Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(89)

“Vero learned to fly.”

“The drugs, she OD’d on the drugs.”

Nicky stared at him. Stared at him, stared at him, stared at him. And for the first time, Wyatt got it. It wasn’t that she couldn’t admit these things to the police. It was that she couldn’t admit them to herself. Chelsea, who’d been unloved before the dollhouse, but who’d found a sister while living in it.

“Yes,” she whispered. Then she closed her eyes, which suited them both, because he wasn’t sure even he could handle the pain he saw there.

“Nicky, I have to ask you another question.”

She swallowed heavily.

“The fingerprints, the ones we recovered from your car . . . How did they get there?”

“She had to be with you,” Marlene spoke up urgently. “My daughter. You’re lying about her death. She was with you that night in your car.”

Nicky shook her head. “No, it’s not like that.”

“It’s not,” Wyatt agreed. “We had a search dog on the scene. And according to Annie, there was only one occupant of the vehicle, the driver who hiked up to the road.”

“But then how do you explain the fingerprints?” Tessa pressed. Her brow was furrowed. It made him feel better to know this was as perplexing to her as it was to him. “You can’t fake fingerprints. No two sets are alike. Not even with identical twins.”

“True.” Wyatt’s gaze fell to Nicky’s hands. They had recovered prints from Nicky’s car, but until this afternoon they’d never printed Nicky herself. They’d questioned her, visited her home, taken her on a road trip, but printed her . . . No, it had never come to that.

Meaning at the end of the day, they had recovered Veronica Sellers’s fingerprints from Nicky Frank’s car. But that didn’t mean they were Nicky Frank’s prints.

Of all the stupid, idiotic, rookie mistakes. He’d have to call Kevin immediately and have him perform a comparison of Nicky’s prints from this afternoon and Veronica Sellers’s childhood prints from thirty years ago.

“Nicky,” he said now, “those prints were left in blood. I saw them for myself. They weren’t old prints. They were made that night. Left in blood, your blood, on the car seats and dash of your vehicle.”

“Vero wants to fly,” she whispered. “And the car flew, so weightless. I can feel her smile. I can feel her laugh with me.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing stays weightless forever.”

“What happened?”

“It’s not the flying; it’s the landing that’s the hard part.”

“Nicky!” he commanded firmly. “Look at me. Consider the photo. That’s not a picture of Vero. Do you understand me? That’s a picture of you! You. Meaning however Thomas got that picture . . . This isn’t about Vero. It’s always been about you.”

“You’re wrong.” Nicky looked up abruptly, stared Marlene straight in the eye. “It is about Vero. She never should’ve been in the dollhouse. She never should’ve died there. Twenty-two years later, she still wants her revenge. And we will all pay in the end.”


* * *



WYATT ESCORTED MARLENE Bilek back into the adjoining room. Having made her grand announcement, Nicky had collapsed on the nearest bed. For her part, Marlene seemed to have gotten over the worst of her anger and now seemed shell-shocked instead.

Wyatt made Marlene review the details of Vero’s description once again, but she had nothing new to offer. Her Vero had had gray eyes. Nicky Frank’s were blue. And her Vero had a scar on her left forearm. Yes, the coffee table accident had happened exactly the way Nicky described it, and no, she wasn’t proud of it, but the fact that Nicky knew the details didn’t change anything in Marlene’s mind. Nicky Frank might know all the stories from Veronica Sellers’s life, but she still wasn’t Marlene’s long-lost daughter.

As for the fingerprints retrieved from the woman’s vehicle . . . They just didn’t make any sense. If Vero was still alive, why hadn’t she contacted her family? For that matter, why had Nicky gone to the trouble to track down Marlene through Northledge Investigations? It wasn’t like Marlene had come into a large inheritance since her daughter’s disappearance. She and her family were strictly working class, meaning there was no financial gain to posing as Marlene’s missing child.

“She’s sick,” Marlene said at last, seeming to have finally talked herself into some semblance of empathy. “And I don’t just mean the way she keeps rubbing her forehead. Nicky, that woman . . . she’s a little crazy, isn’t she?”

Wyatt hesitated, unsure how to answer that question. “I think she’s honestly confused.”

“She thought she was Vero,” Marlene said. “I mean, buying the quilt, tracking me down. It’s like she really thought she was my daughter.”

“She seems to feel a strong connection to Vero,” Wyatt said at last, which was the most he could understand the subject.

“Why?”

He found himself hesitating again. “Mrs. Bilek . . . For everything that comes out of Nicky’s disjointed mind . . . I don’t think she’s delusional. In fact, I suspect many of her recollections are genuine memories. If that’s the case . . .”