Heart of Ice

by Gregg Olsen

  “What did you do?” Jenna dropped to her knees. Shali grabbed at her own stomach and started to gag, then coughed up blood.

  “Jenna, help me,” Shali said, gasping.

  “Drop your phone,” he said. “Drop it or I’ll cut off Shali’s head right now.”

  It was so fast. So frightening. The blood just kept coming. Shali went completely white. Her body slumped backward against the door, slamming it shut.

  Jenna dropped her phone. It started to ring. She could see it was her mother calling.

  “Mom, help me. Something’s happening. Mom,” she said in a loud voice inside her head, a voice that no one could hear.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Michael said, surprised that lying was so easy, even in the midst of utter chaos and crisis. He hoped it would somehow disarm her. It was a fantasy, a dream. Just do as I say and none of this will hurt so bad, he thought.

  “What do you want?” Jenna asked. “My friend needs a doctor! We have to call an ambulance.”

  “I came for you, Jenna. I’m sorry about her.”

  Jenna was terror-stricken and confused. “Came for me?”

  His eyes were like a reptile’s, devoid of compassion for what he’d done as Shali’s blood oozed around them.

  “Yeah you. You were the third of the bitches that trashed my sister.”

  Jenna tried to take a step backward, but there was nowhere to go. Her eyes moved rapidly from Shali to the man with the dripping knife.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked. “I don’t know you! I don’t know your sister.”

  “Sarah Barton.”

  Jenna’s face stayed blank, pinched in horror. Tears ran down her cheeks. “I don’t know her.”

  “Sarah Cleary was her name. Sarah Barton Cleary.” Michael taunted Jenna with the blade. “You said she wasn’t good enough to be in your stupid club. You, Lily Ann, Tiffany…the three of you. You told her that she wasn’t smart or pretty enough. Do you even have a clue how much you hurt the girls who want into your little club?”

  Jenna racked her brain, but things were happening so fast she couldn’t grab on to any memory of any Sarah Barton. “I don’t remember Sarah, I’m sorry. I’m sure she was a nice girl.”

  “You set her up. You told her she was ‘in’ and then you took it away from her. You crushed her. You have no damn idea what her life was about, how much she struggled.”

  Jenna continued scanning the room for a way out, a weapon. Anything. “I really am sorry. Please. We need to get Shali a doctor.”

  “She’s collateral damage. I came for you. I missed you once at Dixon University and I’m sorry about Sheraton Wilkes. But you two look alike and she was wearing your damn coat and she was in your room.”

  Jenna remembered how Sheraton had borrowed her coat that night at the restaurant, how she’d vacated the chapter’s guest room for the sleeping porch the night Sheraton was murdered.

  “You deserve this,” he said.

  Emily Kenyon turned the unlocked knob on the front door and pushed, but something was in the way. She pushed a second time, a little harder.

  Shali Patterson’s unconscious body was blocking the door. Each time she pushed, a smear of blood grew larger across the hardwood floor, but she couldn’t see it.

  Dear God, what’s going on here? She pushed harder, this time using her shoulder like a battering ram.

  Chris Collier’s rental car pulled up and he ran across the driveway to Emily, who was hunched low by the front door.

  “Something terrible is going on here,” she said, her words hushed, and her face awash in worry. “You cover the backyard. Shali’s hurt.”

  “Where’s Jenna?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Call for help. We need an ambulance and backup.”

  “Already called. I’ll check out the back of the house.”

  “Be careful,” she said.

  Chris Collier rounded the backyard with such haste that he nearly fell over a planter on the patio. He steadied himself, bent down low, and peered into the living room window. What the? He could see Jenna walking backward toward the kitchen, a man with what looked like a knife moving toward her. He could see a slice of light come through the front door as Emily pushed and pushed from the outside of the front door.

  Emily stuck her head inside and screamed. “Jenna!”

  The man with the knife started to lunge for Jenna and Chris did what he knew he had to do. This has to be the cleanest shot I’ve ever fired, he thought. He aimed his gun and fired at the man in the hoodie. The window shattered and glittery pieces of glass rained down all over. For a second he couldn’t see what, if anything, he’d done.

  “Jenna! Emily!” he called out.

  “I’m all right,” Jenna said.

  Chris rolled his body through the broken window and ran to Jenna just as Emily came inside. Shards of glass clung to his chest and pant legs.

  “Mom,” Jenna said, pulling her mother toward her in a desperate embrace. “We have to help Shali. That freak stabbed her.”

  Emily hugged her daughter as tightly as she could. “The EMTs are coming, honey. They’ll take care of her.”

  Tears rolled down Jenna’s face. “Mom, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let him in.”

  She squeezed her daughter with the kind of hug that promised to never let go. “Don’t blame yourself.”

  Chris bent over Shali and told her in a gentle voice that she’d be all right.

  “You’re a fighter, Shali Patterson,” he said. “Fight this one. Hang on.”

  Sirens screamed down the street, growing louder as they came toward the Kenyon house.

  Jenna was crying and shaking. She was nearly inconsolable, the kind of breakdown that happens when one feels safe enough to just let go.

  “He said he killed Lily Ann, Tiffany, and Sheraton,” she said.

  Emily held her with the might of a mother’s love. “I know. I know. Baby, it’s all over.” She looked over at the dead man on her living room floor. A puddle of bloody water formed around him. Michael Barton had been shot in the chest. The knife was still clutched in his hand. For a second, Emily felt the look on his face wasn’t anguish or menace.

  It was a dead man. A sick man. A monster at peace.

  Epilogue

  Noplace was more lovely than Cherrystone in the full of a spring day. The cherry blossoms planted along the main arterials by the Boy Scouts in the 1960s were in their pompom prime. Whenever the breeze came down from the north, a little flurry of white petals filled the air, drifting around tires and along the curb. The winter had been beyond turbulent—but the spring promised, as it always did—a rebirth.

  Jenna had been accepted into law school and would be attending Stanford in the fall. She was more than ready to pursue a career in criminal law. No young woman had seen so much, yet stayed steady and optimistic. She quit the BZs with an e-mail the same day that her mom agreed to marry the man she loved.

  “We need to get on with our lives,” Emily had told her daughter. “We can’t always count on a second chance coming around again.”

  Jenna and Shali decorated the gazebo in the Kenyons’ backyard with massive bouquets of cherry blossoms.

  “I had no idea that you had so many cherry trees at your house, Shali.”

  Shali rolled her eyes. “I know why you’re saying that.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, I know that you know we don’t have any at my house. But hey, it’s your mother’s wedding and I like her. So I did a little snipping here and there last night two blocks down.”

  Jenna measured another length of ribbon. “I hope my mom doesn’t get arrested for having stolen property at her wedding.”

  Shali grinned. “I hope she does. We’ll get on the news for sure.”

  Both girls laughed. They hadn’t laughed like that in a while, not since that terrible afternoon when Shali had been stabbed by Michael Barton. Her injuries had healed, and she was conscientiously attending her prescribed ph
ysical therapy sessions. Jenna marveled at her friend’s indomitable spirit. She’d be all right. They all would.

  They stepped back from the gazebo. Indigo blue ribbons and white cherry blossoms were carefully braided around each post. It was, both girls knew, as beautiful as a dream.

  “So your mom’s not going to run for a second term, huh?”

  Jenna surveyed the yard. Things looked perfect. “Nope. Jason is, though. Mom and Chris are going to open their own investigative agency.”

  “Like private eyes?” Shali’s eyes grew wide with intrigue.

  Jenna picked up the roll of indigo ribbon. “Kind of like that. But Mom says, not half as exciting. Mostly hunting down deadbeat dads and working on insurance scams.”

  Shali let out a laugh, touching her abdomen, still a little tender. “I’ll give her my dad’s last address.”

  Jenna returned her best friend’s smile.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said. “The wedding starts at two.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to acknowledge Michaela Hamilton, Susan Raihofer, Jessica Rose Wolfe, Jean Olson, Tina Marie Brewer, Bunny Kuhlman, Jim Thomsen, Charles Turner, and Kathrine Beck for their much-needed advice, guidance, and general good sense on this project. Also, to Claudia for being the best reader a writer ever had. I love you.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at

  Gregg Olsen’s next spine-tingling thriller,

  VICTIM SIX,

  coming from Pinnacle in March 2010!

  “Quiet, number five,” he said. “Be a good girl.”

  His words came at her with the smell of sweat and motor oil, and were delivered in a strangely calm, almost soothing, cadence.

  Amy Lewis was terrified, her body, her very presence shrinking under his power.

  “Don’t!” she said, the last words that she recalled falling from her trembling lips.

  “Good girl.”

  Tears rolled down her ashen face. A coppery flavor filled her mouth. It was as if she tasted spare change or something, yet her mouth was empty. She was bleeding where he struck her.

  And her pleas for help were screamed only in her head.

  God, help me!

  No answer. Just a slow fade to blackness. A curtain pulled. A moon eclipsed. Then absolutely nothing at all.

  But that was before. Just how long ago, Amy couldn’t be sure. At that moment, what he called her barely registered in her mind. Instead, her memories were a mosaic. They came to her in tiny shards and splinters, not the seamless reel she had imagined people saw in their mind’s eye when their final moments came and their life “flashed” before their eyes.

  Her high school graduation and how she and her best friend Danita had purchased a bottle of screw-top wine from the Stop ’n Go near the pavilion where the ceremonies were held. They’d guzzled it in Danita’s car. Real tough, she thought. The only bad thing she’d ever done in a childhood of Brownie meetings, solid B grades, and student government posts whenever there was an opening.

  What did I do to deserve this?

  How her mother had sat her brother Richard, her sister, Courtney, and herself in a neat row on the old floral sofa that faced the TV. Mom flipped off The Price Is Right and fought back tears. The other kids were younger, but she knew right away before her mother opened her mouth what this little family meeting was about. “Your father and I…”

  Another splinter came at her. Amy recalled how she’d stolen a handful of candy corn from a bin in the produce section of Safeway when she was seven. She never told anyone that she’d done so, but to that very day the sight of the Halloween confection made her stomach roil with guilt. She never stole anything again, never broke any law. One time when she was stopped by a state trooper, she cried because she’d thought she’d been speeding and was surely going to get a ticket. Instead, he told her that her taillight was out, flashed a smile, and waved her on to the nearest dealership. “Need to be safe. Have a daughter of my own and wouldn’t want her driving with a winking tailgate,” he said.

  Some thoughts materialized as if underscored by the divine, reminding her not to steal, that parents don’t always stay together, that there are good men out there, too. Some were more random. Things that came to her that felt like filler, a recap of moments that had never been important. She lost her car keys the week before. She threw up on the Merry Go Round when she was four. She endured a bad sunburn and smelled of aloe after a vacation on the coast when she was fourteen. She hated ravioli from the can and could remember the slap she got from her aunt when she told her so at the dinner table.

  Shutting her eyes did nothing. The images still came.

  Stop, she thought. Think. Think. You don’t want to die. Not here, not in this place.

  The man on the side of the steel wall sandwiched between them had his own downpour of recollections. He steadied himself by leaning against the small, cold doorway. The rumble of the machinery soothed him like one of those cheap motels with Magic Fingers attached to the bed frame. Drop in a quarter, ride the pulsating massage. Feel good. He thought of the first one. The Juneau bookstore clerk looking for adventure who begged him to let her go.

  “I have a baby at home! Don’t do this. You don’t want to do this!”

  But, he did want to. So very, very much.

  He remembered how after that, everything had been about the killing. Even when he’d watch TV and a potato chip commercial would come on, he’d write it in his head: no one can kill just one.

  He knew all of their names, though he pretended he’d recalled them only in number or town. No. 1 Juneau, No. 2 Sitka, No. 3 Seattle, No. 4 Port Orchard, and No. 5 Seattle again. Seattle was a big city, but as No. 5 squirmed on her army surplus cot, he let it pass through his mind that he shouldn’t have been so lazy.

  Two from the same town, he thought, invites unwanted scrutiny.

  Getting caught would kill the rush that he’d collected from each victim as he sucked in their lives like a really good smoke.

  In the darkness, Amy Lewis was growing a little stronger, a touch more lucid. She felt the rumbling of something outside the space that held her prisoner. She was on her stomach. Her hands had been bound by tape. Her feet, too. She realized that she was breathing hard, too fast, out of fear. She told herself to slow down. She didn’t want to pass out. Not like before.

  She remembered his hand reaching around her as he held her from behind. He had what looked like a dirty T-shirt balled up in his fist. At that moment, she knew she was probably going to die.

  He pinched her neck and pressed the smelly cloth to her mouth and nose. Tequila? Cleaning fluid? Acetone? She felt the wooziness that comes with too much to drink and maybe too little sleep. She felt her knees starting to bend, though she commanded them to stay locked. The world around her started to grow fainter. She couldn’t even hear his breathing, at once so labored and hot against the back of her neck.

  “I don’t want to die. Why are you doing this to me? Who…What are you?”

  Of course, no words came from her bloodied lips. Amy’s interior monologue was screamed through the fear in her eyes only. She was falling. The lights were going out.

  “Help me. Please someone.”

  Then nothing.

  Her last thoughts were the darkest that had ever gone through her mind.

  I hope he only rapes me. Yes, only rapes me.

  Her wits were nearly gone, but she knew the ridiculousness of her thoughts. She had a friend who’d been raped in college. It was nothing to wish for, but in that moment it was the only hope that she had.

  Amy wanted to live.

  He wanted to smoke, but not there. Diesel fuel had splattered the steel floor. Hydraulic lines ran from the engines through the lazarette where he stored spare parts, a cooler, rigging, and, of course, her.

  He tucked a Camel straight between his lips and pondered his next move. The timing, like the tides, had been with him. She’d been the perfect victim. He even smiled at the thought of her p
acked away in that cramped compartment. Her terror was a rush; a vibration that stimulated. She was his Magic Fingers. She was what he considered a lucky catch—a girl just begging to be a victim because of her trusting nature. He preferred those who fought a little harder or wore their skepticism like a shield. Despite her whining about her baby, the bookstore clerk had been like that. She’d fought hard.

  Like a lioness fighting for her cub, was the thought that came to his mind. But he was stronger, and even if he wasn’t, he could summon help.

  He started for the light of day, cigarette dangling, his fingertip rubbing across the silver Crossfire lighter that felt so good in his palm. He pushed open the hatch and a flood of cool evening light drifted toward his handsome face.

  She was waiting for him as he emerged.

  “Everything in the engine room all right, baby?” she said, her dark eyes full of a mix of worry and excitement.

  “No problems I can’t fix after chow. Going back down there tonight. Be a late one.”

  She smiled. “Need any help?”

  He shook his head. “Got this one handled. Thanks, baby.”

  Belowdecks, in the confines of the vessel’s lazarette, she woke once more. By then she’d figured out that she was not in a car trunk, as she first imagined. There would be no way she could fiddle with the emergency latch as she’d seen a young woman do on the Today Show when she reenacted her own escape from a rapist.

  Or killer.

  The diesel smell, the shaking of the floor, the slight bobbing, gave her an awareness that she was on a boat of some kind. Rolling on her side, she could better take in the smells—fish, water, fuel. Her eyes traced a pinprick of light that bore through the steel walls, weeping with condensation. The light led to a couple of fish scales on the floor.

  A boat, yes, she was sure.

  Amy wriggled some more, panting, pushing, trying to break the tape that kept her strong body constricted. She did not want to be raped. She wanted to get the hell out of there. She twisted with all of her strength and somehow rolled herself on her side, her hands still behind her back. She wanted to scream from the pain emanating from her shoulders, but it wouldn’t matter.