Deja Who (16 page)

D
etective Preston was talking like this was just another day on the job. Which for him, it was.

“The way it looked . . . our crime scene guys say it looks like your mom was trying to stop him, or her, from leaving.”

Leah watched his face as he talked at her and knew that in 1941 his name was Aaron DeSalvo and he loved his big brother more than anything. His big brother protected him from their father; his big brother would goad his father into beating
him
instead of Aaron. His father knocked out all of Mama's teeth and his father broke Mama's fingers and was capable of much worse and his wonderful brother would pull that rage toward
himself
, his brother took beatings meant for Aaron and Aaron was so, so grateful.

And when his big brother killed neighborhood pets Aaron covered for him. And when his big brother started stealing and beating people Aaron covered for him, and when his big brother
started stealing cars Aaron covered for him, and when his brother started strangling old ladies Aaron covered for him, and when his brother started strangling young ladies Aaron covered for him, and when his brother was charged with rape Aaron defended him, and when his brother confessed Aaron defended him, and when his brother went to prison Aaron defended him, and when he was killed in prison by a person or persons unknown Aaron gave up, he gave up and eventually he died a lonely, dismal death and no one cared, or noticed.

And his beloved big brother was Albert DeSalvo, his beloved big brother was the Boston Strangler.

So here he was, life number two, Detective Preston, who has convinced himself he is an avenger, here he was atoning for a past life by investigating murders in this life and it wasn't just a job, not to Detective Preston, and Leah knew these things about him and didn't care.

Leah watched Detective Preston's lips move and seriously considered hitting him,
bludgeoning
him, with his past life, hitting him over and over again until he would shut up shut up
shut up
about her, about her mother, about the dark moon of Leah's childhood.

But she didn't do that to him. And she wasn't quite sure why. Archer, maybe? But maybe not. Whatever the reason, Detective Preston, né Aaron DeSalvo, was still talking.

Oh, God, let him soon stop talking.

“This is total speculation, but she maybe thought you were the next stop,” the Boston Strangler's brother continued, “so she threw herself at him or her. The killer must have panicked or maybe she made more noise than he planned . . . he had to leave before he finished her. He probably thought it wouldn't take long,
he'd bludgeoned her pretty thorough—ah—” Preston cut himself off, remembering this was a civilian next of kin. He was, of course, used to dealing with Insighters in the course of his work. He had just forgotten, for a moment. Insighters experienced loss, sure. It was hard to think of them as victims, though. “She must have found her cell phone and . . .” He shrugged.

Leah heard a roaring in her ears

(how odd, the ocean? how odd, what is that?)

as the implication sank in. “She tried to warn me,” she managed in a voice that cracked and shook, a voice that made Archer's eyes go wide with alarm, a voice that made him seize her arm. “While she was dying. She tried to warn me. And I wouldn't take the call.”

And then the world went away for a while.

“S
top that,” she said, batting away the hand tormenting her. “Stop that right now.” She was not quite sure what had happened, but whatever
had
happened, she simply refused to stand for it. Whatever it was.

She opened her eyes and saw that for some reason Archer had taken her to the piano room, the last place she had seen Nellie alive. Her mother had been murdered, of course, in the photo room. The room where Nellie had hired Archer to follow Leah. The room Leah hated more than any other room in any other building in the world. Fitting, yes. And horrible. Yes.

“I don't think you should . . . ah, hell,” he sighed as she pushed his hand away and sat up. She had been resting on the low bench opposite the piano no one could play. She wondered who would dust it now. And she wondered why she was thinking about such a silly thing, when she had no idea how she had gotten to the piano room. “You were kind of out of it for a minute.”

“I did not swoon,” she said sharply.

“I'm pretty positive I didn't say swoon,” he replied, his expression mild. His eyes, though. His eyes. They were anything but mild. For a cold moment she wondered if he was angry with her, then realized he was angry . . . but not at her.

“I didn't faint, either.”

“Didn't say faint, either.”

“Because I have never done such a thing in my life unless I was acting and I have no plans to start. Certainly not today of all days.”

“You bet. I'm right there with you.”

“And frankly, she had a lot of nerve getting murdered last night.” Leah shut her mouth so hard her teeth clacked together. Archer would be vanishing from her life soon enough without seeing the truly nasty side of her personality; no need to bludgeon him

(like how the killer bludgeoned your mother and you stabbed him moments after your first meeting, how much of your nasty side did you think you'd successfully hidden from the poor man?)

with more of her awfulness.

“She sure did. You thought you were free—”

“Yes.”

“—you loved that you were free—”

“Yes!” She nodded so hard her neck hurt. He understood. It was incredible; unbelievable.

“—and she had to go and fuck all that up.”

She stared at him, at the blue and the green of his eyes, eyes narrowed in concentration but not—was it true?—judgment. “Yes. It's awful, I know.”

“It's also true. Sounds like on top of everything else, your mom's timing was terrible. All the time, not just last night.”

A hysterical giggle burst out of her before she could lock it back, and she slapped her hands over her mouth. But then, to her amazement, Archer slipped warm fingers around her wrists and gently brought them down from her face.

“You can laugh,” he told her, as if he were the Insighter and she the fretful client, afraid and angry and not knowing why why
why
she was feeling so strange. “You can cry. You're entitled. Who cares? The cops have seen worse. I've seen worse. Remind me to tell you about my dad sometime.”

When would you have seen worse, you gorgeous idiot?

“No.” She cleared her throat and said it again. “No. Later. I'll do that later. Right now I want to speak to Aaron.”

“Who?”

“Detective Preston.”

“Feeling better?” As if appearing because she called his (other) name, the man was suddenly in the piano room with them. He was dressed in civilian attire, brown pants and matching jacket, cream-colored shirt, brown tie, brown shoes. His hair was so light a blond it was almost white; his eyes were pale blue; his skin was also pale, with very faint color at his cheeks and nowhere else. He almost seemed to glow in his dark, dull clothes. “You seem to be feeling better. We can certainly have this conversation somewhere—”

“Tell me,” she said. “Everything. I want it all. I insist.” Leah had no idea how much Insighter privilege Preston was going to allow her, but intended to push for every bit of it. Cops, as a rule, tended to accommodate those in her profession. More, perhaps, than most other fields, cops needed them. “Please,” she added, because that seemed called for. And it wouldn't kill
her to be polite. Being polite when she felt anything but wasn't exactly—ha, ha!—like getting murdered.

He looked at her for a long moment, doubtless assessing if she was as ready for the information as she seemed. He must have seen something that convinced him—or perhaps he simply didn't care if his words would make her crack and break—because he gave her exactly what she said she wanted.

“Y
our mother let the killer in, so we're thinking it was someone she knew.”

“That is incorrect thinking,” she said at once. Archer heard her Insighter tone and raised his eyebrows, but mercifully said nothing. “My mother was a fame whore, an attention whore, and, for a few years in the early eighties, an actual whore. All anyone needs to do—needed to do—to get into this house is to recognize her. Or pretend to recognize her. Something as meaningless as ‘weren't you the lady from
It's All Relative
back in the nineties?' would get anyone, anyone at all, the grand tour. And sometimes dinner. And sometimes dessert. And sometimes breakfast.”

“Oh.” Preston gave her a long look. Leah stared back. “All right. Well. The killer wasn't here very long before the attack started. He—”

“—bashed her brains in with my Emmy.” She turned to
Archer, whose eyes were wide and horrified. “Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy,” she clarified. “I was ten. And my mother
hated
that I won. Of course.” She turned back to Detective Preston. “And you're thinking it's difficult to believe a killer-by-chance just happened along last night and just happened to grope around and just happened to grab my Emmy and then happened to beat my mother to death with it.”

“Okay, maybe that's—”

“Except she prominently displays it. Displayed, I mean.” God, why was it so hard to remember that Nellie was now strictly past tense? How long had she wanted that to be the case? Now that it
was
the case, you'd think she would catch up. Sure, loved ones often spoke of the murder victim in the present tense, but Leah had never been a loved one. She had never even been a liked one. “It's the first thing you see when you walk into that room. She hated that I won, but later, when I had quit the business (again) it was the best way to prove she had been relevant. So she kept it where a guest couldn't help seeing it. So, in fact, it could be just chance.”

“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 Talent
TM
(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.