Deja Who (Insighter #1)(46)

“Feeling better?” As if appearing because she called his (other) name, the man was suddenly in the piano room with them. He was dressed in civilian attire, brown pants and matching jacket, cream-colored shirt, brown tie, brown shoes. His hair was so light a blond it was almost white; his eyes were pale blue; his skin was also pale, with very faint color at his cheeks and nowhere else. He almost seemed to glow in his dark, dull clothes. “You seem to be feeling better. We can certainly have this conversation somewhere—”

“Tell me,” she said. “Everything. I want it all. I insist.” Leah had no idea how much Insighter privilege Preston was going to allow her, but intended to push for every bit of it. Cops, as a rule, tended to accommodate those in her profession. More, perhaps, than most other fields, cops needed them. “Please,” she added, because that seemed called for. And it wouldn’t kill her to be polite. Being polite when she felt anything but wasn’t exactly—ha, ha!—like getting murdered.

He looked at her for a long moment, doubtless assessing if she was as ready for the information as she seemed. He must have seen something that convinced him—or perhaps he simply didn’t care if his words would make her crack and break—because he gave her exactly what she said she wanted.





THIRTY-TWO


“Your mother let the killer in, so we’re thinking it was someone she knew.”

“That is incorrect thinking,” she said at once. Archer heard her Insighter tone and raised his eyebrows, but mercifully said nothing. “My mother was a fame whore, an attention whore, and, for a few years in the early eighties, an actual whore. All anyone needs to do—needed to do—to get into this house is to recognize her. Or pretend to recognize her. Something as meaningless as ‘weren’t you the lady from It’s All Relative back in the nineties?’ would get anyone, anyone at all, the grand tour. And sometimes dinner. And sometimes dessert. And sometimes breakfast.”

“Oh.” Preston gave her a long look. Leah stared back. “All right. Well. The killer wasn’t here very long before the attack started. He—”

“—bashed her brains in with my Emmy.” She turned to Archer, whose eyes were wide and horrified. “Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy,” she clarified. “I was ten. And my mother hated that I won. Of course.” She turned back to Detective Preston. “And you’re thinking it’s difficult to believe a killer-by-chance just happened along last night and just happened to grope around and just happened to grab my Emmy and then happened to beat my mother to death with it.”

“Okay, maybe that’s—”

“Except she prominently displays it. Displayed, I mean.” God, why was it so hard to remember that Nellie was now strictly past tense? How long had she wanted that to be the case? Now that it was the case, you’d think she would catch up. Sure, loved ones often spoke of the murder victim in the present tense, but Leah had never been a loved one. She had never even been a liked one. “It’s the first thing you see when you walk into that room. She hated that I won, but later, when I had quit the business (again) it was the best way to prove she had been relevant. So she kept it where a guest couldn’t help seeing it. So, in fact, it could be just chance.”

“Ms. Nazir, I don’t quite get what you’re doing here—”

“I am helping you,” she said coldly, “do your job. Please continue.”

There was a short silence while Preston checked his notes. “Okay. The killer left while she was still alive. And we think he or she knew your mother was alive but wasn’t too worried about it.”

“Or was in a hurry?” she asked. “Because of the noise?”

“We’re still working that. We figure she lived another fifteen minutes or so. We’ll know for sure when the labs come back.”

Ah. The labs. A medico-legal autopsy was mandated, as in the case of any death thought to be criminal in nature. Which this certainly was. Even now, Nellie Nazir was cooling at the morgue in her body bag, her beautiful pale hands, with their long tapering nails, bagged to keep any evidence of her killer in place. She was waiting for a clinical pathologist to photograph her—her last photo shoot!—and then they would put her under an ultraviolet light to pick up any evidence not seen by the human eye. Then they would strip her

(“it’s just nudity, darling. think of it as a documentary”)

and examine her wounds. They would weigh her

(“a moment on the lips, darling! you know how the rest of that goes”)

and measure her. Then they would prop her up with a body block, making the chest easier to open, and cut her with the standard Y-incision, which starts at the shoulders and plunges down past the belly button to her pubic bone. There won’t be much blood, since her blood pressure is now (and forever) zero over zero.

They’ll use shears to open her chest to get a good look at her heart and lungs. Which will be pristine—she took fanatical care of herself, as only the very vain can make the time for. When the rare part called for her to smoke, she strictly adhered to herbal cigarettes, and when not working wouldn’t touch tobacco, alcohol, or red meat. She will be in perfect health for her autopsy.

They will examine her organs, make note of all wounds, all damage, obtain biological specimens for testing, take samples for toxicology tests, and examine the contents of her stomach. Knowing Nellie, her stomach likely contained a salad and maybe a chicken breast, washed down with glass after glass of milk.