December 25, Sisseton, South Dakota

Dixie stormed out of the cabin. Lifting her face to the sun’s brilliance, she filled her lungs with clean winter air. But the awful images clung to her mind like swamp moss. She knocked a bead of ice off the Mustang’s door handle, opened the door, and slid onto the driver’s seat. From the snapshot clipped to the visor, the Keyes girls grinned down at her. On the drive from Texas, their trusting brown eyes had egged her on, willing her to find Betsy’s killer. Now she looked at the snapshot and an ache filled her chest. Two of those three girls were dead. Not one, but two.

She looked away. Her deep feeling of loss made no sense. Dixie had never met Betsy or Courtney, and both had died months ago. Betsy in the spring, Courtney in the summer.

An accident at camp, Dann had said. What were the odds of two fatal accidents occurring in the same family in three months?

Dixie found a napkin in the burger sack and blew her nose. When she looked back at the snapshot, her throat tightened again. She’d made a silent promise that she could no longer fulfill, because Courtney Keyes was dead. Never mind that she died long before Dixie went after Parker Dann. For Dixie, Courtney had been alive, grinning down at her from that visor.

Parker Dann’s case file lay on the passenger seat, under the thermos. Dixie picked it up. She slipped off the rubber band, looping it around her wrist, and opened the folder. Midway through the papers she found Belle’s notation about Courtney’s death. The nine-year-old had drowned on the last day of camp, on the morning of a swim contest. Swimming alone, before breakfast. Belle had talked with the physician who signed the death certificate. The doctor thought Courtney might have suffered a cramp and then got disoriented under the water. An accident. Three months earlier, Courtney’s sister Betsy was killed in an accident. A grotesque coincidence? The mother must be a blattering basket case worrying about her third chick.

Dixie thought about Ryan, the way his twelve-year-old face brightened when he saw his Aunt Dixie, and imagined the agony of losing him.  She fished the newspaper clipping of Dann’s arraignment out of the file. Rebecca Keyes, pale and thin, sat close to her husband, who looked angry enough to kill. The two girls huddled together, Ellie’s small hands clutching the picture book, solemn eyes steady on the page, while her sister glared at Parker Dann.

Dann had been out on bail when the camp accident occurred. He could have murdered both girls, setting up both as accidents. But what reason would he have? Dixie had encountered perversions often enough to know they could surface in the must unlikely personalities. But men who killed children to satisfy some sick need generally wanted close physical contact. They strangled or stabbed, they didn’t run down a child with a car.

Belle had seen no connection between the two deaths. Apparently neither had the DA. It was tragic, certainly, but not unheard of for two family members to die in rapid, unrelated succession. If foul play had been suspected, the media would’ve pounced on it, quick to point out that the man accused of hit-and-run manslaughter of Betsy Keyes was free on bail at the time of her sister’s “accident.”

Okay, so the deaths happened months apart in different counties.

Dixie recalled Dann’s face when the domino spun off the table and hit the window. She’d seen torment there. Every good salesman was part actor, but it would take the skill of an Anthony Hopkins to fake the anguish she’d seen in Dann’s eyes. Was he that good? If she hadn’t caught up with him, he’d be in Canada — hiding out awhile, then reappearing under a new name. The long arm of the law didn’t reach that far in such cases. He’d be a free man.

An innocent man?

Guilty or not, Belle hadn’t been happy with the way Dann’s trial was going. Unless new evidence surfaced in his favor — a witness who saw someone else driving Dann’s car, for instance — Parker Dann would likely spend the next two to twenty years in prison.

Dixie pulled the snapshot off the visor. Her silent promise had been to bring Betsy’s killer to justice. Suppose that killer wasn’t Dann?

Court would reconvene on January 4. If they arrived back in Houston by the twenty-eighth, say, she’d have five or six days to poke around. Granting they were accidents, the stolen-car-drug-dealer theory wasn’t too far out. On the other hand, if the answer was that easy, Belle’s investigator would have turned up something. Or maybe not. Since Dixie had taken up skip tracing, her information network surpassed anything she’d relied on as ADA. It certainly surpassed any network Belle might be using.

Dixie put the news clipping back in Dan’s folder, slipped the rubber band around it, and laid the file on the seat. Then she put the snapshot back on the sun visor. When they hit the highway tomorrow — or the next day — she’d have eleven hundred miles to make a decision.

Join me right here next week for another Bitch Factor chapter.

Meanwhile, grab a Copy of Slice of Life, another Dixie Flannigan thriller. You can see a quick, fun preview in the video below:

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