Page 12 of What’s Left of You (What Left #2)

I keep staring around the corner where Jensen went for another moment. I’m betting they’ve got evidence down here. Otherwise I’d expect them to be upstairs yelling instead. It’s early, but not that early. Gabe makes it sound like they worked all night long.

Vinny smoothes a hand down my arm, and I walk with him up the steps.

There’s a ledge at the top that overlooks the front door and a sitting area that’s crowded with bags.

It’s fairly large, and to one side I spot a bathroom and a hall on the opposite end of the room.

This is definitely a drop spot, but there’s enough space between the couch and all the bags that I don’t feel overcrowded sitting up here.

There’s two chairs on the opposite side of the room from the couch, facing it.

We sit on the couch, and Gabe sits opposite us. “We’ve been doing a lot of analysis on what we know about Porscha and Alastair’s behaviors. It’s something Sterling will want to talk to you both about, individually.”

“So we’re going to be here twice as long?” I ask.

“Not necessarily. I can do the other interview. It shouldn't take too long,” Gabe replies, trying to smile pleasantly, but he looks too damn tired to pull it off, and he just shakes his head and yawns before he continues. “We all want them found. Alive. There’s nothing you can tell us about either of them that wouldn’t be helpful. ”

Since I’m getting the feeling their overall view of the two killers is vague, I think they need us. We knew Alastair best, and they have all those notes, so there shouldn’t be much to share on that front.

Gabe leans forward, taking out his phone.

“I took a picture of some words we’re using to describe the two of them.

It helps us build the picture of how they think about things, and if we understand them we can try and think ahead about what they might do next.

Until proven otherwise we’re going to assume they are working together. ”

After a moment of tapping, he gets up and crosses the short space, turning the phone to show us the screen. It’s a photo of a whiteboard, the reflection making it a little hard to see. It takes me a moment to be able to read all of the words.

Alastair: adaptive, analytical, mentally detached, artistic, physically strong,

Porscha: manipulative, master of disguise, mentally deranged, end game?

I read the list twice. “That doesn’t sound like my mother.”

“What doesn’t?”

My eyes leave Gabe’s phone to find Sterling standing at the top of the stairs. He appears tired too, and I guess it’s a general theme in the house today. He’s holding a manila folder, probably filled with things I’m sure I don’t want to see.

“Master of disguise,” I say, narrowing my eyes at him. He steps closer, nodding towards Vinny who barely returns the gesture. “That’s not my mother. She’s not a master of anything.”

He hesitates, not saying a word until he’s standing right in front of us beside Gabe. “Porscha has a completely different persona now. What your mother was like then and who she is now aren’t necessarily the same person.”

I scoff. “You don’t get it. My mother isn’t what I would call a master of disguise.

She’s a manipulator, sure. She manipulated the whole world into thinking she died.

But disguise? I don’t think you’ve got that part right, Sterling.

She took notes to try to remember things about people so she could emulate them. I don’t call that mastering shit.”

We’ve gone over this. Sterling had so many questions once I was cleared from the hospital after Alastair disappeared, and I answered his questions but for the most part the FBI wanted to get moving to try and find Porscha and Alastair before they were too far gone.

Citrus Grove is close enough to the borders of Georgia and Alabama that if she wanted to cross state lines she could’ve done so fast enough before any messages got out to the local PDs up there.

My initial interview with Sterling was rushed, and Tyler continued it, but for three weeks after their disappearance I recounted things about my mother I hadn’t considered in years.

“You never said she took notes,” Sterling says slowly.

“I said she liked to pretend to be someone else,” I reply. “She wasn’t a people person. Why do you think she chose a job she could manage by herself?”

Sterling drags a hand down his face, messing with the scruff on his cheeks.

I study that way too long, and almost miss the look he shoots towards Gabe.

“We’d like to chat with you about Victim 6, but I’d also like to talk to you about Porscha again, Jo.

If there’s something wrong with the victimology then we’ve misunderstood each other over the last weeks. ”

“You didn’t misunderstand,” I say with a frown, glancing at Vinny.

He has his mask on, and I know him well enough to see the concern in his eyes but I’m not sure anyone else can.

“I didn’t think she would be considered a master of disguise because she knew how to act like other people.

” I snort. “I thought of it like… impersonating. Or pretending. She liked to pretend she was happier than she was. She hated how we lived.”

Sterling nods, gesturing back towards the kitchen. “Let’s chat, Jo. I think there’s a few things we should go over.”

~~~

“Tell me exactly how Porscha would pretend.”

I glare at Sterling, my legs tucked up beneath me as we sit together in the front room.

Vinny is still upstairs speaking with Gabe.

Somewhere between Sterling heading upstairs and us coming back down, he managed to tell Gabe about another body.

At first, I thought it had just turned up, but after pressing him for a bit, he gave me the bare minimum.

They found her yesterday with no ID, and there’s no telling how long it’ll take to figure out who she was.

Which means there’s not only a Victim 6, but a Victim 7 too.

A mix of fear and apprehension lingers over me as I think about the body. Did my mother kill her, or Alastair? Or are they tag teaming the victims, creating a new version of the CGS altogether?

“Jo.”

I blink, forgetting what he just asked me.

The furniture downstairs is closer together than upstairs, and sitting next to me on a different chair still leaves me within touching distance.

When I stare blankly at him he hesitates before reaching out to rest a hand over mine.

“Jo, feel free to take your time. But I really need you to hear more about Porscha’s interest in impersonating people.

That’s not something that was ever investigated in the initial case since she was presumed to be deceased. ”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I don’t need the reminder that everyone thought my mom was dead. I remember her struggling with Alastair in the cellar, but now the pieces in my head don’t fit together like they did before.

Swallowing, I pull my hand from his and open my eyes again. “I told you she liked to copy people.”

He nods, holding up a finger and taps at a tablet.

I’ve seen him input plenty of things into the device since we first arrived in Florida.

After a moment he speaks. “You said… and I quote, Mom liked to pretend we were better off than we were. She worked crazy hours, taking all sorts of jobs. When she’d come home she would tell me about the people she worked with.

How they acted and what she liked or didn’t like.

It sounded judgmental, and sometimes she’d want us to make up a scene where she was whoever she liked the best. It was more fun when I was a kid and she wanted to play dress-up and act things out.

When I got older it just felt like jealousy, and when I didn’t want to play along she would throw stuff around and leave the room. ”

As if to prove the point, he turns the tablet and lets me see it.

Those do sound like my words from a few weeks ago, and there’s tons of notes beneath that but we moved on from the weird skits.

She stopped it when I was a teenager anyway and I stopped encouraging her.

“And that led you to the master of disguise thing?”

Sterling shrugs, turning the tablet away to set it on the couch beside him as he leans back. “She’s made great efforts to conceal her identity so no one recognized her since her supposed death. She’s gone out of her way to become someone else too. You don’t call that a master of something?”

“Psychopath,” I supply instead, meeting his gaze. “I’d call her a psychopath. Who lets the world think they died after their daughter is tortured and almost killed, just to run off and play pretend?”

He nods slowly, cocking his head as he watches me. “She just wanted you to act things out?”

I shrug. As far as I’m concerned this is a huge waste of time when there are so many other things to think about. “Yeah.”

“And what age did that start?”

I frown. “I don’t know. Probably when I was seven or eight.

Mom worked for a cleaning company mostly up to that point and then branched out to self employment and maintenance work around that time.

Beforehand she didn’t really ever want to do stuff like that.

She’d complain about people, sure, but she was still making art so she would just go down to our basement and hide out there. ”

He nods. “That sounds lonely for you.”

“Yeah, it was a real crapfest,” I snap. “She was disinterested in me most of the time, but when she would want to pretend and act out things she was actually excited to spend time with me. It was weird but I loved it when I was a kid. Then as I got older I realized it was kind of weird, and when I mentioned it to her once when I was thirteen she never had us act things out again. It’s like me asking a question killed the experience for her. ”

“So was she looking for something specific from you when you acted out these skits of hers?”