Such a Perfect Family, page 8
From here, I couldn’t glimpse anything of the house.
“Tavish, isn’t it?” It was the neighbor who’d run toward the fire with me. “I’m Tim—I know it must be difficult remembering so many new people.” He followed my gaze. “We can see the property from our place. Did you want to…”
“Yes.” I didn’t know why; it wouldn’t make any difference to my knowledge of the situation, but I had to see.
Tim didn’t talk as he led me to his house and up to the back deck using the external steps. That deck would’ve previously looked down on part of the roof of the Prasads’ single-level residence, the rest of the property obscured by trees. Now Tim’s family had an expansive view across what had been Rajesh and Sarita’s home.
Ash and charred beams, blackened grass and dead trees, that was all that remained. The lake lapped placidly to the left, a silent witness to the horror that had taken place here twenty-four hours ago.
A lone canoeist rowed past, his neck turned to take in the destruction.
Movement. Someone walking through the rubble, a white blot against scorched soil.
“The forensic people have been here since late yesterday—I guess they had to wait for the site to be declared safe,” Tim said. “They still didn’t go in deep that I saw. I don’t know if they worked through the night, but they were here at first light this morning when I took the dog out.”
I knew one of those people was probably a fire investigator, while others had to be connected to the police or the ME’s office—I didn’t know how it worked in this country, who took responsibility for what, but I had enough general knowledge to guess the kind of specialists who’d be looking at the scene.
Bone people.
Forensic anthropologists, I think they were called. They’d have to be brought in if the bodies had been shattered into innumerable shards. So many pieces that they couldn’t tell if two or three people had been inside that house.
Because Ackerson still hadn’t contacted me with an update on the number of fatalities, despite the fact that the forensic teams had been working the site since late the previous day.
“The Alfa Romeo’s down there, isn’t it?” Tim’s face was sympathetic when I made myself look away from the carnage. “Cops say when you can have it back?”
I shook my head. “They’re treating all the vehicles as part of the crime scene. I’ll need to rent a car. Can you recommend a local place?”
Tim looked over to the room that flowed onto the deck. The kitchen, I realized after seeing the long sink tap in the window. A small rectangle of glass, the majority reserved for the walls that faced the lake.
“Hannah and I were talking last night,” the other man said, “and we’d really love to lend you our spare vehicle. It’s a beater and we were planning to give it to our boy when he got his license, but he’s okay with us lending it to you. No rush to return it. Joseph isn’t planning to sit his learner license test until after he finishes up the school year, and then he has to take driving lessons.”
The generosity made my hands clench on the balcony railing. “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. And if you need a place to stay, we have a spare room.”
I couldn’t stand the idea of being stuck with people who’d be watching me with sympathetic eyes the entire time. And if worse came to worst, and Ackerson didn’t drop her suspicions, they’d start to look at me with fear or judgment or prurient curiosity instead.
I’d been through it all before.
“Thank you,” I said, “but I found a place near the hospital.” The nightly fee was one I could afford even with my depleted accessible account, and the family-owned motel was clean and well maintained.
If I did run out of funds, I’d ask my father to transfer me some money. He’d send it, no questions asked, but only up to a point, so I had to be careful with my spending. Because behind closed doors, feared attorney Anand Advani answered to his wife, any money he sent me coming out of his assigned “personal” funds. The rest went into Anand and Audrey’s joint account.
And Audrey would burst a vein at the idea of giving her second son a single red cent. Which was why I’d stolen it. Slowly, and with infinite care, over a period of years, until I had a seven-figure sum sitting in that offshore account. I’d also managed to hang on to it through sheer spite even as I flushed the rest of my money down an endless black hole. Because it had mattered that I have the money, Audrey’s money. A revenge I’d told myself was ice-cold but that had been born in a child’s anguish.
Now that emotion-fueled decision could hang me if it came to light.
It won’t, I told myself. She doesn’t have a clue, will never have a clue. That’s the whole point. To make a fool out of her in front of her face and laugh over her grave when she dies.
Yes, I had a shit ton of mommy issues.
“Oh right, it makes sense you’d want to be close to Diya and Shumi.” Tim’s smile was open, his eyes searching. “Will you have breakfast with us?”
“No, but thank you.” All at once, I didn’t want to be near the house, the smell of soot and fire in my every breath. “If you’re sure about the car?”
“Of course. Let me get the keys.”
The car wasn’t as much of a beater as he’d made it out to be—a small gray sedan, it started straightaway and only had a couple of minor dings in the door. It was a few years old, with knobs and dials for the temperature and other controls, and a radio with a limited bandwidth, but it’d get me where I needed to go.
After thanking Tim one more time, I drove out to the nearest mall to grab the charger I needed, along with a second pair of jeans, a pack of socks, extra boxer briefs, and a stick of deodorant.
The last thing I wanted to do was stink of sweat while talking to Ackerson or the other cops; they’d take it as a sign of guilt.
Dumping everything in the trunk afterward, I shut it, then drove right back to the hospital.
The first ICU patient I saw when I walked in was a Māori man whose age I couldn’t tell due to his injuries, his body showing signs of some kind of a catastrophic accident. The woman who sat beside him was reading quietly to him from what looked like a doorstop of a fantasy novel.
Her exhausted eyes met mine for a heartbeat, a painful understanding passing between us before I moved past.
Seeing a nurse with Diya when I reached her bed, I said, “Is everything okay?”
“Yes. I’m just checking her dressings.” After doing that, she pulled the curtains closed on either side of the bed but left the front open to the view of the nurses’ station. “Hazel’s on a break, but Maria’s monitoring Diya from the station.”
I was glad of the droplet of additional privacy. “Hi, baby.” I leaned over to lightly brush my lips over the side of Diya’s.
I hated the tube that came out of the other side of her mouth because it meant my beautiful wife couldn’t breathe on her own. The ventilator hissed, its mechanical breaths a constant pulse interspersed with beeps from other machines.
Her lips were soft, slicked over with something. The nurses, taking care of her. But it wasn’t what she would’ve used. Diya had a very specific five-step skin-care routine for the morning and an even longer one for nighttime. “I’ll get you that raspberry-flavored stuff you like. Korean beauty products, right? See? I do pay attention when you tell me these things.”
Her hand remained motionless, her hair tangled on the pillow. I tried to smooth it out as gently as I could. “Who’s Annie, baby?” I murmured, thinking of how desperately she’d tried to tell me something when I’d first found her.
Annie…they said…about Annie…not…
But she was silent, and when a doctor walked in, I took the opportunity to ask him about Diya’s injuries in detail. It had struck me that I’d been wrong to tell the surgeon to stick to generalities—the exact nature of Diya’s wounds might tell me something about who’d done this to her.
“No smoke inhalation that we can determine,” Dr. Chen said, his voice far deeper than I’d expected given his near-skeletal frame. “Your wife must’ve managed to get out before the fire really took hold. Eleven stab wounds. Six of them were superficial—but five went deep enough to do significant damage. One in particular only missed severing her abdominal aorta by a millimeter.”
He pointed to Diya’s stomach. “That one caused the worst bleeding, but the ones that hit her kidney and inferior vena cava as well as her liver, along with the one at her neck, are the most dangerous. A little longer before getting her to the ER and it might’ve been too late.” His manner was brusque and pragmatic, taking the emotion out of the situation.
It helped. “How long before you know if she’s out of the woods?”
“No way to tell at this stage,” the doctor said. “Right now, it’s watch and wait. Especially when it comes to her head injury.”
My phone buzzed. I’d have ignored it except that I’d just realized the time. “That might be Shumi’s family.” Taking it out, I glanced at the message. “They’re here, coming up to the ICU.”
Maybe they would know about Annie, this woman whose name Diya had never spoken until she lay bleeding and dying in my arms.
Chapter 16
Private notes: Detective Callum Baxter (LAPD)
Date: Dec 14
Time: 14:03
Finally got a copy of Virna’s will. No unexpected bequests in there—and no mention of Tavish Advani. Bulk of the estate will pass on to her son, Jason, but he’s insistent that Advani must’ve siphoned money from his mother in other ways.
I have to agree on one point: Advani is a financial genius. I did a bit of digging around and there’s a reason he held such a high position at his age. Man delivers when he isn’t getting into bed with his clients. If anyone knows how to play hide-and-seek with money, it’s Advani.
That uptight firm he worked for wouldn’t give me the names of his clients, but I managed to track one down after trawling through social media photos where Advani was tagged at various shindigs, and making some cold calls.
Vincent White was more than happy to talk about Advani—he’s pissed the man “jumped firms”—I guess that’s the cover story for Advani’s firing.
“I’m waiting to see where he pops up,” White said. “The rest of them are good, but Tavish? Pure genius. Got me returns like no one else—so good that I actually had a forensic accountant go over the books, figured maybe it was some pyramid deal.
“Nope, all straight. Tavish kept precise records of every transaction—which is why I learned he was doing deals for me at like four a.m. to take advantage of various time zones. Man is smart and focused and more than earns his paycheck. Whichever firm he joins, I’ll be shifting all my money over there.”
Have to say it wasn’t what I was expecting to hear, not with Jason’s accusations of financial malfeasance. But then, lots of folks are clean at work and messy in private, so maybe Tavish kept his financial messiness to his love life.
Still haven’t found anyone he dated between or before Jocelyn Wai and Virna Musgrave, but I have managed to track down a college friend of his. Maybe Emilio Vasquez can shed some light on our enigma of a person of interest.
Chapter 17
Even though I’d never met Shumi’s family, I would’ve recognized her mother at first glance—she was an older version of Shumi: the same rounded face, the same soft lips and big doe eyes that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a fifties pinup. Not much difference in their heights, either. Both around five four, with bodies that tended toward curves.
No swollen eyes for Mrs. Kumar, no dried tear tracks, but that was likely because she was holding herself so stiffly that she was permitting nothing to escape. I knew what that felt like—and I knew the crash that would come when she released her anguish at last.
The young man with her, by contrast, had eyes feathered with burst red vessels behind his spectacles, his nose rubbed raw from all the times he’d wiped it.
Shumi’s father was a study in grim lines. If not for the circumstances, I’d have pegged him as a beleaguered executive—he had the silvered hair, his neatly trimmed mustache the same shade, and was a short and somewhat stocky man. He wore a suit, as if he’d dressed on autopilot for work.
It was wrinkled from the flights.
“This is Dr. Chen,” I said when they reached us. “I’m Tavish.”
A nod of acknowledgment from the older man before he looked at the doctor. “Our daughter?”
“Please follow me.” He spoke to the family as they walked, while I trailed behind. “Shumi suffered four deep stab wounds alongside three more minor ones.” He waited as if to see if they wanted a detailed breakdown of her injuries as I had with Diya, but when no one spoke, he said, “It’s a miracle she’s alive—your daughter has a strong spirit.”
“She always was stubborn,” Shumi’s mother said, her voice crisp.
“It’ll serve her well in this fight.” The doctor brought them to a stop in front of Shumi’s bed in the overflow unit. “I’ll allow all three of you to visit with her today, but please keep it to one or two people at a time going forward. And maintain calm—I know you’re emotional, but you won’t help her by wailing and weeping.”
“We won’t startle her,” Shumi’s father promised, then looked at me. “You’ll stay? We’ll talk after.”
“Of course.” I propped up the wall nearby while the three of them visited Shumi. I could hear sniffles but that was about the loudest sound aside from the doctor’s retreating footsteps as he returned to his rounds.
The nurses didn’t interrupt the family until it was time to change one of Shumi’s drips.
All three stepped away to join me.
“You should eat and get some sleep,” I said, leaning on what I’d been told. “She’s going to rely on you when she wakes—this is the time for you to rest, so you’re strong for when she needs you.”
Shumi’s mother gave a small nod. “He’s right. We can’t get sick ourselves.” Her voice was calm, her words clipped. “Do you know where we could stay? We didn’t book anything.”
As I told them about the motel, I hoped I wasn’t anywhere near her vicinity when she cracked at last—because it would not be pretty. “Place is clean and modern, and there’s food delivery from a variety of restaurants. Looks like it’s mostly used by families in town to see the mud pools. I can take you—I have a car borrowed from a neighbor.”
That was when I realized. “Where’s your luggage?”
“A lady at reception said she’d store it when we told her why we were here,” Shumi’s brother, Ajay, said in a quiet voice. “I guess everyone knows about the fire and everything.”
“Yes.” It wasn’t every day New Zealand woke up to the news of the mass murder—and attempted murder—of an entire family.
My stomach lurched.
My name was going to end up in the articles. It was pure blind luck it hadn’t to this point. Fuck.
* * *
—
It was only after Shumi’s family had checked into the motel and I’d helped Ajay carry their luggage over to their family suite that I said, “Do any of you know anyone named Annie?” It was a long shot, since they were in-laws, rather than part of the immediate Prasad family—I wasn’t surprised when they frowned and gave me confused looks.
“No, is that a friend of Diya’s you want to contact?” Shumi’s mother asked. “You should get Ajay to help you look online. He’s very clever with the computer.” A fond smile on her face, she patted her son on the arm.
Who surprised me by saying “Actually, I might have seen an Annie on Shumi’s friends list. Let me have a look.” The clean-cut male pushed up his spectacles. “Mum, Dad, you go in and shower. I’ll be right in.”
“Don’t be too long, Ajay beta,” his mother said. “Tavish is right. You have to rest.”
Ajay nodded and pulled out his phone. But instead of opening any social media apps, he shot a glance over his shoulder at the open door of the suite, then nudged his head for me to start walking back to the car.
“It’s not Annie,” he said after we were away from the door. “It’s Ani.”
I heard the difference in pronunciation at once, realized that was what Diya had actually said. The A part of the name was more like an uh sound. Take the m out of “money,” and you’d have the right pronunciation. Of course my fucked-up brain would make that comparison when I could’ve as easily used a word like “honey.”
“Ani,” I said after telling my grief-manic brain to shut up. “You know who that is?”
Brown eyes stared at me from behind the smudged lenses of his spectacles—paler eyes than Shumi’s, set in a more angular face. “How come you don’t already know?”
Ajay shook his head almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth. “I forgot. You two met and fell in love in the space of, like, a month, right? My mum heard from Sarita auntie,” he said in explanation of how he knew. “They aren’t”—a quick pause—“weren’t super close, but I guess she wanted Mum to know in case people started to gossip and make up things.”
Sarita auntie.
It felt odd to hear composed and sharp-witted Dr. Sarita Prasad being referred to as an auntie. Dr. Rajesh Prasad had no doubt been Uncle Rajesh. To simply use the first name of an elder was just not done in large quarters of the Indian community.
Even my publicly ruthless hard-ass of a father was Uncle Anand to some. My mother, by contrast, hated being auntied—and it had nothing to do with different cultural expectations. “Just call me Audrey,” she’d said to my paternal cousin when he’d been only seven. “ ‘Auntie’ makes me feel so old.”
