Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(108)

“I’m not good at this,” Tessa murmured.

“Tessa, what’s wrong?”

“Can’t we just . . . solve this case? You like arresting people; I like arresting people. We’ll be fine.”

“Is it Sophie?” he asked steadily. “Because I can be patient, Tessa. I know she hasn’t fully accepted me yet. That’s okay. I’m in this for the long haul.”

She didn’t answer.

Sharp turn in the road. Forcing himself to focus.

“John Stephen Purcell,” she stated abruptly. “Police just located the gun used to kill him. I’m told they recovered a single latent print.”

Wyatt couldn’t help himself; he exhaled sharply. “That’s it? A gun? A recently recovered gun? That’s why you’re so distant?”

“You don’t understand. John Stephen Purcell, the man who shot Brian, my husband . . .” Her words were weighted with meaning.

“No, no, no,” he interjected hastily, hands flexing on the wheel. “I understand plenty. And we’re not married, so this doesn’t fall under privilege, and there’s definitely no need to say more. God, Tessa. I thought you were breaking up with me.”

Her turn to frown. “It doesn’t bother you? I’m not just talking about what the police might discover; I’m talking about what I once did.”

He didn’t even have to think about it. “No. You saved Sophie. Tessa, I know who you are. It’s why I love you so much.”

She fell silent again. Not ominous this time. More pondering.

He reached over and took her hand. Heard her own heavy exhale.

“Tessa,” he said, keeping his voice light, “you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

“What if I don’t have a choice? One fingerprint; that’s all it will take.”

“We’ll figure it out. Two smart people with lots of law enforcement and legal connections. You really think we can’t figure this out?”

“I can’t lose Sophie.”

“I know.”

“One thousand ninety-six days. I told myself it should be enough. It isn’t.”

“I know.”

“Plus, you know, the puppy. I haven’t even met the puppy, and I can’t leave the puppy. Our family is changing; that’s what Sophie said. Our family, my family. I can’t give it up, Wyatt. I can’t lose all of you.”

“Then we’ll figure it out. Together. Because that’s what families do. That’s what we do.”

And suddenly, he got it. How far a man might go for the woman he loved. Or what Thomas Frank had being doing that night, at the scene of his wife’s accident, bearing a glove with fake fingerprints.

A desperate husband, taking one last desperate chance . . .

“Stop!” Tessa shouted. She twisted away, pointing at a spot along the darkened road just as their headlights swept by. “That’s our turn. The road to the dollhouse. Wyatt, we’re here!”





Chapter 39




I CAN’T STAND still anymore. Thomas has the light, but I don’t want to see. I walk away from him. My head hurts. My heart hurts. I put my hands over my ears as if that will help, but it’s no use. I can still hear the screams.

She’s here. I feel her. In the wind, in the vines, in the hardness of the granite foundation. And it makes me shiver. Because I could handle the Vero in my head. The girl who came to visit. The skeleton who stayed for tea. But this Vero . . .

This Vero can hurt me.

“The first five years,” Thomas says from his perch on the granite blocks, “Mother kept things simple. We fostered a couple of girls at a time. Always teenagers; they’d stay a year or two, then leave. Aged out, right? But eventually, Mother became greedier. By then, she’d made some other . . . connections, in the industry. Now no more fostering. She simply brought in young working girls. Got them directly from their pimps. Or, as in your case, purchased them from their own families. No witnesses, no fuss. Everyone’s equally guilty, right?

“I think she also started taking requests. Maybe from several of the clients, or just the wealthiest. I’m not sure. But the girls became younger. For example, she brought you in at ten. But that also made things trickier. Younger girls might seem easier to control, but some of the new charges . . . Their backgrounds were more hard-core. They grew up lying, stealing, hitting, punching. I remember my mom slapping one of the new girls. I’d just walked into the room; I was maybe thirteen, fourteen. I stopped in my tracks, shocked. But then the girl, half the size of my mom . . . she slugged my mother back.

“So my mother upped the ante. She drugged them. Claimed they were addicts anyway. She was simply doing them the favor of avoiding the horrors of detox.”

Thomas paused, smiled faintly. “Funny the way you can know things aren’t right, but still not allow yourself to think of them as being wrong. For example, if I acknowledged my mother was criminal to supply drugs to addicts, then I’d have to also know she was sinful to have a ten-year-old girl shut up in the tower bedroom. Or worse, little Vero, only six years old when she walked through our door.

“I couldn’t . . . She was my mom. And I was just a kid. Like the rest of you, I had no place else to go.”

Thomas leaves his granite block. He moves to standing in front of me, trying to get me to look at him. But I can’t. Too many things are exploding in my head, and the memories are both simpler and more horrible than I want them to be.