Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(100)

Wyatt ticked off on his fingers. “Nicky’s concussions are real. Her memory loss certainly appears real. Then there’s the multiple accidents, house fire, et cetera. In all those scenarios, Nicky’s a victim, not a perpetrator. Given all this started when she decided to move to New Hampshire and search for answers, I think her desire for the truth upset the apple cart. Meaning Thomas is the one with something to hide.”

“Hang on.” Tessa paused. “What do we have here?” Her fingers worked between the mattresses; then she slowly withdrew an oversize piece of paper, top edge ragged where it had been torn from the sketch pad. Tessa eased it carefully from where it’d been stashed, between the mattresses on Nicky’s bed.

Wyatt immediately crossed the room to study the black-and-white pencil sketch. “That’s Thomas Frank.”

“Little young, don’t you think?”

“She must’ve drawn this earlier, when you had her working, because you’re right; this isn’t the Thomas Frank from present day. This is him, easily twenty years ago.”

“The time of the dollhouse. My God, look at his face.”

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 f*cking 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.”