Crash & Burn

  “I hit you.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I smashed your head with a lamp.”

  “That hurt.”

  “Then I cried. Because I didn’t mean it, I really didn’t, and you had blood pouring down your face.”

  “You thought it was best if you slept alone.”

  “So I couldn’t hurt you.”

  “You think leaving our bed didn’t hurt me?”

  My gaze falls. I can’t look at him and the vulnerability on his face. I find myself touching his chest, my palm flat, my fingers splayed. I can feel his heartbeat. It’s surprisingly steady, given how fast I know my own is racing.

  “Do you love me?” I hear myself ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  He smiles; I can feel the movement of his lips against my hair. I inhale again, the scent of his skin.

  “In the beginning,” he murmurs, “you were so sad. It was like a tangible presence, all around you. And I thought . . . I wanted to see you smile for real. I wanted to be the man who made you happy.”

  “Is that love?” I asked him. “Or is that a hero complex?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” he tells me, and I know he’s being honest. “Maybe it’s something in between. But when I finally did get you to smile, it all seemed worth it. And I just wanted to do it again and again. I figure there are worse ways to spend a life than making the woman I love happy.”

  “But I’m not happy.”

  “You were. At least, in the beginning. When we first left New Orleans, we went to Austin. You loved the warm weather, the great music, the dogs frolicking in Zilker Park. But then you got restless. More bad days, fewer good days, so we tried San Francisco. Then Phoenix. And Boulder, and Seattle, and Portland, and Chicago, and Knoxville and Raleigh and Fort Lauderdale and, and, and . . . You would be happy. Then you would be sad. So we would move again. Because to this day, all I want is to make you smile.”

  I don’t speak.

  “But you’re right: I can’t make you happy anymore,” Thomas says quietly. “You wear your sadness again, and when I try to ask you questions, you refuse to answer. What do you need, how can I make you happy? Just tell me what you want. But you don’t talk to me anymore, Nicky. Hell, I couldn’t even get you to come clean about that damn yellow quilt.”

  “It’s mine,” I hear myself say. Immediate. Defensive.

  “You ordered it on eBay three years ago. Day it came, you locked yourself in the bedroom with it and cried all day. I asked, I waited, I begged. But you’ve never told me why you need it so badly, what makes it so special. Most of my life I have loved you. And still, there are moments when I’m sure I don’t know you at all.”

  “You have secrets, too,” I say, conscious of the worn envelope pressed against the small of my back.

  “Silence breeds silence,” my husband says.

  “Why do you stay with me? It sounds like I’m nothing but trouble.”

  “Because I haven’t given up hope.”

  “Hope of what?”

  “That someday, I can make you smile again.”

  He rolls away from me. I feel his absence more acutely than I would like. The air is cold, the bed empty, and for a second, my hand actually reaches out, as if I would call him back. It comes to me, what I thought the first moment I saw him. He was looking right at me, smiling right at me. And my first impression was I wished he would just go away.

  But then, once he left, I wished he’d come back, because no one had ever smiled at me like that before.

  I love him. I fear him. I need him. I resent him. I pull him close. I push him away.

  And I have a feeling that it has nothing to do with him and everything to do with me.

  “You can stay,” Thomas says, rising to his feet. “Rest as long as you’d like. I’ll go down, start dinner. Grilled cheese, tomato soup, sound good?”

  I nod, not trusting myself to speak.

  “We’ll get through this,” he says. Reassuring me? Reassuring himself? Maybe it’s all the same. My husband leaves the room.

  I wait until I hear his footsteps descend all the way down the stairs, followed by an echo from the kitchen below. Then, and only then, do I roll gingerly onto my side and pull the envelope from my back. My fingers are shaking. I set the small parcel on the bed, noting the way the edges are yellow, the paper darkened in places from old stains, perhaps the oil from a workingman’s fingerprints.

  He has handled this often over the years. Obviously revisited it again and again.

  I find myself hesitating. A turning point. Do I really want to know? Maybe all couples need their secrets. Apparently, I still hoard mine, from a yellow quilt to a stash of scotch.

  But I can’t let it go. Having discovered the envelope, I need to know what it contains. So I delicately ease it open, pull out a single item: an old photograph in about as great shape as the envelope.

  Faded out, yellow toned, smudged; I still know immediately what I’m looking at. A summer’s day. A ten-year-old girl wearing a familiar floral dress and a small, uncertain smile.

  I stifle a gasp. Reflexively clutch the picture.

  Vero.

  I am holding a photo of Vero.

  Which my husband had hidden from me.

  Chapter 15

  WYATT HATED SECURITY camera footage. On TV crime shows, the quality was always highest resolution. You could blow it up, freeze it frame by frame, zoom in here, zoom out there, read the expiration date on the bread shelved just behind the evil perpetrator.

  In reality, gas stations, convenience stores, mom-and-pop shops, were stressed-out businesses with little leftover profit to invest in things like state-of-the-art security systems. They had a tendency to go with the cheapest cameras available, weren’t above purchasing used and/or out-of-date technology and reusing the same discs over and over until the results were filled with ghosts of recordings past.

  Wyatt and Kevin had wanted one week’s worth of security footage. The harried clerk informed them he had three days, which was all they kept in rotation. Wyatt and Kevin had hoped for decent-quality images. They got dark, blurry footage of endless cars turning in and out of the gas station. As for cars driving by, the cameras were too far away, while the road lacked adequate lighting. They could track twin beams of approaching headlights sweeping by; that was it.

  As Kevin pointed out, at least Nicky’s Audi had xenon headlights, with their particular crystalline-blue beam, meaning the vehicle that swept by at 4:39 A.M. Thursday morning could very well have been Nicole’s car. But could they capture a license plate? No. An image of the driver? Not a chance. A paint color, defining dent, hint of make and model, or anything else that might help them in a court of law? Shit out of luck.

  Not like the clerk cared. He’d left them alone in a narrow storage room to sort it all out. From his perspective, security cameras existed to catch the guy who entered the store and placed a gun to his head. Cars idling outside, vehicles passing by on the main road, not his problem.

  “Well, at least it tells us what didn’t happen,” Wyatt said at last.

  “What didn’t happen?” Kevin asked.

  “Nicole Frank didn’t fuel up here. Thomas Frank didn’t stop in for an energy drink to perk him up while preparing to crash his wife’s car. That’s something.”

  “And no women, beautiful or otherwise, hung out after one A.M.”

  “Meaning if Thomas Frank did have a lover waiting to pick him up, she didn’t wait around here,” Wyatt said.

  Kevin agreed. “That certainly narrows things down. I can see why you’re so happy with this case.”

  “I like your idea to check his clothes,” Wyatt said after a moment. Because when one door closed, another inevitably opened.

  “We don’t have probable cause,” Kevin reminded him. “We’d need
a witness who could place Thomas Frank at the scene or, better yet, Thomas Frank personally appearing on one of these video cameras. Without that . . . We can’t tell a judge we suspect him solely on the grounds that he’s her husband and everyone knows it’s always the husband who did it.”

  “Policing 101: What do we do when we don’t have probable cause?” Wyatt asked.

  “Stir the pot until we do.”

  “Exactly. I say we return to the Franks’ home. We request a look at his jackets and shoes, and we do it in front of his wife.”

  “Makes it harder for him to say no,” Kevin acknowledged. “He won’t want to look guilty.”

  “And maybe we get lucky, find something then and there.”

  “Sediment on the soles of his boots,” Kevin deadpanned, “that matches the exact ratio of dirt, sand, minerals, present in the two-foot stretch of road where Nicole Frank’s car plunged to its doom.”

  Both men rolled their eyes. Such CSI matches never occurred in real life. Best you could do in New Hampshire was compare road mixes. As in the newly paved two-mile stretch of road in Albany used a rough patch mix versus the more expensive repaving completed in North Conway. But that narrowed you down to miles, or maybe helped place a guy in a particular town. Still hardly a forensic smoking gun.

  Of course, one advantage of TV: people watched the impossible enough times, they honestly thought it could be done. And there was nothing illegal about playing to those expectations. Why, sir, I see there’s sand on your shoes. Very interesting, this sand. We’ll definitely be taking a sample. Yep, that’s pretty important sand.

  While the sample itself might be bogus, when your suspect chooses to toss the shoes in his burn barrel the second two officers leave his house . . . Even judges grew suspicious of such behavior.

  “What if Thomas has already washed his clothes?” Kevin was asking now.

  Wyatt smiled. “Perfect. Gives us an excuse to check out the laundry room, scene of his wife’s first accident.”

  “Oh, I like the way you think.”

  “I’d like it even better if my thinking told us what was going on with Nicole Frank.”

  “Give it time, my friend. Give it time.”

  * * *

  THOMAS FRANK ANSWERED the door after the first ring. Less hesitation this time. Clearly a man growing resigned to his fate.

  He looked tired, Wyatt thought. Stressed out. From the strain of caring for a concussed wife, or from the stress of covering his tracks? Either way, Wyatt smelled grilled cheese and tomato soup. He loved grilled cheese and tomato soup.

  “Are we interrupting dinner?” Wyatt asked.

  “As a matter of fact . . .”

  “Then we’ll keep it quick. Nicole around?”

  Nicky appeared down the hall, by the family room, wearing the same yoga pants and oversize sweater from the morning. Her long brown hair appeared rumpled—maybe she’d been resting—while her face remained a quilted mess of bruises and lacerations.

  “Mrs. Frank,” Wyatt acknowledged.

  “Good evening, Sergeant.”

  He noticed she didn’t immediately approach, but kept her distance. She and Thomas exchanged a glance, and Wyatt began to wonder if they were interrupting more than dinner. Interesting.

  “Do you mind if we look at your coats?” Wyatt asked. He and Kevin had rehearsed this on the way over. Rather than go straight after the husband, which might raise his defenses, they would ease their way into it.

  “My coats?” Nicky asked in surprise.

  “Coat, rain jacket, an article of outerwear you would normally wear to head out at night.”

  She gazed at them curiously, then looked at her husband again. When Thomas remained silent, she finally approached, opening the entryway closet. “My coats are in here.”

  “You remember that?” Kevin asked.

  “In a manner of speaking. I don’t understand. Why do you want to see my coats?”

  “We checked with the hospital,” Wyatt said. “Morning you were brought in, you weren’t wearing a jacket.”

  “Maybe I left it in the car.”

  Wyatt thought back to the mint-clean interior of the vehicle, as pointed out by the dog handler. “No,” he said.

  Nicole appeared confused, but she stepped back, let them do their thing.

  He and Kevin took their time. Kevin pulled out each jacket that appeared to possibly belong to a female, while Wyatt made note of all the others. None of the coats were wet or particularly filthy; then again, it had now been nearly thirty-six hours since the rainstorm had ended Thursday morning.

  “These all of your jackets?” Kevin asked.

  Nicky tilted her head to the side, obviously having to think about it. “I think so.”

  Kevin looked at Thomas. “This all of your wife’s coats?”

  “Yes.”

  “So . . . you weren’t wearing a coat when you got into your car Wednesday night.”

  Even Nicky seemed to understand that was strange. “But it was pouring out. Had been for days.”

  “Cold, too.”

  She hesitated, looking troubled. Then, because who else could she turn to, Wyatt thought, she glanced once more at her husband.

  “Last I saw you,” he said quietly, “you were on the couch, wearing jeans, a black turtleneck and a gray fleece pullover.”

  Which was consistent with what the ER nurse had remembered. She’d also offered the tidbit that Thomas had been very insistent on getting his wife’s bloody clothes back, regardless of the fact they were considered biohazardous waste.

  “Shoes?” Wyatt asked.

  Thomas shook his head. “When I saw her, she was wearing her slippers. Like now.”

  Kevin and Wyatt glanced at Nicky’s shoes. Sure enough, she was wearing a sturdy pair of fleece-lined slippers with black rubber soles. Most likely L.L. Bean, and owned by most households in the North Country.

  Now Kevin and Wyatt turned their attention to the line of shoes in the closet. Once again, Kevin drew out the smaller, female models, while Wyatt noted the male equivalents.

  “Sneakers are missing,” Thomas said at last. “Your running shoes.”

  Beside him, Nicky nodded. “My old pair. New Balance, silver with blue markings.”

  “You wore your sneakers out into the rain?” Wyatt asked. He hadn’t thought to ask the ER nurse about Nicky’s shoes. Now he wished he had.

  Nicky frowned, shook her head slightly. “I wouldn’t . . . My first instinct is that I’d grab my Danskos. The black clogs, right there. Sneakers soak through, and I wouldn’t want to get them muddy. Whereas the Danskos . . .”

  One of the most popular clogs in the wintry North, Wyatt thought. And yeah, that’s what he’d figure someone would grab on a mucky night as well.

  “Picture your sneakers,” Kevin spoke up. “Silvery, old, maybe well-worn . . .”

  Nicky closed her eyes; she seemed to understand what he wanted from her. “I should throw them away. They’re old, starting to smell. But for gardening, household chores, they still come in handy.”

  “It’s Wednesday night,” Kevin intoned. “It’s dark, raining. Can you hear it?”

  “The wind against the windows,” she whispers.

  Wyatt kept his attention on Thomas, who he noticed made no move to interrupt the trip down memory lane. Because he honestly had nothing to fear from his wife’s memories? Or because he was curious for the answers himself?

  “I’m tired. My head hurts.”

  “You’re resting.”

  “On the sofa. Thomas has gone back to work. I think I should just go upstairs, go to bed. But I don’t feel like moving.”

  “What do you hear? The wind, the rain?”

  “The phone,” Nicky murmured. “It’s ringing.”

  Kevin and Wyatt exchanged a glance. This was new in
formation. Apparently Thomas hadn’t known either, as he straightened slightly, muscles tensing.

  “Did you pick up the phone? How does the receiver feel in your hand?”

  “I have to go,” Nicky whispered.

  “You answer the phone, pick it up,” Kevin tried again. “And you hear . . .”

  But Nicky won’t go there. “I have to leave,” she said again. “Quick. Before Thomas returns. My tennis shoes. I spot them still out in the hall from earlier in the day. I grab them. They’ll have to do.”

  “You put on your shoes, find a coat—”

  “No. No time. I have to go. Now. I need a drink.”

  Standing beside Wyatt, Thomas flinched but still said nothing.

  “You take your car keys,” Kevin intoned. “You reach into the basket, feel them with your fingers . . .”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” Nicky said abruptly. Her eyes opened. She stared at all three men. “I didn’t have to go out into a storm to find scotch. All I had to do was head upstairs.”

  * * *

  THOMAS WAS CLEARLY not a happy man. About his wife’s confession that she had a secret stash of alcohol elsewhere in the house. That she’d received some mysterious phone call she’d never told him about. But he gamely led Wyatt and Kevin to the handheld receiver in the family room, to check caller history. The phone, however, didn’t have any record of a call on Wednesday night.

  “Could it have been on your cell phone?” Wyatt asked after a moment.

  Nicky hesitated, reflexively patted her pockets. Since her scotch confession, she was studiously avoiding her husband’s eyes.

  “We recovered your cell phone in your vehicle,” Kevin spoke up. “It’s currently at the state police lab for processing.”

  “Oh. I guess so, that the call could’ve been on my cell phone.”

  Wyatt made a note. Cell phone records were easy to retrieve, a simple matter of a phone call to the service provider. Which beat trying to trace down the mangled phone from the state police.

  “You shouldn’t be drinking,” Thomas spoke up abruptly.