“And...” Alex met my eyes. “After. If that’s what you want.”
“I—”
“Mrs. Kim?” Davis appeared at my side. “With me, if you please.”
I certainly didn’t feel like making any love confessions in front of the man who all but accused me of hiring a hitman to kill my mother, so I let him lead me away—leaving my reply unsaid.
That’s how I found myself in the front room, sitting on the couch as the detectives pulled over two armchairs and placed them directly before me.
The proximity allowed me to get a proper look at the two of them, and they were opposites in almost every way.
Balogun was tall, slim, bald, and severe from the way she dressed to her angular features and sharp cheekbones. She was also young. She didn’tappear to be much older than me, but she was already a homicide detective with the LPD.
Whereas her partner, Kaplan, was short, thick, sported a full head of silver hair, and had round red cheeks to go with the almost jolly smile he gave me when he sat down.
A click behind me turned my head.
Davis stepped into the room, shut the door, and leaned against the wood.
“Morning, Mrs. Kim,” Balogun said. “Before we begin, we’d like to warn you that we are recording this interview.” She slipped the recorder out of her pocket and tapped it on before I got a chance to object.
“Go ahead. It’s fine with me.” It really was fine with me. My own phone was on and recording since Davis knocked on my door an hour before and told me to go downstairs.
“We’re sorry for your loss, Mrs. Kim,” Kaplan spoke up. “We know this is difficult, and if you need a minute, please tell us.”
“I will,” I replied. “But I can do this. I want to help.”
“Good,” Balogun said. She whipped out a notepad and pen. “With that said, let’s cut straight to the heart of the matter. There was a lot of rage poured into the attack that killed your mother. Do you know anyone who held such a grudge against her? Did Madame Kim have any enemies?”
I was shaking my head before she finished. “My mother was a hard woman. Strict, judgmental, humorless. But she also minded her own business. She didn’t work, so when she wasn’t hanging out with the Ajumma Gossip Network, she was home—gardening, reading, doing jigsaw puzzles, and keeping herself to herself. She—”
“I’m sorry, excuse me.” Balogun paused in her notetaking. “Ajuman gossip network? Is that what you said? What is that exactly?”
I tossed my head. “Oh, sorry. Of course you don’t know what that is. Ajumma means like middle-aged woman, or married woman, or both in Korean,” I confessed. “Part of the reason my parents chose Lantana is because there’s a thriving Korean American community here. Whenever Mrs. Park, Mrs. Choi, and Mrs. Jeong came over for tea, the four would sit... here,” I whispered, “and gossip about everyone in town. That’s why I called them that.”
Balogun wrote something down. “Had your mother been in contact with her friends recently?”
I shook my head. “Omma stopped seeing all of her friends and pretty much shut the world out when she started losing her hair,” I said bluntly. I wasn’t making that up. Mrs. Park told me as much when I ran into her and her grandson in town that morning. “My mother was a proud woman. She didn’t want anyone seeing her like that.”
“Understandable, but are you sure that was the only reason?” she asked. “There could’ve been a falling out. Maybe the real reason she stopped seeing her friends is because—”
“—because she committed a crime against them so terrible, they waited almost a year after she stopped inviting them over to sneak into her house and stab her in the face?” I sliced off. “And apparently getting this revenge was suddenly so urgent, they had to do it while the manor was full of cops and my mother was already on her deathbed? Because waiting for nature to take its course is such a poor option compared to life in prison.”
My gaze hardened. “Detective, I invited all of my mother’s friends to the party, butyou and your officersdidn’t invite them to stay this morning—meaning, none of them went upstairs around the time my mother was killed, and therefore, aren’t suspects. So why don’t we both stop wasting each other’s time and you just ask me what you want to ask me.”
Kaplan leaned back in the armchair, blown back by that response.
But Balogun didn’t. A smile stretched her lips. “I’m sorry if you think I’m wasting your time, Mrs. Kim, but you certainly aren’t wasting mine. You can tell a lot—almost everything—about a person by the way their own child describes them. And you describe her as hard, judgmental, gossipy, strict”—my own words shot like bullets from her lips—“humorless, exclusionary, distrusting—”
“I didn’t say she was exclus—”
“You said she moved here because there were people that looked like her here,” Balogun spoke over me. “And it was only those people she befriended and invited into her home, correct?”
“I— Yes, but that doesn’t mean she was distrusting—”
“Doesn’t it?” Balogun cocked her head. “These are the same friends she tossed aside when she needed them the most because she didn’t trust themnot to judge her for something as insignificant as a hairless head?” She gestured to her own. “You’re her daughter, but you don’t have a single kind word to say about her.”
“I didn’t—”
