Chapter 37
My phone rang on the way to the airport. The name on the screen read Ackerson.
I ignored it, not ready to talk to her when—in the practical sense—I was in no better a position than when I’d sat across from her in that interrogation room. Ani’s story couldn’t help Diya until she woke up and was ready to talk about it, and it couldn’t help me at all.
As for Shumi…was it possible that after Bobby had attacked everyone with such murderous violence, she’d break, tell the truth? Who knew? Right now, there wasn’t any way to know if she’d even wake up. I could only hope she did. Because her memories of Ani’s murder mattered.
Three years older than Diya, she’d have been eight at the time, old enough to remember all of it.
Even if she refused to talk of what had happened at the Lake Tarawera house, if she admitted what Bobby had done to Ani, it’d shine a spotlight on his violent nature.
It would also put this tragedy in the territory of an annihilation driven by old emotion and old secrets, instead of a cold-blooded crime with a financial motive that put me in the crosshairs.
I squeezed the steering wheel in lieu of smashing my head against it.
I’d been such a self-destructive idiot all those years after Susanne’s death!
What had I seen in the dopamine rush of gambling away every dollar that had come into my hands?
It’d be easy to keep on blaming Jocelyn for the part she’d played in dragging me deeper and deeper into that world—because she had, oh, she had.
Witty, sarcastic, fascinating Joss had wanted a fellow addict at her side, one she could control.
Her little toy whom she’d delighted in breaking…until he’d broken her.
My chest heaved, my breathing choppy.
The therapist I’d seen, under duress from my father after Callum Baxter put a target on my back and zeroed in, had been a sanctimonious old prick, but he’d said one thing that stuck with me: “You’re looking for validation, Tavish.
Each time you win, you get that rush. False validation, but validation nonetheless.
You’ve been searching for it all your life. ”
Well, fuck that. I was done with being a mess because my mother was a narcissist who could only love one child, the one she’d so carefully molded in her image.
I almost felt sorry for Raja at times. My brother had never had a chance to be anyone but who Audrey wanted him to be; he didn’t even enjoy acting as far as I could tell, but Mommy dearest wanted him in the land of make-believe and so Raja trudged on with a string of mediocre guest appearances, his life funded by Audrey.
Unfortunately, my decision to shrug off the strangling chains of the past came too late, the damage already done. A fact that became crystal clear when I found Ackerson waiting for me in the busy arrivals hall of Auckland Airport late that afternoon, a uniformed officer at her side.
Lips pinched, she said, “I told you to stay close.”
I hitched the duffel over my shoulder, trying not to notice all the people staring in our direction. “I went to fetch a religious relic for the funeral rites. I wanted to have it ready for Diya when she wakes. So she can do right by her family.”
“I’ll need you to accompany me to the station.”
I smiled. “Sure.” Soon as I was in the back of the marked police cruiser, I sent a text to the criminal defense attorney my father had hooked me up with—he’d shot me the man’s details two hours after we spoke.
Still trying to protect me as he hadn’t when I was a child.
The lawyer was waiting at the station when we arrived. Broad shouldered, with rich black hair cut with flair, his skin the same shade of brown as mine, he wore a suit fitted to his body with such perfection that I knew it had to be bespoke.
A greenstone pin glinted on one lapel, the design intricate.
“Kia ora, Detective Ackerson,” he said with a beaming smile. “Andrew Ngata. You’ll remember me from the Piri case. I’ll be sitting in on this interview with my client.”
Ackerson’s face flushed a scalding pink, a balloon about to explode blood. “You don’t need a lawyer,” she said to me. “This is just a chat.”
“You picked me up from the airport with a uniformed officer and put me in a cruiser in front of the public,” I said, my tone tight. “Sorry if I’m pissed off. I want to be by my wife’s side, not here while you waste time looking at the wrong man.”
The balloon pulsed.
My lawyer touched me on the arm. “Detective Ackerson is just doing her job, Mr. Advani. Let’s keep this cordial.”
Let me do the talking was the unspoken order. Since there was a reason my father was paying this man’s significant three-figure hourly rate, I obeyed.
Once in the interview room, Ackerson raised her eyebrows. “Funny how you had your passport handy for your jaunt to Fiji. I’d have thought it was at the house. We know the Prasads had a safe—thing came through the fire.”
Only after Ngata gave me a small nod did I say, “I wanted to ask the bank if I could open up a local account.” It was the truth. “Figured my California driver’s license might not be enough ID so took my passport along.”
“What did the bank say?”
“I blew it off. Wanted to get home to Diya, thought we could come in together later in the day.”
Ackerson set her jaw, her next questions hard and flat. I let Ngata head them off for the most part. She’d met the cooperative Tavish Advani; now it was time for her to meet the Tavish Advani who was the son of one of the most successful criminal defense attorneys in Los Angeles.
It soon became obvious that she had nothing beyond my lack of solid employment and apparent lack of money.
The staff at the bakery where I’d picked up the cakes had verified my alibi—God, that cheerful interaction where they’d teased me about the wedding madness to come seemed about a million days in the past—but with no way for Ackerson to know the exact time of death, she continued to insist that I could’ve done it before I left.
“I had a very interesting conversation with Detective Callum Baxter yesterday,” she said at one point. “He had a lot to say about the Virna Musgrave investigation.”
“Which isn’t your bailiwick, Detective,” Ngata inserted with unflinching calm, his faint smile chiding.
But Ackerson didn’t back down. “Perhaps not, but it does give me an excellent idea of your client’s predilection for violence. Though it seems he usually chooses older women.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Why don’t you look at the bully in the family?” I yelled, having waited until the right moment. Growing up with a narcissist for a mother had taught me how to manipulate people without them ever being aware of it; it was all in the timing.
Ackerson sat back. She was too smart to smile, but it was clear that she thought she’d broken me. “Clarify that,” she said.
“Bobby.” I fisted my hand on the table. “Ask his classmates how he was as a boy. Not his friends, the other children. He sure as fuck was a controlling bastard of a husband.
“Check with Shumi’s doctor, because even if she never made a police complaint, she probably needed medical attention at some point.
” The latter was another gamble, but one with a good chance of paying off given all the information I had about Diya’s older brother; a boy who enjoyed bullying other children wouldn’t think anything of bullying his slavishly devoted wife.
If anything, he’d probably enjoyed it even more. After all, he’d known Shumi would never call him out on it.
That betraying twitch of her left eye, the signal that I’d startled her. “Are you saying Vihaan ‘Bobby’ Prasad was an abusive husband?” she said, even as Ngata said my name in a tone that told me to shut up.
“Yes.” I leaned forward. “Which you’d know if you’d done any actual investigating rather than deciding it had to be the outsider who did it.” Despite my words, I wasn’t so sure of her motives anymore, because just before, when she’d mentioned Virna, her voice had risen. Not by much, but enough.
How old was Ackerson? Fifties? Younger than Virna by more than a decade, but close enough to feel a sense of kinship with her. Out to nail the man she thought had scammed, then murdered a rich older woman desperate for love.
Gut instinct stirred, telling me to push on that vulnerability, but I stayed on the track I’d already laid down—letting her believe that I was ignoring my lawyer because I was a hotheaded idiot.
“That was rage, what went on in that house,” I said. “I don’t feel strongly about any of the family except for Diya! They’re just people to me, people I tried to get along with for her sake, but people I didn’t really know. Why the fuck would I stab my sister-in-law? Shumi was nice to me!”
“On that subject,” my lawyer interjected, “have you located Bobby Prasad’s remains?”
“The scene is still under forensic investigation.”
A faint smile from Ngata. “So it’s possible the younger Prasad committed this crime, then walked out to start a new life. I assume you’re keeping an eye on his bank and phone accounts for signs of life?”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, Mr. Ngata, and I won’t tell you how to do yours.”
“I want to go see Diya now.” I got to my feet.
Ackerson didn’t argue, and I walked out with my lawyer. Who sighed once we were out on the sidewalk, under the bright green leaves of some tree I couldn’t identify. “You’re supposed to let me speak. Anand assured me you know how to keep your mouth shut.”
There was little traffic on the road just then, and what looked to be pale orange poppies—interspersed with small white flowers I couldn’t name—bobbed their heads in the plantings on the median.
A woman pushed a stroller on the opposite sidewalk, while an elderly man stepped out of a café with a take-out cup in hand.
As I watched, he unhooked the lead of a scruffy brown dog from an outdoor chair, and the dog sat up, tail waving.
People carrying on with their lives as if mine hadn’t gone up in flames only days past.
“I know, I know,” I said to Ngata. “Sorry, but she’s so focused on me that she’s missing the giant elephant in the room.”
“You got away with it this time, but don’t do it again.
” He squeezed my shoulder. “And be careful what you say to her. She puts on the thick tunnel-visioned cop act, but that woman has a top-tier closing rate—and her cases are winners for the prosecution, so she isn’t just about closing cases; she gets the evidence, locks her suspects down tight. ”
“I’ll remember,” I said, shaken.
I’d fallen for the idiot cop act, had come close to treating her with the very contempt my father had warned me about.
“You have to be extra clean at this point.” Ngata’s gaze was suddenly as hard as granite.
“Your identity hasn’t leaked to the media yet—not in terms of your past in the States—so keep a low profile and stay away from Ackerson.
The instant she approaches you again, you call me. No more cozy little chats. Got it?”
“Absolutely.”
I stewed on the possibility of media exposure on my cab ride back to the airport to pick up my car from the parking lot.
My history made for damn good newspaper inches—and if it had been bad in the metropolis of LA, how much worse would it be in this small city inside a small nation where the Lake Tarawera deaths were still headline news?
A sudden whiff of sulfur on the wind, a reminder that Rotorua was a place where the earth boiled…the land itself on fire deep below the surface.