Page 11 of Hard Heart

I didn’t dare to mention the rent. “Let me know if you need anything from the pharmacy.”

“As long as the swelling goes down, I’ll be okay. Do you mind if I put the TV on? Or are you still working?”

“I’m studying.” Sort of.

“Oh, yeah, that exam thing. When is it again?”

“February.”

She rolled onto her side to reach for the remote and accidentally knocked one of my files. Papers slid out and fluttered to the floor.

“Shoot, I’m sorry. Hey, is that one of the exam questions? The Sexy Strangler?”

“The…Sexy Strangler?”

Did she realise how insane that sounded?

“That’s what we used to call him. And by ‘we,’ I mean a bunch of girls at my high school who were willing to overlook a man’s flaws as long as he was hot.”

“Yikes.”

“I lived in a little town near Manassas at the time,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“Was this little town a place where people wore straitjackets and resided against their will?”

Heidi giggled. “There wasn’t a whole lot to do except work at the button factory, gossip, and dream of a way to get out of there.”

“You didn’t fancy working at the button factory, then?”

“It closed when I was seventeen, so…”

“How old were you when the Sykes trial took place?”

She thought for a moment, chewing on her bottom lip. “Fifteen? I was a sophomore. Boy, the trial was a real soap opera. Folks used to watch the local news every night for the next instalment. When Levi was found guilty, there was like this…collective grief.”

“For him? Not for the poor girl he murdered?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know how else to describe it. Mandy Richards kept crying, and I remember Becky Shrimpton wrote him in prison.”

“Did he write back?”

“Oh, no. The guards probably laughed at the letter and filed it in the trash.”

“Isn’t that a bit disturbing? A teenage girl writing to a convicted killer?”

“A hundred percent. But like I said, there wasn’t much to do in town, and don’t teenage girls always go for the bad boy?”

“Not me. I dated a polo player.”

Although he lost his driving licence after drinking several glasses of wine and attempting to drive his Porsche home from the local gastropub. Luckily, I hadn’t been in the car with him at the time.

“Polo’s a rich people horse thing, right?”

“Yes, that about sums it up.”

“I hooked up with a cowboy once. The whole ‘roll in the hay’ experience, you know?”

“Polo players don’t actually do hay. They have people for that.”