Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(82)

Wyatt turned back to the picture of the madam. “If Nicky was truly kept in this dollhouse, and Thomas was somehow part of it, I can think of at least one person who’d never want them talking to the police.” He tapped the cold-eyed woman. “Tessa, if this is all true . . . How’d Nicky, Vero, get out? That’s what bothers me the most. An operation like this, a woman like this, she didn’t simply let one of her girls go. Something happened. And I’m not just talking Vero learned to fly, and all that nonsense.”

Tessa hesitated. “I have a theory. Maybe I’m biased, having my own . . . past and all. But I think Vero was kidnapped thirty years ago. I think she was held by this woman in this house. And I think . . . I think something really terrible happened that enabled her to escape. No. I suspect Vero did something really terrible that got her out. And all these years later, that’s what she can’t stand to face. Except.” Tessa shrugged, that sad smile back on her lips. “The past has a will of its own. It wants to be heard. Her own purposefully blocked memories are starting to break free.”

“November is the saddest month,” Wyatt murmured. “A woman twice returned from the dead.”

“I think Nicky’s trying to remember. I think some part of her even wants to tell us what happened, get it off her chest. She just needs a push.”

“Another scented candle?” Wyatt arched a brow.

“No. I think we put her face-to-face with her mom. Let them finally speak.”

Wyatt thought about it. “All right. I’ll call Marlene, break the news. She’s already taken an interest in Nicky. I can’t imagine she wouldn’t want to see her missing daughter after all these years. We’ll need to keep it under wraps, though. God knows the press is about to descend upon us any minute.”

“True.”

“But it’s gotta be tonight. And I don’t just mean because the feds will change everything in the morning. Thomas Frank fled from his burning home nearly twenty-four hours ago, yet we pinged him only forty miles from here. Know what that tells me?”

Wyatt paused.

“He still considers Nicky a threat. And he isn’t finished with her yet.”





Chapter 29




VERO AND I are sipping cups of tea. The rosebush mural has been obliterated on the wall, scribbled over in angry black marker. The pink gauze that once surrounded the bed is now sliced into ribbons. The mattress has been reduced to a gutted pile of shredded foam.

I can’t even look at what she did to Fat Bear.

“You’re scared,” I tell her knowingly, though it’s my own heart pounding in my chest.

“Fuck off.” Vero hasn’t bothered with clothes. Or the memory of skin. I sit with a grinning skeleton, bits of hair and decaying flesh plastered to her skull. When she drinks, I can watch the scotch cascade down her moldering spine.

“She’s your mother,” I try again. “You’ve dreamed of this moment for years and years. Remember?”

“I liked this room best,” she says abruptly. “Of all the places in this stupid house. This room looked like it was meant for a princess. All little girls dream of being a princess.”

“Your mother still loves you,” I tell her.

She suddenly smiles. “Don’t you mean your mother?”

“It’s okay,” I hear myself say, to her, to me, to the sad remains of eyeless Fat Bear. “Everything is going to be okay.”

Vero smiles again, tosses back another shot of scotch.

“Ah, Nicky,” she assures me. “You always were an idiot.”


* * *



BY 9 P.M., I can’t stay on the bed anymore. I get up, pace around the hotel room. Sitting on the second bed, Tessa does her best to give me space. She is checking all the news channels, trying to see if the story has gone national. There were news cameras arriving when Wyatt hastily shuttled us out of the back of the sheriff’s department hours earlier, word of the discovery of a missing child, thirty years lost, having finally leaked out.

I’d just returned to the conference room, mesmerized by my black-stained fingerprints, when Wyatt dropped his second bombshell: Marlene Bilek wanted to meet with me. Immediately. Tonight. Not a discussion, not a debate. He’d already set it up. End of story.

I would speak with my mother. After all these years, doubts, wonderings . . .

Tessa got us back to the hotel, using every back road and evasive-driving technique she knew. Once we were safely ensconced in the room, she advised me to eat a good dinner, then rest up. It was going to be a long night.

Now Tessa works the remote. So far, a startling break in a thirty-year-old cold case seems to be local fodder only. The news producers are most likely in a holding pattern, Tessa informs me, waiting for the right confirmation, interview, photo op, to blow the story to the next level. Lucky me.

I pace around the beds again, my mind going in a million directions.

I think of that tiny, desperate little apartment. Of the woman who once tucked Vero in the closet for her own safekeeping. The mother who brought her ice cream and played hide-and-seek and would sleep, when he wasn’t around, with her arms holding her daughter tight.

I pause to finger the yellow quilt, inhaling a fragrance my head knows can no longer be there, though my heart still hopes for otherwise.