Chapter 77
They told me later that they found me on the lawn on my front, with a huge knife sticking out of my back and an unconscious Diya beside me. I’d have died if I hadn’t made that frantic call to emergency services.
My luck, it seemed, had finally come in.
“Jesus Christ, I fucked this one up.” Detective Ackerson, who’d come to visit me at the hospital, put her hands on her hips, her suit jacket flared out.
“But in my defense, your batshit sister-in-law did a good job of looking as innocent as Mother Teresa. She’s still protesting her innocence even though she got caught on that emergency call as good as confessing to it all. ”
“Any chance she’ll escape the charges?” I winced as I tried to make myself more comfortable in my seated position on the bed. “She didn’t actually say she murdered everyone.”
“What she did say is plenty,” Ackerson reassured me. “Her obsession with your wife, though…” She shook her head. “The word ‘stalker’ doesn’t quite capture it. The shrinks are having a field day with her.
“Apparently, she thinks she’s Diya’s protector, the only one who understands her. Extreme maternal urges. I say unhinged, but, hey, I’m just a mum who never murdered my daughter’s friends for daring to take her away from me.”
I thought about Shumi’s own mother, the complete lack of a mother-child bond. Because Shumi’s obsessive attachment to Diya hadn’t appeared out of thin air; it had been born in the cold abandonment of her own childhood. “Her family still supporting her?”
“Only one she’s willing to see is Ajay. Poor kid. He’s shattered.”
I hadn’t seen Ajay since the events in Taupo—I’d been in the hospital. That final knife strike? It had perforated my lung and nicked other things. I’d made it worse when I’d slammed into Shumi. “How is she doing physically?”
“Better than you.” Ackerson folded her arms. “She only made it out because you called 111. Otherwise, she’d have died from smoke inhalation well before the fire got to her.
House is only a little damaged—your sister-in-law had to make do with what she could find in terms of accelerants, and it wasn’t much.
I think the plan was to make it look like a terrible accident. ”
“A second fire?” I asked skeptically. “She really thought people would buy an accident?”
“Yeah, she was decompensating by the end. Shrinks say she wasn’t prepared for the impact of losing the support structure of the senior Prasads as well as her husband. They propped her up in ways she didn’t understand before she destroyed that structure.”
It made sense; Rhiannon and Violet, those crimes had been so well planned that not even a droplet of suspicion had fallen on Shumi.
The Lake Tarawera Incident, in contrast, had been a mess that I still didn’t understand, while Lake Taupo had been a full-on psychotic fantasy that would have put the spotlight firmly on her even if it had gone exactly as she’d wished.
“What about the drugs?” I asked. “Where did she get those?”
“Plain old sleeping pills. Her doctor prescribed them to her for insomnia, but she must’ve stocked them away at her and Bobby Prasad’s home—her family confirmed that she did go back after she was released, to get some clothes, personal items, that kind of thing.
” The cop scowled. “I hate shrinks but I can see why someone would need some head shrinking after this. You and your wife should get therapy.”
I took a sip from the juice box Diya had left for me before she went out to get me a burger with every fixing imaginable. I was craving one like you wouldn’t believe, and it wasn’t like knife wounds meant I had to be on a bland invalid diet.
Ackerson crossed her arms over her chest, pinned me with her gaze.
“Did you hear that both of Jason Musgrave’s soon-to-be-ex-wives—though I guess only one is legally married to him—did a Dateline interview?
Both redheads, so he has a clear type. They’re pissed and planning to form a united front against the murdering bigamist.”
I stared fixedly at the curtain around my bed. “Virna deserved better, deserved more.” Warm, generous, kind, she’d spent forty years with a husband who barely paid attention to her, too busy with his business interests, had only begun to fly after he was dead. “What a waste of a life.”
I caught Ackerson’s nod out of the corner of my eye, but when she spoke, it had nothing to do with Virna. “Baxter says the original detective on the Jocelyn Wai case still thinks you had something to do with it.”
“Joss was self-destructive,” I said. “That’s why she was with me—because I was self-destructive then, too. I was grieving the loss of the first woman I ever loved, was vulnerable.”
In had swooped Joss like the vulture she was; she’d led an already struggling and grieving young man to the edge of the abyss, then nudged him over.
This time when her ghost tried to whisper in my ear, I shut it down.
Joss had made me who I’d been the night she died—a man who, after a year of her working on him, had finally been willing to walk deeper into dissipation, let the drugs dull his pain. What happened next was her fault. I’d only killed one woman in my life, and it wasn’t Jocelyn Wai.
“She did drugs, got messed up, and went over the balcony,” I said, my anguish over the death for which I was responsible a visceral thing that hadn’t faded even after all these years.
“It’s that simple, but because she was beautiful and charismatic, people want to believe there’s a greater story, that it’s not the same sad and predictable one as that of the addict on the street. ”
A nurse bustled in. “That’s enough,” she said to Ackerson. “He needs to rest. Come back tomorrow if you want to interrogate him more.”
“We’re just chatting.” Ackerson scowled, but the nurse was having none of it, and honestly, I was grateful.
Exhaustion had begun to wash over me in waves, and I was asleep a bare minute or two after the cop left the cubicle.
I dreamed of curls of smoke on the carpet, my mind filled with a whispering hum that said,…lied for you.