Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(15)

“Tell us about your daughter,” Wyatt said. “Where was she last night?”

Thomas Frank didn’t recoil. He didn’t shudder reflexively or even jerk away. Instead, he regarded them blankly. “What?”

“Your daughter, Vero. The little girl who’s missing.”

Of all the reactions Wyatt had been expecting, this wasn’t it. Thomas closed his eyes. He sighed heavily. “I don’t have a daughter.”

“Nicky’s daughter, then—”

“Sergeant . . . We don’t have kids. Any kids. Not mine, not hers, not ours. And I would know. We’ve been together twenty-two years.”


* * *



“LOOK, EVER SINCE the first concussion, Nicky has had trouble sleeping. She has horrible nightmares, except the dreams, episodes, whatever, don’t always happen at night. It’s like her brain has been turned inside out and upside down. She can’t remember people she knows—say, my name, but on the other hand she rants about people who don’t exist. Best I can tell, the real has become imaginary, the imaginary, real. We’ve consulted with doctors, played with some meds. But the best advice the docs have for us is to practice our patience. Traumatic brain injuries take time to heal.”

“Vero doesn’t exist.” Wyatt had to test out the statement. Because of all the information he’d expected to learn from this conversation, that wasn’t it.

“There is no Vero.”

“But you know the name,” Kevin pointed out, looking as perplexed as Wyatt felt.

“She’s called it out before, mostly in her sleep. Plus there’ve been some . . . episodes. Look, in the beginning, I got confused myself, maybe there was something I didn’t know. But here’s the deal. If you really get her going about this . . . Vero . . . the story, who she is, constantly changes. Sometimes Vero is a little girl, maybe a baby that Nicky is caring for. But once I found Nicky hiding in a closet, because she and ‘Vero’ were playing hide-and-seek. Then there was the evening she burned dinner because ‘Vero’ had been yelling at her all evening. Teenagers, she told me. I think . . . Hell, I don’t know what to think. But Vero isn’t a real person. More like a massive mental misfire.”

“When Officer Reynes was at the scene,” Wyatt pressed, “he claimed your wife was pretty adamant. She’d lost Vero. She was just a little girl. She had to be found. Your wife sounded pretty convincing.”

“Welcome to my world.” Thomas Frank sighed again. He didn’t sound sarcastic; more like a man who was very tired. “I can give you the name of our neurologist, Dr. Sare Celik,” he offered. “Maybe she can help you understand.”

“Could the name come from a family member? A sister, past friend?”

“Nicky doesn’t have any family. When I met her she was just a teenager and already on her own, had been for a couple of years. She doesn’t like to talk about it. In the beginning, I pressed. But now, twenty-two years later . . . What does it matter? Everything”—Thomas Frank paused, eyed them meaningfully—“everything has been great since then. We’ve never had any problems; Nicky’s never had any problems. You have to believe me on this. My wife is just . . . sick. Ask the doctors. Please, talk to them.”

“Walk us through last night. What happened?”

“Nicky cooked chicken,” Thomas replied immediately, “meaning it was a good night for her. Focus is tricky with TBIs. Sometimes she starts a project, say, cooking, and then . . . blanks out. Walks away or something. But yesterday, she started and finished baked chicken, with no fires in between.”

“What were you doing while she cooked?”

“Returning some calls. In the house, in case I needed to jump up and turn off a burner, but trying to squeeze in some work.”

“You ate dinner. Wine, beer?”

“Alcohol isn’t recommended for people recovering from brain injuries,” Thomas recited.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“No wine, no beer, no alcohol. We ate chicken, a garden salad, and garlic bread.”

“And then?”

“We watched some TV. Home and garden channel, light stuff. It’s important that my wife not get agitated.”

Wyatt got the time, name of show, and wrote it down.

“So it’s now eight P.M. . . .”

“More like seven thirty. Nicky dozed off on the couch. I glanced at the clock, figured it was too early to call it a night, so again, I should get some work done. I placed a blanket on my wife, then crept out the back to the work shed.”

“When did you return?”

“I don’t know. Eleven P.M.”

“And you discovered Nicky missing?”

“I noticed she wasn’t on the sofa. But my first thought was that she must have gone upstairs to bed. I watched the evening news, then headed up myself. That’s when I realized my mistake.”

“What’d you do?”

“Went around the house, calling her name. Then wised up and checked the driveway for her car. Noticed that was gone, too, not a good idea in my opinion, so I called her cell.”

Wyatt nodded, encouraging the man to continue.

But Thomas Frank simply shrugged. “She never picked up. I honestly didn’t know what my wife was doing till the hospital called and said my wife was in the emergency room. That’s the first I knew of the accident.”