Deja Who (Insighter #1)(47)

(“Strong bones and teeth, darling, take care of them and they’ll take care of you and don’t roll your eyes at me, clichés are clichés because they are truth.”)

Finally, they’ll examine her mother’s brain, peeling her scalp away from her skull, then cutting the skull (likely with a Stryker saw) to expose the brain. After that, they’ll put her back together again, exactly like Humpty Dumpty, except in her case . . .

“She’ll be a gorgeous corpse.”

“Pardon?” Detective Preston asked.

“Are you okay?” Archer asked in a low voice.

“I’m fine.” She made a determined effort to stop picturing her mother’s autopsy. “What you’re telling me, Detective Preston, is what we already know: my mother lived long enough after her attack to call me.”

“Yes, that’s—”

“Twice.” Beside her, Archer winced, no doubt recalling hearing “no wire hangers, ever!” while they were trying to hurt each other in the front seat of her car last night. “But she couldn’t speak. And I—” Leah cut herself off and shrugged.

“And we know it wasn’t your creepy ex-agent?” Archer asked, still sounding skeptical.

Leah shook her head. Tom Winn of Winner’s TalentTM (ugh)? No. “No, remember—Tom was on a plane to Los Angeles when she and I last spoke.”

Detective Preston looked up from his notes. “We’ll check that, of course. And I thought you said your mother called you more than once.”

“One of the times we last spoke,” she corrected herself. “You have to understand, we have a difficult relationship. Had.”

“Yes, I’m getting that impression.” Preston managed that with a straight face.

Leah elaborated. “I did not love her. I did not like her. I did not tolerate her. We were done.”

“Done, huh?” Preston took a long look around the richly appointed room, the piano, the art, the glossy, polished floors . . . all the wonders of the McMansion, the first of which could be noticed from the street, as Nellie had planned from the very beginning. Leah wondered if he thought he was being subtle. “So she disowned you?”

“I wish. I disowned her. The third to last time she called me last night, I told her we were finished, that I wanted nothing to do with her again. Again,” she added. “I wanted nothing to do with her again, again.”

“This wasn’t the first time you disowned her?”

“Correct.”

“And that was the third to last phone conversation.”

“Correct.”

Preston’s demeanor was changing, and Leah wondered if it was another cop trick, designed to trip up a subject, or if she was actually seeing him wonder if she was a murderer. “And you’re telling me you fought?”

“I fought. She was being her normal passive-aggressive self and pretending everything was super-duper fine. Neither of us touched each other. You will not find my skin cells beneath her fingernails.”

“So the anger—it was all on one side.”

“The acknowledged anger was all on my side, yes. My mother would not admit she was angry with me, ever. At most she would voice disappointment.” How Leah had lived to disappoint her. Hmm, was that some sorrow, at last? Was she a little sad at the thought that she would never disappoint her again? Was that mourning?

“And then?”

“She called again, and I didn’t answer.” As I was far too busy trying to corrupt Archer Drake’s morals, which were annoyingly concrete. “And the third time, it was just . . .” Something in her throat; God, why was it so fucking dry in here? Her mother cranked the AC year-round, how was that for foolish and extravagant? Cranked it and so it was like the Sahara in there, if the Sahara was entirely contained in a McMansion. She barked an angry cough into her fist and finished. “Breathing. I could just hear her breathing over the phone.”

“So your mother was breathing . . . like gasping? Panting?”

“Like the breathing exercises you do to improve your vocals.”

“Your mother, dying from multiple head wounds, called you and did breathing exercises into your phone?”

Leah shrugged. Sure, if you didn’t know Nellie, that would likely sound strange.

“And your phone is . . . ?”

“Broken.” At his look, she elaborated. “When I got your voicemail I panicked and dropped my phone.”

Preston took in her chilly demeanor, her eyes, which weren’t welling with tears, her hands, which weren’t shaking, and her face, which (most likely . . . she couldn’t see herself, after all) wasn’t pale. “You panicked? You panicked.”

“Yes.” Leah refused to believe that in the entirety of his career, Preston had never seen a loved one not fall apart at a murder scene. Humanity was an endless variety of good and bad, mostly bad. People reacted to loss in many different ways. On the other hand, if he was letting Aaron’s life cloud his thinking . . .

“But even if my phone wasn’t broken,” she continued, shelving that thought for later, “it would only give you the times of the calls. Which you can get from the phone company or her phone, which I’m betting isn’t broken.”

“So during the last call, when your mom did vocal breathing exercises into your phone, you panicked.”