“Well, she brought it with her when she moved down here. Said it was her good luck charm and that it had brought me to her or something. We were pretty corny, I’m not going to lie. She even played me some of the new songs she’d been working on, although she swore me to secrecy.”
“She did?” That surprised Con even more than the tree and told her a lot about how her original must have felt about Levi Greer. She had never played her songs for anyone. Ever. She didn’t know what had gone wrong in their marriage, but if her original trusted Levi Greer enough to share those songs with him, then she’d loved him once.
“Then that crazy New Year’s Eve show at Glass House. She had that awful fight with Kala and that prick manager threatening to sue if she didn’t go on. I was halfway to knocking his teeth in. Con wouldn’t stop crying. Like I legit thought I was going to have to take her to the hospital.”
“What happened that night?” Con asked.
Levi’s face fell. “You seriously don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“Zhi’s parents called. He’d died that morning.”
Con became very aware of her own breathing and of the electronic whine that filled her ears. Levi was talking but she couldn’t hear him anymore.
“I have to go,” she said, trying to swallow down what felt like a knotted rope being dragged up her throat. She needed to get outside in the fresh air before she was sick.
Darius Clarke was waiting for her on the jailhouse steps. He was leaning beside the door but pushed off the brick wall and glided up alongside her like a frigate preparing to board a crippled schooner. All she wanted was to reach her car before she started to cry. Somehow she’d managed to hold it back so far, but every step she took, she could feel her makeshift levee begin to give way to a grim hysteria. She thought she’d already grieved for Zhi, but apparently that had just been the opening act. The headliner was itching to take the stage. Then an unexpected thing happened. She looked at Darius Clarke, and the urge to cry went away as if it had never been there at all. Whatever else happened, she would not cry in front of this man.
“I could have sworn I left you at a motel,” the detective said with a bemused smile.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“I had things to do,” Con said.
“Yeah, I saw that,” Clarke said. “Very touching.”
Con stopped halfway down the steps, catching his meaning. What she’d written off as inefficiency had actually been the jail buying Clarke time to get there.
“You were watching.”
“Course I was watching. They notified me as soon as you checked in here. You really think a clone gets into a Virginia jail otherwise? It was a good idea too. Wish I’d thought of it. We could have fed you questions to keep him talking. Wasted opportunity if you ask me. Not every day you get the chance to confront a killer with his victim. Have to hand it to him, though. That was one hell of a performance. For my money, he’s wasting himself playing video games. Should get his ass out to Hollywood. They love lying bastards who can cry on cue out there.”
“He didn’t kill her.”
“Right, it was your mystery men at the farmhouse. And they’re working for who again?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“That’s always the best part of a good conspiracy theory,” Clarke said, his condescension cloaking his words like low-hanging clouds.
“I really don’t think he did it,” she said but made no real effort to convince him. If he’d eavesdropped on her conversation with Levi Greer and still didn’t believe her, there was nothing left that would convince him.
“He did it,” Clarke said with absolute certainty. “Want to know why I didn’t need your witness statement to get a search warrant for his place? Because that farm where you found the body, well, turns out that was Levi Greer’s foster home growing up. And the room where you found his wife’s body, that was the bedroom where the old man used to work him over. The foster parents are monsters. Guess no one wanted to live in that house after word got out what happened there.”
Clarke loaned a file to her LFD and stood silently while she swiped through the pages of Levi Greer’s case file. It painted a vivid portrait of cruelty at the hands of his foster parents, who were both currently serving lengthy jail sentences for a host of criminal charges. The pictures of his childhood bedroom looked little different than it did now. She froze on a series of photographs documenting the horrific bruising on young Levi Greer’s torso.