Run (The Tesla Effect #2) by Julie Drew

made his way across the parlor and into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes while he walked.
    “You look like hell,” Bizzy said, and Finn dropped his hands to see her sitting on the kitchen counter eating a sandwich.
    “Thanks,” he said, too tired to spar.
    “Are you just now getting home?” she asked, glancing at the clock.
    “Yeah, I was at the library all night with Joley, looking at newspaper archives. Then the police station this morning, charming my way into seeing the case file on Tasya Petrova’s accident.”
    “Did you get what you needed?”
    “Bizzy,” he said, chiding her gently. “I said it required charm. What do you think?”
    “My question stands,” she retorted.
    He grinned. “Yeah, I got it, but it was touch and go—I had to pull out my best material.”
    Bizzy took a bite of bologna and mustard on white bread—Beckett would have gagged—and merely rolled her eyes.
    “I learned some interesting things, though,” he said. He did not look happy about it.
    “Such as?”
    Finn hopped up onto the counter next to her in one easy motion, reached over and took the sandwich out of her hand. After taking a bite that reduced what was left of it to almost nothing, he handed it back, chewed and swallowed before he answered.
    “Well for one, Jane was a brand new federal agent who ‘happened upon the scene,’ according to the police report. She’s the one who called it in.”
    “Oh, man. You guys were right, she’s in the middle of this.”
    “Well, we don’t want to jump to conclusions. It’s certainly possible that she had been driving to or from the Abbott house. They were best friends, and the accident happened on Pinewood Lane, that old blacktop road that winds between the university and the neighborhood the Abbotts lived in then.”
    “Did you find anything else?” Bizzy was wide-eyed and had forgotten all about the last remnant of her sandwich, which dangled between her fingers. Finn plucked it from her hand and popped it into his mouth, talking while he chewed.
    “The M.E.—the medical examiner—put the time of death between ten pm and midnight. Jane called it in just after eleven thirty.”
    “That seems reasonable,” Bizzy said. “It must have happened during the earlier part of that time frame if she called it in at eleven thirty—wait, was Tasya already dead when Jane arrived?”
    “Unclear. But Greg Abbott was there as well and…”
    “What??”
    “And so was Tesla.”
    Bizzy was stunned. “What do you mean? Tesla was there when her mom died? How come she never said so?”
    “I’m not sure she knows—or remembers, rather. It’s all basically reasonable, when you read all the official documents, pretty cut and dried, but there are interpretations made and conclusions drawn by the authorities that aren’t the only, or even the most obvious ones that could be drawn.”
    “You have to explain that,” said Bizzy, breathless now, her thin shoulders quivering with excitement.
    “Jane called in a car accident on a quiet, unlit road in the woods just outside of town, not far from the Abbott’s house. She happened upon it at eleven thirty. She reported a casualty from the one-car accident, which she said in the transcription of the call was a collision with a tree just to the side of the road. No other passengers.”
    “Okay, fine so far.”
    “When the emergency vehicles got there, Tasya’s car—with her body in the driver’s seat—was smashed into a tree, and it was burning out of control. The paramedics couldn’t get near it, and the small extinguishers they had were useless.”
    “So?”
    “So, Jane didn’t report the fire, so the fire department didn’t respond, only the paramedics and the cops.”
    “That means—”
    “We don’t know what it means, if anything. Her report and the follow up that closed the case as a simple accidental death explained that the car was not on fire when she called it in, that the fire began afterward. The department’s