Cold Cold Heart Read online

  Also by Tami Hoag

  NOVELS

  The 9th Girl

  Down the Darkest Road

  Secrets to the Grave

  Deeper Than the Dead

  The Alibi Man

  Prior Bad Acts

  Kill the Messenger

  Dark Horse

  Dust to Dust

  Ashes to Ashes

  A Thin Dark Line

  Guilty as Sin

  Night Sins

  Dark Paradise

  Cry Wolf

  Still Waters

  Lucky’s Lady

  Sarah’s Sin

  Magic

  SHORT WORKS

  The 1st Victim

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Hoag, Tami.

  Cold cold heart / Tami Hoag.—First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-0-698-15727-9

  1. Missing persons—Investigation—Fiction. 2. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)—Fiction. 3. Post-traumatic stress disorder—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.O333C65 2015

  813'.54—dc23 2014035865

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Also by Tami Hoag

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Prologue

  She should have been dead. After everything he had put her through, she should have died hours before. There had been many moments during the ordeal when she wished she would die, when she wished he would just end the unimaginable suffering he was inflicting on her.

  He had done things to her she could never have imagined, would never have wanted to know one human being could be capable of doing to another. He had abused her physically, sexually, and psychologically. He had abducted her, beaten her, tortured her, raped her. Hour after hour after hour.

  She didn’t really know how much time had passed. Hours? Days? A week? The concept of time had ceased to have any meaning.

  She had tried to resist physically, but she had learned resistance was rewarded only with pain. The pain had surpassed anything in her most terrible nightmares. It had surpassed adjectives and gone into a realm of blinding white light and high-pitched sound. Eventually, she had ceased to fight and had found that in seemingly giving up her life, she was able to keep her life.

  Where there is life, there is hope.

  She couldn’t remember where she had heard that. Somewhere, long ago. Childhood.

  At one point during the attack she had called for her mother, for her father. She had been overwhelmed with the kind of pure fear and helplessness that stripped away maturity and logic and self-control, reducing her to a screaming mass of raw emotion. Now she couldn’t remember ever being a child. She couldn’t remember having parents. She could remember only the sharp pain of a knife carving into her flesh, the explosion of pain as a hammer struck her.

  She had tried to resist the overwhelming desire to break down mentally, to give herself over and drown in the depths of hopelessness. It would have been so much easier to just let go. But he hadn’t killed her. Yet. And she wouldn’t do the job for him. She continued to choose life.

  Where there is life, there is hope.

  The words floated through her fractured mind like a ribbon of smoke as she lay on the floor of the van.

  Her tormentor was driving. She lay directly behind his seat. He was happily singing along with the radio, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, as if there wasn’t a beaten, bloody, half-dead woman in the back of his van.

  She was more alive than he knew. In giving up fighting, she had reserved strength. In giving up fighting, she had stopped him short of rendering her completely incapacitated. She could still move, though there was something wrong with her coordination and every effort set off nauseating explosions of pain. Her head was pounding. It felt like her brain might burst out of her skull—or maybe it already had.

  She faded in and out of consciousness, but she could still form thoughts. Many were incomplete or incoherent, but then she would muster as much will and focus as she could, and something would make sense for a second or two.

  The cold floor beneath her was numbing some of the pain that wracked her body. The blanket he had thrown over her to hide her offered a cocoon, a place to be invisible. Her wrists were only loosely bound together in front of her with a long, wide red ribbon. He had positioned her with her elbows bent, her hands tucked beneath her chin as if in prayer.

  Prayer. She had prayed and prayed and prayed, but no one had come to save her.

  He had all the power, all the control. He had killed before, many times, and gotten away with it. He believed he was invincible. He believed he was a genius. He believed he was an artist.

  He said she was to be his masterpiece.

  She didn’t know what that meant. She didn’t want to find out.

  The van hit a pothole in the road, jarring and rocking. She wanted to brace herself, to lessen the movement of her broken body, but the ribbon tied around her wrists prevented her. She strained against it for a few seconds, then stopped trying. The effort made her nauseous. As she rode the wave of the nausea, nonsensical words and images tumbled through her battered brain like the colored glass pieces in a kaleidoscope.
As her consciousness dimmed, the glass shards of thought settled in a heap in her mind. The seductive voice of death whispered to her. She could just let go. She could go before she found out what he had in store. It would be so much easier.

  The tension started to seep out of her body. Her hands relaxed . . . and she felt the satin ribbon loosen around her wrists. . . . She put her concentration to the task of working a hand free.

  Where there is life, there is hope. Where there is life, there is hope . . .

  “You’re gonna be a star, Dana,” he called back to her. “That’s what you always wanted, right? Network news. Your face on televisions all across America? You’ll have that now, thanks to me. It won’t be the way you imagined it, but you’re gonna be famous.”

  He cursed as the van hit another deep pothole. Dana’s body bounced painfully on the van’s floor. The pain rolled through her like a violent wave. She turned to her left side, curling into the fetal position, and tried not to cry out, not to make a sound, not to call attention to herself.

  Next to her, the collection of tools he had brought along bounced and rattled in their open tote. Not considering her any threat to him at all in her semiconscious, beaten, broken state, he hadn’t bothered to put the tote out of reach. His ego allowed him to disregard her. She was little more than an inanimate object to him now. Her purpose was as a prop to prove his point: that he was smarter than any of the many law enforcement officers who were looking for him.

  They had offended him, crediting him with a murder that was sloppy; a careless crime, supposedly his ninth victim. He would show them his true ninth victim. He would present her to them as a work of art, tied up with a bright red ribbon.

  He was a serial killer. The police and the media called him Doc Holiday. These were facts Dana had known before he had abducted her. She didn’t fully grasp any of the details now. The story had been boiled down to this: He was a predator and she was prey. And if she couldn’t pull herself together and make one valiant effort, she would soon be dead.

  She had to do something.

  She had to summon as much will and life as she had left. She had to form a coherent thought and be able to hang on to it for just a moment. She had to fight through the pain to find the physical strength to execute that thought.

  It all seemed so hard. But she wanted to live. The fire of life had burned down to an ember inside her, but she wouldn’t let it go out without a fight.

  Her brain ached at the effort to form and hold the thought.

  Her body protested and resisted the signals to move.

  Under the blanket, her right hand trembled uncontrollably as she reached toward the tote.

  In the front seat, he was still talking out loud. He was a genius. He was an artist. She would be his masterpiece. The media wanted to credit him with a victim who looked like a zombie? He would give them a zombie.

  Dana pulled her legs up toward her chest and shifted her weight, turning onto her knees.

  Where there is life, there is hope.

  Her head swam; her thoughts tumbled. She had to fight so hard to stay in the moment.

  She would have only one chance.

  He laughed at his own joke. He glanced in the rearview mirror as if to see if she had heard him.

  His smile died as his eyes met the eyes of his zombie.

  With all the strength she had left in her body, Dana swung her arm and buried the screwdriver to the hilt in his temple.

  Then everything went black, and she was falling and falling and falling into a darkness that swallowed her whole.

  1

  January

  Hennepin County Medical Center

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  She woke screaming. Screaming and screaming and screaming. Loud, long, terrible screams that tore up her throat from the depths of her soul.

  She didn’t know why she was screaming. There was no emotion attached to it, not pain, not fear. She seemed completely detached from the noise coming out of her.

  She had no awareness of her body. It was as if the essence of her being had taken up residence inside an empty shell. She couldn’t feel. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t see. She didn’t know if her eyes were open or closed or gone.

  She could hear the commotion of people rushing around her. She didn’t know who they were. She didn’t know where she was or why she was there. The people were shouting. She couldn’t really understand what they were saying. Only one frantic voice penetrated as it shouted: Dana! Dana! Dana!

  The word meant nothing to her. It was just a sound.

  Like the screams coming from her own throat, these words were just sounds. She continued to scream and scream and scream.

  Then a sinuous sensation of warmth spread through her, and the screaming stopped, and she ceased to be aware of anything at all.

  * * *

  “I KNOW THIS WAS upsetting for you, Mommy.”

  Lynda Mercer was still shaken and shocked by the sound of her daughter’s screams, screams that had come from Dana’s unconscious body lying perfectly still on the bed.

  Dr. Rutten motioned for her to take one of the two seats in front of his desk. He took the other, choosing not to put a professional distance between them.

  In his midfifties, Rutten was Dutch, fit, and bald, with large, kind, liquid brown eyes. It was his habit to be close when he spoke to the anxious parents and spouses of patients, to reach out and touch with a large, reassuring hand. While the tactic could have seemed a phony, contrived intimacy, his kindness was genuine and very much appreciated. He was a rock for his patients and their families. He took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

  “After all the years I’ve spent studying the human brain, and with all the technology we’ve developed to help us in our study of the human brain, the one thing I can tell you with certainty is that there is no certainty with a brain injury,” he said.

  “We can define the specific type of injury Dana has sustained. Based on our experience, we can attempt to predict some of the effects the injury might produce, some of the changes we might see in her personality, in her memory, in possible physical impairments. But there are no hard-and-fast rules about how her brain will react to the trauma.”

  “She was screaming and screaming,” Lynda murmured, her trembling voice barely more than a whisper. “Was she in pain? Was she having a nightmare? All the machines were going crazy.”

  She could still hear her daughter’s screams. She could still hear the shrill beeping and shrieking of the alarms on the monitors. Dana’s heart rate had gone from a normal rhythm to a pounding pace. They had recently taken her off the ventilator, and she gulped air like a fish out of water.

  “The screaming is extremely disconcerting to hear, but not an uncommon occurrence for people with brain injuries at this stage of their recovery as they begin to climb their way out of their unconscious state,” Rutten assured her. “Sometimes they moan or cry hysterically. Sometimes they scream.

  “Why does this happen? We believe this is caused by a misfiring of signals within the midbrain as it tries to cope and reroute itself. Neurons are firing, but the impulses are landing in strange places. Also, there can be heightened fight-or-flight responses caused by external or internal stressors, resulting in panic or combativeness.”

  “People scream when they’re in pain,” Lynda murmured.

  Regardless of the neurologist’s explanation, she couldn’t escape the idea that her daughter was locked in a deep, unending nightmare, reliving the things a monster had done to her. Not just the skull fracture that had led to brain surgery to remove bone fragments, but also facial fractures, broken fingers, broken ribs, a fractured kneecap. Contusions and abrasions colored her body and her face. The killer the press called Doc Holiday had literally carved into her flesh with a knife.

  Imagined scenes from the nightmare flashed through Lynda’s
mind like clips from a horror movie. Ligature marks burned into Dana’s wrists and ankles indicated she had been tied down. She had been tortured. She had been raped.

  “We immediately upped the amount of pain medication Dana is receiving,” Rutten said. “Just in case some of that was the result of pain, but that may not be the case at all.”

  “I shouldn’t have left her,” Lynda whispered, a wave of mother’s guilt washing over her.

  She had left Dana’s room for just a moment, needing to stretch her legs. Just a walk to the end of the hall, to the family lounge to get a cup of coffee. As she walked back, the first scream split the air and pierced her heart.

  She had dropped the coffee and run to the room, flinging herself into the melee of scurrying hospital staff. She had shouted her daughter’s name over and over—Dana! Dana! Dana!—until someone had taken hold of her shoulders from behind and pulled her out of the way.

  Dr. Rutten squeezed her hand again, pulling her out of the memory to focus once more on him. The corners of his mouth curved subtly in the gentlest smile of understanding and commiseration.

  “I’m a father myself. I have two daughters. I know how it tears at a parent’s heart to think their child is suffering.”

  “She suffered so much already,” she said. “All the things that animal did to her . . .”

  Dr. Rutten frowned. “If it gives you any comfort, she probably won’t have any memory of what happened to her.”

  “I hope not,” Lynda said. If there were a God, Dana would remember nothing of her ordeal. But then, if there were a God, none of this should have happened at all.

  “Will it happen again?” she asked. “The screaming?”

  “It might. Or it might not. She could drift in and out like this for a long time, or she may become fully conscious tomorrow. She has been saying words these last few days. She’s been responsive to vocal commands. These are positive signs, but every brain is different.

  “The kinds of injuries Dana sustained can mean she may have difficulty organizing her thoughts or performing routine tasks. She may become impulsive, have trouble controlling her emotions or empathizing with other people. She may have difficulty speaking, or she may speak perfectly but not always be able to grab the right words from her brain.