by Tami Hoag
So he had gotten rid of his problems himself in a two-for-one killing.
“No one knew about us,” he said. “Not even you. You were too busy looking down your nose at John.
“Why couldn’t you just have left it alone, Dee?” he asked. “All these years with no one the wiser, no one even looking. I told you to leave it be, but you had to keep digging and digging.”
“Why would you even come back here?” she asked. He was going to kill her. All she could hope to do was stall for time and pray for a miracle. If she died, at least she died with answers.
He smiled like a crocodile. “Why wouldn’t I? I got away with murder. When I made detective, this case would have been mine.”
Like Hardy had said, Dana thought. He had gotten some kind of sick charge out of coming back to the scene of his crime and going to work in the very sheriff’s office that hadn’t managed to even consider him a suspect.
“Where are we?” she asked, glancing around the room. There was nothing familiar.
He came forward, straddling her legs, and lowered himself to his knees. The smile that curved his mouth made her skin crawl. He placed a hand on either side of her head and leaned in close.
“We’re at a crime scene,” he murmured, amused at some secret joke.
A chill shuddered through her as she began to think of what he might do next. He was so close she thought he might try to kiss her. His breath was warm against her cheek. The memory of all the times she had kissed him back turned her stomach now.
“I wish I had time,” he said as he closed a hand around her throat.
* * *
JOHN CREPT DOWN THE hall, straining to hear the voices—one male, one female. He hadn’t been able to make them out well enough to understand who these people were or why they would be here in his father’s house, but it was clear the woman wasn’t here by choice.
He had come down from the attic and grabbed the first thing he saw he could use for a weapon—the short length of galvanized pipe he had always used to prop open his bedroom window. He would have preferred a firearm, but his father’s guns would have all been confiscated in the search. There was no time to go digging for anything the old man might have hidden.
His thumb rubbed up and down against the metal pipe as he crept down the hall, nearing the living room.
“Is this what you did to Casey?” the woman asked.
“No,” the man said. “Casey made it easy . . .”
Casey.
John felt like he had fallen into a surreal dream. Maybe he had. Maybe his brain was bleeding and he was in a coma and this nightmare was his new reality. The disembodied voices drew him into a story like he was walking in on the middle of a movie, except that he knew the players: Dana Nolan and Tim Carver.
He paused in the hallway just short of the living room.
Is this what you did to Casey?
No. Casey made it easy . . .
He slipped out of the shadows of the hallway and stood at the edge of the living room, staring at a grotesquely battered version of Dana Nolan. Leaning into her, his hand around her throat, was Tim Carver.
“I wish I had time,” Carver said. “You were a sweet little fuck back in the day.”
Rage and hatred burned through John, old fuel for his old friend. He thought of the summer Casey had gone missing, of the hell law enforcement had put him through while all of Liddell County celebrated the poster boy that was Tim Carver. Tim Carver, local hero, West Point cadet. Tim Carver, killer.
Dana Nolan looked at him with pleading eyes.
“John,” she said, her voice barely more than a tremulous whisper. She looked right at him over the shoulder of her tormentor. “John, help me. Please.”
“Nice try,” Carver said. “There’s nobody here to help you, sweetheart.”
“Think again, asshole,” John said.
Carver came to his feet in an instant, stepping away from Dana, drawing his weapon and pointing it at John.
“Well, shit,” he said. “This is my fucking lucky day. I’m about to happen upon a tragic murder-suicide.”
The gun was not his service weapon. The filtered light from outside touched the chrome barrel like moonglow as Carver crossed the room with it pointed at John’s sternum. “With your old man’s gun.”
“Let’s start with the suicide,” Carver said.
“Let’s not.”
John spun sideways and struck out with the pipe, knocking Carver’s aim wide as the gun went off. He followed through on instinct and adrenaline, calling on his army combatives training, stepping in and catching Carver in the face with his right elbow.
He felt the broken shaft of his collarbone give and the flesh of his shoulder tear free of sutures. The pain was like a white-hot ball of fire that dimmed his vision and buckled his knees for a second. In that second, Carver swept his feet out from under him.
John hit the floor on his backside and rolled to the left, using his good arm to start to push back up to his feet. Carver came with a knee to his already damaged ribs and dropped him again, catching him with a second knee to the chin, snapping his jaw shut hard enough to crack teeth.
As John fell to his side, he swung the pipe, cracking Carver’s ankle, knocking the leg out from under him, dumping him on his ass. The gun flew free of his hand and skidded across the floor.
They came up onto their knees together, John swinging backhanded with the pipe. Carver caught hold of the pipe and twisted it out of John’s grasp, turning it back around on him with a vicious strike to his bad shoulder. John felt the collarbone collapse. A second blow sank directly into the wound his father’s bullet had cut through his flesh. Pain exploded through him, and everything went black.
* * *
JOHN CRUMPLED TO THE floor, his face contorted in agony. Tim turned and kicked him like he was a soccer ball, hard and repeatedly.
“Stop it!” Dana shouted. “Stop it!”
Tim turned around, looking across the floor, looking for the weapon he had lost in the brawl.
Dana struggled to cock the hammer back on the gun. The sound seemed abnormally loud in the otherwise silent room. The weapon was awkward in her bound hands, too big for her, cumbersome and heavy. Her hands were shaking as she pointed it at him.
Tim stared at her, his face carefully blank. They weren’t more than a few feet apart. She could hear him breathing. She could smell his sweat. He had been her first love. He had murdered her best friend. He would have killed her. He still would.
He didn’t bother saying she wouldn’t shoot him.
He started to move toward her. She raised the gun.
“I’ll do it in a heartbeat,” she said.
He stopped, hands out at his sides, his eyes trying to read her, looking for a tell. Would she really? Would she hesitate? Would she fumble the gun, which was too big for her awkward grip?
“Where is Casey?” she asked. “She’s not in that barrel. What did you do with her body?”
He said nothing.
“Answer me,” Dana said. “Answer me!”
His eyes were fixed on hers. “If I answer you, you won’t have a reason not to shoot me.”
“Casey’s dead,” she said. “She’s never coming back to life. I don’t have a reason not to shoot you now.”
The tension of the moment stretched as taut as a guy wire.
“You’re not a killer, Dee,” he said.
“Yes, I am. I’ve done it before.”
“You won’t kill me.”
He started to turn away, to walk away, as if he thought he could do that—kill Casey, try to kill her, try to kill John, then just walk away.
I should shoot him now, she thought. But she hesitated. What if she couldn’t hold on to the gun? Holding on to it, she had the upper hand. If she dropped it, she was screwed.
He stopped
and looked down, then knelt to attend to a bootlace.
Dana glanced at John as he stirred on the floor. A dark stain spread across the right shoulder of his shirt. He held his right arm close against his body as he struggled to get up to one knee. He looked up at Tim. His eyes widened and his mouth tore open to shout: “Gun!”
It seemed to happen in slow motion and in the blink of an eye at the same time.
Tim pulled a revolver from a holster strapped to his ankle and leveled it at her.
John launched himself not at Tim, but at her, knocking her flat as the revolver fired.
They tumbled across the floor, Dana losing hold of the bigger gun, John grabbing it. He came up to his knees firing.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
The look on Tim’s face was stunned surprise as he stumbled backward, struck twice in the chest. The slugs buried themselves in the bulletproof vest he wore under his uniform shirt. He sat down hard on the floor, banging the back of his head into the wall.
The third shot had hit him in the forehead. Dead center. Blood trickled down between his open eyes.
Just like that, it was over. Seven years of wondering and waiting and searching. All the complicated pieces of who they had been as children, and how their lives had fit together, and how they had impacted one another . . . Just like that, it was over.
Casey was gone.
Tim was gone.
She turned to John as he dropped the gun to the floor and fell on top of it, blood spreading out on the carpet.
“Oh my God!”
Dana scrambled to his side, fumbling to get the phone out of the pouch of her hoodie, the zip ties cutting into the flesh of her wrists.
“Hang on, John! Hang on! Don’t you die on me too!”
She managed to punch the numbers and make the call, then pressed her fingers to the side of his neck and felt his pulse. It was weak, but he was alive.
“Where there’s life, there’s hope,” she whispered like a mantra, like a prayer. “Where there’s life, there’s hope. Where there’s life, there’s hope . . .”
40
He dreamed he was in heaven with his mother. He could see her, dressed in a beautiful sky-blue dress, standing on white stone steps, maybe twenty feet away. She waved at him, smiling a sad, sweet smile. Her dark hair was down, loose and wavy, hanging past her shoulders. She was so beautiful. He had always thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
He had been eight years old the last time he’d seen her. She had taken him to lunch at the diner downtown and bought him an ice cream sundae for being a good boy while she did her shopping. He remembered she had bought two suitcases at the Goodwill store—one for her and a little one for him.
She was going to take him with her, but she never had.
In his dream he reached out toward her. He tried to walk toward her, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get any closer. Even when he tried to run straight at her, he couldn’t get any closer. He banged his fist against an invisible wall. She just looked sad as she waved good-bye and turned and walked away.
John opened his eyes and saw nothing but white. White walls. White ceiling. White sheets. But he knew he wasn’t in heaven because heaven wouldn’t let him in.
* * *
“DENTAL RECORDS HAVE CONFIRMED the identity of a skeleton found in a barrel on the Shelby Mills, Indiana, property of John Villante Sr. to be that of Villante’s wife, Rachel Longo Villante, missing for nearly two decades. Foul play is suspected.
“In other news, a memorial service for a Liddell County sheriff’s deputy—”
Dana used the remote to silence Kimberly Kirk. She knew all she wanted to know about the memorial service of Tim Carver. Despite the details surrounding his death, there were still plenty of people in Shelby Mills who remembered Tim the star athlete, the West Point candidate, the affable man with a badge and a ready smile.
They didn’t want to believe that he had murdered Casey Grant and her unborn child, that he had covered it up all these years, that he had planted evidence in the Villante house to try to turn the spotlight back on John or his father. They didn’t want to know that he had tried to kill Dana and John.
Until someone convinced them otherwise, Tim Carver’s death was a stunning tragedy at the hands of a former schoolmate, an army veteran with documented psychiatric problems and a former suspect in the disappearance of Shelby Mills sweetheart Casey Grant.
“They’ll believe the truth when they see it on Dateline,” Dan Hardy had said.
Dana had told Wesley Stevens to call the Dateline people and make it happen. As much as she hadn’t wanted to tell her story about Doc Holiday, she wouldn’t let this one go. She would expose herself to the stares and revulsion of viewers, but they would come away knowing who the hero was in this story.
The news had yet to break that Tim Carver was now also being considered a person of interest in the attack on Grindstone waitress April Johnson and that authorities in Liddell County, Fort Wayne, and the area surrounding the military academy in West Point, New York, were reviewing similar cases for possible connections.
Hardy’s theory that after Casey’s murder the pressure would have built inside Tim until he felt a need to lash out was looking more than plausible.
Even though she had experienced Tim the monster herself, there was a part of her that didn’t want to believe it either. The better part of him had been her first love, her first lover. Before Dana would mourn his loss. After Dana would move on, even more disillusioned than before, as impossible as that seemed. After Dana would mourn the loss of the naïveté that had allowed her to believe in the inherent goodness of the people in her life. Tim. Roger. She had yet to tell her mother about Roger’s confession that he had lied all those years ago about the day Casey had gone missing. She didn’t see the point in telling her now. What purpose would it serve to ruin her mother’s belief in her husband over a sin of omission that hadn’t changed the outcome of anything? None.
She stood up from the table and slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder. The better part of a week had passed. Her face was still swollen and the bruises had turned putrid colors. She didn’t care. She had something important to do.
“Are you sure you want to do this by yourself?” her mother asked as Dana dug her car keys out of her bag.
“Yes,” Dana said. “I’ll be fine. Turns out he’s the good guy, remember?”
“I’ll never forget,” her mother said, tears rising.
She hugged Dana and found a spot on her cheek without a fading bruise and kissed it. She was clingy these days. Dana didn’t blame her. As close as she had come to death for a second time, Dana had decided to welcome all the hugs she could get.
“Call me if you get lost.”
“I will.”
“Text me when you get there.”
“I will,” Dana promised.
They both knew she would forget.
* * *
JOHN WAS WAITING ON a bench outside the ER entrance of the hospital, looking uncertain and uncomfortable. All he had was the clothes on his back—gray sweatpants and a zippered hoodie and a pair of too-white sneakers—courtesy of the hospital auxiliary. He still wore the bruises and lacerations of his life-or-death struggles with his father and with Tim. His right arm was in a sling.
“You didn’t have to do this,” he said as he eased himself awkwardly into the passenger seat. He moved as gingerly as a brittle old man. He had served tours of duty in two wars and managed not to get shot, only to be shot in his own home.
“You saved my life,” Dana said. “The least I can do is give you a ride.”
He was uncomfortable with the idea of someone feeling beholden to him.
“It’s not just a ride.”
“You need a place to stay and we have a place to offer you,” she said. “Don’t look a gift horse in th
e mouth.”
Even if he had wanted to live in the home he had grown up in—which Dana couldn’t imagine, considering the events that had transpired there—he wasn’t going to be allowed to. Even from a jail cell his father was a son of a bitch. He had made it known via his attorney that John was not welcome to stay there.
A caretaker’s cottage on the Mercer-Nolan nursery property had been vacant for some time. It had been Roger’s suggestion for John to live there and to assume caretaker’s duties when he was able. The gesture would garner him favor with voting veterans, but Dana happily let him have that.
“It’s charity,” John said.
“It is not,” Dana argued. “Charity is something for nothing.”
“I’ll start work as soon as I can.”
“Nobody’s worried about it but you.”
“I’m just saying. That’s all.”
Dana looked over at him with frustration.
“What’s harder for you?” she asked. “Believing I could be a nice person or believing you deserve to have anyone treat you well?”
Both, she thought, but he didn’t answer her. He was a man with less than nothing and less than no one, and Dana knew she had certainly done nothing in her past life to deserve him risking his life for her, but he had done so, nevertheless. Whatever her younger self might have believed a long time ago, John Villante was a hero in every sense of the word.
“I’m sorry about your mom,” she said. “It was on the news this morning.”
He looked out the window. What was he supposed to say? The tragedy of his life was so much bigger than the Band-Aid of a polite apology could begin to cover. His mother dead at the hands of his father all those years ago . . . No one caring enough to look for her or to look after the child she had left behind, taking Mack Villante’s word for it that she had abandoned him and her son . . . It seemed that everyone on the face of the earth had failed John Villante.
“I’m sorry about Casey,” he said softly.
“Me too,” Dana said, tears and emotion rising. “I wish we knew where he left her so we could bring her home.”
