Cold Cold Heart

by Tami Hoag

  It took a moment for Dana’s brain to process what she was looking at. As realization dawned, a chill went through her, down her spine, down her arms and legs, and a sudden nausea swirled through her stomach and rose in the back of her throat.

  Her eyes went to the photographs. Too many photographs. Formal and casual. Posed and candid. Casey in her senior portrait. Casey in her cheerleader outfit. Casey in short shorts, holding a sign for a charity car wash. Casey as a little girl. Casey as a prom princess.

  A shrine to a girl missing seven years, built by a man no longer a detective.

  17

  She was a pretty girl, wasn’t she?”

  Dana shied sideways and spun around to face him, realizing too late that he had now cut off her escape route to the door. Her heart was pounding wildly. He could probably see it fluttering like a trapped bird at the base of her throat. She wanted to panic. She wanted to scream. She knew she couldn’t do either.

  Slowly, she slipped a hand into the pocket of her hoodie, reaching for her phone, only to find it wasn’t there.

  “Was?” she said. “She’s missing. She’s not dead.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Hardy asked.

  “She’s alive until someone proves to me that she’s not. There have been sightings—”

  “I’ll tell you right now that girl is dead,” he said. “And she’s probably been dead since the day she went missing.”

  “People survive horrible things,” Dana said, hating the tremor in her voice. She had to blink to fight back the tears that threatened to rise in her eyes.

  “You know all about that, don’t you?” Hardy said quietly.

  She wanted to bolt and run, but he blocked her way out the door. Behind her a big plate-glass window looked out on the yard. Security lights illuminated the clearing between the house and the woods beyond. The yard was being patrolled by a pair of massive guard dogs. Even if she could have gotten past Hardy and out of the house, she would never make it to the car.

  The sense of dread and panic swelled in the base of her throat until she thought she would choke on it. Hardy stared at her like a big cat waiting for a mouse to run. Her right hand closed around the pen she had clipped to her notebook. She could try to use it like a dagger. If she got him in the eye or the throat . . . She had no memory of it, but she had stabbed Doc Holiday in the temple with a screwdriver. She could do it if she had to.

  “Are you afraid of me, little girl?” he asked, amused at the prospect. “Afraid of an old man with cancer?”

  He wasn’t that old, Dana thought, and how did she know he had cancer? Because he had told her? She had put herself in danger by accepting an image of this man she had created in her own mind. He had been a sheriff’s detective; therefore, he must be a good and decent person. He was retired; therefore, he must be old and harmless. He had cancer; therefore, he must be weak.

  The truth was that he was bigger and stronger than she was, and he was enjoying making her afraid.

  “Why do you have all of this?” she asked, glancing at the wall covered with photographs and notes and news clippings. “You’re not a detective anymore.”

  “It’s the one case I never solved that sticks with me,” Hardy said.

  He stepped closer, his hands on his hips, his attention on the collage of photographs mounted on the wall. “I spent days and weeks and months investigating her case. Years. A man spends that much time with a victim, she becomes like his daughter and his sister and his lover all in one. I’m not letting go of that. What else do I have? I’ve got no family. I’ve got no career. I won’t have a life much longer.”

  “But another detective took over the case when you left,” Dana said.

  Hardy made a sour face. “Tubman. Fat, lazy bastard. It’s my case. I have a copy of every single piece of paper in that file. If anybody’s going to solve it, it’s going to be me. She’s my girl.”

  Dana looked from one side of the whiteboard to the other, taking in the notes Hardy had made in harsh, hard-slanting handwriting, using his own personal shorthand, abbreviations, and cryptic symbols. In her nervous state, her brain on the brink of flooding, the letters and numbers and arrows and lines combined into an indecipherable mishmash that began to turn and spin as she stared at it. Desperate for a focal point, she looked at the long timeline that ran across the lower third of the board. It began with the day Casey went missing.

  9:00 AM Vic & D Nolan dprt Mercer res in Vic’s vehicle

  9:15 AM Girls stop @ Grindstone breakfast

  10:00 AM Vic & D Nolan arrive @ Mercer-Nolan Lndscp

  Dana’s summer job had been to help around the nursery, watering plants, working in the gift shop, helping at the checkout. Sometimes Casey would go with her in the morning before she had to go to her own job at the Grindstone in the afternoon. They would talk while Dana dragged the hoses around through row after row after row of colorful annual flowers and terraces of potted rosebushes.

  They were forever getting in trouble because the summer months at the nursery were crazy busy and the place was swamped with customers. There was no time for gossiping teenage girls lollygagging in the aisles. The frustrated manager would occasionally root Roger out of his office, and he would give them a few terse words and send Casey on her way.

  Roger hadn’t gone into work that day. Dana remembered now he had stayed home with a migraine—no doubt brought on in part by having to tolerate the shrieks and giggles and endless chattering of two teenage girls the night before.

  10:15 AM (aprx) Vic and D Nolan seen arguing. Vic leaves the premises.

  “What did we argue about?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hardy said. “You told me you weren’t arguing,” he said. “You told me Casey left because she wasn’t feeling well. You lied.”

  “I’m not a liar!” Dana protested. “If I said Casey wasn’t feeling well, she wasn’t feeling well.”

  “You lied about not arguing with her. Another employee told us they witnessed the two of you getting into it near the employee restrooms.”

  “They’re mistaken,” Dana said stubbornly. “Or it wasn’t really a fight.”

  “Everybody lies,” Hardy said. “Everybody lies to the cops. The question is why? Why did you tell that lie on that day?”

  “Stop saying I lied! Casey and I didn’t fight. My mom said we were having some kind of disagreement about our boyfriends. Maybe we had words about that, but Casey was my best friend. I loved her like a sister. I just thought her boyfriend was holding her back; that’s all.”

  “Call it whatever makes you feel better about yourself,” Hardy said, stepping back to lean against his desk. “You don’t want to believe you had harsh words with your friend, then never saw her again. That’s okay—unless what you fought about was relevant to her disappearance. In that case, you’re hindering an investigation at best, and at worst you’re an accessory to the crime.”

  “If I knew something that would help Casey, I would have told you.”

  “That wasn’t your call to make. What an eighteen-year-old girl thinks might be relevant to a criminal investigation and what actually might be relevant are two different things,” he said. “Cases get broken all the time on small details that might seem to mean nothing to the person who mentions them. It might be a tiny discrepancy in someone’s story—a time that doesn’t jibe, a name that doesn’t ring a bell. It might be a piece of evidence that seems irrelevant to the person who has it—a note, a photograph, a cigarette butt, a piece of jewelry. Every little thing is part of the puzzle. It’s the detective’s job to put the pieces together to complete the puzzle. But we can’t complete the puzzle if we don’t have all the pieces.”

  Dana stared at the whiteboard and the note on the timeline that said she and Casey had argued. She couldn’t believe that she would have held anything back that might have helped the case, but now she
couldn’t remember the details at all. What might have seemed insignificant then couldn’t even be held up for scrutiny now.

  “You weren’t the only one who thought that about the boyfriend,” Hardy said. “Young Villante had trouble written all over him.”

  “But you never arrested him.”

  “Can’t arrest somebody without evidence. Villante claimed he hadn’t seen Casey for a couple of days before she went missing. We never found anything or anyone to contradict that. We know from Casey’s cell phone records she called him around one in the afternoon the day she disappeared. She left a message telling him she wanted to see him that evening. He claims she never showed. She also spoke to Tim Carver that day shortly after she left the nursery. To complain about you, he said.”

  Dana frowned, not liking the idea of her friends talking about her behind her back. If she had been hard on Casey, it was only because she wanted the best for her. Casey had always been too quick to fall for a sob story and take in the wounded and the abandoned, a habit that always hurt her in the end.

  “She was mad at me for breaking up with Tim,” she said. “She kept trying to get us back together.”

  “Yeah? Well, good judgment on your part,” he said. “Carver was quite the little prick back then. Mr. Ambition. Too good for the likes of this town. Karma kicked him in the balls, didn’t she? Got his ass chucked out of West Point.”

  The comment stopped Dana short. “He told me he decided it wasn’t for him.”

  “That’s an easy decision when you’ve been asked to leave.”

  That would be like the Tim she remembered, Dana thought, always spinning the tale to reflect well on himself.

  “Turns out he otherwise wasn’t as smart as he thought he was,” Hardy said. “He flunked out.”

  That wasn’t like Tim at all. He had always been a good student and a clever politician, winning over his teachers with his wit and humor. But West Point wasn’t Shelby Mills High. The expectations at the Point were of the highest order, and certainly no one skated by on looks and charm. Still, she couldn’t imagine him flunking out.

  But after leaving West Point, he had chosen to come back to Indiana and go to the police academy. And he had chosen to come back to Shelby Mills when he could have gone anywhere with no one here the wiser. She liked what that said about Tim Carver the grown man. He had to have eaten his share of humble pie over his failure at West Point, but here he was, working his way up the ranks in the sheriff’s office.

  “You said over the phone you wanted to see your statement to me,” Hardy said. “Why?”

  “I have a head injury. My memory is coming back, but it’s sketchy. Casey was my best friend. I feel like I should remember every detail, but I don’t. Maybe if I could find all the pieces, I could put that puzzle together now. Maybe I would look at something differently now, see something I didn’t see back then.”

  “Like Doc Holiday?” he asked, moving away from the desk again.

  He seemed too close in the cramped space. The astringent antiseptic scent of his aftershave burned her nostrils. Dana stood her ground, wishing she could get to the other side of him, nearer to the door.

  “I don’t have any memory of him. I don’t remember any of it,” she said. “So don’t bother asking me if I think Doc Holiday took Casey, because I don’t know.”

  “That would be a hell of a coincidence,” Hardy said.

  He pulled a pair of half-glasses out of the breast pocket of his denim shirt and perched them on his nose as he turned toward his desk and opened a file folder lying on top of a pile.

  “Then again,” he said, “you and I both know real life is far stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense in the end. There’s plenty of shit goes down in the real world no book editor would ever believe in a novel. It doesn’t matter how impossible, improbable, coincidental, anything might be in the real world. Reality doesn’t have to make any damn sense at all.”

  He swiveled his desk chair around to face her and lowered himself into it like a man in pain. A fine film of sweat coated his face. He drew in a slow breath and let it out carefully.

  “When I heard that theory was being tossed around,” he said, “that maybe Doc Holiday was around here back when Casey went missing—I reached out to someone I know with the FBI,” he said. “They’ve got a team coordinating the local agencies that think they might have Doc Holiday victims. They’re going back years, laying out timelines. Turns out he was part owner of a junkyard near Terre Haute since 2005. Which means he had a base three hours away from here.

  “There are a few people in the county who deal in antiques and junk who claim to have run across him at flea markets and auctions and the like. So, yeah, he could have passed through here,” he said. “He could have stopped at the Grindstone. I don’t know of anyone who could testify to it, but Casey Grant could have served him a piece of pie. He could have taken a shine to her and somehow got her into his truck. All of that could have happened.”

  “Do you think that’s what happened?” Dana asked.

  He looked across the narrow room at the timeline. “I don’t know. She never made it to work that day, but her car was in the parking lot. Where’d she go? Nobody saw anything. Did Doc Holiday snag her out of the parking lot with nobody seeing a damn thing? That’s what he did to you, right? Caught you in the parking lot, pulled you into his vehicle—”

  “I don’t remember,” Dana said quickly, but her heart rate increased a beat; anxiety tightened her throat as if she was reacting to a memory she swore she didn’t have.

  “That’s the story,” Hardy said. “That was his MO. He grabbed a girl in Missouri out of a convenience store parking lot. Picked up a girl in Milwaukee at a truck stop. He grabbed you in the parking lot of your apartment building when you were on your way to work.”

  “But you thought John did something to Casey,” Dana said. “That’s what everybody thought.”

  He shrugged. “We didn’t know about Doc Holiday then. And it’s a known fact that most personal crimes are committed by people who were known to the victim. Despite your experience, stranger abductions are relatively rare. Most people are done in by so-called friends and loved ones; their reasons are simple: money or sex, and variations on those themes.

  “The significant other is always a prime suspect. Casey and John hadn’t been getting along. She was probably going to dump him, right? That was what you wanted. You dumped your boyfriend. You wanted her to dump hers.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Dana protested.

  “Wasn’t it?” Hardy arched a brow. “You were quite a bossy little thing.”

  “You didn’t know me,” Dana said, irritated by the picture he was painting of her.

  “You were supposed to go off to college together, right?”

  “Yes. So?”

  “So it’s a lot more fun going to college as two single girls than having one of you tied to a boyfriend,” he said. “Especially a boyfriend like young Villante. Maybe that’s what the two of you argued about. Maybe you were pressing her to break up with him. Maybe she was telling you to go fuck yourself. Or maybe that’s why she wanted to see him that night—to tell him it was over.”

  That was the theory most people had latched onto at the time. But nothing had ever come of it.

  “But seven years later he’s still walking around free.”

  “Like I said before, we never had any evidence he did anything to her. Was an angry eighteen-year-old boy smart enough to pull off the perfect crime? That doesn’t seem very likely. Did he seem like a criminal mastermind to you?”

  She thought about John Villante, about the boy she had seen in the yearbook photos. Overly sensitive, easily offended, often brooding, sometimes angry. Casey had helped him to keep his grades high enough to stay in sports.

  “No.”

  “Now we hear about Doc Holiday,” Hardy s
aid. “We weren’t looking for a serial killer back then, so we didn’t see one.”

  Once again he took a big breath and blew it out slowly, looking away from her. He pulled open a desk drawer and came up with a pack of Marlboros and a lighter.

  “Should you be smoking?” Dana asked.

  He hung a cigarette on his lip and gave her a sardonic look as he lit up.

  “I’m gonna die, little girl. I might as well enjoy myself while I can.”

  He pulled a document out of the folder he had opened and handed it to her. “Here’s a copy of your statement, for what it’s worth. Read it over. Maybe you’ll remember the answers you should have given me.”

  Dana took the report and tucked it into her notebook without looking at it.

  “Seven years after the fact,” Hardy said. “People forget things—faces, names. Waitresses at the Grindstone have come and gone. Is anybody going to remember seeing Doc Holiday? Maybe only somebody who has a reason to—like you.”

  * * *

  THE TROUBLE WAS, DANA thought as she drove away from Dan Hardy’s property, while she might have been the one person with a reason to remember Doc Holiday, she was also the one with every reason to forget him.

  Her head was throbbing as she tried to focus on the road and on the voice of the navigation app. She wanted to blink her eyes and be magically back home and not have to wonder if she had turned left instead of right. The up and down and twist and turn of the country roads were making her nauseous. And suddenly there were lights behind her.

  She couldn’t have been much more than a mile gone from Hardy’s cabin in the woods. She hadn’t seen another vehicle on the drive out here. The way the woods closed in on the sides of the road made her feel like there couldn’t be another human being for miles, and yet, she knew there were others. One was right behind her.