Touch & Go (Tessa Leoni, #2)(16)

As for the rest of the days, months, weeks currently unfolding ahead of me… I tried to tell myself I had not become the clichéd middle-aged woman, abandoned by her cheating husband, alienated by her teenage daughter, until she now existed as a mere shadow in her own life, with no identity or purpose of her own.

I was strong. Independent. An artist, for God’s sake.

Then I would get up and wander out to the rooftop patio. Where I would stand in the faint ambience of city lights, my arms wrapped tightly around my body for warmth, taking step after step closer to the edge…

I never managed to stay awake an entire night.

Five thirty A.M. was probably the longest I made it. Then, I’d find myself curled up once more on top of the king-size bed in the master suite. And I’d watch the dawn break, tomorrow forcing itself upon me after all. Until I closed my eyes and succumbed to a future that happened whether I wanted it to or not.

It was during the second month of forced sleep deprivation that I opened my medicine cabinet and found myself staring at a bottle of painkillers. Justin’s prescription, from when he hurt his back the prior year. He hadn’t liked the Vicodin. Couldn’t afford to feel that fuzzy at work. Besides, as he put it bluntly, the constipation was a bitch.

It turns out, walking all night will not keep the future at bay.

But the right narcotic can dull the edges, steal the brightness from the sun itself. Until you don’t have to care if your husband is sleeping in the basement beneath you, or your teenage daughter has locked herself in a time capsule down the hall, or that this house is too large and this bed too big and your entire life just too lonely.

Painkiller, the prescription promised.

And for a while, at least, it worked.





Chapter 9


WALKING INTO THE THIRD-STORY STUDY, Tessa immediately recognized the detective sitting at the computer as the final member of D.D.’s three-man squad. An older guy, heavyset, four kids was her memory. Phil, that was it. He’d been at her house, too, that day. Then again, most of the Boston police and Massachusetts state cops had been.

Apparently, he remembered her, too, because the moment he spotted her, his features fell into the perfectly schooled expression of a seasoned detective, seething on the inside.

She figured two could play at that game.

“My turn,” she announced crisply, heading toward the computer.

He didn’t address her, turning his attention to Neil and D.D. instead.

“It’s okay,” Neil, the lead officer, proclaimed. “The owner of the house, Denbe Construction, hired her to assess the situation.”

Tessa could tell Phil got the nuances of that statement loud and clear, because a vein throbbed in his forehead. If Denbe Construction owned the house, then in theory, Denbe Construction owned the contents of the house, including the computer, which this fine Boston detective had been searching without permission.

“File a missing person’s report?” Phil asked Tessa, voice curt.

“Based on what I’ve seen here, I’m sure that will be the company’s next move.”

Another investigative quandary. For the police to become involved in a missing person’s case, a third party must first file a report. Even then, the standard threshold was that the family hadn’t been seen for at least twenty-four hours.

Meaning at this stage of the game, without a report filed, without twenty-four hours having passed, D.D.’s squad was stuck responding to a call, but not yet handling a case.

“Any contact…?” Phil again, voice less certain, more searching.

“From the family, no.”

“Kidnappers?”

“No.”

A fresh tic of the vein in his forehead. Like Neil and D.D., Phil understood lack of contact was not a good thing. Ransom situations generally involved keeping the victims alive. Whereas in an abduction case with no financial demands…

“Anything good on the computer?” Tessa gestured to Phil, who was still seated at the keyboard.

“Been looking at the Internet browser. Family liked Facebook, Fox News and Home and Garden. Already guessing the iPads will be more personal. Not enough activity here for a family of three. I’m assuming they each do their own thing on their individual devices.”

Fair assumption, Tessa thought. She gestured to the keyboard. “May I?”

Grudgingly, he stepped aside. Tessa reached into her inside coat pocket and withdrew a small notebook. She had written the name and manufacturer on it. Now she started scanning computer icons until she found the desired program.

“Justin Denbe has a new toy,” she explained as she double-clicked the icon. “His crew gave it to him in the fall, partly as a joke, but he loves it. Apparently, these job sites—prisons, hospitals, hydroelectrical plants—are quite large. And Justin, as the hands-on owner, inevitably holds the answer to every question. Meaning his guys spend a fair amount of time searching for him. Sites are also often in rural areas with shitty cell-phone coverage, making it hard to snag him by phone when they can’t locate him physically. So”—she paused a second, scrolling through the directions that had just popped up on screen—“his guys bought him a coat.”

“A coat?” D.D. asked with a frown.

Neil, however, was already ahead of her. “A GPS jacket. They got him one of those fancy outdoors never-get-lost-in-the-woods kind of jackets.”