by Tami Hoag
“Damage to the temporal lobe of the brain may affect her memory, but how much? I can’t tell you. She may have no memory of what happened to her. She may have no memory of the last ten years. She may not recognize her friends. She may not recognize herself. You may not recognize her,” he said, unable to hide his sadness at a truth he had seen again and again.
“She’s my daughter,” Lynda said, offended. “She’s my child. Of course I’ll recognize her.”
“Physically, yes, but she will never be exactly the girl you’ve known all her life,” he said gently. “One thing I know is true in every case: The person you love will be changed from this, and that will be the hardest thing of all to accept.
“In a way, the daughter you had is gone. Even though she may look the same, she will behave differently, look at the world differently. But she is still your daughter, and you will still love her.
“You will have ahead of you a long and difficult road,” he said. “But you will go down it together.”
“But she’ll get better,” Lynda said, as if phrasing it as a statement instead of a question would make it so.
Dr. Rutten sighed. “We can’t know how much. Every case is its own journey. This journey will be like driving at night. You can only see as far as the headlights reach, but you can make it the whole way nevertheless.
“You have to stay strong, Mommy,” he said, giving her hand another squeeze. “You have to stay focused on what’s positive.”
Lynda almost laughed at the absurdity of his statement. “Positive,” she said, staring at the floor.
The doctor hooked a knuckle under her chin and raised her head so she had to look him in the eye. “She shouldn’t be alive. She survived a killer who had murdered who knows how many young women. She survived a car crash that could have killed her. She survived her injuries. She survived brain surgery. She’s fighting her way back to consciousness.
“She should be dead and she’s not. She’s going to wake up. She’s going to live. That’s a lot more than I get to tell many parents.”
* * *
THE WEIGHT OF HIS words pressed down on Lynda as she wandered the halls of the hospital. She needed to find a way to be positive. Dana would need that from her when she finally rejoined the world and they began her journey to recovery. But it was all uncharted territory, and thinking about the enormity of it was daunting.
She felt so tired and so alone, dealing with all of this in a strange, cold city where she knew no one. Her husband planned to come from Indiana on Fridays and go back Sunday nights. But even if Roger came to Minneapolis on the weekends, there was a part of Lynda that felt like he wasn’t fully in this with her. Dana was her daughter, not Roger’s. While Dana and Roger had always gotten along, they weren’t close in the way Dana had been with her father before his death when Dana was fourteen.
Dana’s coworkers from the television station came by but were allowed only short visits. The doctor wanted Dana to rest most of the time, to keep stimulation to a minimum to allow her brain time to heal. Her producer and mentor, Roxanne Volkman, brought a box of items from Dana’s apartment so she could have some familiar things in her room—a perfume she loved, her iPod, a soft blue throw from her sofa, a couple of photographs.
Dana had been working at the station for only nine months. But even in that short time she had made a positive impression, the producer had told Lynda. Everyone appreciated Dana’s sunny smile and go-getter attitude, but none of them knew her well enough to be much more than acquaintances.
The lead detectives assigned to Dana’s case had come by to check on her progress. They would eventually want to speak to her, to find out if she could shed any light on the case. Even though the perpetrator was dead, there were still many questions left unanswered. Had Dana heard anything, seen anything, that might implicate the killer in other cases? According to Dr. Rutten, they would probably never find out.
The female detective—Liska—was a mother too. She brought Starbucks and cookies and lists of support groups for victims of crime and their families. They talked about the stresses and the joys of raising children. She asked Lynda what Dana had been like as a little girl, as a teenager. Lynda suspected that line of questioning was just a way to get her mind off the difficult present with stories of happier times.
The male detective—Kovac—didn’t have as much to say. He was older, gruffer, and had probably seen more terrible things in his career than Lynda would ever want to imagine. There was a world-weariness about him, a certain sadness in his eyes when he looked at Dana. And there was an awkward kindness in him that Lynda found endearing.
In the aftermath of the crime there had been some public criticism of the police for not finding Dana or the killer sooner. Lynda didn’t engage in it.
The local and national media had been all over the case as soon as it was known that Dana was missing. It was a sensational story: the pretty fledgling on-air television newscaster abducted by a serial killer. It was an even bigger story when she was found alive—if barely—and her captor was found dead. As far as anyone knew, she was his only living victim. They all believed she would have an incredible story to tell when she finally came to. They hadn’t considered that she might not remember any of it. Lynda hoped she wouldn’t.
Finally making her way back to Dana’s room, she had no idea of the time of day or how many hours had passed since the screaming incident. As she went into the room she was surprised to see that the world beyond the window was already growing dim, as night seeped across the frigid Minnesota landscape. Darkness came early here this time of year. The pale, distant sun was gone by late afternoon.
The screens of the machines monitoring Dana’s vital signs glowed in the dimly lit room, chirping and beeping to themselves. She appeared to be sleeping peacefully.
Lynda stood beside the bed, watching her daughter’s chest rise and fall slowly. Her face was unrecognizable, swollen and misshapen, with centipede lines of stitches. Her head was bald beneath swathed gauze and the helmet that protected her in the event of a fall. Her right eye was covered with a thick gauze patch. The orbital bone and cheekbone had been shattered. The left eye was swollen nearly shut, and the black and blue seeped down into her cheek like a spreading stain.
Dana had always been a pretty girl. As a child she had been a pixie with blond pigtails and big royal-blue eyes full of wonder. She had grown into a lovely young woman with a heart-shaped face and delicate features loved by the camera. Her personality had accompanied her looks perfectly: sweet and optimistic, open and friendly. She had always been inquisitive, always wanting to dig to the bottom of every story, to research the details of anything new and unfamiliar.
Her curiosity had helped to shape her goals and had eventually led her to her career. Armed with a degree in communications, she had worked her way into broadcast news. She had only recently landed her first big job in front of the camera as a newscaster on the early-morning show of a small, independent Minneapolis station. She had been so excited to have the job, not caring at all that she had to leave her apartment at three A.M. to go on the air at four.
Lynda had worried about her going out alone at that hour. Minneapolis was a big city. Bad things happened in big cities all the time. Dana had pooh-poohed the idea that she could be put in jeopardy going from her apartment building the few dozen yards to her car in the parking lot. She argued that she lived in a very safe neighborhood, that the parking lot was well lit.
She had been abducted from that parking lot on the fourth of January, taken right out from under the false security of the light. No one had seen or heard anything.
Lynda had come to Minneapolis as soon as she heard of Dana’s possible abduction. But she hadn’t been able to see her daughter until she was brought to the ICU after the surgery, a tube coming out of her shaved head, attached to a machine to monitor brain pressure. Tubes seemed to come from every part of her, co
nnecting to an IV bag and a bag of blood. A catheter line drained urine from her bladder to a bag on the side of the bed. The ventilator was breathing for her, taking one vital task away from her swollen brain.
Now the ventilator was gone. Dana was breathing on her own. The pressure monitor had been removed from her skull. She was still unconscious, but closer to the surface than she had been.
It had been eerie to watch her these last few days as her mind floated in some kind of dark limbo. She had begun to move her arms and legs, sometimes violently, to the point that she had to be restrained. And yet she wasn’t awake. She responded to commands to squeeze the hand of the doctor, of the nurse, of her mother. But she wasn’t awake. She spoke words that suggested she was aware of the physical world—hot, cold, hard, soft. She answered when asked who she was—Dana. But she didn’t seem to recognize the voices of people she knew, some she had known for years, if not her whole life.
The physical therapist came every morning to prop Dana up in the chair beside the bed because movement was good for her. She would sit in the chair moving her arms and legs randomly, as if she were a marionette, her invisible strings being manipulated by an unseen hand.
But she had yet to open her eyes.
She stirred now, moving one arm, batting at Lynda. Her right leg bent at the knee, then pushed down again and again in a stomping motion. The rhythm of the heart monitor picked up.
“Dana, sweetheart, it’s Mom. It’s all right,” Lynda said, trying to touch her daughter’s shoulder. Dana whimpered and tried to wrench away. “It’s okay, honey. You’re safe now. Everything is going to be fine.”
Agitated, Dana mumbled and thrashed and clawed with her left hand at her neck brace, tearing it off and flinging it aside. She hated the brace. She fussed and fought every time someone tried to put it on her. She tore it off every chance she had.
“Dana, calm down. You need to calm down.”
“No, no, no, no, no, no! No! No!”
Lynda could feel her own heart rate and blood pressure rising. She tried again to touch her daughter’s flailing arm.
“No! No! No! No!”
One of the night-shift nurses came into the room, a small, stout woman with a shorn hedge of maroon hair. “She has a lot to say today,” she said cheerfully, checking the monitors. “I heard she was pretty loud this afternoon.”
Lynda stepped back out of her way as she moved efficiently around the bed. “It’s so unnerving.”
“I know it is, but the more she says, the more she moves, the closer she is to waking up. And that’s a good thing.” She turned her attention to Dana. “Dana, you have to rein it in. You’re getting too wild and crazy here. We can’t have you thrashing around.”
She tried to push Dana’s arm gently downward to restrain her wrist. Dana flailed harder, striking the nurse in the chest with a loose fist, then grabbing at her scrub top. She rolled to her left side and tried to throw her right leg over the bed railing.
Lynda stepped closer. “Please don’t restrain her. It only upsets her more.”
“We can’t have her throw herself out of bed.”
“Dana,” Lynda said, leaning down, putting her hand gently on her daughter’s shoulder. “Dana, it’s all right. You’re all right. You have to quiet down, sweetheart.”
“No, no, no, no,” Dana responded, but with a softer voice. She was running out of steam, the brief burst of adrenaline waning.
Lynda leaned closer still and began to sing softly the song she had rocked her daughter to sleep with from the time she was a baby. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night. Take these broken wings and learn to fly . . .”
The words touched her in a very different way than they had all those years ago. The song took on a very different meaning. Dana was the broken bird. She would have to learn to fly all over again. She would have to rise from tragedy, and Lynda was the one waiting for that moment to arrive.
Tears rose in her eyes. Her voice trembled as she sang. She touched Dana’s swollen cheek in a place that wasn’t black-and-blue. She touched the pad of her thumb ever so softly to her daughter’s lips.
Dana let go a sigh and stilled. Slowly her left eye opened—just a slit, just enough that Lynda could see the blue. She was afraid to move, afraid to take a breath lest she break the spell. Her heart was pounding.
“Welcome back, sweetheart,” she murmured.
The blue eye blinked slowly in a sea of blood red where the white should have been. Then Dana drew a breath and spoke three words that shattered her mother’s heart like a piece of blown glass thrown to the floor.
“Who . . . are . . . you?”
2
Pieces of cheap jewelry. Locks of hair bound with tiny rubber bands. Human teeth. Fingernail clippings painted in confetti colors.
Nikki Liska looked through the photographs of the suspicious items found in the home and vehicles of Frank Fitzgerald—aka Frank Fitzpatrick, Gerald Fitzgerald, Gerald Fitzpatrick, Frank Gerald, Gerald Franks, and a couple of other names, according to the driver’s licenses and credit cards they had found. The cops called him Doc Holiday.
Law enforcement agencies had attached him to nine victims in various states in the Midwest, four in the metro area alone. The supposed trophies from his victims indicated the victim count could be much higher. He had traveled the highways in a box truck for years, collecting antiques and junk for resale and kidnapping young women. He took them in one city, tortured them for days, and dumped their bodies in another state, another jurisdiction, complicating any investigation.
He had been too good at getting away with his crimes for law enforcement to believe murder was new to him. Men in their forties didn’t wake up one day as sexual sadists and start killing women. The seeds for that behavior were planted early on, were nurtured and festered for years. Aberrant behavior began small—porn, window peeping, panty sniffing—and escalated over the years. The first kill usually happened in the man’s twenties or early thirties. Doc Holiday had been thirty-eight when Dana Nolan buried a screwdriver through his temple and into his brain.
The items in the photographs were almost certainly trophies, remembrances of the kill. Something he could hold and look at and relive the crime. Sick bastard.
Nikki stared at the picture of the nail clippings—some long, some short, some acrylic, some with what looked like the dried remains of blood on the underside.
“That’s just disgustingly weird,” she said.
“Hmm?” Kovac asked, pulling his attention away from the wall-mounted television where the travel channel was beckoning viewers to explore winter in Sweden. No one else in the hospital lounge was paying any attention.
“We live in Minnesota,” Nikki said, looking up at the screen. “Why the hell would we go to Sweden in the winter?”
“They have a hotel made entirely of ice,” Kovac said. “Even the beds are made of ice.”
“That’s not a selling point for me.”
“What are you looking at?”
“The nail clippings. That’s so creepy.”
“Doesn’t beat suncatchers made of tattooed human skin.”
They had seen that once, too. The killer had cut the victims’ tattoos off their bodies and stretched the hide on little hoops to dry, then hung them in a window in his home.
“True,” Nikki conceded. “But still.”
“The teeth creep me out,” Kovac said. “Sick fuck. I hope the lab can pull DNA out of them.”
Kovac always looked like he hadn’t slept in a night or two—a little rumpled, a little bleary-eyed. Harrison Ford after a three-day bender. His salt-and-pepper hair was thick and stood up like the pelt of a bear. He had ten years and half a lifetime of homicides on her.
“You think we’ll ever know how many girls he really killed?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No. But maybe we’ll get to identify a
few more.”
Like that was a good thing, Nikki thought, being able to call more parents and tell them their daughters weren’t missing anymore because they had been abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered by a serial killer. How many times had she imagined what it would be like to be the parent on the receiving end of a call like that? Every case. Every single case.
She thought of her boys: Kyle, fifteen, and R.J., thirteen. She loved them so much she sometimes thought the enormity of that emotion would make her explode because she couldn’t possibly contain it all within her. She was barely five feet five, but her love for her sons was the size of Montana and as strong as titanium. She would have taken on an army for them.
What if she answered the phone one day and the voice at the other end told her someone had beaten and strangled R.J. to death? She thought of Jeanne Reiser, the mother of their first Doc Holiday victim. Her grief and her pain had seemed to cut through time and space to reach all the way from Kansas like a lightning bolt over the phone lines.
What if someone called to tell her Kyle was in the hospital, clinging to life, the only known surviving victim of a sexual sadist? Nikki had been the first to speak to Dana Nolan’s mother, Lynda Mercer. The split-second shocked silence on the other end of the line had seemed to Nikki as if the news had struck Lynda Mercer as hard as the hammer blow that had fractured her daughter’s skull.
“If something like this ever happened to one of my boys . . . ,” she said, shaking her head at the violent images that ran through it.
“I wouldn’t want to be the guy who did it,” Kovac said impassively.
She gave him a serious look. “I’d fucking kill him, Sam. You know I would. I’d kill him with my bare hands.”
Kovac shrugged, his expression not changing at all. “I’ll hold him down. You kick him.”
“I wouldn’t do it quick, either,” she went on. “I’d beat every inch of his body with a steel rod, and slowly, slowly let his muscles break down from the lactic acid, and let his internal organs digest themselves in pancreatic fluid.”