Constance (Constance #1)(60)

“Wouldn’t have been your wedding anymore. Would have been the Mary D’Arcy show, trust me.”

“That’s just what she said,” Levi said. “Man, this is so damn weird. Like, my wife is dead. But . . .”

“But here I am.”

“What am I supposed to do with all this?” he said, jabbing himself hard in the chest with four fingers.

“Can I ask how you two met?”

“You really don’t know?”

“No, I have no memory of you at all. She met you and stopped doing her refreshes. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. The team was in DC for a versus against the Filibusters. If we won, we’d make the playoffs for the first time. We did. A group of us went out to celebrate. It was the day after Christmas. We wound up at this club in Shaw. Con was singing with Weathervane. Couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had a way on stage. A presence. I didn’t meet her that night, but I made an excuse and didn’t take the team bus back to Richmond just so I could see her sing again the next night. Thought that’d be it, but the show was at a tiny little club, and she wound up next to me at the bar after the show. Got to talking. Never stopped. You know those moments when you can feel something happening, but you’re too in it to know what it is? Like you’re on the train going a hundred miles an hour, not watching a train go a hundred miles an hour, so you’ve got no perspective on it.”

She did. That’s exactly how she would have described meeting Zhi.

He continued. “I stayed up at her place. We sat around this fake little purple Christmas tree and just talked until it was time to go to the next show.”

“I loved that tree,” Con said.

“Well, she brought it with her when she moved down here. Said it was her good luck charm and that it had brought me to her or something. We were pretty corny, I’m not going to lie. She even played me some of the new songs she’d been working on, although she swore me to secrecy.”

“She did?” That surprised Con even more than the tree and told her a lot about how her original must have felt about Levi Greer. She had never played her songs for anyone. Ever. She didn’t know what had gone wrong in their marriage, but if her original trusted Levi Greer enough to share those songs with him, then she’d loved him once.

“Then that crazy New Year’s Eve show at Glass House. She had that awful fight with Kala and that prick manager threatening to sue if she didn’t go on. I was halfway to knocking his teeth in. Con wouldn’t stop crying. Like I legit thought I was going to have to take her to the hospital.”

“What happened that night?” Con asked.

Levi’s face fell. “You seriously don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“Zhi’s parents called. He’d died that morning.”

Con became very aware of her own breathing and of the electronic whine that filled her ears. Levi was talking but she couldn’t hear him anymore.

“I have to go,” she said, trying to swallow down what felt like a knotted rope being dragged up her throat. She needed to get outside in the fresh air before she was sick.

Darius Clarke was waiting for her on the jailhouse steps. He was leaning beside the door but pushed off the brick wall and glided up alongside her like a frigate preparing to board a crippled schooner. All she wanted was to reach her car before she started to cry. Somehow she’d managed to hold it back so far, but every step she took, she could feel her makeshift levee begin to give way to a grim hysteria. She thought she’d already grieved for Zhi, but apparently that had just been the opening act. The headliner was itching to take the stage. Then an unexpected thing happened. She looked at Darius Clarke, and the urge to cry went away as if it had never been there at all. Whatever else happened, she would not cry in front of this man.

“I could have sworn I left you at a motel,” the detective said with a bemused smile.





CHAPTER TWENTY


“I had things to do,” Con said.

“Yeah, I saw that,” Clarke said. “Very touching.”

Con stopped halfway down the steps, catching his meaning. What she’d written off as inefficiency had actually been the jail buying Clarke time to get there.

“You were watching.”

“Course I was watching. They notified me as soon as you checked in here. You really think a clone gets into a Virginia jail otherwise? It was a good idea too. Wish I’d thought of it. We could have fed you questions to keep him talking. Wasted opportunity if you ask me. Not every day you get the chance to confront a killer with his victim. Have to hand it to him, though. That was one hell of a performance. For my money, he’s wasting himself playing video games. Should get his ass out to Hollywood. They love lying bastards who can cry on cue out there.”

“He didn’t kill her.”

“Right, it was your mystery men at the farmhouse. And they’re working for who again?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“That’s always the best part of a good conspiracy theory,” Clarke said, his condescension cloaking his words like low-hanging clouds.

“I really don’t think he did it,” she said but made no real effort to convince him. If he’d eavesdropped on her conversation with Levi Greer and still didn’t believe her, there was nothing left that would convince him.