“No, that wasn’t a question,” Balogun said, flapping a hand at me. “There wasn’t much love lost between you and your mother, Mrs. Kim, and your words told me so. But there was something else your words told me—that you’re either innocent, or a sociopath.”
“What?” I cried, shooting up. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“When I brought up your mother’s friends and suggested they may have a motive, you immediately shut me down,” she said. “In my experience, a guilty personnevermisses a chance to throw suspicion on someone else.Anyoneelse. They don’t care who as long as we’re not looking at them.
“But you didn’t take that chance. Either because you don’t have a guilty conscience, or because you have no conscience at all, and you really don’t care if we suspect you. You don’t care about anything. You just wanted your mother dead.”
I stilled, thinking through my reply carefully. Balogun was smart—one conversation and I couldn’t deny that. She was also tricky, laying traps for me that I couldn’t see coming. I wasn’t guilty of my mother’s murder, but I was guilty of something.
And the last thing I needed was for her to follow that trail and discover what happened to the real Soo Min Kim.
“Well, then, you know the answer to that question too,” I finally said. “You can’t say I’m an emotionless sociopath today, but a raging psychopath last night. Whoever killed my mother was in a rage, and I felt a lot of things toward Omma, but rage wasn’t one of them. The opposite, actually.
“I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the morphine. Maybe it’s because she felt time running out, but the last few weeks, my mother’s been like another person,” I confessed. “Laughing, joking, being kind to me—even in her lucid moments. The last thing she said to me was... that I was an angel.” I swallowed hard. “I’ve waited a long time for my mother to look at me as anything other than a disappointment. Now that it’s finally happened, why would I make it go away?”
A heavy, deep silence spread through the room.
“It’s not that we believe you would,” Kaplan put in. “But someone killed your mother and we need to know why. You and she may have made your peace in her final days... but someone else didn’t. Who?”
“I can’t tell you who, Detective. I don’t know anyone so impatient to see my mother dead that they couldn’t just... wait.”
There was a pause as that sunk in.
“It’s true,” Balogun said, scribbling something in her notepad. “There isn’t much sense in murdering a woman on hospice. But there also wasn’t much sense in killing an innocent house manager and chef on her first day back to work, and yet, two women were killed on this very property only two weeks apart.
“Mrs. Prado worked for your family for twenty-five years,” she continued. “Until, according to her daughter, she was fired three years ago, and then suddenly—out of the blue—you called and offered her a substantial raise to come back.”
Was it a detective thing to make every little action sound suspect?
“Why is that?” she breezed. “Why was Mrs. Prado suddenly fit to work for you today when she wasn’t fit for the job three years ago?”
“It had nothing to do with fitness. Three years ago, I was an ass,” I dropped. “I took over supervising the household staff from Omma, but for reasons unknown, I convinced myself that staff meant slave. I treated them horribly and Mrs. Prado—who knew me since diapers—wouldn’t take any of my shit.
“We butted heads too many times, and instead of admitting I was the problem, I fired her. Big mistake on my part because all the other staff quickly quit without Mrs. Prado there to be a buffer between me and them.
“It took me awhile, but I’m a different person now. I see now what a great, big, flaming asshole I’ve been to too many people in my life,” I said, popping Kaplan’s brows up. “But I don’t want to be that way anymore. I reached out to Mrs. Prado and offered her a raise because I was wrong. Because she deserved an apology. Because she deserved the raise. And because she is—she was the best at her job. I was never going to ask anyone else.”
Balogun looked down at her notepad, then flicked up—sharing a look with her partner.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing, it’s just...” Balogun turned that shrewd look on me. “Your description of the events that led to Mrs. Prado’s termination matched her daughter’s description to a tee. You don’t hesitate to take full responsibility for the matter, and we don’t see that often. Most people aren’t as comfortable with accountability as you seem to be, Mrs. Kim.”
“Thank you.”
She bared her teeth at me in a semblance of a smile. “I didn’t say that was a compliment.”
I bared mine right back. “But I’m sure it was.”
She chuckled. “You caught me. It was.”
“Does this manor have any secret passageways?”
My smile wiped away. Head snapping around, I fixed on Davis—who was standing still and eyes shadowed against the door. “Excuse me?”
“Does this manor have any secret passageways, rooms, or staircases?” he repeated slowly.
I stared at him. “Why would you ask that?”
