Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(91)

Tessa shook her head.

“How lucky we were to have such obvious prints. Think about it—most cars, you can’t even print. Surfaces are irregular, have been handled so often, all you get is a smeary mess. But Nicole Frank’s car. With my plain eyes, I could make out a thumb print left behind in blood. Lucky us.”

Tessa stared at him. “You’re thinking it was planted.”

“Annie the search canine swears there was only one person present at the crash site, and I don’t argue with a good dog’s nose.”

“But why?”

“I have no idea.”

“How would you get such a print?” Tessa continued. “Three decades later, who even has access to her case file?”

“Don’t need her case file for her fingerprints,” Wyatt said. “The Center for Missing and Exploited Children digitized all the records years ago for national distribution. To assist with matches.”

“So we don’t know why or how, but under the who column, you’re thinking someone with access to the national database.”

Wyatt stared at her. In the back of his head, something finally clicked. “Of digital prints,” he stated. “Digital files.”

“Yes?”

“You know what else you can do with digital images?”

“Um . . . E-mail them, text them, share them—”

“Import them into AutoCAD and create a digital model.”

“A digital model of fingerprints?”

“Yes. Which could then be downloaded to a three-D printer, which would create a three-D mold of the distinct ridge patterns, used to, say, create a latex glove cast from a perfect handprint.”

Tessa’s eyes widened. “A glove alone can’t leave fingerprints. You’d have to spray it with an oily substance such as cooking spray—”

“Or blood.”

Tessa shuddered slightly, but nodded. “The bloody gloves, the ones you collected from Thomas Frank’s car.”

“That’s what he handed Nicky that night. A pair of . . . fingerprint gloves . . . he’d made himself on his three-D printer. So she’d cover the car in Veronica Sellers’s fingerprints. So she’d be mistaken as Veronica Sellers.”

Tessa asked the next logical question. “But why?”

Wyatt shook his head. “I don’t know. He’s got to be part of it, right? According to Nicky, she found that photo of . . . herself, I guess, in Thomas’s possession. Taken while she was in the dollhouse.”

“How’d she get away?” Tessa said suddenly. “I mean this whole, got Vero to OD then took the place of her roommate’s dead body. So Nicky gets herself buried alive, then heroically claws her way back to the land of the living in the midst of a storm . . . and then what? Walks all the way to New Orleans?”

Wyatt saw her point. “She must’ve had help. Enter Thomas Frank?”

“In that scenario, he saved her. And he must’ve cared for her to end up spending the next twenty-two years together. Just rescuing her one dark and stormy night doesn’t require a lifetime plan. And if he’s in cahoots with Madame Sade, maybe assigned as, what, Nicky’s watcher all these years, that doesn’t necessitate marriage. It feels like . . . he must genuinely care for her, at least in some manner.”

Wyatt remained skeptical. “He crashed his wife’s car, with her in it. He burned down their house, with all their belongings in it. If this is love, I’m sorry I’ve been wasting my time buying flowers.”

Tessa rolled her eyes. She rattled off their case: “Thirty years ago, six-year-old Veronica Sellers was abducted from a park and locked away in a high-end brothel. Twenty years ago, roughly, she died in that same house, but her roommate, Chelsea, managed to escape and, all these years later, has kept Vero’s memory alive.”

“Chelsea spent all her time in the dollhouse internalizing Vero’s stories. Which she now has a tendency to confuse as her own? Or maybe just wishes were her own?” Wyatt decided it was a moot point. “Either way, Vero is always with her. She can’t let her go.”

“Which leads us to six months ago, when Chelsea, who’s been trying to live happily ever after with her husband, I-will-always-take-care-of-you Thomas Frank, decides she can’t keep running anymore. She wants answers to her troubled memories, trauma, depression, et cetera. She demands they move to New Hampshire.”

“And suffers her first accident almost immediately. A fall down the basement stairs of her new home. Followed by wiping out on her front steps.”

“Followed by,” Tessa continued, “Wednesday night. When she meets Marlene Bilek, who she’s obsessed with as a living link to Vero. Unfortunately, Nicky then discovers Vero’s beloved mom has a whole new family and isn’t mourning Vero nearly as much as Nicky-slash-Chelsea is.”

“Nicky calls Thomas. And he puts his own plan in gear? Turn his confused wife into Veronica Sellers?” Wyatt stared at Tessa. “Now, see, this is where things break down for me.”

Tessa nodded. She eyed him thoughtfully. Opened her mouth, paused, then shook her head. “No. I agree. It makes no sense.”

“I’m gonna get Kevin on the phone. Have him start comparing prints and analyzing those rubber gloves. Then you and I are gonna run through this all over again. We’re missing something.” Wyatt glanced at his watch, noting it was now nearly midnight. “We have about nine hours left to find it.”