As I watched, he stood in the open doorway to the two-bedroom suite and took a deep breath, as if bracing himself, before he walked in. Poor kid. Only twenty-one if I had my mental math correct, and having to handle his parents’ grief and worry on top of his own.
Getting into my vehicle on that thought, I drove back to the hospital, but there was no change in Diya’s status, her face serene in her wounded sleep. As I sat beside her, my hand on hers, I thought about what she’d actually said. It hadn’t just been Ani’s name, hadn’t just been a moment of her life flashing before her eyes.
She’d been trying to tell me something.
Ani…they said…about Ani…not…
I couldn’t make any sense of that, but it was all I had. And I knew I had to follow that fragile thread—even more so after I was called into the police station for a formal interview by Detective Ackerson.
I’d forgotten to make that call to my father, forgotten to get alawyer. No matter. I could handle this first interview on my own—all I had to do was keep my cool and remember what Dad had told me prior to my first ever conversations with the cops in LA.
“Never flinch,” Anand had advised after Jocelyn’s fall, his brown eyes as hard as granite. “Cops are like wolves on the hunt. A single drop of blood and they start to smell victory.”
I’d almost asked him if he’d learned that lesson from his wife. In the realm of film and television, my mother was an actress touted as the best of her generation, her reputation one of warmth and kindness. Behind the closed doors of my parents’ strikingly modern Malibu home? The mask came well and truly off.
Audrey not only scented blood, she drew it with vicious efficiency.
Of the three men who lived or had lived in that home, it was my brother, Raja, alone who’d experienced Audrey as she was to the outside world. Ironically enough, in the end, my childhood had proved a gift—no cop could come close to the cold manipulation that was Audrey’s stock-in-trade.
“So.” Detective Ackerson’s tone was polite, even kind, but her eyes drilled into me in the confines of the interview room. “You’re doing contract work for a finance magazine.”
“Yes.”
“Were your in-laws aware of the downgrade in your employment status?”
I hated this windowless box of a room marked up by God knows what, my mind pushing to shove me back into the hellish seven-hour interrogation by Detective Gina Garcia that my father had told me I needed to white knuckle because if the case went to court, we’d have evidence of my cooperation as Jocelyn’s grief-stricken lover.
Give it up, Tavish. We both know you two had a volatile relationship—what went wrong that night? Did she do something that drove you to pushher off the balcony? Provocation can be looked at as a mitigating factor, but you have to be honest.
Gina Garcia was the kind of tough-talking cop who didn’t let up. She just kept on pushing, her questions unrelenting. Drops of water wearing away stone.
But I’d walked out of her interrogation room and I’d walk out of this one.
“Sarita and Rajesh understood that I had to establish myself in my career here and that it could take time,” I said without acrimony. “They did the same when they moved to New Zealand.”
It had been a slender strip of common ground between us, Dr.Rajesh Prasad going as far as to slap me on the shoulder and say, “It’s hard to change countries and start all over again—it makes me feel good that our Diya’s found a husband who loves her enough to make the effort.”
It had been the night before the party, the two of us out on the back patio. The sun had set, the water motionless under the dark orange light that was already fading to charcoal at the edges. “I do, sir,” I’d said as two black swans took to the water, twin ripples in their wake. “Love Diya. And she wants to live here, so that’s what we’ll do.”
He didn’t need to know that Los Angeles had become hostile ground to me after Virna’s accident. The world of wealth and fame in which I existed had seemed far more angered by her death than by Jocelyn’s. For Joss, they’d wanted lurid stories and endless gossip. For Virna, they’d demanded justice.
Hypocrites.
“Care to tell me why you left your previous position?” Ackerson asked in a calm tone, her expression neutral, nothing accusatory about it.
Talk to me, it said,I’m no threat at all. Too bad for her that I’d played this game against far more experienced foes and won.
I just had to hold my nerve.
Chapter 20
Private notes: Detective Callum Baxter (LAPD)
Date: Dec 21
Time: 14:27
Lunch with Gina was productive. Turns out the gossip rags weren’t making things up—Gina did look at Advani as a suspect in the Jocelyn Wai case. But Wai’s fall was eventually ruled an accident.
