Cold Cold Heart (24 page)

Dana drove her
own car to the Grindstone with Hardy following in a nondescript older gray sedan. Not a pickup, she noted, though that didn't mean he didn't have one. She parked in the lot out in front of the restaurant and sat for a moment, rethinking the wisdom of coming here. She couldn't just walk into a place and go unnoticed. People would look at her, stare at her. They would recognize her and turn to each other and whisper.

She jumped as Hardy rapped his knuckles on her window.

“Let's go,” he barked, pulling her door open.

“I don't want to,” Dana said. “I changed my mind.”

“Why? You think everybody's gonna look at you?”

“Yes.”

“So what? You are who you are now. You can't hide for the rest of your life because you've got a few scars. If people don't have better manners than to look, fuck 'em. Come on.”

“Gee,” Dana muttered. “Why should I bother with a therapist when I can just spend time with you?”

“Don't know why you would anyway,” he grumbled, reaching for her arm to pull her out of the car.

Dana jerked away. “Don't touch me! I'll get out when I feel like it. It's not like you're paying for my time.”

“I'm dying,” he groused. “I'd sooner not do it in a goddamn parking lot waiting for you to decide whether or not to risk your delicate sensibilities.”

“Fuck you.”

“Don't curse. It sounds ridiculous coming out of a little thing like you,” he said as she got out of the car. “Unless you're strong enough to knock him on his ass, never tell a man to go fuck himself.”

“You're just full of life wisdom,” Dana muttered, pulling up her hood.

“Feel free to stitch that on a pillow.”

Dana walked toward the restaurant as if she was walking to her execution. She hadn't been to the Grindstone in years. The building sat a little bit separate from the other facilities on the property—Silva's Garage, the island of fuel pumps, and the convenience store that also offered shower facilities for truckers. While the building itself was of simple concrete-block construction, the facade of the restaurant had been decked out with weathered board-and-batten siding and a wide front porch lined with old rocking chairs, giving it a down-home country look.

Dana's apprehension grew with every step. If she and Casey had crossed paths with Doc Holiday all those years ago, this would have been the scene of the encounter. He was known to have followed truck routes. He had snagged several of his known victims from areas just like this one, busy, high-traffic places where people came and went and were quickly forgotten, their faces blending into all the others that stopped there for ten minutes or an hour at a time.

“What are you thinking?”

She flinched at the abrupt sound of Hardy's gruff voice. “Just that we spent so much time here—Casey and I, and our friends. We always came here after football games and basketball games. We never thought that it might not be safe, that someone we might have met here for a few minutes could have turned out to be . . .”

She didn't want to say his name. She felt like if she said his name
here she might somehow conjure him up, like calling up a demon at a séance.

“He was just a man,” Hardy said as they climbed the steps to the porch. “Don't make him more than what he was.”

He was just the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face. He was just a man who had tortured and killed who knew how many young women.

“He got up in the morning and took a shit just like every other man on the planet,” Hardy said. “And when you killed him, he bled like any other man. Don't give him superpowers just because he got the drop on you once.”

Dana wanted to argue with him that there was a lot more to what had happened to her, that it wasn't that simple, but she swallowed her protest. What man could understand the terror of being absolutely at the mercy of someone bigger and stronger, someone who had a boundless capacity for cruelty and an insatiable hunger for the suffering of others? Not many men would ever experience anything close to what she had experienced. From what Tim had told her, Dan Hardy had more in common with her assailant.

He held the door for her to go into the restaurant. Dana stepped inside and immediately turned to the right, head down, pretending to look at the rack of tourist brochures that mostly advised people to keep on driving past Shelby Mills to Louisville and Kentucky's horse country. Hardy asked the hostess for a booth.

She kept her head down as a waitress led them through the restaurant, self-consciously tugging at the edges of her hood. Even then she believed she could feel the stares and hear the whispers of people who caught glimpses of her face.

“What are you looking at?” Hardy barked at someone.

Dana cringed and tucked her chin to her chest, pulling again at the hood, wishing it could swallow her whole. She slid into the booth, up against the corner, and made herself as small as possible.
Hardy took his seat across from her and ordered coffee for both of them.

“You defeat the point of the exercise if you spend the whole time staring at the tabletop,” Hardy complained. “You need to look up, look around, listen to the voices, smell the smells.”

The sounds and smells were inescapable. She was on the verge of sensory overload. The place was busy, nearly full. Conversation and the clink of silverware on plates was an assault on her ears. She imagined she could hear her name being whispered. The aromas of strong coffee and bacon grease filled her sinuses. She hadn't been in a restaurant in nearly a year, and her first outing was to be crammed into a truck-stop diner overpopulated with men, stuck in a place where she may well have first encountered the man who had brutalized her years later.

Her nerves were humming like high-voltage power lines. In her mind she ticked through the checklist to calm her thoughts and even her breathing, to push back the flood of emotions that would swamp her brain and send her into a meltdown.

She looked up at Hardy without lifting her head. “I thought you were supposed to have chemo today.”

“I canceled.”

“Why?”

“Look around,” he said, dismissing her question. “Imagine Casey sitting here with you. You came for breakfast. What did you order?”

She took a slow, deep breath and released it on a slow count of four. “I always got the egg skillet with biscuits.”

“Order that.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“Doesn't matter. Order it anyway.”

“Are you buying?” she asked. “I forgot to bring money.”

“I'm buying.”

“You order it.”

The waitress returned with the coffee. Hardy ordered the breakfast skillet. Dana kept her head down, counting out her breaths.

“You're Dana Nolan, aren't you?” the waitress said, a little breathless, like she was meeting a movie star. “I followed your case every night on the news! And now you're back. You're like our own celebrity in Shelby Mills!”

“Leave her alone,” Hardy barked.

The waitress shied away like a skittish horse, hustling back toward the kitchen, where she would tell every single employee about her encounter.

“She'll probably spit in my food now,” Hardy grumbled.

“A waitress from here was attacked the other night,” Dana said.

“Yep. The night you came home.”

“You say that like it's my fault.”

“Could be. I don't believe in coincidence.”

“I think the stock market fell that day. Was that my fault too?”

“You come home. It's all over the news. And that night a young waitress, who happens to work at the same place as your friend that went missing, gets attacked and brutalized.

“On the one hand, shit happens,” he said. “This county averages a certain number of reported rapes a year. On the other hand, you coming back here is generating renewed interest in Casey Grant's case. That could be enough of a stressor to set somebody off.

“If her bad guy lives here, he's gotten away with a crime for seven years. He maybe had even stopped looking over his shoulder by now. God knows that asshat Tubman wasn't putting any pressure on the case. Then all of a sudden here you come, and everybody's looking at you and looking at that old case, and everybody has questions, and Casey Grant is in the news again, and the pressure starts to build for this guy. What if someone remembers something? What if someone finds something? And that pressure builds and builds until he needs to tap the valve. So he goes out and finds himself another young waitress from the Grindstone.”

Dana followed his logic, her stomach turning at the idea that her return home could have been the catalyst for an attack on another
woman. The cycle of violence fed on itself in ways she hadn't even imagined.

“I saw John Villante that night,” she said. “He delivered a pizza. When he saw me he ran away like he'd seen a ghost.”

“Maybe he had,” Hardy said. “Or maybe Doc Holiday grabbed Casey. Maybe April Johnson was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and her attack has got nothing to do with you.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes while the possibilities chased one another around in Dana's head until her brain began to hurt. To distract herself, she pulled her phone out of the pouch of her sweatshirt and started taking pictures of the restaurant, catching some patrons eating and others staring at her, looking annoyed or surprised or perplexed. She pointed the camera at Hardy and captured his scowl.

Beneath the unflattering overhead light, his complexion was sallow, and the lines in his face were as sharp and deep as if they had been gouged out by a woodworker's tool. She remembered him as he had been when Casey had gone missing—younger, heavy, with hair. It was as if time and illness had stripped away everything that wasn't strictly necessary except for his thick mustache, his one remaining conceit.

When the food came, the waitress plunked the skillet down in front of him and left without a word.

“What did Casey order that day?” he asked as he took a fork and stirred the food in the small skillet.

The aromas of the dish escaped in a cloud of steam: fried egg and home-fried potatoes with onions and green peppers and chunks of bacon. Despite the fact that she wasn't hungry, Dana's mouth watered as she breathed in the scents. She could almost taste the biscuit as Hardy slathered it in butter and lifted it to his mouth. The memory of the taste and texture had been imprinted on her memory years ago, and even though she hadn't eaten this dish in a long, long time, that memory was still there, triggered by her sense of smell.

“What did Casey order that day?” Hardy asked again.

“Toast,” Dana said, surprised such an insignificant detail just popped to the surface like an air bubble emerging from the thick soup in her head.

“Did she or you speak to anyone that you remember?”

“Wouldn't I have told you that seven years ago?”

“Not necessarily. Not if you didn't think it was important. What's a ‘Hey, y'all' to someone on your way to the ladies' room? Probably nothing.”

“Then it probably wouldn't stick in my memory either,” Dana pointed out.

“It's all in there,” Hardy said. “Buried in the back of a drawer in some mental filing cabinet. You just need the right trigger to shake it loose.”

Dana tried to picture Casey making her way to and from the ladies' room, smiling, tossing her thick mane of dark hair. So many of the Grindstone's local patrons were regulars and knew Casey. She always said hello to everyone, had been friendly with everyone. Despite what Hardy said, Dana didn't think she would have paid any attention to Casey exchanging a casual greeting with anyone. There wouldn't have been anything remarkable in it.

But there was something in his mention of the ladies' room that struck her. Casey hadn't been feeling well that day and had made a trip to the ladies' room the instant the food arrived at the table. Dana closed her eyes and tried to call up the scene—Casey coming back to the table, all smiles, exchanging greetings with people on the way. Dana tried to remember the other faces but couldn't.

She turned her attention back to the screen of her phone and flicked through the photographs she had just taken, looking closely at the faces of the other diners without them being able to look at her. Had any of them been here that day seven years ago? Had any of these men been the one to put April Johnson in the hospital two nights ago? They all looked so . . . ordinary.

He was just a man, Hardy had said of Doc Holiday. He was just a man like any other man. Just like the men sitting in this restaurant. Tall, short, fat, thin, bald, bearded—they blended, one into the next. What made a killer remarkable was not what was in his looks, but what was in his head and in his heart. What made a killer was hidden in the places no one could see. The shells were interchangeable. No one could tell who the bad guys were until their demons emerged in the dead of night.

Her breath caught a little as a pudgy balding man with a dark beard filled the phone's screen.

“What?” Hardy asked. “Do you recognize someone?”

Dana stared at the photograph. Her hands were suddenly cold. Her face felt suddenly hot. Her heartbeat quickened.

“Who is it?”

“I don't know,” she murmured, shaking her head. She felt sick to her stomach. “I don't know who he is.”

Impatient, Hardy snatched the phone out of her hands and looked at the picture, then turned and looked directly at the man, who sat in a booth not far away.

“Oh my God,” Dana whispered, mortified. “Don't look at him!”

Hardy was already out of his seat. Dana watched in horror as he walked up to the man and showed him a badge. She wanted to pull her hood over her face and slide down under the table as both men turned and looked at her. It felt like everyone in the restaurant was staring at her now. The din of voices and bang and clang of food being served and eaten faded to nothing. All she could hear was the roaring of her pulse in her ears.