Cold Cold Heart (3 page)

Lynda had worried about her going out alone at that hour. Minneapolis was a big city. Bad things happened in big cities all the time. Dana had pooh-poohed the idea that she could be put in jeopardy going from her apartment building the few dozen yards to her car in the parking lot. She argued that she lived in a very safe neighborhood, that the parking lot was well lit.

She had been abducted from that parking lot on the fourth of January, taken right out from under the false security of the light. No one had seen or heard anything.

Lynda had come to Minneapolis as soon as she heard of Dana's
possible abduction. But she hadn't been able to see her daughter until she was brought to the ICU after the surgery, a tube coming out of her shaved head, attached to a machine to monitor brain pressure. Tubes seemed to come from every part of her, connecting to an IV bag and a bag of blood. A catheter line drained urine from her bladder to a bag on the side of the bed. The ventilator was breathing for her, taking one vital task away from her swollen brain.

Now the ventilator was gone. Dana was breathing on her own. The pressure monitor had been removed from her skull. She was still unconscious, but closer to the surface than she had been.

It had been eerie to watch her these last few days as her mind floated in some kind of dark limbo. She had begun to move her arms and legs, sometimes violently, to the point that she had to be restrained. And yet she wasn't awake. She responded to commands to squeeze the hand of the doctor, of the nurse, of her mother. But she wasn't awake. She spoke words that suggested she was aware of the physical world—
hot
,
cold
,
hard
,
soft
. She answered when asked who she was—
Dana
. But she didn't seem to recognize the voices of people she knew, some she had known for years, if not her whole life.

The physical therapist came every morning to prop Dana up in the chair beside the bed because movement was good for her. She would sit in the chair moving her arms and legs randomly, as if she were a marionette, her invisible strings being manipulated by an unseen hand.

But she had yet to open her eyes.

She stirred now, moving one arm, batting at Lynda. Her right leg bent at the knee, then pushed down again and again in a stomping motion. The rhythm of the heart monitor picked up.

“Dana, sweetheart, it's Mom. It's all right,” Lynda said, trying to touch her daughter's shoulder. Dana whimpered and tried to wrench away. “It's okay, honey. You're safe now. Everything is going to be fine.”

Agitated, Dana mumbled and thrashed and clawed with her left hand at her neck brace, tearing it off and flinging it aside. She hated the brace. She fussed and fought every time someone tried to put it on her. She tore it off every chance she had.

“Dana, calm down. You need to calm down.”

“No, no, no, no, no,
no! No! No!
”

Lynda could feel her own heart rate and blood pressure rising. She tried again to touch her daughter's flailing arm.

“
No! No! No! No!
”

One of the night-shift nurses came into the room, a small, stout woman with a shorn hedge of maroon hair. “She has a lot to say today,” she said cheerfully, checking the monitors. “I heard she was pretty loud this afternoon.”

Lynda stepped back out of her way as she moved efficiently around the bed. “It's so unnerving.”

“I know it is, but the more she says, the more she moves, the closer she is to waking up. And that's a good thing.” She turned her attention to Dana. “Dana, you have to rein it in. You're getting too wild and crazy here. We can't have you thrashing around.”

She tried to push Dana's arm gently downward to restrain her wrist. Dana flailed harder, striking the nurse in the chest with a loose fist, then grabbing at her scrub top. She rolled to her left side and tried to throw her right leg over the bed railing.

Lynda stepped closer. “Please don't restrain her. It only upsets her more.”

“We can't have her throw herself out of bed.”

“Dana,” Lynda said, leaning down, putting her hand gently on her daughter's shoulder. “Dana, it's all right. You're all right. You have to quiet down, sweetheart.”

“No, no, no, no,” Dana responded, but with a softer voice. She was running out of steam, the brief burst of adrenaline waning.

Lynda leaned closer still and began to sing softly the song she had rocked her daughter to sleep with from the time she was a baby.
“
Blackbird singing in the dead of night. Take these broken wings and learn to fly . . .
”

The words touched her in a very different way than they had all those years ago. The song took on a very different meaning. Dana was the broken bird. She would have to learn to fly all over again. She would have to rise from tragedy, and Lynda was the one waiting for that moment to arrive.

Tears rose in her eyes. Her voice trembled as she sang. She touched Dana's swollen cheek in a place that wasn't black-and-blue. She touched the pad of her thumb ever so softly to her daughter's lips.

Dana let go a sigh and stilled. Slowly her left eye opened—just a slit, just enough that Lynda could see the blue. She was afraid to move, afraid to take a breath lest she break the spell. Her heart was pounding.

“Welcome back, sweetheart,” she murmured.

The blue eye blinked slowly in a sea of blood red where the white should have been. Then Dana drew a breath and spoke three words that shattered her mother's heart like a piece of blown glass thrown to the floor.

“Who . . . are . . . you?”

Pieces of cheap jewelry.
Locks of hair bound with tiny rubber bands. Human teeth. Fingernail clippings painted in confetti colors.

Nikki Liska looked through the photographs of the suspicious items found in the home and vehicles of Frank Fitzgerald—aka Frank Fitzpatrick, Gerald Fitzgerald, Gerald Fitzpatrick, Frank Gerald, Gerald Franks, and a couple of other names, according to the driver's licenses and credit cards they had found. The cops called him Doc Holiday.

Law enforcement agencies had attached him to nine victims in various states in the Midwest, four in the metro area alone. The supposed trophies from his victims indicated the victim count could be much higher. He had traveled the highways in a box truck for years, collecting antiques and junk for resale and kidnapping young women. He took them in one city, tortured them for days, and dumped their bodies in another state, another jurisdiction, complicating any investigation.

He had been too good at getting away with his crimes for law enforcement to believe murder was new to him. Men in their forties didn't wake up one day as sexual sadists and start killing women. The seeds for that behavior were planted early on, were nurtured
and festered for years. Aberrant behavior began small—porn, window peeping, panty sniffing—and escalated over the years. The first kill usually happened in the man's twenties or early thirties. Doc Holiday had been thirty-eight when Dana Nolan buried a screwdriver through his temple and into his brain.

The items in the photographs were almost certainly trophies, remembrances of the kill. Something he could hold and look at and relive the crime. Sick bastard.

Nikki stared at the picture of the nail clippings—some long, some short, some acrylic, some with what looked like the dried remains of blood on the underside.

“That's just disgustingly weird,” she said.

“Hmm?” Kovac asked, pulling his attention away from the wall-mounted television where the travel channel was beckoning viewers to explore winter in Sweden. No one else in the hospital lounge was paying any attention.

“We live in Minnesota,” Nikki said, looking up at the screen. “Why the hell would we go to Sweden in the winter?”

“They have a hotel made entirely of ice,” Kovac said. “Even the beds are made of ice.”

“That's not a selling point for me.”

“What are you looking at?”

“The nail clippings. That's so creepy.”

“Doesn't beat suncatchers made of tattooed human skin.”

They had seen that once, too. The killer had cut the victims' tattoos off their bodies and stretched the hide on little hoops to dry, then hung them in a window in his home.

“True,” Nikki conceded. “But still.”

“The teeth creep me out,” Kovac said. “Sick fuck. I hope the lab can pull DNA out of them.”

Kovac always looked like he hadn't slept in a night or two—a little rumpled, a little bleary-eyed. Harrison Ford after a three-day bender. His salt-and-pepper hair was thick and stood up like the
pelt of a bear. He had ten years and half a lifetime of homicides on her.

“You think we'll ever know how many girls he really killed?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No. But maybe we'll get to identify a few more.”

Like that was a good thing, Nikki thought, being able to call more parents and tell them their daughters weren't missing anymore because they had been abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered by a serial killer. How many times had she imagined what it would be like to be the parent on the receiving end of a call like that? Every case. Every single case.

She thought of her boys: Kyle, fifteen, and R.J., thirteen. She loved them so much she sometimes thought the enormity of that emotion would make her explode because she couldn't possibly contain it all within her. She was barely five feet five, but her love for her sons was the size of Montana and as strong as titanium. She would have taken on an army for them.

What if she answered the phone one day and the voice at the other end told her someone had beaten and strangled R.J. to death? She thought of Jeanne Reiser, the mother of their first Doc Holiday victim. Her grief and her pain had seemed to cut through time and space to reach all the way from Kansas like a lightning bolt over the phone lines.

What if someone called to tell her Kyle was in the hospital, clinging to life, the only known surviving victim of a sexual sadist? Nikki had been the first to speak to Dana Nolan's mother, Lynda Mercer. The split-second shocked silence on the other end of the line had seemed to Nikki as if the news had struck Lynda Mercer as hard as the hammer blow that had fractured her daughter's skull.

“If something like this ever happened to one of my boys . . . ,” she said, shaking her head at the violent images that ran through it.

“I wouldn't want to be the guy who did it,” Kovac said impassively.

She gave him a serious look. “I'd fucking kill him, Sam. You know I would. I'd kill him with my bare hands.”

Kovac shrugged, his expression not changing at all. “I'll hold him down. You kick him.”

“I wouldn't do it quick, either,” she went on. “I'd beat every inch of his body with a steel rod, and slowly, slowly let his muscles break down from the lactic acid, and let his internal organs digest themselves in pancreatic fluid.”

“Saw on him with a steak knife while you're waiting,” he suggested. “And pour salt in the wounds.”

“Fresh-ground sea salt,” she said, glancing at a somber family having a quiet discussion at a table on the other side of the room. “Bigger granules take longer to dissolve and cut into raw tissue like ground glass.”

Kovac raised an eyebrow. “You're perfecting this fantasy.”

“Damn right,” she said. “Someone messes with my kids, I'm going fifty shades of crazy all over them. And no one would ever find a trace of the perp. Not so much as a pubic hair.”

“Fifty-five-gallon drum and forty gallons of sulfuric acid,” Kovac suggested, using the remote control to scroll through the on-screen TV guide. “Mix the acid with concentrated hydrogen peroxide and make that piranha solution the ME told us about. That shit will dissolve anything.

“Do it at his house,” he added matter-of-factly. “Seal the drum and leave it in the farthest corner of the basement. It could sit there for thirty years. No one would ever want to bother moving it.”

They had probably had this conversation a couple of hundred times over the course of their partnership.

Nikki sighed and got up and wandered to the coffee machine. She was tired. She was tired of thinking terrible thoughts, but given what they had been working on since New Year's Eve, terrible thoughts were the norm. The abduction of Dana Nolan. The hunt for Doc Holiday. The gruesome murder of one of Kyle's school
friends. And then, the discovery of Dana Nolan and the captor she had killed.

Nikki would never forget the sight of the once-perky young newscaster as the paramedics went to load her into the bus. She was unrecognizable, her face battered, cut, bloody, and grotesquely swollen. Her would-be killer had drawn a huge red smile around her mouth, making her look like an evil clown from a macabre nightmare. A red ribbon fluttered from her mangled left hand. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she had babbled over and over, “I'm his masterpiece.”

Nikki checked her watch as the coffeemaker sputtered and spewed more fuel into her cup. They had been waiting for nearly an hour. An hour and three weeks since Dana had been rushed to the hospital. It seemed like a year ago—and it seemed like she had been working every hour of that year. She was exhausted. She wanted to go home and hug her kids, put on sweatpants and a big old sweater, curl up on the couch with them, and watch some silly blow-'em-up boy movie.

“Let's step out,” Kovac murmured, throwing his cup in the garbage. He tilted his head toward the family across the room. A doctor with a too-serious expression had joined them at the table and was speaking to them too softly for the news to be good. The mother of the family started to cry. Her husband put his arm around her and whispered something in her ear.

Nikki nodded. She slung her bag over her shoulder, took her coffee, and followed her partner into the hall.

A large window looked out onto the dim world of winter's dusk: the darkening ash-gray sky, bare trees, dirty snow, wet street lined with slush. A restaurant across the street far below them beckoned the hospital's weary, hungry, emotionally raw refugees with a red neon light:
COMFORT FOOD CAFÉ.

Nikki set her coffee cup on the sill and crossed her arms against the chill coming off the glass, thinking,
I need to change my life. I
can't stand all the bad anymore.
She and Kovac dealt every day in death and depravity. Even now, though they were here to see a victim who had survived, the experience would not be a happy one. Dana Nolan would not be who she had been before her abduction. She wouldn't look the same. Her injuries were devastating and disfiguring. No one could say with any certainty how debilitating—or how permanent—the brain damage would be. And psychologically, Dana Nolan was broken in a way doctors couldn't fix.

Nikki turned her back to the window and looked up at Sam, who stayed facing the gloom.

“You know she's not going to remember anything,” she said. “Even if she can, why would she want to?”

“We have to try,” Kovac said. “Rutten said there's no way to know exactly what she'll remember and what she won't. Maybe something in one of these pictures will strike a chord. Maybe the only thing she'll remember is Fitzgerald telling her the names of his other victims.

“If you had a daughter missing, you'd want the cops to ask her,” he said. “You'd beg Lynda Mercer to let you talk to Dana. There are families out there who need to know what happened to their girls.”

“I know. You're right. If I was the mother of a missing girl, I'd do anything to find out what happened,” Nikki said. “But if I was the mother of a daughter who had been tortured and brutalized and nearly killed, I'd do whatever I could to protect her.”

“Dana is the lucky one,” Sam said. “As fucked-up as that may be.”

“That's about as fucked-up as it gets.”

He studied her face for a moment. He knew her as well as anyone. Better.

“Look, I'd send you home to the boys and do this myself. But there's a good chance she isn't going to want anything to do with a man.”

“It's okay,” Nikki said, dodging his eyes. “I'm fine.”

Kovac drew a long breath and let go a longer sigh.

He knew what she was thinking, and he knew why. After all these years, she was going to transfer out of Homicide. They had already had the discussion . . . over and over. She needed better hours and more time with the boys. She loved her job. She was good at her job. But her first job was to raise her sons. She knew too well that the time for that could be gone in a heartbeat.

“We need to do this soon,” Kovac said. “Before she ships off to rehab in Indiana.”

Although Dana had regained consciousness two weeks past and was reportedly doing well in relation to the things that had happened to her, Lynda Mercer had put them off again and again. Dana wasn't well enough to see anyone. Dana couldn't remain conscious or couldn't focus long enough to be asked questions. Communicating was exhausting for her. All of which was probably true, but excuses nonetheless.

It had been Nikki's job to crack the ice with Lynda, to impress upon her the necessity of their talking to Dana. Feeling like a traitor to the motherhood union, she had downplayed what they would be asking of Dana. All they wanted was for her to look at some snapshots of objects, see if she recognized any of them. What they really wanted was for that recognition to lead to a memory made during a traumatic event.

“Let's go check at the nurses' station,” Kovac said. “If they're not ready for us by now, we'll come back in the morning.”

“You're just trolling for a date,” Nikki chided, bumping her partner with an elbow as they started down the hall, giving him a wry smile, trying to lighten the mood—hers as much as his.

“I've sworn off nurses,” he growled. “They know too many ways to inflict pain.”

*   *   *

D
ANA
N
OLAN WAS SIT
TING
in a chair next to her hospital bed when they walked into the room, wearing a hospital gown and a hockey
helmet. This was the first time Nikki had seen her conscious since the night they had found her near the Loring Park sculpture garden, her captor's van crashed into a light pole. Nikki had kept in touch with Dana's mother, stopping in at the hospital every few days to check on Dana's progress and to offer Lynda Mercer a little kindness from one mother to another.

Nikki had dealt before with victims who had suffered brain injuries. The process from coma to consciousness was arduous and unpredictable. Patients came up from the depths like deep-sea divers—slowly, stalling now and again to adjust to the new pressure. They could remain submerged just below the surface, near enough to see but not to communicate, or they could bob in and out, for days or weeks, responding to stimuli, even speaking, but not fully waking up.

In the movies, the heroine always awoke from a coma as if from a wonderful long nap, with bright eyes and rosy cheeks and a full head of beautifully brushed long tresses. And the worst trauma she faced was deciding whether or not Channing Tatum was really her husband. Dana had a much longer road ahead of her.

Some of the swelling had finally left her face, but she looked nothing like the pretty young woman who had greeted the early-rising residents of the Twin Cities on the first local newscast of the day. Bandages still swathed her skull, and a patch covered her right eye. The bruising in her face had faded from black to blue to a red-purple surrounded by a sickly shade of yellow. The cheekbone on the right side of her face appeared to be sinking. The right corner of her mouth drooped downward in a constant frown. Stitches marred her face like train tracks on a map.