Heart of Ice

Chapter Eighteen

San Diego

“What a bitch!”

Lily Ann Denton cursed under her breath, but resisted the urge to press her palm against the horn. She let out a gasp of exaggerated anger. Some woman in a Dodge minivan stole a parking spot in front of the Circle K just as she was about to pull in.

Did she have to do that?

Lily Ann did another loop around the tiny, packed lot and found a space. She waited a moment for the Maroon 5 song that she’d fallen in love with to finish before she turned off the ignition on her sunny yellow Cabriolet. She was a grad student on a mission. At twenty-one, gone were the days when she relied on a pretty good fake ID and eye-catching breasts that acted as a winning backup plan—if the clerk was a male.

A horny male.

After a quick lip-gloss and hair check, she got out of the Cabriolet and hurried inside the store, eyeing the clerk—good, a young guy—as she made a beeline for the cold beer case in the back of the store. She rolled her pretty blue eyes at the woman who’d snatched her prime parking spot. She had three kids with her, all clamoring for candy bars and sodas.

“One or the other, Mattie, Diet Coke or Snickers. Not both.”

Mattie, a chubby ten-year-old, started wailing and Mom gave in within a second. Lily Ann caught the little girl’s eye and saw something in it. The little girl offered up what seemed to be a little too much of a grin, a-look-what-I’m-getting countenance that said everything about who she was and where she was headed.

Nice, a little manipulator. Probably Beta Zeta material, she thought.

Lily Ann leaned closer to the clerk, waving her driver’s license like a dog dangling a bone. The young man barely glanced at the laminated card.

“Party up at campus?” he asked. He was referring to the fashion design college just east of downtown San Diego.

“Party everywhere I go,” she said.

“Hot.”

“That’s right.” She pulled a twenty from her purse and paid for the beer—she didn’t have to show her breasts or her ID, really, which made the day a pretty good one so far.

“Have a good one,” he called out.

“Always do,” she said.

The mother with the three kids observed the exchange and figured that one day whatever attributes the young woman had she’d lose them to marriage and gravity.

But she wasn’t the only one watching Lily Ann.

As she ferried her beer to her car, she didn’t notice the man standing across the street watching her. He followed her movements like she was some kind of performer, a figure to be studied. He took in her long blond hair, and watched how it bounced up and down as she stepped toward the Cabriolet.

She was lovely. Maybe the prettiest of the bunch.

He could feel his rage swell as she started to back out of her parking spot.

Off to a party. Have fun. It’ll be your last. Girls like you don’t care about anyone but yourselves.

He got back into his own car to follow her; her yellow car was like a beacon in traffic. Lily Ann couldn’t lose anyone tailing her if she’d wanted to. Girls like her, he thought, always had cars that screamed “Look at me!”

If she had known that she was being followed or that she was in danger, she might have pulled into the fire station she zipped past or the church. There were a half-dozen opportunities when she might have escaped her fate. A stop. A quick turn. A cop was writing a ticket on the side of the road, and she tapped her brakes.

She punched in a phone number on her cell phone.

“Kara, God, I almost got a ticket. Was going fifteen over on Lander and passed a cop. I swear we had eye contact.”

“Close call.”

“I’m lucky. Hey, I got the beer.”

“Awesome,” Kara said, “I just finished my psych reading and I’m ready to party.”

“You’re always ready to party.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“See you in a few.”

Lily Ann looked in her rearview mirror. She didn’t notice the man following her. In fact, she didn’t even look at the traffic. Instead, she checked her makeup one more time. A couple of cute guys were coming to their little pre-func get-together before the party at the frat house later that evening.

The man behind her slowed, too. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, sending a curl of smoke out of the cracked-down window. He flicked on the radio and smiled when he heard a Maroon 5 song come on the radio. He’d known through her Facebook account that Lily Ann loved the pop band.

He wondered if she was listening to them now. She was so predictable. So easy. He parked and waited and smoked, flicking out the ashes as they grew to quarter-inch points of gray. He liked to keep things neat. He even hated that he smoked in the car, but Jesus, smoking was the hardest habit to break.

Maybe even harder than killing a girl.

Lily Ann Denton was nothing to him. In fact, the more he read her online profile, the more he hated her. She posed for picture after picture, beer in hand, laughing and pointing at the camera like she was some goddamn superstar. Like she had no cares whatsoever.

He drew on the cigarette, sucking the smoke deeply into his lungs and nodding as if he was having a conversation with someone.

But the conversation was in his head.

“I hate her stupid little mouth. So tight and tiny.”

“Yeah, she thinks she’s so pretty. So special. She’s nothing. Says she wants to be a doctor or a lawyer on her Web bio.”

“She’d be lucky to need either when I get finished with her.”

“Yeah. She’ll need an autopsy, if anything.”

“If they can find her.”

“Right. That’s right. They didn’t find the other, did they?”

“They don’t have a clue. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.”

He could feel his own lips moving as he had the conversation with himself, but he knew he wasn’t really uttering any of the words. He wasn’t crazy like that. They were only playing in his head. Over and over. The conversation sustained him, fueled him, as he waited for Lily Ann to drink a few beers and move on to the party. To move on to her final destiny. The one he’d scripted all on his own. Talking to himself, even silently, took the ennui out of the business of murder.

“Yeah, the truth is that killing is hours of boredom with ten seconds of ecstasy.”

A couple of girls, both long and lean, with dark hair that curled past their necklines, walked past. One carried a coat, the other wore one. They were in a hurry. He watched as they headed up the steps to the house where Lily Ann was holding court. He checked his watch. They were punctual. The time for the pre-party drinking was half past the hour.

They’d drink for an hour.

And he’d kill Lily Ann Denton, put her in the trunk, and go to Arby’s.

God, he was hungry.