Heart of Ice

Date in a Dungeon—Girl Held Captive Tells Her Story

Shali looked at the magazine cover as she flopped on the bed. “Why do you keep that shitty magazine, Jen?”

Jenna sprawled out next to her friend, tilting her head way back to take in Mariah’s photo. “I don’t know. I guess to remind me how close I came to losing everything. Mom said that it was better to ‘own’ your past then run from it.”

“Your mom is a nut.”

Jenna laughed. “She is, but I love her. She’s my mom.”

“Better by far than mine.”

“No argument, there.”

Shali picked at a small blemish on her chin. “So tell me about this so-called consultant job. Is it as bad as we thought it would be?”

“Worse.” Jenna stopped herself. There were parts of the job she liked—meeting people and problem solving, to name two. But there was an overdose of self-pity and self-absorption that seemed to come with the chapter insignia.

“These girls have everything,” she said, “but they think they have nothing at all.”

Shali stopped picking at her pimple. “They sound like us, don’t they?”

Jenna shook her head, and the bed rocked a little. “Look, I was mixed up with a junior serial killer and I have a father that would rather align himself with his new wife and replacement kid than be a father to me. That’s me. Let’s talk about you, now.”

“Let’s not.” Shali sighed.

Jenna got up and retrieved a brush from the bedside table.

“I like your hair that way. Looks prettier than that goth shit.”

For a girl with pink hair, that was saying a lot and Jenna smiled. She’d dyed her hair black the summer before college, thinking that she needed a change. It also fit her mood at the time. She just didn’t want to look like the girl who’d been held captive. Eventually she let it return to her light brown. That fall, for the very first time, she colored it blond.

“Being a blonde isn’t edgy, but I think it suits me. It kind of makes me feel, I don’t know, a little invincible, when I go after what I want.”

Shali brightened. “A little blonde ambition is a good thing.”

“I guess.” Jenna set down the brush, pulling some long golden strands from the bristles and dropping them in the trash can. She thought about Shali’s “blonde ambition” comment for a second. It was a very good line. She’d use it in her next Beta Zeta blog post.

Jenna had no idea that a thousand miles away, a man in his basement office was eagerly waiting for her next blog post. He was counting on Jenna to be as thorough as ever—detailing where she was going to be, who she was going to see.

It was all about timing.

Chapter Twenty-three

Miller’s Marsh Pond, outside of Cherrystone

The thought of a decomposing body is enough to make the skin crawl on the living. But decomp is always the natural outcome of a death. A stealthy decomp is the killer’s hope for lifelong freedom. Maybe even life itself.

A grave, not the proverbial shallow one, is always the best course of action. Bury the corpse deep enough in a remote location, scatter debris over the surface in a haphazard manner, and hope that no one stumbles upon it. That’s been a successful path for all of the murderers no one has ever heard about.

Dismemberment works well, too. Chop up the corpse in the bathtub, disperse the bits and pieces as convenience allows, and keep fingers crossed.

The killer of the woman in the water had done a mental pros-and-cons chart and decided that while enhancing the convenience of disposal, dismemberment was too messy a course of action. Blood spatter from a power saw almost always goes in a place that escapes detection by the killer with a scrub brush. Luminol with its eerie blue glow is a chemical finger that points right at the killer.

When a human body is surreptitiously dumped in the water, it becomes food for fish, turtles, and the other scavengers of the dead. If the body doesn’t get consumed, gases swell in the tissues and fill the cavities, distending the organs. Enough time in the water turns a dead person into a balloon, bringing it to the surface for discovery by a boater or in the nets of an unlucky fisherman.

Dead bodies and water don’t mix.

In Florida, a body can be consumed by alligators in a sunny afternoon. In the open sea of the Pacific, sharks dine on the fleshy morsels of what had once been a human being with the kind of glee that brings to mind the phrase feeding frenzy. In particularly pure and deep waters like Washington State’s Lake Crescent, bodies have been found preserved decades after they’d been hidden there.

That wasn’t going to happen with the body that he’d dumped that flat, moonless night. That body wasn’t going to be eaten, weighed down, or preserved at the depths.

The weather warmed and for a short time, the snow turned to rain. Mandy was about to make her return.

Chapter Twenty-four

Jack Fletcher had left his youngest son’s tackle box in the trunk. All bundled in heavy coats, hats, and gloves, Jack and his kids had made it halfway down the path toward Miller’s Marsh Pond. There, ice fishing was the order of the afternoon in the days after Christmas. Damn, the weather had likely ruined this year’s outing. A seesawing patch of weather had brought a thaw and then another hard freeze—it was an unusual occurrence that the big-city weatherman liked to call “Pineapple Express” to indicate that the genesis of the storm had come from Hawaii. It meant a lot of rain on the western part of the state and snow on the eastern region, including Cherrystone. This season, the Pineapple Express blew through with a hot breath that drove temps up to 55 degrees for forty-eight hours.

And now it was back down below freezing. New snow was coming that evening and winter was headed back with a vengeance.

“Watch the boys, Stacy,” Jack told his daughter, a fittingly sullen girl of fourteen. “I’m going back to the car to get Brandon’s tackle.”

“You always leave the boys with me,” she said. “You ought to pay me, Dad. I’m the live-in sitter around here.”