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 They had a tendency to go with the cheapest cameras available, weren’t above purchasing used and/or out-of-date technology and reusing the same discs over and over until the results were filled with ghosts of recordings past.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 information. 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.
Nicky didn’t reply. She stood with her arms crossed tightly over her chest.
“You said you wouldn’t,” Thomas persisted. “Dammit! I’ve been bending over backward, trying to take care of you, ridding the house of any trace of temptation. Where the hell did you even hide it—”
“I don’t know. Maybe not far from where you hide your little secrets.” Nicky’s voice was cool. Thomas shut up, glared at her instead.
Interesting and more interesting, Wyatt thought. Now, as long as both members of the Frank family were fighting among themselves . . .
“Mr. Frank,” he said, “mind if we take a look at your shoes and coat?”
“What?”
“Your shoes and coat. You know, whatever you were wearing on Wednesday.”
“I already told you, I was here—”
“Which will make our inspection very quick. But we gotta verify your story, you know. It’s part of our job. As long as you’re telling the truth, I’m sure you won’t mind.”
Thomas, no dummy, thinned his lips. But with his wife standing there, still regarding him stonily . . . He stalked back to the foyer, yanked open the closet door. “By all means. Have at it.”
Kevin and Wyatt helped themselves. They identified a light Windbreaker, a heavy wool jacket, a well-used ski coat, plus a designer leather jacket, the usual suspects for a middle-aged man. Shoes lined up the same. Tennis shoes, old and new, hiking boots, well-worn. Then: a brown pair of slip-on Merrells with their thick soles heavily encrusted with sand.
Kevin pulled them out with a pencil. He gave Wyatt a serious look. “We should have these tested.”
Thomas immediately held up a hand. “Wait. Tested? What do you mean?”
“This sand. Of course, I’m just a detective, not one of the lab geeks, but looks to me to be the same color, consistency, of the roadside sand near your wife’s crash.”
“What? It’s just sand. Traditional New England sand, dumped everywhere this time of year to help manage patches of ice. Of course I have it on my shoes. After all those days of rain, damn stuff is washed up into piles everywhere. Hell, step out on my driveway.”
Wyatt stared at him. “Sure? We test these shoes, the sand won’t come back as matching that stretch of road?”
“Oh, give me a break.”
Kevin gave Wyatt a slight shrug. They were selling their story; Thomas just wasn’t buying it.
“These all your husband’s shoes?” Wyatt asked Nicole, who’d followed them back to the entryway.
“I think so.”
“And the jackets?”
She hesitated. “Raincoat,” she murmured. “A black-and-silver raincoat. I don’t see it.”
Was it Wyatt’s imagination, or did Thomas flinch again?
“Mr. Frank?”
“It was wet. I wore it back and forth to the work shed during the storm on Wednesday. Of course it became soaked.”
“Where is it now?”
No doubt about it, the man’s voice was sullen. “I hung it up in the basement. In the laundry room, for it to dry.”
Wyatt glanced at Nicole. “Mind showing us to the laundry room? Then we could be all done here.”
Nicole paled. For a moment, Wyatt thought she might refuse. But then she squared her shoulders, shot her husband a look that was hard to interpret and headed once more down the hall.
Turned out, door to the basement was behind the entryway staircase, off the family room. Nicole yanked open the door with more force than was strictly necessary, snapping on a light. Wyatt made out a downward flight of rough wooden stairs, leading to a bare cement floor below.
In front of him, Nicky took a deep breath in, blew it out, then grabbed the railing and began her descent.
The stairs scared her. Wyatt noted her white-knuckle grip on the railing, the way she took each step one by one. Post-traumatic stress? he wondered. An instinctive response to the site of her first accident? He didn’t ask. Just watched her slow but determined progress.
The risers felt sturdy enough, he thought, making his own descent behind her. A little narrow and steep. Coming down them with a laundry basket wouldn’t be the easiest task. Day after day . . . Perhaps some kind of fall had been inevitable.
“These days, I slide the basket down,” Nicky murmured, as if reading his mind. “It’s probably what I should’ve done from the beginning. Just toss the clothes down, then make my way after them.”
“What about coming back up when the clothes are clean and neatly folded?”
“That’s Thomas’s job now. I wash the clothes; he moves them.”
“Why not have him just take over the laundry duty?”
“He ruins my delicates,” she said, and it took Wyatt a second to realize she wasn’t joking.
Arriving in the middle of the basement, Wyatt discovered a surprisingly large and open space. Probably meant to be turned into a rec room, man cave, in-law suite, whatever might suit a couple best. One corner had been framed off and finished into a combination laundry room, lower-level bath.
“You guys do this?” he asked Nicky. Kevin and Thomas were still descending behind them.
“One of Thomas’s first projects,” she volunteered. “I told him I didn’t want to do laundry all covered in spiders. So he made me a real room. Said it was his contribution to clean clothes everywhere.”
“Nice setup,” Wyatt observed, taking in the state-of-the-art front-loading washer and dryer, topped with a long laminate countertop to serve as a folding table. Then, of course, upper cabinets to hold laundry detergents, fabric sheets, cleaning basics.
As a carpenter himself, Wyatt appreciated Thomas’s attention to detail. The room was professional grade, no doubt about it. Which made Wyatt wonder, after going through this much work to create a separate laundry facility, why the hell hadn’t Thomas taken the time and effort to build a better, safer flight of stairs?
Kevin and Thomas had arrived in the basement.
“Nice work,” Wyatt told the husband, indicating the space.
He merely shrugged, but Nicky volunteered: “Thomas is good with his hands.”
“Obviously. Must have a good tool collection as well. Miter saw, pneumatic nail gun, cordless drills . . .”
Thomas met his eye. “In my workshop. I craft custom props, remember? A lot of that starts with wooden models, if not finished products.”
“Except now you’re moving to plastic,” Nicky spoke up again. No doubt about it, her tone was disapproving.
Wyatt and Kevin returned their attention to Thomas. “I have a three-D printer,” the man said. “Now my clients can send me digital files of their own creations, which I can turn into three-D molds with a push of a button. I call that progress. My wife considers it risky.”
He glared at his wife. She glared back at him.
“My coat,” Thomas said now, turning away from Nicky to wave at a drying rack just off to the side of the dryer. Sure enough, a single silver-and-black raincoat hung from the wooden dowels. Kevin fingered the coat first, lifting the front folds this way and that.
“Dry now,” he murmured to Wyatt.
“Dirty,” Wyatt observed, pointing to a pale smudge marring the front, streaks of sand lining both arms.
“Of course it’s dirty,” Thomas said impatiently. “I wore it to my workshop. And given that I’d already turned off the heat for the day, I left on my jacket while I worked.”
“Not afraid of snagging a sleeve in a power tool?” Wyatt asked.
Kevin was inspecting the left cuff of the jacket, which showed definite signs of wear. What were the chances they’d find a thread from the frayed edge of this coat snagged in the bumper of Nicole’s car? Heaven forbid anything about this case would be that easy.
“We should take this for a match,” Kevin said, voice deliberately loud.
“Definitely. Mind if we borrow your jacket?” Wyatt asked Thomas, who was looking defensive.
“Of course I mind. It’s my only rain jacket. And I already told you. It’s dirty and covered in stuff from my workshop; that’s all.”
“Is this more sand?” Kevin spoke up. “Like the sand on your shoes. Like the sand we found on the side of the road . . .”
“There’s sand everywhere! It’s New England, for God’s sake, and we’ve already had several mornings below freezing.”
“Where are Nicky’s clothes?” Wyatt asked abruptly.
“What?” Thomas blinked.
“I understand from the hospital staff you took her clothes from the night of the accident.”
“Nothing wrong with that—”
“Where are they? Muddy, bloody, soaked in scotch, sure as hell didn’t put them away. So they should be here, right? The laundry room. Waiting to be washed.”
Thomas didn’t answer right away. “My wife did nothing wrong,” he said abruptly.
Nicky’s turn to stare at him.
“Dr. Celik showed me the tox-screen results: .06. Below the legal limit. Meaning neither of us owes you answers or explanations. It was an accident. Plain and simple. Dark, rainy night. She drove off the road. End of the story.”
“Like falling down the basement stairs?”
“You saw the stairs.”
“And stumbling off the front steps? Come on, Thomas. Just how clumsy can one woman be? Stairs, steps, driving a car. To hear you talk, your wife can’t get anything right.”
“Go away. We’re done with you now.”
“Fine. Then give us your rain jacket. And while you’re at it, Nicky’s clothes from that night and the tennis shoes she shouldn’t have been wearing in the rain, and, oh yeah, the coat she didn’t even bother to grab. Provide it all. Give us what we need to prove your accident. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll leave you alone.”
“I want to see it,” Nicky spoke up suddenly.
The men stopped, stared at her. She was standing in the middle of the basement, arms crossed defensively over her chest. She wasn’t looking at the jacket or at any of them. She was looking at a spot at the base of the stairs.
The spot where she’d landed, Wyatt knew without asking. The site of her first accident, when her headaches and memory loss all began.
Thomas frowned. “What do you want to see?”
“The scene of the crash. I want to visit it. Maybe it will help me.”
“Nicky, you have a concussion; you’re under doctor’s orders to take it easy—”
“I’m going.”
“You’ll get another headache—”
“I don’t care.”
“I do! This is exactly what they’re trying to do, Nicky. Can’t you see that? This whole visit, this farce . . . The police are trying to come between us. It’s the only way they think they’ll get answers.”
“Maybe I want those answers, too.”
“Nicky . . .” Thomas reached out a hand toward his wife.
“What are you afraid of? Tell me, Thomas. If our life is so damn perfect, why can’t the police have your rain jacket?”
Thomas didn’t answer. Nicky shot him one last look, then turned and stalked up the stairs.
“All I’ve ever wanted,” Thomas muttered, “was to keep her safe. Take the jacket, all right. Take whatever you want. Then leave us alone. We were better off without you. You have my word.”
He headed up the stairs, chasing his wife.