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)
The house was gone. So was the garage apartment.
All the photos pinned to the huge corkboard in Diya’s suite in the main house. All the tiny animal figurines she’d collected since girlhood. All the black-and-white images from her maternal and paternal grandparents’ lives in Fiji that her mum was so protective of because they had no backups beyond physical negatives—which had also been in the house.
Gone.
A family’s entire history erased from existence.
I switched off the TV and tried to make some sort of sense of it all. I couldn’t, my head thick with foggy thoughts when I finally fell into a restless sleep.
* * *
—
Jocelyn sat across from me in the dream, a cigarette in her mouth as she dealt cards with the speed of a Vegas dealer. Glossy black hair in a sleek bun, high cheekbones further defined by makeup, those striking green-black eyes that had first led a sixteen-year-old girl from her humble village in Henan Province, China, to the catwalks of Milan and Paris.
Then later, straight into back-to-back hit movies.
Even at sixty-one, she was considered a timeless beauty and still had a number of deals with companies that wanted her to wear their clothing and jewelry at various high-profile events.
“You don’t smoke those!” I blurted out. “You always say they’re cheap rubbish.”
“I borrowed it from some odious man, love. Every dealer should have a cigarette, after all.” She pretended to stub the unlit cigarette on the table before just leaving it there. “How much do you want to bet?” Her accent was “European,” as she’d put it—a mélange of her original accent and all the other places she’d lived and worked.
“Calling it European sounds so much better than saying I’m a vocal mongrel,” she’d said with a laugh one night as we drank together.
Jocelyn Wai was known for her bawdy humor, but in private, she could go straight to crass.
I’d liked that about her, liked that she had no filter.
“Bet, Tavish,” she said again, drawing out my name as she always did until it sounded more like Ta-veesh. “Come on, this suey isn’t going to chop itself.”
Pure Jocelyn. Taking the racial epithets and comments that had been directed her way before power and fame and making them a part of her signature snark.
Too real. Too much.
“I don’t want to do this anymore.” I tried to push away from the table but the chair wouldn’t move.
“Oh really?” Jocelyn’s husky laughter drew my attention back to her. “Because of her? The love of your life? That insipid child? Oh, please. You were already bored of her before this unfortunate…accident. Such a shame she survived.”
“Shut up!” I flipped the table over, scattering the cards. “I love Diya!”
Jocelyn smiled. “You loved me, too, once.” Sorrow in her eyes. “What happened, Tavish? Did I get too old?” Her face began to crack and rot in front of me.
“Joss, no! Joss!”
But she wasn’t listening, her now-skeletal face focused on the cards she was dealing into empty air. “I screamed as I fell. The air cut like ice against my skin even though it was a warm night. Did you hear me?”
Flames licked around her, the scent of burned flesh in the air.
And suddenly, her face was Diya’s, the hands that dealt the cards coated in blood.
“Diya!” I jolted up in the flimsy motel bed, my scream yet reverberating in my throat and the sheet pasted to my sweat-soaked skin.
The clock blinked 3:07 in the morning.
The time of Jocelyn’s fall.
When even LA had been silent and quiet, no one awake to hear that scream.
“I wasn’t there,” I reminded myself. “I was at Danny’s apartment, crashed out on his couch because we’d tied one on that night.” My heart continued to thunder. “I wasn’t there.” It was a mantra I’d repeated over and over while waiting for Detective Gina Garcia to call me back to the station for an interview.
Hands shaky, I shoved off the sheet and walked into the bathroom. The compulsion to check my buried offshore account using my phone was almost overwhelming. That was my one rule: to never ever access that account using any device that could be traced back to me. Only once I’d successfully maneuvered the money through various channels would it be safe for me to touch.
Until then, it might as well be poison.
I stepped into the shower, turned the water to cold.
“Fuck.” The shock snapped me out of the last hazy pieces of the nightmare, shoving my brain from the obsessive line of thought that could land me in a prison cell. “I didn’t kill Jocelyn,” I said aloud. “I did not kill Jocelyn. I loved Jocelyn.”
But not as much as I loved Diya.
I’d never loved anyone as much as I loved Diya.
Not even Susanne.
Chapter 14
Private notes: Detective Callum Baxter (LAPD)
Date: Dec 12
Time: I-should-be-home o’clock
Perez uncovered an interesting fact about Tavish Advani—that fancy condo isn’t a rental. It’s his. Transferred to his name when he was roughly twenty-two.