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)
“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.
Chapter 38
Private notes: Detective Callum Baxter (LAPD)
Date: Jan 28
Time: 15:07
Finally pinned down that two-year gap in Tavish Advani’s love résumé. Man wasn’t dating. At all. Grief from Jocelyn Wai’s death? Possible—though from all appearances, they didn’t seem to have a true-love type of deal. Not like he apparently had with Susanne Winthorpe.
I just got off the phone with her best friend, one Cecilia “Cici” Summers.
She couldn’t say enough good things about Tavish. “I teased her about dating someone so young, but when it came down to it, Sue was right—he made her final months so happy. She loved being with him, though in the end she was sorry for ever having come into his life. He took it so hard, you see. Was broken up about her loss. She’d started it all as a lark, a little hot fling, as she’d say, but she ended up becoming his first real love.”
I didn’t know how to bring up how quickly he’d moved on, but I didn’t have to. Cici did it herself. “That terrible relationship he was in with Jocelyn Wai? All the partying and drinking? Grief, that’s what it was. He was looking for Susanne in her, poor boy—had no idea that Jocelyn was a piranha. We didn’t run in the same circles, but I heard through the grapevine what she was like—a hard, hard woman, that one, taking young lovers and using them up, then throwing them away.”
Never thought of Tavish Advani as the victim; Cici is right about Jocelyn’s track record. Her boyfriend before Advani was a B-list actor in his twenties who died of a cocaine overdose during their relationship (though she was out of the country at the time). That type of toxic relationship, though, it can lead to violence.
Gina’s a good cop—if she thinks Advani had something to do with Wai’s death, I believe her. Knowing something and being able to prove it in court are two different things—especially if you have a DA who doesn’t like to file anything but slam dunks.
Cici states that Advani always comes to the memorial dinner she holds for her friend at a “glitzy place Sue would’ve loved.” She also has no qualms about Susanne’s final days. “Sue died as she lived—on her terms. Never doubt that, Detective.”
Susanne’s niece—Grace Green—had nothing bad to say about Tavish, either, and she was in the thick of it during Susanne’s decline, literally lived in a self-contained suite in the same apartment.
She was also adamant that Tavish never made any moves on her. I’m not sure I believe her. I might pay her a visit in person, see if she’ll open up further.
Chapter 39
The first thing I did when I got to the hospital late that afternoon—after stopping at the motel to shower off the long journey home—was kiss my wife on the cheek, then sit with my hand on hers for a long, long time. Willing her to wake, to look at me with those eyes that saw me, loved me.
“I’ll always be there for you, baby,” I told this fragile candle flame of a woman who owned my heart. “Doing that…being there for you…it saves me.” She filled up the well of emptiness inside me with her need, and I was more than okay with that.
“It’s all about Ani, isn’t it?” Diya’s moods, her need for medication, her endless need for love. “What did your family do to you?” Because this was what I’d realized in Fiji—me and Diya, we’d been drawn together because we mirrored each other’s scars, each other’s damaged psyches.
The machines beeped, the ventilator breathed rhythmically, and the nurses walked past on soft-soled shoes. But from my wife, the woman I loved to my core, there was only a wordless silence.
Swallowing, I released her hand to reach into the duffel I’d put beside the bed. I was careful in how I handled the statuette. “I got this from your mother’s prayer alcove.” After unwrapping it, I placed it on a small table beside her bed, where it wouldn’t be in the staff’s way.
“You weren’t the one who did anything wrong, Diya. I know.” I brushed a strand of hair off her cheek. “I believe you.” If there was even a chance she could hear me, then I needed her to know that she wasn’t alone any longer; I was in her corner in this fight, wasn’t going to allow anyone to ever again blame her for Ani’s brutal death.