by Tami Hoag
“Saw on him with a steak knife while you’re waiting,” he suggested. “And pour salt in the wounds.”
“Fresh-ground sea salt,” she said, glancing at a somber family having a quiet discussion at a table on the other side of the room. “Bigger granules take longer to dissolve and cut into raw tissue like ground glass.”
Kovac raised an eyebrow. “You’re perfecting this fantasy.”
“Damn right,” she said. “Someone messes with my kids, I’m going fifty shades of crazy all over them. And no one would ever find a trace of the perp. Not so much as a pubic hair.”
“Fifty-five-gallon drum and forty gallons of sulfuric acid,” Kovac suggested, using the remote control to scroll through the on-screen TV guide. “Mix the acid with concentrated hydrogen peroxide and make that piranha solution the ME told us about. That shit will dissolve anything.
“Do it at his house,” he added matter-of-factly. “Seal the drum and leave it in the farthest corner of the basement. It could sit there for thirty years. No one would ever want to bother moving it.”
They had probably had this conversation a couple of hundred times over the course of their partnership.
Nikki sighed and got up and wandered to the coffee machine. She was tired. She was tired of thinking terrible thoughts, but given what they had been working on since New Year’s Eve, terrible thoughts were the norm. The abduction of Dana Nolan. The hunt for Doc Holiday. The gruesome murder of one of Kyle’s school friends. And then, the discovery of Dana Nolan and the captor she had killed.
Nikki would never forget the sight of the once-perky young newscaster as the paramedics went to load her into the bus. She was unrecognizable, her face battered, cut, bloody, and grotesquely swollen. Her would-be killer had drawn a huge red smile around her mouth, making her look like an evil clown from a macabre nightmare. A red ribbon fluttered from her mangled left hand. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she had babbled over and over, “I’m his masterpiece.”
Nikki checked her watch as the coffeemaker sputtered and spewed more fuel into her cup. They had been waiting for nearly an hour. An hour and three weeks since Dana had been rushed to the hospital. It seemed like a year ago—and it seemed like she had been working every hour of that year. She was exhausted. She wanted to go home and hug her kids, put on sweatpants and a big old sweater, curl up on the couch with them, and watch some silly blow-’em-up boy movie.
“Let’s step out,” Kovac murmured, throwing his cup in the garbage. He tilted his head toward the family across the room. A doctor with a too-serious expression had joined them at the table and was speaking to them too softly for the news to be good. The mother of the family started to cry. Her husband put his arm around her and whispered something in her ear.
Nikki nodded. She slung her bag over her shoulder, took her coffee, and followed her partner into the hall.
A large window looked out onto the dim world of winter’s dusk: the darkening ash-gray sky, bare trees, dirty snow, wet street lined with slush. A restaurant across the street far below them beckoned the hospital’s weary, hungry, emotionally raw refugees with a red neon light: COMFORT FOOD CAFÉ.
Nikki set her coffee cup on the sill and crossed her arms against the chill coming off the glass, thinking, I need to change my life. I can’t stand all the bad anymore. She and Kovac dealt every day in death and depravity. Even now, though they were here to see a victim who had survived, the experience would not be a happy one. Dana Nolan would not be who she had been before her abduction. She wouldn’t look the same. Her injuries were devastating and disfiguring. No one could say with any certainty how debilitating—or how permanent—the brain damage would be. And psychologically, Dana Nolan was broken in a way doctors couldn’t fix.
Nikki turned her back to the window and looked up at Sam, who stayed facing the gloom.
“You know she’s not going to remember anything,” she said. “Even if she can, why would she want to?”
“We have to try,” Kovac said. “Rutten said there’s no way to know exactly what she’ll remember and what she won’t. Maybe something in one of these pictures will strike a chord. Maybe the only thing she’ll remember is Fitzgerald telling her the names of his other victims.
“If you had a daughter missing, you’d want the cops to ask her,” he said. “You’d beg Lynda Mercer to let you talk to Dana. There are families out there who need to know what happened to their girls.”
“I know. You’re right. If I was the mother of a missing girl, I’d do anything to find out what happened,” Nikki said. “But if I was the mother of a daughter who had been tortured and brutalized and nearly killed, I’d do whatever I could to protect her.”
“Dana is the lucky one,” Sam said. “As fucked-up as that may be.”
“That’s about as fucked-up as it gets.”
He studied her face for a moment. He knew her as well as anyone. Better.
“Look, I’d send you home to the boys and do this myself. But there’s a good chance she isn’t going to want anything to do with a man.”
“It’s okay,” Nikki said, dodging his eyes. “I’m fine.”
Kovac drew a long breath and let go a longer sigh.
He knew what she was thinking, and he knew why. After all these years, she was going to transfer out of Homicide. They had already had the discussion . . . over and over. She needed better hours and more time with the boys. She loved her job. She was good at her job. But her first job was to raise her sons. She knew too well that the time for that could be gone in a heartbeat.
“We need to do this soon,” Kovac said. “Before she ships off to rehab in Indiana.”
Although Dana had regained consciousness two weeks past and was reportedly doing well in relation to the things that had happened to her, Lynda Mercer had put them off again and again. Dana wasn’t well enough to see anyone. Dana couldn’t remain conscious or couldn’t focus long enough to be asked questions. Communicating was exhausting for her. All of which was probably true, but excuses nonetheless.
It had been Nikki’s job to crack the ice with Lynda, to impress upon her the necessity of their talking to Dana. Feeling like a traitor to the motherhood union, she had downplayed what they would be asking of Dana. All they wanted was for her to look at some snapshots of objects, see if she recognized any of them. What they really wanted was for that recognition to lead to a memory made during a traumatic event.
“Let’s go check at the nurses’ station,” Kovac said. “If they’re not ready for us by now, we’ll come back in the morning.”
“You’re just trolling for a date,” Nikki chided, bumping her partner with an elbow as they started down the hall, giving him a wry smile, trying to lighten the mood—hers as much as his.
“I’ve sworn off nurses,” he growled. “They know too many ways to inflict pain.”
* * *
DANA NOLAN WAS SITTING in a chair next to her hospital bed when they walked into the room, wearing a hospital gown and a hockey helmet. This was the first time Nikki had seen her conscious since the night they had found her near the Loring Park sculpture garden, her captor’s van crashed into a light pole. Nikki had kept in touch with Dana’s mother, stopping in at the hospital every few days to check on Dana’s progress and to offer Lynda Mercer a little kindness from one mother to another.
Nikki had dealt before with victims who had suffered brain injuries. The process from coma to consciousness was arduous and unpredictable. Patients came up from the depths like deep-sea divers—slowly, stalling now and again to adjust to the new pressure. They could remain submerged just below the surface, near enough to see but not to communicate, or they could bob in and out, for days or weeks, responding to stimuli, even speaking, but not fully waking up.
In the movies, the heroine always awoke from a coma as if from a wonderful long nap, with bright eyes and rosy cheeks and a full head of beautifull
y brushed long tresses. And the worst trauma she faced was deciding whether or not Channing Tatum was really her husband. Dana had a much longer road ahead of her.
Some of the swelling had finally left her face, but she looked nothing like the pretty young woman who had greeted the early-rising residents of the Twin Cities on the first local newscast of the day. Bandages still swathed her skull, and a patch covered her right eye. The bruising in her face had faded from black to blue to a red-purple surrounded by a sickly shade of yellow. The cheekbone on the right side of her face appeared to be sinking. The right corner of her mouth drooped downward in a constant frown. Stitches marred her face like train tracks on a map.
“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 bott
om 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.