“Ms. Nazir, I don’t quite get what you’re doing here—”
“I am helping you,” she said coldly, “do your job. Please continue.”
There was a short silence while Preston checked his notes. “Okay. The killer left while she was still alive. And we think he or she knew your mother was alive but wasn’t too worried about it.”
“Or was in a hurry?” she asked. “Because of the noise?”
“We’re still working that. We figure she lived another fifteen minutes or so. We’ll know for sure when the labs come back.”
Ah. The labs. A medico-legal autopsy was mandated, as in the case of any death thought to be criminal in nature. Which this certainly was. Even now, Nellie Nazir was cooling at the morgue in her body bag, her beautiful pale hands, with their long tapering nails, bagged to keep any evidence of her killer in place. She was waiting for a clinical pathologist to photograph her—her last photo shoot!—and then they would put her under an ultraviolet light to pick up any evidence not seen by the human eye. Then they would strip her
(“it’s just nudity, darling. think of it as a documentary”)
and examine her wounds. They would weigh her
(“a moment on the lips, darling! you know how the rest of that goes”)
and measure her. Then they would prop her up with a body block, making the chest easier to open, and cut her with the standard Y-incision, which starts at the shoulders and plunges down past the belly button to her pubic bone. There won’t be much blood, since her blood pressure is now (and forever) zero over zero.
They’ll use shears to open her chest to get a good look at her heart and lungs. Which will be pristine—she took fanatical care of herself, as only the very vain can make the time for. When the rare part called for her to smoke, she strictly adhered to herbal cigarettes, and when not working wouldn’t touch tobacco, alcohol, or red meat. She will be in perfect health for her autopsy.
They will examine her organs, make note of all wounds, all damage, obtain biological specimens for testing, take samples for toxicology tests, and examine the contents of her stomach. Knowing Nellie, her stomach likely contained a salad and maybe a chicken breast, washed down with glass after glass of milk.
(“Strong bones and teeth, darling, take care of them and they’ll take care of you and don’t roll your eyes at me, clichés are clichés because they are truth.”)
Finally, they’ll examine her mother’s brain, peeling her scalp away from her skull, then cutting the skull (likely with a Stryker saw) to expose the brain. After that, they’ll put her back together again, exactly like Humpty Dumpty, except in her case . . .
“She’ll be a gorgeous corpse.”
“Pardon?” Detective Preston asked.
“Are you okay?” Archer asked in a low voice.
“I’m fine.” She made a determined effort to stop picturing her mother’s autopsy. “What you’re telling me, Detective Preston, is what we already know: my mother lived long enough after her attack to call me.”
“Yes, that’s—”
“Twice.” Beside her, Archer winced, no doubt recalling hearing “no wire hangers, ever!” while they were trying to hurt each other in the front seat of her car last night. “But she couldn’t speak. And I—” Leah cut herself off and shrugged.
“And we know it wasn’t your creepy ex-agent?” Archer asked, still sounding skeptical.
Leah shook her head. Tom Winn of Winner’s TalentTM (ugh)? No. “No, remember—Tom was on a plane to Los Angeles when she and I last spoke.”
Detective Preston looked up from his notes. “We’ll check that, of course. And I thought you said your mother called you more than once.”
“One of the times we last spoke,” she corrected herself. “You have to understand, we have a difficult relationship. Had.”
“Yes, I’m getting that impression.” Preston managed that with a straight face.
Leah elaborated. “I did not love her. I did not like her. I did not tolerate her. We were done.”
“Done, huh?” Preston took a long look around the richly appointed room, the piano, the art, the glossy, polished floors . . . all the wonders of the McMansion, the first of which could be noticed from the street, as Nellie had planned from the very beginning. Leah wondered if he thought he was being subtle. “So she disowned you?”
“I wish. I disowned her. The third to last time she called me last night, I told her we were finished, that I wanted nothing to do with her again. Again,” she added. “I wanted nothing to do with her again, again.”
“This wasn’t the first time you disowned her?”
“Correct.”
“And that was the third to last phone conversation.”
“Correct.”
Preston’s demeanor was changing, and Leah wondered if it was another cop trick, designed to trip up a subject, or if she was actually seeing him wonder if she was a murderer. “And you’re telling me you fought?”
“I fought. She was being her normal passive-aggressive self and pretending everything was super-duper fine. Neither of us touched each other. You will not find my skin cells beneath her fingernails.”
“So the anger—it was all on one side.”
“The acknowledged anger was all on my side, yes. My mother would not admit she was angry with me, ever. At most she would voice disappointment.” How Leah had lived to disappoint her. Hmm, was that some sorrow, at last? Was she a little sad at the thought that she would never disappoint her again? Was that mourning?
“And then?”
“She called again, and I didn’t answer.” As I was far too busy trying to corrupt Archer Drake’s morals, which were annoyingly concrete. “And the third time, it was just . . .” Something in her throat; God, why was it so fucking dry in here? Her mother cranked the AC year-round, how was that for foolish and extravagant? Cranked it and so it was like the Sahara in there, if the Sahara was entirely contained in a McMansion. She barked an angry cough into her fist and finished. “Breathing. I could just hear her breathing over the phone.”
“So your mother was breathing . . . like gasping? Panting?”
“Like the breathing exercises you do to improve your vocals.”
“Your mother, dying from multiple head wounds, called you and did breathing exercises into your phone?”
Leah shrugged. Sure, if you didn’t know Nellie, that would likely sound strange.
“And your phone is . . . ?”
“Broken.” At his look, she elaborated. “When I got your voicemail I panicked and dropped my phone.”
Preston took in her chilly demeanor, her eyes, which weren’t welling with tears, her hands, which weren’t shaking, and her face, which (most likely . . . she couldn’t see herself, after all) wasn’t pale. “You panicked? You panicked.”
“Yes.” Leah refused to believe that in the entirety of his career, Preston had never seen a loved one not fall apart at a murder scene. Humanity was an endless variety of good and bad, mostly bad. People reacted to loss in many different ways. On the other hand, if he was letting Aaron’s life cloud his thinking . . .
“But even if my phone wasn’t broken,” she continued, shelving that thought for later, “it would only give you the times of the calls. Which you can get from the phone company or her phone, which I’m betting isn’t broken.”
“So during the last call, when your mom did vocal breathing exercises into your phone, you panicked.”
“No, I panicked this morning when I listened to your first voicemail, Detective. As I told you.”
“Oh.” He consulted his notes again. “But you didn’t come here right away. You went to your . . . uh . . .”
“Future boyfriend, eventual husband,” Archer said, cheeks flushing just a bit. “We’re preparing to fall in love once she tackles a few problems in her life. You know how it is.”
>
“Not at all, actually.” Preston turned back to Leah. “So you panicked, but only enough to go see your boyfriend.”
“Yes, it was stupid.”
“Stupid?”
Argh. I know this is how they teach you to do it, all the boring repetition and the trick about repeating the last word in the witness’s statement, but I honestly would rather be getting one of It’s stupid clinic colonics right now. “Yes, stupid. I thought you were telling me Archer had been hurt. I panicked and broke my phone when I thought Archer was hurt. I put one shoe on and drove to Archer’s house and did a terrible parking job and left my keys in the ignition and the door open when I thought Archer. Was. Hurt.”
He glanced at her feet. “Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. But how would I have known to call you if Mr. Drake had been harmed?”
“You wouldn’t. Which is why my reaction was . . . wait for it . . . stupid. As I said, I panicked. When people panic, they are not especially bright, do not think clearly, make foolish decisions, and we are all prone to it. Or so I am discovering this week. No need to look so skeptical, Detective.”
“Was I?” he asked mildly, scribbling, scribbling.
“You know I’m capable of such behavior. Panicking. Overreacting. I . . .” She paused, gritted her teeth. “. . . blacked out for a bit. Earlier.”
“It sure seemed like that’s what you did.” Unspoken, but she could read him like a chart: convenient, too. The whole on-site team saw you go down, saw your brand-new lover oh-so-solicitously help you into another room where you could talk about God-knows-what until I followed.
“All right. I see it now.” That is goddamned enough. Doing your job is one thing. Willfully blinding yourself is quite another. Leah met his openly skeptical gaze, held his eyes. “It must be awful.”
“What?”
“You know, but you don’t know. You can’t ever escape the feeling that no matter how much good you do, it will never be enough. And what’s really maddening is you can’t figure it out, and you’re too scared to find an Insighter and ask.”
He looked at her. “What.”
“ReallynotthetimeLeah,” Archer muttered in one breath.
“Because really, you don’t want to know. What you did. Or didn’t do. You dream about it, though, don’t you?” she asked kindly. “And the dreams are like everything else. You can’t ever tell anyone. Of course not. But don’t worry, Detective Preston.” She dropped one eyelid in a slow wink. “Your secret is safe with me.”
First thought: That is an alarming shade of red he’s turning. I wonder when he last had his blood pressure checked?
Second thought: Huh. I’ve never been arrested before. Is he arresting me because he thinks I killed Nellie, or because I’ve made him scared and angry? Either way: this will be interesting. Better yet, it got her out of the room she hated above all others.
THIRTY-THREE
Clusterfuck!
Total, utter clusterfuck. And all Archer could do was sort of stare, horrified, and be pulled in—sucked in—like Leah’s rage and hurt was the damned tide and he was the hapless swimmer. And that made Detective Preston Jaws.
She’d been a block of ice once she recovered from her “it’s not a faint, dammit!” It was funny that the one thing in all this awfulness, the one thing about the murder that threw Leah and freaked her out was the realization that her mom, the poster mom for selfish maternity, tried to warn her only daughter as she was dying.
Her mother’s dying act had been selfless and Archer could see the exact second Leah made the connection; the color just fell out of her face and her eyes rolled up and then he was moving and sort of walking her out of the room, into the piano room. She never lost her feet but she wasn’t exactly all there, either.
He’d made her sit on the nearest bench and just sort of held her wrist to check her pulse (ninety-plus, yikes) and stroked her hair away from her face until her eyes came back and she was glaring at him and batting his hands away. Relief? Putting it mildly. It had been damn near joyful to have Leah back to her old grumpy chilly self.
And then shit got really weird. Even for a murder scene. Even for a murder scene when your mom had been murdered with your Emmy from when you were a resentful, talented child actor. That Preston cop was telling her all sorts of awful things, things that would have made anyone else throw up or cry or both, and Leah just got icier and icier. Archer wanted nothing more than to get her the hell out of there, back to his house, where he could comfort her and maybe even get her to laugh and kiss her until they were dizzy, which probably wasn’t the best way to deal with grief (if that’s what Leah was even feeling) but it wasn’t the worst, either.
And then it was like she was going out of her way to make the cop think she had guilty knowledge, when Archer knew she didn’t. And she kept calling the cop Aaron for some reason, and then made a whole bunch of guesses about him, except they probably weren’t guesses because by the time she was done Preston had the cuffs out.
“You can’t arrest her for making you mad!” he yelped, torn between taking a swing at a cop and getting his own set of cuffs, or trying to stay calm so he could bail Leah out.
“No, but he can arrest me because I have motive, means, and opportunity,” Leah told him, and the horrible hilarity of it was, she was trying to soothe him.
“But you were with me!”
“Yes, but we’re each other’s alibi.” Soothe, soothe. “If one of us is the killer—”
“What?”
“—my alibi is worthless. Oh, and so is yours. Plus I was recently here; my prints will be here somewhere.”
“You were her daughter! Of course your prints are here!”
He tried to beg her with his eyes. Leah liked his freak mismatched eyes, so he stared at her and thought really really hard: Do something! Come on, Leah, be your brilliant self and read my mind.
And she did.
“I do not deny it: I wanted her dead.”
Just not the way he expected.
“Wanting her dead is not a motive!” Archer howled.
She blinked. “I’m pretty sure it is. Also, my mother died in the picture of health. If someone hadn’t coshed her over the head with my Emmy, she could have lived for decades. Perhaps I was after her money. Which, the police will soon discover, is my money. She spent her life robbing me and my resentment is a matter of public record. I knew I should have told that stupid judge he used to be Lavinia Fisher.”
“Leah, stop it!”
“What? I haven’t said one thing that isn’t the complete truth. The judge was stupid, and he did used to be the first female mass murderer. And of course, all the things I said about Nellie, and my relationship to her, are true.”
“Don’t be . . .” He stopped, tried to calm down, tried again, softer. “Don’t be stupid.”
“I’ll be stupid whenever I like!” she snapped, a crack in her control showing at last. “You don’t get to decide when I’m stupid. I decide when I’m stupid. You are not the boss of how and when I am stupid!”
“Do you hear yourself? This is nuts. Tell him you didn’t kill her.”
And I thought it was weird when she stabbed me. That was the most normal interaction I’ve had with this woman. The stabbing!
“Oh, that reminds me, the murder weapon: my Emmy. Come on.” She glanced over her shoulder at Preston, who was cuffing her. “That’s pretty indicative, don’t you think? Symbolic of my crushing resentment, which I then used to crush her skull? It’s pretty perfect.”
“You have the right to remain silent,” Preston said, but he was talking like he wasn’t at all sure what he was saying. In fact, Preston looked like someone had hit him over the head with an Emmy. Just not repeatedly. There were three dangerous adults in the room (well, two at least) and none of them seemed to know what they were doing. Leah had that effect on people.
“Don’t feel bad, Aaron.” Leah actually sounded comforting now, instead of chilly. “It’s not your fault that the Boston Strangler was able to kill many more women because you were an ineffectual crybaby.”
“Leah!” Archer screamed, fingers plunging into his hair and yanking, hard.
“Don’t mind him,” Leah told the cop as he dragged her away. “He thinks I have it in me to be a good person. Isn’t that hilarious?”
“Actually,” Preston replied in a low voice, carefully steering her out of the room, “yeah.”
THIRTY-FOUR
“I’ve never had to do this before.”
“What?”
“Bail someone out of jail.”
Cat shrugged. “It’s easy. It’s just paperwork, right down to the money part. How much do you need?”
Appalled, Archer stood—no, practically leaped off the park bench. He’d watched them haul a weirdly cheerful Leah away, asked questions of the cops remaining at the scene, then came to the park to tell Leah’s only friend what had happened. “I’m not here for a loan.”
“Oh yeah?” She squinted up at him, deep brown eyes narrowed, one side of her mouth tipping up in a smirk. “You’ve got . . . hmm, let’s see . . . fifteen percent of a six-figure bail bond to piss away?”
“Uh . . .” Oh, shit. “Six figures?”
“If they arrested her for aggravated homicide, which it sounds like they did, yep.”
“Okay, I guess I am here for a loan.”
“Mmmm. Might not need it. I’m betting that detective’s boss is gonna look over the paperwork and have a chat with—what’s his name?”
“Preston. Except Leah kept calling him Aaron. I guess he used to be related to the Boston Strangler.”