“And you did it.” Con didn’t know why she cared but found herself asking anyway. “Why?”
“For my younger brother. He’s sick. Cancer, but they found it too late. Money was placed in an offshore account to pay for a clone.”
That was a small fortune. Con thought she should almost be flattered. “And his clone wouldn’t have cancer.”
“It’s unlikely, and anyway, we would know to screen for it this time. You had stopped doing refreshes, so what difference did it make? I didn’t know what they were going to do.”
“But you didn’t think about it any too hard, did you?”
“No, I did not,” Laleh said, some of her old poise returning. “I’ve spent years watching billionaires cheating death while complaining about what a hardship it was to have to come in once a month to do a refresh. Why should they live while my brother dies a slow, horrible death?”
It made it somehow better, knowing that Laleh hadn’t been motivated purely by greed. That didn’t mean Con was ready to absolve her. She’d been contacted more than a year ago—the first link in the chain that had led to Con D’Arcy’s murder. Con moved on before she said exactly that. “And then what happened?”
“Nothing. That was it. I thought I was done. Until about three weeks ago.”
“What happened three weeks ago?”
“Your original showed up,” Laleh said.
“She did what?” Con said, her skin going cold.
“She was waiting for me one night when I got home. She was scared and anxious. Said she had gotten herself in over her head and was in danger. She was afraid that something bad might happen to her and needed my help.”
“She knew that you’d tampered with the lockout?”
“She seemed to know everything. Where the money was. All of it.”
“How?” Con asked in disbelief.
“She said there was a battle being waged for control of the company. I think somehow she had gotten involved with Vernon Gaddis.”
“She told you that?”
“Not explicitly, no. But when I mentioned his name, she reacted strangely. Like he frightened her.”
“She knew she was going to die,” Con said, slumping back against the park bench. All along, she’d assumed that her original was an innocent victim.
“I think so. That was the last I ever saw of her. Then she went missing and her death event triggered your revival.”
“I need to talk to Levi Greer,” Con said.
“They arrested him. It popped up on my feed as I pulled up here.”
Con cursed. Clarke might be a son of a bitch, but he seemed plenty good at his job. Well, Levi Greer might be a murderer, but if he was, someone was pulling his strings same as Laleh Askari. There were too many coincidences to think otherwise.
“I have to go,” Laleh said.
“What will you do now?”
“I fly to England tonight. I have family in Manchester.”
After leaving Washington, Con told the car to take her back to Levi Greer’s home. If the police had arrested him, there was a chance they’d be gone and that the house’s identification system would mistake Con for her original and let her in. She was dying to have a look around and get a feel for how her original had lived. But when she got there, she found a police car parked in the driveway and the front door barred by yellow caution tape.
With nothing to be done until morning, she went back to the motel for the night. She stopped in at the manager’s office, curious to know if Detective Clarke had left word. A tired white woman in her sixties looked up from a dog-eared book of sudoku puzzles.
“We don’t log messages. This ain’t the Beverly Wilshire.”
It was a fair point. And despite the motel’s half-hearted approach to record keeping, she doubted Clarke had been by. Why would he? With Levi Greer behind bars, she’d probably dropped way down his list of priorities. Possibly off of it. With a bit of luck, he didn’t even know that she’d played hooky.
Back up in her room, she put on the news and ran a shower. The death of Con D’Arcy was now national news. She sat on the edge of the bed, wrapped in a towel, and flipped to all the news networks to be sure. One channel showed footage of police searching the farm while a reporter described the gruesome discovery of Levi Greer’s wife. A wedding photograph of the happy couple appeared in one corner of the screen. For contrast, Con supposed. She’d also be good with them referring to her as something other than a wife. On another channel, a heated roundtable discussion raged over the ethical treatment of clones. To her surprise, there was even some sympathy for her situation among the panelists. The fact that she was of “limited means” seemed to work in her favor—a polite way of saying broke-ass poor. It was nice to hear something positive, but it wasn’t lost on her that there wasn’t a single clone on the panel. When the discussion turned to Levi Greer, the panel wasn’t nearly so gentle.