly.

Dana still didn't trust him. “I've been told you used to live to fuck with people's heads.”

He might have lunged at her and smashed her face with one of his massive fists. He might have leaned down and crushed her larynx in one hand. Instead, he laughed with a mix of amusement and bitterness.

“You're a funny little thing,” he said. “Indeed I do live to fuck with people's heads. There isn't much else left for me. Except this case,” he said, nodding up at the wall and the notes Dana had scribbled across it. “Are you gonna help me with it, little girl?”

“I'm not getting in a car with you,” Dana said again.

“Suit yourself. We start here, anyway,” he said, pointing at the beginning of the timeline. “Casey spent the night with you here. What do you remember about that night?”

“Nothing stands out. We slept over at each other's houses all the time. Well,” she corrected herself, “Casey slept over here more than the other way around. Her mother had a boyfriend from out of town. When he would come for a visit, Casey would stay here so she didn't have to hear them having sex.”

“Karl Florian,” Hardy said. “He was an insurance claims adjuster from Terre Haute. He and Ms. Grant had gone up to Indianapolis for a long weekend. They had solid alibis. So Casey came here and . . . ?”

“I read over my statement,” Dana said. “It didn't say we did anything special.”

“The statement isn't worth wiping your ass on,” Hardy said. “It doesn't mean anything. I don't want you thinking about what you told me seven years ago. I want you to close your eyes and imagine that night. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? Who else was here?”

“My mom was in Florida with my grandmother. We stayed in that night. It was raining. We ordered pizza. We watched movies. Just normal stuff. Nothing worth remembering. We didn't know that would be the last time.”

“What about your stepdad?”

“What about him?”

“Was he around? Did he hang out with you?”

“He was around. He had some pizza.”

“Was he ever inappropriate in any way?”

“Roger? No. He was kind of awkward around my friends. He wanted to be the cool dad, but he just wasn't.”

“Did Casey ever say she felt uncomfortable around him?”

“No,” Dana said automatically, then took a moment to think about it, trying to remember any time she would have said his awkwardness had crossed a line. Nothing clear came to mind, but when she said no a second time, she said it with less conviction.

“Was Roger a suspect?” she asked.

“Everyone is a suspect,” Hardy returned. “Until I find an answer in a case, everyone is a suspect. You're a suspect.”

“Me?” Dana said, offended at the idea. “Why would I hurt Casey?”

He shrugged, indifferent to her feelings. “You were angry with her for something.”

“I didn't like her choice in boyfriends, so I killed her?” Dana said, getting to her feet. “That's ridiculous!”

“People lose their tempers,” he said, taking the black marker out of her hand and stepping up to the wall to add to her notes. “They lash out. They don't always mean it. Angry words get exchanged, a push, a shove, someone stumbles and falls, hits their head wrong. Just like that, you're a killer.”

“And I'm such a criminal mastermind, I hid her body without a trace of evidence anywhere. How did I manage that?”

“You'd manage that with help,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Who's my accomplice?”

“Your boyfriend, her boyfriend, your stepdad, your mom—except she was out of town. She's in the clear.”

“You're out of your mind.”

“I'm just saying. This is how a detective has to think,” he said. “I can't worry about you getting your feelings hurt, little girl. I can't worry that your stepdad is a state senator. There's not a person on this earth that couldn't be guilty of murder in the right circumstances.”

“Yourself included?”

He gave her a long sideways look but said nothing.

Dana looked at the wall, at the note he had added to the timeline saying that after leaving the nursery Casey had returned to the house and picked up her things.
Time undetermined.

He capped the marker and checked his watch. “Let's go. I want to get to the Grindstone before the lunch crowd.”