Deja Who (18 page)

“Y
ou stabbed me,” Archer said for the third time, “which I generously overlooked—”

“Stalker,” Leah said as if talking to the air. “Stalker hired by my mortal enemy.”

“Okay, that's a fair point, but you're breaking up with me?”

“How can I do that? We were never boyfriend and girlfriend.”

“We were negotiating, dammit!”

“A month ago I didn't even know your name. You, of course, knew mine. Because, as earlier: stalker.”

“I let you feel me up in your car!”

“Oh, ‘let' me?”

“I gave you my innocence! Repeatedly! Which wasn't part of the plan except you've got great hands and oh my God, your mouth . . .”

“That is quite enough about my mouth.”

“You used your sexuality as a weapon! And now, after you've callously gotten what you wanted—”

“What did I want, exactly?”

“—you're breaking up with me because my dad
didn't
kill my uncle? Cat will understand where I'm coming from,” he added darkly. “She, like me, was vilified for shit she didn't do. Or people related to her didn't do.”

“I'm breaking up with you—dammit!” As this was all happening outside a curiously empty desk (on TV the desk sergeants were always at their desks) while Detective Preston looked on with the unapologetic air most cops have (“yeah, sorry, I know this is none of my business, but you'd be surprised how often ‘none of my business' turns into ‘totally my business,' so I'm just going to linger and shamelessly eavesdrop, and sorry in advance”) while witnessing heated exchanges, she plucked Archer by the elbow, nodded a terse good-bye to a bemused Preston (who turned out to be almost okay given his previous life nonsense and propensity to yank the handcuffs off his hip before he had all the facts), and marched Archer out of the police station. As she expected, he bitched incessantly, and loudly, and didn't appear to give a single shit about the stares and interest they were attracting.

Until then, the arrest-jail nonsense had been almost . . . not fun, but . . . interesting? Alarming yet intriguing? She wasn't sure there was a word for it. She had never been frightened. She had never felt threatened. Mostly she watched and listened and, when she thought it was appropriate, commented. As at work, when she felt it was appropriate to comment, and when the person she spoke to felt it was appropriate, were often different. As at work, she didn't especially care.

She had started on Preston in the car on the way to the, as Archer put it, hoosegow.

“All right. Here is my confession.” When she caught Preston's startled gaze in the rearview mirror, she continued. “That was inappropriate. I should have prepared you before confronting you with past-life stressors.”

He made a strange noise from the driver's seat, an amalgam of a sigh and an annoyed grunt. “That's not even close to the confession I was hoping for.”

“Yes, well.” She watched the perfectly manicured lawns roll by, somewhat startled to observe that they looked exactly the same to her even though she was under arrest for murdering her mother. Was this her dearest dream or most awful nightmare? She had imagined Nellie dead so many times. She had imagined killing her so many times. Never by Emmy-induced head trauma, though. She had to give the killer points for symbolic originality. “I can't oblige you on that one, sorry to say. But as to the other matter—”

“You're going,” he muttered, occasionally glancing at her in the mirror, “to keep talking at me about this. Aren't you?”

“Yes, I am. Because it's important, Detective.”

“How is
not
convincing me you didn't kill the mother you admitted wishing dead important? How is anything else we could be discussing more important than you getting clear?”

“Sorry, I misspoke. It's not important to
me
.”

“Aw, hell. Look, there's nothing wrong with me.”

Excellent.
He was ignoring Cop 101, to wit, don't engage with the psycho in the backseat. She had worried he would blithely ignore her, or feign interest while toting up an imaginary
scoreboard in the middle of his brain (Reasons I Can Justify Arresting That Pain in My Ass Leah Nazir).

“Nothing,” he said again, as if saying a word meant anything, or changed anything.

“Of course there is.”

He sighed. “The polite thing to do—”

“Don't waste my time with Etiquette 101. You're arresting people for homicide because they scared you and pissed you off—”

“You're half right,” he retorted, managing to drive steadily out of pure force of will.

“—which will not be at all good for your career. And honestly, Detective, aren't you tired of being afraid of not knowing? You've been worrying for years that you feel guilty because you were a killer of some kind. Well, you weren't. Don't you want to know who was? There's a reason you're a homicide detective instead of a cable repairman.”

“That's not relevant to your mother's murder.”

“Of course it isn't.” He sighed, possibly in relief. “Except for the whole false arrest debacle.” He groaned, probably not in relief.

“I don't want to discuss this.”

“But it's a long dull drive.” She guessed. She had no idea which precinct/ideal body dump site he was taking her to. “And I
do
want to discuss it.”

“Change of subject.”

“But it's so foolish, especially when you consider how close you are to putting the nightmares of your childhood behind you.”

“Change of subject
right now.
”

“You're right. There is one more option.”
You realize you're antagonizing a grown man with a gun, yes? Have you considered the fact that he might be your killer?
Leah ignored her inner voice, which often made cowardly suppositions. Here was a man who had a problem she could assist him with. If he was her killer, so be it. At least she wouldn't wonder anymore.

Oh but Archer . . .

She shoved that thought away. “You could go the other way, I guess.”

“Miss Nazir, I do not fucking want to talk about this!”

Hearing a sworn officer of the law shriek in a closed vehicle as she sulked in the backseat with her hands cuffed behind her was a definite first. Oh, the colleagues she loathed would
adore
this. Perhaps she would embellish the story for them: “And then he perpetrated police brutality all over my head and shoulders which stung horribly.” Mmmm . . . better not. In addition to being illegal, false allegations of police brutality were impolite, and sometimes led to murderous misunderstandings.

“All right,” she said after a long moment in which a) she was intrigued and b) Detective Preston was grateful. “I only have one thing to add—stop that,” she scolded as Preston banged his head on the steering wheel. It was fortunate they were at a red light. And that the horn was located elsewhere in the vehicle. “You'll kill us both, or give yourself a nasty headache, or both, or you'll only kill you, or you'll only kill me. All those results are unacceptable.”

“I. Am. Begging. You.”

“My last comment on the subject under discussion—”

“It's not! Under discussion, I mean.”

“—is that none of it was your fault. I implied as much because I'm a bitch, for which I have apologized.”

“You didn't, actually. Oh my Christ, we're still talking about this.”

“Hmm.” That brought Leah up short. “Well, I meant to apologize. It was on my list of things I meant to discuss. But as I was saying, none of it was your fault; it was all on Albert DeSalvo.”

True to her word, she dropped the subject and contented herself with looking out the window and humming “No Light, No Light” under her breath. Florence and the Machine was one of the more vastly underrated musical acts in the history of music. She wondered if Detective Preston took requests.

At the station she had been booked, which was a series of paperwork, followed by her mug shot, and then her fingerprints were taken (no ink required in the twenty-first century and she was a bit let down, having been looking forward to the drama of ink-stained fingertips), scanned, and put into the System, which, as an Insighter, was redundant, as upon licensing all Insighters were routinely printed and photographed, new photos required every five years.

Then she had been escorted to a spotless, well-lit holding cell

(does television get
everything
wrong?)

populated by half a dozen other women of various ages, conventional attractiveness, skin color, and clothing choices. Per television, they should all be prostitutes and/or meth addicts.

Only one of them looked like a prostitute (Leah did not approve of tube tops on anyone, never mind an overweight, sallow-skinned woman in her late thirties) and she was the shoplifter. The others were:

1) Karen the Boyfriend Beater. Karen was a gorgeous young lady (“Young lady? Jeez. I'm twenty-nine, okay, and when I was fourteen, I helped my uncle set the Piggly Wiggly on fire, so ‘lady' is off, too.”) with skin so dark it had mahogany undertones. She tolerated her boyfriend's gambling habit, his inability to keep a steady job (which was hilarious, as he was a temp worker, so his steady job was to not keep a steady job), and his unfortunate propensity for anal sex. (“That doesn't sound so bad,” Renee the Shoplifter said. “
Only
anal sex.” “Oh.”)

Karen worked both her jobs with an often-throbbing backside, but when she objected to his $1,000 wager on the outcome of an upcoming Cubs game, he backhanded her. Karen's response to this was to hoist a knee into his testicles and, while he writhed and sniveled on the kitchen tile, beat him repeatedly in the face with a container of Clorox wipes. In true douchebag fashion, he called the police.

“That makes so much sense,” Leah decided after hearing the lurid and hilarious tale.

“Thanks!” Karen smiled, pleased. “My mom, she said the same thing, and all my sisters did, too.”

“Yes, well. You, and they, used to be comfort girls in Japan.
Chinese
comfort girls in Japan,” she emphasized, assuming they would catch the reference. “Sometimes comfort girls volunteered. You didn't. So in this life, you're not interested in tolerating male bullshit.”

“That's creepy,” Karen announced, “but you're pretty good. Normally I'd be super pissy about being called a hooker. No offense,” she told Celia the Hooker.

“No, no.” Celia waved it away. “S'fine.”

2) Terry the Sociopathic Cat Cooker. Terry did not like being on the wrong end of unrequited love. Not that what she felt for her boyfriend was love, unrequited or otherwise. “He's the only one that can make me come,” she explained.

“Who can make you come.”

“He can. Like I said.”

“No, you said ‘he's the only one
that
can make me come' and it's ‘
who
can make me come.'” At Terry's long, unsettling stare (unsettling to someone unused to staring down socios once or twice a month), she added, “Never mind. Continue.”

“Right. Anyways—”

Good God. Anyway! Singular! If she says “towards” or “amongst” they'll have to arrest me for homicide. Again.

“—he can't make me feel that good all the time and then just take it away. He's too big for me to hurt directly, so Muffin had to go.”

“He can, though,” Celia said. Leah concurred, but did not waste time or breath agreeing. “Just like you've got the right to dump anybody you want.”

“Yeah, that's a totally different thing.”

“It's not,” Celia tried again, to the same effect.

“And then that crybaby hostess calls the cops! Like Muffin muffins would be so much worse than the usual crap coming out of that kitchen.” Terry had indulged her anti-cat politics at her (former, Leah assumed) place of employment, Dan's Diner. “Cat's totally fine. Okay, a little singed. But otherwise fine. It's not like I would have really done it.”

“Why lie to
us
, Terry?” Celia wondered. Oh, she was
adorable. Leah assumed it was either a) the sociopath's instinctive, perpetual habit of lying even when it was easier to tell the truth, or b) television's portrayal of what happened to those in jail who became, as John Cusack put it, “garrulous in the company of thieves.” Hmm. Is that why she was so taken with Archer? He did remind her of Cusack in
Better Off Dead
, a bit, but not, thank heavens, Cusack in
The Raven.

“So, what is it? Who'd I used to be?”

Leah shrugged. “You were a sociopath then, and you're a sociopath now.” Déjà vu. She'd said that earlier to Chart #6116.

“Yeah, I figured.” Terry preened a bit, ignoring everyone's tandem eye rolls.

How I loathe that sociopathy now has cultural cache.

3) Brienne the Shoplifter. Brienne alternately claimed entrapment, absentmindedness, and drunken intent. “It can happen to anybody!” she protested. “I was thinking about the rest of my errands and took it without thinking.”

“Brienne.”

“You can't tell me people don't do that every damn week in this country.”

“Brienne.”

“It was
one
thing.”

“It was a ten-speed bicycle from Wal-Mart.”

She threw up her hands. “Without thinking! Can happen to anyone!”

“For God's sake.”

She dropped her hands back to her lap, a petite blonde who
could not pull off a tube top. “So what's the scoop? What's my backstory?”

“I have no idea.” At the other woman's glare, Leah added, “Sorry. Don't believe what you see on TV; Insighting doesn't explain everything. Sometimes people do silly things.” And that, too, sparked déjà vu; it reminded her of Archer. Although these last several days, few things did
not
remind her. How irritating, while also comforting. “If you were my patient, I'd have to put you on reindyne and we'd likely have to do a few sessions. And even then I might not be able to help you.”
And regardless, you would be responsible for your actions in this life, whoever you were in another life.