Cold Cold Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

She knew too well that the time for that could be gone in a heartbeat.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œLet’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.”
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œI’ve sworn off nurses,” he growled. “They know too many ways to inflict pain.”
    *   *   *
    D ANA N OLAN WAS SIT TING in a chair next to her hospital bed when they walked into the room, wearing a hospital gown and a hockeyhelmet. 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 beautifully 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.
    â€œSorry 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 herdaughter’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