Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Diya would finally be where she belonged: under Shumi’s loving care.
Life would be perfect.
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.”