Cold Cold Heart (4 page)

“Sorry we kept you waiting,” Lynda Mercer said, mustering a brittle smile.

She fussed with the thin white blanket covering her daughter's lap and legs, tucking it in around her, her movements quick and nervous. A pretty, petite woman in her late forties, she seemed to have aged years since she had arrived in Minneapolis the day of her
daughter's abduction. She had lost weight. Her hair was dull, her face drawn, her skin sallow. Her blue eyes had a haunted quality Nikki could only imagine had come not only from worry for her daughter's recovery, but also from the inevitable thoughts of what had been done to her child. And now she and Kovac would ask to open the door on Dana's memory of that torture.

“Dana was pretty tired after her speech therapy this afternoon,” Lynda said. “Weren't you, sweetheart?”

“Mom . . . don't.” Dana tried to push her mother's hands away. Her movements were slow and as awkward as a drunk's. She fixed her one good eye on Nikki.

“Dana, this is Detective Liska,” Lynda said. “Remember I told you she would be coming to see you? To talk about your accident.”

Nikki traded a quick look with Sam.
Accident?
She stepped a little closer while Sam hung back.

“No,” Dana said.

“Hi, Dana. It's good to see you awake. How are you feeling?”

The young woman looked at her with suspicion. “I don't . . . think you. Think?” Her eye narrowed as she searched for the word she wanted. “I don't . . .”

“Know,” Lynda said.

Dana frowned. “I don't know you.”

Her speech was labored and slightly slurred, as if pulled down and held back by the drooping corner of her mouth.

“Dana gets frustrated with her speech deficiencies, but Dr. Rutten says this type of aphasia is normal for someone with a brain injury,” Lynda chattered. She couldn't seem to be still. She moved around like a sparrow darting from one branch to another.

“He said the brain is like a filing cabinet. And Dana's has been turned upside down and all the files have fallen out on the floor. It's hard for her to find the right file or to know what files should go where,” she explained. “Sometimes she can't find the right word, but
she can find a word close to what she means. Anomia, the speech therapist calls it.”

“That has to be tough,” Nikki said. “Especially for someone who uses words for a living.”

“She's always been so articulate,” Lynda said. “She won speech competitions in school. She was on the—”

“Don't talk . . . a-bout me,” Dana said firmly, “l-ike I'm not where.”

“Here,” Lynda corrected.

“I'm sorry, Dana,” Nikki said, taking a seat across from her. “I'm here to talk to you, not about you. Me and my partner, Sam.”

The girl looked past Nikki's shoulder, squinting at Sam.

“Hi, Dana,” he said. “Is it all right with you if I come in and sit down?”

She didn't answer right away.

“It's all right, sweetheart,” Lynda said as she pulled up another chair. “Policemen are good.”

Dana sighed impatiently. “I'm not a little . . . killed? K-illed?” She didn't like the word, though she seemed not to understand why. Her respiration picked up. Her right hand squeezed and released on the arm of her chair. “Not killed. No. No.”

“Child,” Lynda supplied.

“K-Kid,” Dana said, scowling. “I'm not a . . . lit-tle kid. Stop treat-ting me like it.”

Lynda's eyes filled with tears. The tip of her nose turned red. “I'm sorry, sweetheart. I'm only trying to help.”

Dana pounded her hand down on the arm of her chair. “Stop! Stop it!”

“Please calm down,” Lynda pleaded.

“I'm not . . . stu—stu-por. Stu . . . pid. I'm . . . not stupid!”

Lynda knelt down at her daughter's feet to beg forgiveness. “No, of course not, Dana. I don't think you're stupid. Please calm down. You don't need to get upset.”

Dana clenched and unclenched her right hand. She was breathing hard and turning red beneath the bruises.

“I've watched you on television, Dana,” Sam said, taking a seat, distracting her.

“I . . . don't know . . . wh-why,” Dana said flatly.

“She's having a little trouble with her memory,” Lynda said, stating the obvious. She hovered and fussed around her daughter like a new mother whose baby was just learning to walk. She wanted to catch every fall, to spare her child failure or injury.

“That's okay,” Sam said to Dana. “You don't need to think about that right now.”

“No. N-ot,” Dana said, moving her head slightly left and right, hindered by the brace around her neck. Still agitated, she pushed her blanket off onto the floor. “Not o-kay. It's not o-kay.”

“It'll all come back to you, sweetheart,” Lynda said, picking up the blanket. “It's just going to take some time.”

Her false cheer was almost as hard to listen to as nails on a chalkboard. Nikki's own level of tension ratcheted up as Dana waved away her mother's attempts to put the blanket back on her lap.

“Don't!” Dana snapped.

“Your friends from the station are going to bring some DVDs of you on the news,” Lynda said, still talking to her as if she was a five-year-old. “Remember? Remember Roxanne told you she would do that? That'll be fun to see, won't it?”

“N-no. Stop it.” Dana turned her face away, reached up with her good hand, tore the neck brace off, and threw it on the floor.

“Dana . . .”

“Lyn-da . . .”

Nikki reached down to retrieve the brace.

“She hates this thing,” Lynda said, taking it. “She doesn't want anything around her throat.”

Nikki looked at the bruising that circled Dana Nolan's throat.
She had been strangled—repeatedly, by the look of it. No doubt a game for Doc Holiday—choking her unconscious, then letting her come back, watching her “die” over and over, feeling the rush of godlike power as she came back to life. He hadn't intended for her to die of it. If Doc Holiday had wanted her dead, she would have been dead. Anything he had done to her had been just a game to satisfy his sick, sadistic fantasies.

“I don't like things around my throat either,” Nikki said. “I don't even like turtlenecks.”

“She's tired,” Lynda said curtly, though she was clearly as close to the end of her rope as her daughter was. “We should probably just call it a day.”

“Let's have Dana take a quick look at those photos first,” Kovac suggested. “Then we can get out of your hair.”

“I don't have any,” Dana said without emotion. “Hair.”

“Your hair will grow back, honey,” Lynda said. “You'll be just as beautiful as before.”

Nikki almost winced. She wondered if Dana had been allowed to look at herself in a mirror. She suspected not.

“We just want you to take a look at each of these photographs, Dana,” she said, pulling the pictures out of her bag. “And tell us if anything looks familiar to you.”

She shuffled the images of human teeth and fingernail clippings to the bottom of the stack in favor of the snapshots of individual pieces of jewelry, starting with a silver bracelet dangling with charms.

Dana took the picture with her good hand and frowned at it.

“Does that look familiar to you?” Nikki asked.

Dana stared at it. “N-no.”

Nikki handed over another, this one of a necklace with a small cross.

Again Dana stared at the photograph, frowning, suspicious. Her respiration quickened ever so slightly. “N-n-no. Wh . . . why?”

“We're just wondering if you may have seen these things before,” Kovac said, ignoring her question.

She turned her eye on him. “What's it . . . to do with my . . . ac-cident?”

Kovac flicked a glance at Lynda Mercer.

“I think you should go now,” she said stiffly. “Dana needs to rest.”

“No,” Dana said.

“Dana—”

“Lyn-da . . . No,” she said again. She reached out her good hand toward Nikki for another photograph.

Nikki hesitated. Dana didn't know. Her mother hadn't told her that she had been abducted, that she had been tortured and raped by a serial killer. She knew she had been in a car accident. That was all. As a mother, Nikki knew she would have been tempted to do the same. As a cop, she had to hand over the next photograph: a necklace. A delicate silver-filigree butterfly dangling from a fine chain.

Dana stared at the photograph.

Sam leaned a little closer, studying her face. “Does that look familiar to you?”

She continued to look down at the photo. “T-tell me . . . why.”

“It's not important, sweetheart,” Lynda said. “It doesn't matter. We don't have to do this now.”

Dana gave her mother a long look, then turned back to Nikki. “W-w-why?”

Nikki took a deep breath. She could feel the ice of Lynda Mercer's gaze . . . and the calm, steady heat of Kovac's. “It has to do with the other person who was in the accident,” she said.

“I don't know . . .”

“You didn't know him, sweetheart,” Lynda said impatiently. She went to reach for the photographs. Dana clutched them against her body.

“You're tired,” Lynda said. “We can do this another time. It's not important. Let's get you into bed.”

She started to reach out toward her daughter. Dana stopped her with three words: “You are . . . ly-ing.”

“Dana . . .”

“Stop ly-ing to me!” Dana said loudly, struggling more with the words as she became more agitated. “What are th-ese things?” she asked Nikki, holding up the photographs.

Lynda grabbed them out of her daughter's hand. “That's enough. We're done with this.”

She flung the pictures in Sam's direction and pointed toward the door. “Get out.”

“Lynda,” Nikki started, getting to her feet.

“How dare you?” Lynda Mercer hissed, turning on her, her face growing red, her eyes bright with tears. “How dare you?”

“Mrs. Mercer,” Sam began, getting to his feet.

“T-t-tell m-m-me!” Dana shouted. Her upper body began to jerk slightly, forward and back. “T-t-t-tell t-t-t-te-ll me who h-h-e-e w-was!”

Nikki went to move toward her, to tell her to calm down, to tell her that there was no reason for her to get upset. The photographs were of some worthless trinkets she had probably never seen, and it didn't really matter if she had. No girls were going to rise from the dead because Dana Nolan had seen photographs of jewelry kept as souvenirs by a killer.

Suddenly Dana's head snapped back, her visible eye rolling back as her body went stiff. She seemed to fling herself from the chair to the ground, shaking violently.

“
Oh my God!
” Lynda shrieked.

“She's seizing!” Nikki yelled, dropping to her knees, grabbing hold of Dana Nolan's shoulders.

Kovac bolted for the door, calling for help.

Dana's body bucked and strained against Nikki's hold.

Lynda Mercer flung herself to the floor, striking out, shouting, and sobbing, “Get away from her! Leave her alone!”

Nurses rushed into the room, their focus on Dana. Lynda was pulled away to one side, Nikki shoved to the other. Then Kovac was behind her, seeming to hold her up with his hands clamped around her upper arms. As he drew her backward, the chaos swirled before her in a blur of blue scrubs and Dana's violently jerking body and Lynda Mercer's face as she cried out her daughter's name, the hate in the woman's eyes as she looked at them, screaming, “
You did this!
You did this!
”

Sam pulled her out into the hall. She jerked away from him. “We did that!” she said, pointing at the room. “We did that!”

Kovac grabbed hold of her again, his face dark. “Stop it! We did not,” he argued. “We showed her pictures of jewelry and asked her if she'd seen it before. We did not cause her to have a seizure.”

“Would she have had a seizure if we hadn't come here?”

“The girl has a traumatic head injury, Tinks. People with head injuries have seizures. Besides, she wasn't upset with us. She was upset with her mother.”

“You can't blame her mother for trying to protect her.”

“I'm not blaming anyone for anything. I'm stating the facts. Lynda Mercer agreed to have us come and do this.”

“Because I bullied her into it,” Nikki said.

“You're not the bad guy here, Tinks. There is no bad guy. No,” he corrected himself. He let go of her arms and stepped back, plowing his fingers through his hair.

“Doc Holiday is the bad guy,” he said, calmer. “Let's not lose sight of that. We only came here to try to close the door on some of the misery he caused. I'm sorry Mrs. Mercer got upset. I'm sorry we didn't approach the conversation a little differently. I'm sorry this ever happened to that poor girl. Am I sorry enough?” he asked without sarcasm.

Nikki sighed. The truth of the matter was that there was no good to come of it all, no matter which way they played it.

“Don't be a martyr, Tinker Bell,” Kovac said softly. “Life is hard enough.”

Drained and exhausted, Nikki nodded. She glanced across the hall to the open door of Dana Nolan's room. The activity within had quieted. The seizure had passed or been subdued by drugs.

“No matter how bad her mother wants to protect her from the truth, she's going to find out,” Kovac said. “Her friends know. She's going to ask them. Hell, the whole damn country knows.
Dateline
is going to be calling;
48 Hours
is going to come knocking. Every newsie vulture in America has already called our office.”

“Tragedy,” Nikki said. “The gift that keeps on giving.”

“People eat that shit up with a spoon,” Kovac said. “And the world keeps on turning.”