Crash & Burn

by Lisa Gardner

  Wyatt understood her point. The Thomas he’d interviewed had been a stressed-out middle-aged male. Clearly tired, maybe a bit frayed from caring for his ailing wife, but not the kind of man you’d look at twice.

  Whereas younger Thomas—teenage Thomas? He looked haggard. Haunted. Hard.

  A kid who already had plenty to hide.

  “Nicky never showed this to you?” Wyatt asked.

  Tessa shook her head. “No. I left to take a call. Bet she stashed it then.”

  “She’s sitting here. Candle’s lit, the air smells like grass. She draws the house. She draws rooms in the house. She sketches Madame Sade, and then: this.” Wyatt turned over the matter in his mind. “She didn’t expect it. I bet that’s why she hid it. Of all the details to start returning to her, that Thomas is part of the dollhouse, that she knew him before, better yet, he knew her from before, must’ve rattled her.”

  “He was part of it,” Tessa whispered. “And judging by his expression, not a nice part of it either. You think she contacted him somehow, set up a meeting time? But how? She doesn’t even have a phone.”

  Wyatt shrugged. “If she really wants answers, Thomas is the next place to start.”

  “Except . . .” Tessa’s voice trailed off. “I don’t think this boy”—she tapped the sketch—“has anything good to tell her.”

  Wyatt nodded. He was worried about the same. If even half of what Nicky had said about the dollhouse was true, then there were plenty of secrets worth killing to protect.

  “We need to get eyes on your car. Immediately.”

  “Shit! We’re idiots. It’s my vehicle, dammit. And I have OnStar!”

  * * *

  TESSA MADE THE call. Once given the password, the operator of OnStar was more than happy to be of assistance. In fact, he pinpointed the location of her Lexus in less than thirty seconds as sitting in the hotel’s parking lot.

  “What the hell?”

  She and Wyatt walked out together, discovering Tessa’s black SUV, sitting beneath an energy-efficient lamppost.

  “Why take my keys if she wasn’t going to take my car?” Tessa exploded. She sounded genuinely insulted.

  “Slow us down, keep us from following her?” Wyatt reasoned. “She already hid Thomas’s sketch. Clearly, she wants some privacy.”

  Wyatt took his hands out of his pockets, walked the space. One A.M. Lot held four vehicles, which made for a quick inventory. Bushes, trees, shrubs, nothing.

  “She didn’t walk out of here,” he stated. “We’re too far away from civilization, let alone any major roads. So if she’s not here, but your car is, then she found another mode of transportation.”

  “Maybe she didn’t have to drive to meet Thomas. He met her here.”

  “She called him from the hotel room?” Wyatt tried on.

  “Can’t. I asked the hotel manager to block all incoming and outgoing calls. Containment issue. Plus, I have my cell. We didn’t need anything else for making contact.”

  Wyatt was impressed. “You didn’t trust her?”

  “Hey, just because she’s my client doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Plenty of people ask for help, then maneuver around your back, which, of course, gets the savvy investigator in trouble. One form of contact means I always know what’s going on. For example, she didn’t call Thomas.”

  “Maybe he followed us from the sheriff’s department to here,” Wyatt theorized. “Or even tracked my vehicle while I was picking up Marlene Bilek. Easy enough to guess she’d want to meet with Nicky, given the story on the nightly news.” Wyatt’s voice trailed off. If Thomas had known Nicky was here, then the moment she walked out of the hotel into the darkened parking lot . . . They hadn’t kept her safe at all, he realized. More like delivered her straight to the lion.

  Wyatt glanced at his watch again. He needed to get on the radio, mobilize a fresh search. Except be on the lookout for what? They’d already been hunting for Thomas Frank for more than twenty-four hours. The man was a fucking ghost.

  “We need cameras,” Tessa muttered, as if reading his mind. “Search like this in Boston, we’d have toll records, traffic light cameras, business surveillance and/or ATM security on every block. One click of a video screen, and Thomas would be ours.”

  “Hang on. We might not be in a big city, but this hotel has a security system. Check it out.” He pointed back at the hotel roofline, where at least one camera was clearly visible. He turned on his heels, already heading for the front office. “We might have some tricks up our sleeves just yet.”

  The nighttime hotel clerk identified herself as Brittany Kline. Blond, bubbly, and extremely excited to assist with an official police investigation. Yes, the hotel had an excellent security system, she informed them. Installed six months ago, great cameras, great imaging, tons of stored footage. She liked to peruse it herself on slow nights. You know, in order to augment her online classes in criminology. She led them toward a back office, where she immediately proved herself to be adept at retrieving video from the system.With Brittany’s assistance, they sorted out which security camera had the best view of the parking lot; then backtracked through the various video feeds in one-minute intervals. It took only four tries to get it right.

  “There!” Tessa exclaimed excitedly, pointing at the screen, as Brittany manned the digital controls. “That’s Nicky, walking toward the parked cars.”

  “And there’s person number two, pushing away from the tree,” Wyatt provided.

  They watched the figure approach. Clearly a male, but his back was to the overhead lights, casting his face in shadow. Still, neither one had any doubt.

  “Thomas,” Wyatt stated.

  “She doesn’t seem afraid of him,” Tessa commented.

  “And yet, no welcoming hug.”

  “Can you zoom in?” Tessa asked Brittany. The night clerk did her best, but the resolution remained grainy. After a bit more playing around, they decided the footage was best in broad view. Brittany resumed normal screen size, hit replay.

  Wyatt watched the screen. Thomas’s rapid approach upon spotting his wife, followed almost immediately by an obvious hesitation. Nicky’s instinctive lean toward her husband yet also drawing up short. Love and fear, he thought. Twin companions in any relationship.

  Even his and Tessa’s.

  Thomas held out his hand to his wife.

  Nicky stood there. Doubt? Wyatt wondered. Hostility? Wariness? Did she still see her husband of twenty-two years, a man who’d pledged to take care of her? Or did she see the grim-eyed youth from the dollhouse, a boy clearly conditioned to do what had to be done, regardless of the cost?

  Another moment passed. Two. Three.

  Thomas stepped closer. Nicky tilted her face up. The lighting was wrong. Wyatt couldn’t see her expression, and yet what she did next didn’t totally surprise him.

  She placed her fingers within her husband’s grasp. She handed herself over to him.

  Brittany sighed heavily, as if watching a romantic movie.

  While Tessa exclaimed, “Oh my God, they’re in this together!”

  “Maybe,” Wyatt murmured. But he wasn’t thinking of joint criminal activity. Mostly he was thinking that love is like that.

  Thomas led Nicky to the last vehicle in the row. Low-slung hatchback. Subaru, dark green. In a matter of seconds, he was backing it out of the parking space. Heading toward the exit.

  Standing behind a seated Brittany, Wyatt and Tessa both leaned forward, willing the parking lot light to illuminate the back license plate, give them what they were looking for.

  “Come on,” Wyatt whispered, grabbing a notebook and pen from his pocket. “Come on . . .”

  One digit. Two, three . . .

  He was hastily scribbling them down, when Tessa suddenly grabbed his arm.

  “Stop!” she ordered Brittany. “Freeze that frame. Look. On th
e right. Another car is pulling out. Wyatt, someone is following them.”

  Chapter 35

  THOMAS AND I drive in silence. He has both hands on the wheel, his gaze ping-ponging from the front windshield to the rearview mirror. Checking for what, I’m not sure. But I can feel his tension.

  Outside the car windows, the darkness rushes by. There are no streetlights out here. No road guards, traffic lights. We are in the mountains, carving our way up through vast wilderness. It should be raining, I think. Then it would be exactly as it was before.

  “For the longest time,” Thomas says at last, “I thought if we just stayed away, if you just had more time to heal. There were moments, you know, entire months, sometimes even a year, when you seemed to be better. I’d catch you smiling at a bird, a flower, a sunrise. Your face would brighten when I walked into a room. You’d even sleep at night.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “But then the wheels would come off. Abruptly. Without warning. I read book after book on the subject. Tried to identify the triggers. Some PTSD sufferers can’t handle noise; for others it’s a smell, a color, the feel of the walls closing in. For you . . . I couldn’t figure it out. Ocean, desert, city, country. I tried it all. But no matter where we went, your nightmares found you again.”

  My husband turns to me. It’s hard to see his expression in the dark, but I can feel the seriousness of his gaze. “I tried, Nicky. I tried everything. I believed for the longest time that I could be the one who saved you. But then . . .”

  He pauses, returns his attention to the road.

  “I fell down the stairs,” I fill in.

  “Vero,” he states. He sounds bitter, though I understand, somewhere in the back of my head, that his feelings regarding her are as complex as mine. He found a way to move forward, however. I didn’t, and therein lay the difference.

  “Days on end,” he says now, “you laid on the couch with that damn quilt and whispered under your breath. Long, involved conversations with Vero. Vero flies. Vero cries. Vero only wants to be free. If I interrupted, you flew into a rage. If I tried to comfort you, you slapped my face and screamed at me it was all my fault. You hated me. Vero hated me. Go away.”

  I can picture it, exactly as he says. My need, my all-consuming need, to commune with the past. Thomas, walking into the room. Thomas, daring to interrupt. The sharp feel against my palm as I connected with his face.

  It’s all your fault, I screamed at him. I know what you did. She told me, you know. She tells me everything!

  Thomas, not even bothering to argue. Thomas, walking away.

  “The day you fell down the basement stairs, when I returned from the workshop and couldn’t find you . . . I ran around the house frantic. I thought you’d left me, Nicky. I thought, this was it. Given a choice between a future with me or a past with Vero . . . you’d left. The ghost girl had won.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Then I finally discovered you sprawled on the basement floor . . . You wouldn’t respond to your name. Any of them. Trust me, I ran through the whole list. All the places we’d been, the names we’d initially tried on. Finally, I called you Vero. And you opened your eyes. You stared right at me. And so help me God, I almost walked away right there and then. You, her . . . I just can’t do this anymore.”

  I can’t help myself. I shiver slightly because I know he’s right. There’s a thin line in my mind, and it’s been that way for a long time. “I am you,” Vero tells me. But I wonder what she really means. As in, she’s a piece of my subconscious, maybe even the voice of my guilty conscience? Or . . . something else entirely?

  I would like to say I don’t believe in ghosts, but I can’t.

  “I only ever wanted for you to be happy,” Thomas says now, his hands gripping the wheel. “I fought a good fight for twenty-two years, thinking if we can just keep moving forward, once more time has passed. But I’m wrong, aren’t I, Nicky? You can’t go forward. You have to go back. Given a choice between Vero and me, Vero has won.”

  I don’t speak. I can’t tell my husband what he wants to hear, which makes it easier to say nothing at all.

  Instead, I study the dark night rushing behind him. I smell smoke. I feel flames. But I don’t reach out my hand to him.

  We have both come too far for that.

  I feel Vero then. She is standing in the back of my mind. Not speaking, not sipping tea, not even sitting in the dollhouse, but more like a lone figure, waiting in a black void. I can’t see her face; more like I feel her mood.

  Somber. Tired. Sad.

  She is not coming to me, I realize, because for the first time in twenty-two years, I am coming to her.

  She finally opens her mouth. She utters a single word: “Run.”

  But we both know it is much too late for that.

  Thomas slows the car. For the first time, I see it. A dirt road has appeared on the right. Nearly overgrown, it would be difficult enough to spot during the day, and almost impossible at night. Except, of course, that Thomas already knows that’s it there.

  “Run!” Vero whispers again.

  But there’s no place to go. I’m trapped in this car now, just as surely as I was trapped in my Audi three nights ago.

  As my husband takes the turn, headlights slashing across a tangle of shrubs, tiny car heaving up the first divot.

  “All I ever wanted,” Thomas repeats, “was for you to be happy.”

  As he forces the four-wheel-drive vehicle up the rutted road.

  Returning to the dollhouse.

  Thomas’s childhood home.

  Chapter 36

  THEY STRUCK OUT on the green Subaru. Kevin was able to trace the partial license plate to a vehicle that had been listed as stolen the day before. Being an older model, it didn’t carry such modern-day amenities as GPS for tracking, and they had no hits on sightings of the vehicle.

  Two A.M., Wyatt sat back in frustration, scrubbing his face with the palm of his hand. “We’re still reacting. Thomas runs, we give chase. Nicky taunts us with half a puzzle, we batter our brains trying to deduce the missing pieces. Just once, I’d like to be ahead in this game.”

  “As in knowing where Nicky and Thomas went?” Tessa asked him.

  “Oh, I know where they went. Can’t find it on a map, of course, but I know where they went.”

  “The dollhouse.”

  “Who’s in the second vehicle?” he barked impatiently. They were still in the back hotel office, surrounded by the security video they’d watched again and again. Wyatt had sent Brittany out of the room, ostensibly because they no longer required her assistance, but mostly because it was never good to appear stuck in front of an adoring member of the public. “What the hell happened way back when, what the hell is going on now and who did we miss? Because if Nicky is with Thomas, and according to my deputy, Marlene Bilek was returned safely home three hours ago, who’s left to follow our favorite two suspects in a separate vehicle?”

  They’d tried zooming in on the security footage of the second car, but that vehicle had stuck to the dimly lit edges of the parking lot. They had a recording of a small, dark compact. Not even a blur of the driver’s face, let alone something truly helpful, such as a glimpse of the license plate. “Madame Sade?” Tessa guessed now.

  Wyatt nearly growled in frustration. He’d gone almost forty-eight hours without sleep. Combined with a sense of his own stupidity, the night was wearing on him.

  He picked up Tessa’s sketch of the woman, held it up. “We take this picture to the press, we gotta tell them why.”

  “Police have some questions for her regarding the disappearance of a child thirty years ago,” Tessa provided immediately. “Don’t call her a suspect, but imply she’s a witness. People feel better about ratting out their neighbors when it won’t get them in trouble.”

  “Excellent plan for the morning
news cycle. Problem is, we need answers now, and press conferences don’t work well at two A.M. Mostly because the target audience is asleep.”

  “Maybe you should take a nap,” Tessa informed him.

  He nearly growled again. “I want the dollhouse. Thomas, Nicky, our answers. All at the dollhouse.”

  “We have that sketch.”

  “Fed it to local Realtors this afternoon. No hits. Kevin ran specs through a New Hampshire property tax database, too many hits. Historic homes, even grand old Victorians, are lousy in these hills.”

  “What about Marlene’s hubby?” Tessa asked now. “If Marlene’s safe at home, what about him, because I bet he has opinions about a long-lost daughter appearing from the dead.”

  “Except Nicky’s not Vero. No threat to him or the new family order.”

  Tessa frowned, plopped down in the office chair across from Wyatt.

  “Nicky and Thomas are both connected to the dollhouse,” Tessa stated. “We can’t prove it, but that makes the most sense.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Meaning their relationship didn’t start in New Orleans, but here. Meaning both of them most likely know things about a former brothel that plenty of people wouldn’t want known.”

  “Agree times three,” Wyatt assured her. “Unfortunately, it leads us back to the same conundrum. Dollhouse holds the key. Except we can’t find the dollhouse.”

  “Track down Nicky-slash-Chelsea’s real identity?” Tessa asked him.

  “No hits off her fingerprints as of yet. Assuming Chelsea is a runaway or was sold to Madame Sade, it’s possible her prints aren’t in the system at all, meaning we may never get that answer.”

  “Thomas Frank’s real identity?”

  “No prints to run. The fire destroyed such evidence from his home. Latent prints attempted to work his car, hotel room, et cetera, but recovered nothing usable. Guy’s either that lucky or that good. You can guess my vote.” Wyatt expelled heavily, wrapped his knuckles against the top of the office desk. “Case is starting to piss me off.”