Cold Cold Heart (31 page)

As her mother began to cry, Dana reached out. In that moment she realized it was her turn to offer comfort, to console her mother for the child she had lost. She would never be the same girl she had been before that cold January morning in a Minneapolis parking
lot. Doc Holiday had taken that girl away from herself and away from everyone who loved her. They would all have to start again with the damaged young woman who had survived, and part of that process was mourning what they all had lost.

They held each other for a long while as that truth settled over both of them.

It was dawn
by the time John walked out of the ER. Despite his protests to the contrary, his body had betrayed him in the end. After more than an hour of questioning by the detective, Tubman, he had excused himself to go piss blood and had passed out five steps from his truck. He had come to quick enough, but the decision was out of his hands by then. Carver had driven him to the ER.

There was no sign of him now as John walked out into the gloom. Another Liddell County cruiser sat at the curb. A young bulldog of a deputy he didn't know got out of the car and called to him across the roof.

“Can I drop you someplace, Mr. Villante?”

“Home,” John said.

The deputy shook his shaved head. “Can't take you there. The whole place is a crime scene. It's still being processed.”

John tried to sigh, pain stabbing him in his cracked and bruised ribs, catching his breath short. “I just want to get my truck.”

“'Fraid that's not happening either. It's part of the scene.”

He had nowhere else to go. Home, such as it was, or his truck. Beyond those two choices, he had nothing and no one. All he had were the clothes on his back, filthy and stained with his own blood and the blood of his father.

He had refrained from asking after the old man while he was in the ER. That hadn't stopped him hearing, just the same. Multiple facial fractures and a skull fracture. He would live to fight another day. That figured. The son of a bitch was too damned mean to die, even if John had made a better effort. Belligerent and combative, the old man had been put in some kind of twilight state to keep him quiet through the worst of his concussion.

John had fared little better. The bullet had indeed fractured his collarbone. His right arm now hung useless in a sling. He didn't want to know how many stitches it had taken to close the trench the bullet had dug through the flesh of his shoulder. He had badly bruised and cracked ribs and a kidney that felt like it had been pounded with a mallet. The right side of his face was like something from a horror movie, the eye swollen nearly shut, the cheek glued together, all of it filled with fluid and discolored like a rotten peach.

Even though his head was banging like a bass drum, he had refused the head CT against the doctor's wishes. His brain was already a mess. He didn't need a test to prove he had a fresh concussion in addition to the damage he'd already had. What difference would it make what Mack had done to him? If he was lucky, he would get a blood clot and die from it. But he was never that lucky.

He heard the distant crackle of the cruiser's radio and watched the young deputy speak into the remote unit on his shoulder.

“Detective Tubman suggests you come in to the sheriff's office to wait,” the deputy said. “We can make you comfortable there.”

What good would it do to protest? He had nowhere else to go. As much as he would have liked to get on the first bus out of town, no one was going to let him do that either.

Resigned, he eased himself into the backseat of the deputy's car and closed his eyes against the pain as the car pulled away from the
curb. His last thought before he passed out was to wonder what might have become of his dog.

*   *   *

H
E CAME BACK AROUND
as the deputy took hold of his damaged shoulder to shake him. John's roar of pain sent the kid running backward.

“Hey! Sorry, dude!”

John said nothing as he worked his way out of the car.

He was “made comfortable” in an interrogation room with no windows and nothing but a hard chair to sit on. John ignored the chair in favor of sitting on the floor, propped up in the corner, facing the door. The deputy brought him a bottle of water and a couple of stale doughnuts and left him. He drank the water, ignored the doughnuts, and drifted in and out of consciousness, welcome, at least, for the quiet when it came.

When he was awake, he worked to keep his mind quiet, to keep the flashbacks of what had happened from replaying over and over. He wanted to think nothing, to feel nothing. He tried to picture absolute darkness, but the blank screen was sporadically interrupted by blasts of sight and sound and feeling, so loud and so intense it made him flinch. Memories of last night, memories of his father, memories of war, memories of death—
Bam! Bam! Bam!
Flash-bang bright. So loud he wanted to cover his ears, but the sound was in his head, and there was no escape.

Eventually, exhaustion overtook him, and he dozed for a while. He had no idea how much time had passed when Tubman showed up.

“You should have stayed in the hospital,” the detective said as he pulled out a chair and seated himself next to the tiny round table. He promptly ate one of the doughnuts.

“When can I go home?” John asked.

“Remains to be seen.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means it won't be anytime soon.”

The detective munched on the second doughnut and stared at him.

John let his eyes drift shut.

“You want to tell us about that barrel?” Tubman asked.

“No, sir. I don't know anything about that, sir.”

“How long has it been in that shed?”

“I don't know.”

“Why don't you know? You grew up there. You live there.”

“I don't go in that shed.”

“Ever.”

“Ever.”

“I'm supposed to believe that.”

John said nothing. He didn't give a shit what this tub of lard thought, but even with a concussion he knew better than to say so.

“You don't know who that skeleton is,” Tubman said.

“No, sir.”

The detective opened the cover of a thick file and looked down through the lenses of his little wire-rimmed glasses at a typed page of something John couldn't make out.

“How is it nobody looked inside that barrel seven years ago when Casey Grant went missing?”

“I don't know, sir. You'd have to ask one of your own.”

“Fucking Hardy,” Tubman muttered under his breath.

Detective Hardy, John supposed. He hated the very name. Hardy had made his life a misery. It was half Hardy's doing that he had ended up in the army. He might have thanked the man for that—right up until the moment the IED had gone off, flipping the Hummer he was in, scrambling his brain like an egg.

“What's the deal with you and your old man?” Tubman asked.

“How do you mean?”

“You clearly hate each other. Why is that?”

John said nothing. He didn't know how to begin to explain his
relationship with his father. Looking back to his childhood, he knew that he had both loved and feared the old man. Even as a teenager, as much as he had hated the man, he had still known a pathetic need to make his father proud of him—something he had managed every once in a while on an athletic field. He might have thought his father was proud of his service in the military, but he had never heard it from the old man's lips.

Even last night, even after every other disappointment in his life, a little part of his heart had died looking down the barrel of his father's gun. Surely he had known long before that his father didn't love him in any sense of the word, and yet some small part of him had held out a tiny scrap of hope, secret even to himself.

He didn't have the energy to try to explain any part of that to Tubman.

“How was he around your girlfriends?” Tubman asked. “Did he express an interest? Was he inappropriate in any way?”

A strange wave of shame washed over John as he considered his answer. His father's leering and inappropriate remarks had been the reason he had rarely taken Casey to his house. His lack of ability to do anything about his father's behavior had left him feeling less of a man.

“Yes, sir. He was a pig, sir,” he said.

“Did he ever threaten Casey Grant? Did you ever see him make a physical advance on her? Did she ever express a fear of him?”

“He made her uncomfortable,” John said. “I didn't bring her around him much.”

The detective referred back to his notes, licking the tip of a thick finger and paging through the file.

“You think it's Casey Grant in that barrel?” Tubman asked.

He had considered the possibility. He had wondered over the years if his father could have had something to do with Casey's disappearance. Her car had been found in the parking lot between Silva's Garage and the woods. The old man had just laughed at him
when John had confronted him about the possibility. He'd had an alibi. An alibi who had died in a fire a month later.

“I don't know, sir,” he said.

“You sure about that?”

And so it would begin again, John thought. The endless questions, the accusations, the twisting and turning of his words and deeds, the scrutiny of the media. The inevitability of it swarmed over him, sapping what little strength he had. He had barely weathered the storm seven years ago when his brain had been whole. In the intervening years he had grown from boy to man. He had been battle-tested and survived two wars. But he was so tired now, his body and his brain so beaten, the idea of having to face it all again made him want to cry.

He hated Casey Grant in that moment—as he had hated her that summer seven years ago. She had been the one pretty, perfect thing in his otherwise ugly life. She had been his reward after a childhood of abandonment and abuse, finally someone to love him when no one else ever had or ever would, it seemed. Too good to be true, he had thought at the time, every time he looked at her as she held his hand or smiled at him or kissed him. Too good to be true. And so she had been. A pretty little liar, tired of his drama, done with her community service of being kind to the poor boy with no mother. He had ceased to be her charity, and she moved on to a brighter future with no real understanding of what that meant to him.

She had broken his heart, had ruined his life, and she was about to do it all over again.

“Sir?” he asked. “Am I under arrest?”

“No,” Tubman said. “But it's in your best interest to cooperate here.”

With great effort and great pain, John pushed himself to his feet.

“No, sir,” he said. “I don't believe it is. I'll be going now.”

The waiting was terrible.
Every minute was like a bubble that grew and grew, filling with anticipation only to burst so that another might begin to form and grow and grow. Dana had texted Tim with the single question:
Is it her?
And then waited and waited for him to text her back, only to receive:
will
let u know
. An answer that wasn't an answer.

The story was all over the news. The local television stations all had reporters and cameras live at the scene. Each crew had staked out a patch of weedy ground outside the yellow barrier tape that cordoned off the Villante property on the ragged edge of town. They stood in the rain, bundled in their station-logo storm jackets, reporting the news of no news, regurgitating everything that had happened the night before.

The one revelation of the day was the name of the person who had been hospitalized. John “Mack” Villante Sr. was in serious but stable condition with a head injury of some kind. John Jr. had been treated and released. There still had been no official explanation of the reported shooting that had initiated the call to the sheriff's office.

Dana sat at the kitchen table watching the coverage and checking her phone, checking the time, checking to make sure no
messages had managed to sneak into it unnoticed, as if that was even remotely possible. She watched the recounting of Casey's disappearance, the rerunning of old footage from news stories seven years ago.

There they all were, players in the drama—herself and Tim and John, their friends from school, Casey's mother, the people in her life who wanted her found, and the people in her life who might have wanted her dead.

It seemed so strange to see herself, Before Dana, just on the brink of going out in the world, trying so hard to seem like an adult, as frightened as a child at the sudden loss of her friend. And there was Tim, tall and straight, already carrying himself like the military cadet he was about to become. His hair thicker than now and combed just so with a razor-sharp part on the side. He seemed so serious and so earnest in his answers to the reporter's questions about Casey. And there was John, lean and sullen, brows tugged low over his narrowed dark eyes, his broad shoulders hunched against the weight of accusation.

All three of them had left Shelby Mills, left that time, and left the story of Casey Grant behind them. And here they were, seven years later, back in the town that had grown them, back in the wake of Casey's vanishing.

The television screen was full of still and video images of herself seven years ago, and a year ago, and three days ago. A photo chronicle of her growth and her tragedy. Then John took her place, and the photos were of him in a football uniform, then in an army uniform, then in the desert camouflage of a war half a world away. Images of Tim completed the segment. A still photo of him at eighteen was planted in the upper left of the screen as video rolled showing him today, in uniform, directing other sheriff's personnel around the scene at the Villante property.

There was no real neighborhood where the Villantes lived. Curbs and gutters ended a quarter of a mile from their driveway. Properties were irregular in size and shape and set apart from one another
with no sense of community intended. The houses had been built in the fifties and sixties and neglected in recent decades, cracker boxes and ranch rectangles in aluminum siding and cheap brick. Detached garages and ramshackle sheds were the norm out there. A thick woods ran right up to the back of the Villante yard.

Dana imagined John as a boy growing up there with no mother and a brute for a father. She remembered him as a third grader, always having bruises but never having much of anything to say. She had kept her distance from boys like John. She was the queen of the class, hosting tea parties for her circle of little ladies-in-waiting.

Her mother brought a steaming cup of tea to the table now, set it down in front of her, and ran a hand over Dana's hair.

“No word?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

They both sighed and stared at the television. They jumped together when the doorbell rang. Dana popped out of her chair like a jack-in-the-box and hurried to the front door.

Tim stood on the front step looking like he hadn't slept in days, dark half-circles sagging beneath his blue eyes, the lines around his mouth etched deeper than his years accounted for.

Dana's heart caught in her throat and fluttered there like a trapped bird. She put her hand over her mouth to prevent herself from asking the question. She didn't want to hear the answer.

“We haven't heard,” Tim said. “There's some snafu finding her dental records.”

“Oh my God,” Dana's mother said, putting her hands on Dana's shoulders. “Come in, Tim. You look like you could use a cup of coffee.”

“Yes, ma'am. Thank you.”

He took his cap off and shrugged out of his rain poncho and left both in the foyer to drip on the tile next to his wet boots.

“Can you tell us what's going on?” Dana asked as they went back to the kitchen.

“Not really,” he said. “I'm not allowed to say much more than what you've probably seen on the news—if that much. We haven't pieced it all together yet ourselves, at any rate. We haven't been able to speak to Mack Villante yet.”

“But you've spoken to John?” Dana said.

“Yes. He apparently went to the house to get his stuff and move out. He ended up in that shed at the back of the property. His father—we don't know if he mistook him for an intruder or what. John says his father knew it was him. Anyway, he took a shot at John and there was an altercation. That's what we know.”

“Oh my God,” Dana's mother said, bringing a cup of coffee to him at the table. “He shot at his own son?”

Tim made a pained face. “That's what you might call a bad family dynamic there.”

“Casey always said John's father made her skin crawl,” Dana said.

“But he's the one in the hospital?” her mother asked. “I'm confused.”

“John got the better of him,” Tim said. “You know, he's a trained commando—Special Forces and whatnot in the army. He's got a box full of medals. I wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of a fight with him.”

“What does John have to say about the skeleton?” Dana asked.

“Nothing. He denies knowing anything about it. But I have to say I don't think he's telling us everything he knows. He walked out of an interview with our detective just a little while ago.”

“He just walked out?” Dana's mother said. “How can he do that?”

“It was what we call a noncustodial interview,” he explained. “He's not under arrest. That makes him free to get up and leave.”

“He put his father in the hospital!”

“His father shot him. Winged him pretty good. It looks like John was defending himself. He made the 911 call and was reasonably
cooperative at the scene. We didn't have grounds to arrest him. Not at that point, anyway.”

“And now?” Dana asked.

“And now things are getting complicated,” he said.

He took a sip of his coffee as if to fortify himself. Dana could feel him holding something back. There was a tightness around his mouth like he was trying not to swallow medicine that was bitter on his tongue. He made a little gesture toward the television on the wall.

“As you've seen, we've been going over the place with a fine-tooth comb.”

“And what have you found?” Dana asked.

“Something I need to have you look at,” he said.

He reached into a big pocket on his coat and pulled out a clear evidence bag with chain-of-custody notes scribbled on the front of it.

“I have to leave it in the bag,” he said. “But I think you might recognize it.”

He flipped the bag over, notes side down, on the table and pushed it toward Dana.

“We found this in the house,” he said.

Dana stared at the piece of jewelry in the bag, every inch of her body suddenly ice-cold with dread. Just last night she had looked at the photograph of herself and Casey, each holding up the pendant of their friendship necklace. Two halves of the same heart, inscribed with a saying only complete when the halves were joined together.

“Oh no,” she said in the tiniest voice.

“Of course, this by itself doesn't necessarily mean anything,” Tim said. “She could have left it there by accident . . .”

“No,” Dana murmured, fingering the necklace through the plastic bag. “We wore these every day. She had it on that day. We both did.”

She could see it in her mind as she squeezed her eyes closed against the tears. She had taken her necklace off that day and put it away because she was angry. She had written about it in her journal.

I'm not going to wear a friendship necklace shared by someone who isn't a true friend.

There couldn't be an innocent explanation for Casey's necklace being in the Villante home. Casey would never have left it anywhere voluntarily. John had said again and again that he never saw her that day. But someone in that house had seen her. Someone in that house had probably killed her.

The tears welled up and spilled over Dana's lashes. She turned to her mother. “Mom . . .”

Her mother wrapped her up in a hug and kissed her hair and murmured, “I'm so sorry, sweetie.”

Tim waited for a moment before clearing his throat discreetly.

“I need to get going with this,” he said as he got up. He tucked the bag back into his coat pocket. “Thank you for the coffee, Mrs. Mercer.”

“Anytime.”

Dana followed him to the foyer, wiping her cheeks on the sleeves of her sweatshirt.

“I wish I hadn't found it,” Tim said, glancing up at her as he pulled his boots on.

“I guess the truth works its way out eventually,” Dana said. “Like a sliver. Sometimes it hurts worse coming out than it did going in.”

“I think sometimes things are better left unknown,” he said. “She's just as gone as she was before.”

“But she'll get justice now.”

“If that's her in that barrel. If we can prove John killed her.”

“Or his father,” Dana said, thinking of what Hardy had told her about Mack Villante's so-called alibi for the day Casey went missing.

Tim shook his head. “My money's on John. He told you his motive. Casey was dumping him for me. He always was jealous of everything I had.”

True enough,
Dana thought. Poor John Villante from the wrong side of the tracks. He had always worked twice as hard for half as
much, while the sun rose and set on Tim Carver. How angry he must have been to know the only girl he'd ever loved was setting him aside for the golden boy of Shelby Mills.

“But if the body in the barrel is Casey, and John put her there, why would he call 911?” Dana asked.

“I don't know. Maybe that makes him look innocent while it makes his old man look guilty.”

“Maybe his father
is
guilty.”

“We'll know soon enough if it's Casey in that barrel,” he said. “As soon as her dental records turn up. Then we'll figure out who put her there.”

“God,” Dana said, hugging herself against an internal chill. “Now I want to hope some poor person I don't even know died a terrible death.”

“Somebody died. It's a sad story no matter what.”

He pulled his rain poncho over his head, sending little water droplets scattering.

“I'd better go.”

Dana went to open the door, pausing with her hand on the doorknob. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“When did you and Casey get together?”

His eyes narrowed slightly, but he didn't look away.

“Just then,” he said. “Like I told you. Why?”

“John told me Casey had been cheating on him,” Dana said. “Past tense.”

He shrugged. “I don't know.”

“You might as well 'fess up,” she pressed. “What does it matter now?”

The muscles in his jaw flexed. “If it doesn't matter, why are you asking?”

“It matters to me, not to anyone else,” she said. “I've been going back over my journal, and it just looks to me like something had
been going on with her for a while. I thought that something might be you.”

“We'd seen each other a couple of times,” he confessed. “She didn't feel right about keeping it from you. That's why she decided to just come out and talk to you about it. You and I had split up, Dana,” he said with an edge to his voice.

“You and I,” she clarified. “Casey was still supposed to be my best friend. Best friends don't lie to each other. We had never kept a secret from each other until that summer. Then she had a couple doozies.”

“Let it go, Dee,” he said, weary of the conversation. “Just let it go. Remember the good times. We were kids, for God's sake. We made mistakes. We shouldn't have to pay for them for all eternity.”

“Had she told you she was pregnant?”

“What? No!” He shook his head. “Did she tell you that?”

“No, she wouldn't have. She would have known I would go ballistic. But I think she might have been. Something was wrong that summer. She was sick a lot. I made a remark one day—a joke—that she'd better not be pregnant. She laughed it off. I let it go. I never told anyone because I didn't know. But looking back on it, I think she might have been.”

“Not by me, she wasn't,” he insisted. “We'd only just started seeing each other. Besides, you know I was careful. I never would have risked that. Did we ever have sex without a condom? Ever?”

Which was all but an admission that they had slept together before Casey's big attack of conscience. Salt in the already raw wound.

“No,” Dana admitted. “Well, one more strike against John, then. Casey had arranged to see him that night. Maybe that's what she was going to tell him.”