Page 74 of Deja Who
THIRTY-EIGHT
Had to be done. It absolutely had to be done.
Oh, God, forgive me, the look. The look in his eyes.
“I had to do it,” Leah tearfully told the cabbie. She was a matronly woman in her forties, blond and brown-eyed and fair-skinned and running to plump, she and a million others like her in the Midwest. She wasn’t at all alarmed by the crying once she made sure Leah wasn’t physically hurt, or needed a hospital or the police.
“Don’t take me back to the police,” she begged, “I just got out of there. I had to get him clear of me. Of my life. My mess. Everything. I had to get him away. But oh, you should have seen. How he looked, oh, God. God.”
She burst into fresh tears, accepting the box of tissues and instantly going through half of them. “Please put the price for these on the meter,” she ordered between sobs.
A snort from the driver. “Not charging you for tissues, honey.”
“Thank you, that’s very nice. If you had a daughter you wouldn’t make her do cattle calls for tampon commercials unless she really wanted to, right?”
“A what for a what?”
“An audition where they call in dozens of actresses and see them all in the same one- or two- or three-day period.”
“Cattlecall?” the cabbie (Brenda Morgan, per the ID helpfully posted on the plastic divider between them) said, lips thinning in distaste. “Is that what they call those? Awful. Well, hon, here it is. I have four daughters, two in med school, one in law school, and one is teaching history to seventh graders. None of them ever wanted to do a cattle call and never have.”
“You’re a good mom. Your daughters are so fortunate,” Leah said, more grateful than she could express. Although why she was grateful to a strange cab driver for not charging her for half a box of tissues she did not know. Was she so starved for positive maternal attention that she would latch onto any older woman who was nice to her?
No, of course not.
No, except for Cat.
Cat!
Oh holy hell.Leah clutched damp tissues in her fist and thought hard. Her killer wasn’t content to murder Leah and be done with it once the purpose of both their lives was fulfilled. Sometimes he was arrested and sometimes he lived to a ripe old age and sometimes he was killed while killing her, but one way or the other, they both ended up dead.
This time around he went for Leah’s mother first, doubtlessassuming that their parent-child dynamic would dictate a bond. Next time, he could beat someone to death shedidcare about: Archer. Or Cat. Archer was safe, she hoped.
“Can you please go faster?” she begged. “Please please go faster. I’ll tip you one hundred percent.”
“You won’t,” the cabbie said with an envious air of serenity as she took the second-to-last turn to Leah’s apartment. “I’m not letting you do that when you’re obviously not yourself.”
“You have no way of knowing what ‘myself’ is; you don’t have a baseline,” Leah argued, annoyed out of her tears. “This could be daily behavior for me. I might often weep in cabs and tip one hundred percent. Two hundred percent!”
“Somehow I doubt it,” came the dry reply. After a pause, the older woman continued. “I’m not charging you for the ride, either.”
Leah sat up straight and bit off the words. “That. Is. Just. Ridiculous! How do you expect to make a living if you don’t charge?”
“My husband works, too.”
“But that doesn’t—”
“You helped my niece. Years ago.”
Blowing her nose, she looked up in mid-honk and caught the cabbie’s gaze in the mirror. “I did?”
“If you’re Leah Nazir, yeah. You were on TV a couple years ago, you helped the cops figure out who that Cereal Rapist scumbag was.”
She vaguely remembered the Cereal Serial Rapist. A local reporter, one more insensitive than the rest of the herd, hung the nickname on Marcus Farrady, who, after he raped his victims, hung around long enough to have a bowl of cereal (his first preference) or toast. Something breakfast-y, at any rate.He took the bowl and utensils he used with him. When the cops caught up with him, a full quarter of his unfinished basement was shelf after shelf of mismatched cereal bowls, small plates, bread knives, and spoons.
Leah had been called in to consult, and reasoned that he could have been the reincarnation of three deceased serial rapists (deceased number 1: electric chair, 1990; deceased number two: succumbed to cancer in prison, 1991; deceased number three: shot and killed by last victim, 1992). She backtracked birthdays to their dates of death and was able to come up with a list for the cops. It helped that the Cereal Serial Rapist actually looked and acted like a rapist: shifty eyes, blocky hands like bowling balls, murderous temper, bull-like shoulders, crippling misogyny, juvenile record of peeping, adult record of assault. Leah found it refreshing; bad as their crimes were, it was always much more horrible when the monsters looked like they could be your next-door neighbor.
It also helped that he obsessively ate bowl after bowl of cereal while being interrogated. Obtaining a warrant was not difficult. And though he’d had ample time to ditch the evidence in his basement, Farrady hadn’t bothered. That behavior was not at all refreshing. She had ceased wondering why so many serialanythingswanted to be caught years ago.
