by Gregg Olsen
I think of all the cases I’ve observed over the years and know that the zeitgeist of crime is fickle.
Carter offers me a stick of gum, and I decline. I don’t want to be photographed like I’m the Borden cow. It doesn’t matter if he’s caught chewing. Women get beat up in the media for things that guys do all the time. No one ever judges a male cop’s attire. A woman police officer is slammed for looking slutty. Or lesbian-like. Fat. Or out of style.
“Lot of people here,” he says.
“I thought there would be,” I say. “Ally’s been all over the news. Have you heard of Google news alerts?”
Carter makes a face. “What’s Google?”
I ignore his semijoke. He’s dressed for the funeral. He’s wearing the same sport coat and slacks that he wore when I interviewed at the department. The top button strains across his chest, but only a little. I don’t say anything about that, but I think Carter has lost a little weight.
“You clean up pretty good,” I say.
He gives me a Carter half smile. “You look all right yourself, Detective,” he says.
“Mascara and a new blouse,” I say.
A police cruiser, lights flashing, silently edges up the hill to a parking spot next to a masonry chapel. Right away, a Daily World reporter scurries over with her camera in position.
Luke Tomlinson has arrived from the jail.
It’s the moment everyone has been waiting for.
I watch as Mia separates herself from her supporters to greet her husband. She speaks to the officer while Luke stays planted in the backseat. I know I’ll find out later what she’s telling him. Carter says something, but I’m so surprised by what happens next that I can’t hear him.
Now out of the cruiser and facing his wife, Luke appears to be sobbing.
“What is he saying to her?” Carter asks.
“I wonder,” I say.
Mia looks at the officer and says something. A second later she gives Luke a warm embrace and bends close to whisper in his ear.
Carter nudges me. “Officer shouldn’t let them touch,” he says.
“No shit,” I whisper back.
The hug is quick, though. The officer is joined by a second officer, and the four of them walk across the parking area to the grave-site awning with its folding chairs set up and its mound of freshly dug dirt covered in dark green carpet.
“Let’s move closer,” I say.
Carter agrees, and we find ourselves next to my old high school pal Debbie Manning and her resourceful assistant, Brooklyn.
Both of them bristle a little at us. Cops are seldom welcome attendees at either weddings or funerals.
“Thank God you people let Luke out,” Debbie says, sending vodka vapors over me like disinfectant spray. “Can you imagine missing your daughter’s funeral?”
I don’t have a daughter. I have Emma. And, yes, I hope I miss her funeral. I hope she lives to be one hundred years old and I’m long gone.
Brooklyn says nothing. She’s wearing jeans and a crop top, her flat, taut stomach the envy of every woman there who’s given birth. I wonder if she’s off the clock or if her boss is paying her minimum wage to ensure that she’s there. When the wind drags over Debbie’s black dress, I catch another whiff of vodka.
Though it is one in the afternoon, I wonder if Brooklyn is Debbie’s designated driver.
The minister thanks everyone for coming and at the family’s request pushes the “Play” button for Eric Clapton’s ode to tragedy, “Tears in Heaven.” Even from where we stand, I can see Mia’s and Luke’s shoulders shudder with emotion. I look around, and everyone is crying.
Even Carter seems caught up in the emotion. He turns away and dabs at a tear.
Ally’s death is definitely a thing.
Prayers follow. First the Lord’s Prayer, then something vaguely nondenominational. Everyone is crying now. The minister talks a bit more, and then he holds a microphone up to Luke. He glances around and nods at his WinCo friends—including Rachel, his former flame from the floral department. She gives him a little wave and a smile.
I don’t think they are really finished after all.
“My precious,” Luke begins. His vocal cords seem tight, and he clears his throat. I can’t tell if it’s an affect or if he’s genuinely overcome. “That’s my little girl. In this box right here. This isn’t right. Nobody can tell me otherwise. I made a really bad mistake that morning. There’s no way of getting around that. I own that.”
Mia and Rachel are sobbing in stereo as Luke kicks his mea culpa into overdrive.
“I should never have left Ally in the car and forgot about her. I try to wrap my head around the events of that morning every minute of the day. How could I, of all people, do this? I knew there were dangers in a hot car. Everyone who watches the news knows that. But what people don’t know is that sometimes you can make big errors in judgment. Even when you are a really good person. My little girl’s an angel now and I know it’s all my fault. The only consolation I can find in this tragedy is that she’s in heaven where she’ll never, ever hurt again. She’s not in that pink box.”
His arm goes limp for a minute, and the microphone is now at his side.
“Her body is,” he says, moving the mic back to his lips and looking around at the mourners, who by my count number more than two hundred. “Yes,” he goes on. “But she’s up there, smiling down on all of us, grateful that she’s free from her earthly body.”
Luke looks over at one of our officers, and the officer nods.
Ally’s father moves toward the casket and caresses its velvety-smooth surface.
“Jesus,” Carter whispers to me, “he’s not going to open it up and drag Ally out, is he?”
I don’t answer. Mostly because Luke’s decidedly over-the-top performance is riveting in every way imaginable but also because I’m really not sure. Luke Tomlinson, as far as I can see, is pretty much capable of just about anything.
“Ally, baby,” Luke says, “people have said terrible things about me but you know the truth. You and you alone. And that’s all that matters. I’m your daddy. You are my precious, and no one with a badge is going to rewrite our story.”
Mia looks over at the same officer. A second later she has her arm around Luke’s beefy shoulders. The reporter from the paper moves in for a shot. I don’t even need to wait for the headline the next day to know what it will be.
Grieving Mother Stands by Accused Husband
After another prayer from the minister, the casket is lowered, flowers and dirt fall, and the crowd starts to disperse. The officer who brought Luke leads him back to the waiting cruiser. Mia and her hospital friends linger by the casket. As funerals go, this one is at once tragic and bizarre.
Carter and I turn to leave, when I feel a tap on my arm.
“You know he’s innocent,” Brooklyn says as she and Debbie face me. “You’re making matters worse for that family.”
I remember how she considered Luke a good guy because he wasn’t a creeper like some of the other dads who came to the day care. She’s young. She’s trusting.
“We’re only doing our job, Brooklyn,” I say.
Brooklyn shrugs off my remark.
“I’d rather work at a gas station than do something that makes innocent people feel terrible,” she says. “You totally suck.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Tuesday, August 22
The sun turned up the heat again and has transformed patches of the parking lot into liquid. I’ve tracked tar into my office, and I know that I’ll never get the stains out of the formerly pristine carpet. I guess I don’t care. Not when I think of all the other things that are more important than a scolding from the department’s janitor. I sit in front of my computer to reread the autopsy report for the third time—the image of the casket and the mourners fresh in my mind. Nothing on the face of the earth is more wrong than a baby’s funeral. I try to make sense out of what happened. It’s what I do. For a moment I allow m
yself the possibility that Luke had some kind of a major brain freeze and forgot his daughter. It was possible that the reminder about the canceled beach walk from Debbie Manning’s Little Pal’s Day Care didn’t jog his memory that he’d forgotten to drop off his little girl. The tech guys are deep into the laptops and the phones, and I know whatever they find will lead the investigation where it needs to go. Can’t lie with data.
I drink a warm Coke and fight the urge to Facebook-stalk friends from my old life. It’s a fight I can’t win. I can’t not look at the life I had and the people I once knew. I scroll through my feed. A few have blocked me, which crushes me to the core. Those that haven’t still inhabit the same old lives. I see children who have grown so much in three years. Colleagues who have been promoted. One fighting cancer. I see bits and pieces of my discarded life, and I have no one to blame but myself.
Okay. Sometimes I do blame Stacy a little. I tell myself that God allows me that because no one on this earth has blazed a deeper trail of destruction than my little sister. No one has been more brazen in her quest to do whatever it was that she wanted to do. More selfish. More evil.
I hate Stacy.
And I miss her—and what I imagined she was when we were little—with all of my heart.
I refresh my computer and see that the email from Tech has arrived. I open the file and start reading. Within thirty seconds I’m running down the hall to Carter’s office. He’s glued to the report.
“Holy crap, Nicole,” he says looking up.
“He planned this whole thing,” I say.
“Yeah, more than a dozen Internet searches for ‘hot-car death’ and ‘how long can a child survive in a hot car.’”
“And the date,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Yeah. The date. He looked it all up the first day of our heat wave.”
It’s confirmation of what I knew, and it still hits me hard. “Luke didn’t forget Ally at all,” I say. “He left her in the car to die.”
“Not only that. He checked on her after lunch to make sure.”
“This guy has to be the most evil piece of shit of all time,” I say. “Ever.”
I seldom swear, and this brings a slight smile in the grimmest of moments to Carter’s face.
“You can say that again,” he says.
I don’t.
“What do you make of Mia?”
“What about her?”
He looks down at his screen.
“You didn’t get that far, did you?”
“No, I guess not. What?”
“She researched it too. Two days after Luke did.”
“No,” I say.
“Right. She did. They must share the laptop. The Dell was beyond life support. It’s dead. The MacBook has two different sign-ons.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. “Why would she do that?”
Carter picks up his key ring. I notice for the first time that the fob says “My Dad’s #1.” He sees me looking at it, and he shoves the keys into his pocket.
“We’ll need to find out,” he says.
Having learned that Mia has already returned to work on the afternoon of her daughter’s funeral, we go to the hospital. “Mia’s on break,” the charge nurse tells us when we arrive.
“People handle grief in their own way,” I remind Carter when he gives me a look.
“I didn’t say anything,” he says.
“You don’t have to.”
I think of a case I worked in Bellevue in which a schoolgirl brought her homework to the hospital as her mother lay dying of antifreeze poisoning. She couldn’t face what was really happening. Routine brought comfort.
The nurse tells us Mia is in the cafeteria.
“She’s usually in the back along the windows.”
The woman in her midforties has caring eyes and soft, delicate features. She’s everything I wish the people taking care of my father were. She’s probably never been to a tattoo parlor. Never come to work after a weekend drunk. Never wished that some old codger would just die, because taking care of someone who can’t speak is so utterly boring.
“Kind of a loner,” she goes on. “Breaks my heart, considering how she must be grieving. Doesn’t take a hug too well. Sorry about that. Love’s the only real medicine. Sweet, but a loner,” she says before burying her face in her sheaf of paperwork.
As promised, Carter and I find Mia alone with her stir-fry and Greek yogurt.
“Mia,” I say, “the main desk said we’d find you here.”
Mia puts down her fork. “So you found me. Are you here to search me too?”
She’s angry. I’m fine with that. Yes, her daughter is dead. But, seriously, she has some explaining to do.
“Luke researched hot-car deaths before Ally died,” I say.
“I told you that already,” she says.
Carter lets me handle her. “Yes, you did. You said it wasn’t research but he was concerned about it. Don’t you find that odd?”
“The weatherman said it was going to be hot. Very hot. What’s so strange about Luke looking up information on that?”
I wait a beat. An intern smiles in Mia’s direction. It’s a sad smile. I’m sure he knows—I’m sure everyone in the hospital knows—that Mia’s baby has died and that her husband appears to be guilty of a crime somewhere in the spectrum of negligence and premeditated murder.
“But he wasn’t the only one who researched it, was he?”
Our eyes lock. She has suddenly shifted from grieving mom to a person of interest, and she’s aware of it.
“I don’t know what you mean?”
Mia’s attempt at playing dumb is an epic fail. She knows it. I know it.
“Mia, please,” I say, unraveling some rope.
She looks at her tray and arranges the silverware as though she’s at a dinner party.
“So much has happened,” she says.
“Yes,” I say, “that’s true. So much has happened. You know what I’m getting at, Mia. Don’t you?”
A little more rope off the imaginary spool.
“I guess it seems bad,” she finally says. “But I think I looked it up too. You know, after Luke started talking about it.”
Carter can’t contain himself. My guess is that he never could. Not when it comes to kids. He talks about his all the time.
“Does my partner look stupid?” he blurts out. “Do I look stupid? You’re telling us that you looked up the same thing your husband did—the same thing that killed your little girl? You seriously want us to think that coincidence after coincidence is how the world works? People do shit like what you and Luke did on purpose. Things don’t just happen.”
For a minute I thought he was going to add missy to the end of the rebuke. I’m glad he didn’t.
Mia sits up like someone under the table has goosed her.
“It is the truth, Detectives,” she says. Now her face is Venetian red, I think. “God’s honest truth. Luke was worried about the hot weather. So, yes, he read up. I was worried too. So I looked it up. Just because someone wants to find out how to protect their child shouldn’t be reason to think the worst of them. Far from it. I’m a nurse. I see the messed-up things people do to each other. Sometimes I see them before they even get to the likes of people like you. So check your suspicions and take them elsewhere. I have a job to do. I have a husband to get out of jail.”
Her voice was far louder than needed. She has suddenly become the center of attention in the hospital cafeteria. So have Carter and I.
A couple of nurses and a doctor glare in our direction.
At that moment Mia Tomlinson is Norma Rae holding up a placard for everyone to see. Instead of “Union,” it reads “Persecuted.”
Carter gulps. I step away, reeling in the rope.
Mia cannot be stopped. She drops the final bomb.
“And if it matters to either of you,” she says, jabbing a finger at us, “I have a daughter to mourn! A daughter who was cooked alive!”
She bolt
s out of the cafeteria, and we slink out. Awkwardly. I turn to Carter and whisper in his ear. “That went really well.”
“Tell me about it,” he says as we start to walk out. “I hope to God if anything happens to me, they airlift me to Seattle. I won’t stand a chance here.”
Even the nice nurse glares at us when we pass by the nurses’ station. Word travels at warp speed in any institution that’s built on the sanctity of confidentiality. Telegraph. Telephone. Tell a medical care provider.
“Seriously,” I say as we go back out into the black goo of the hospital parking lot. “Mia is either a misunderstood mom or a really good liar in as deep in this as her husband.”
“She’s a liar,” he says. “I’m telling you, Nicole. I have a sixth sense about these things. You know that.”
I can’t argue with his sixth sense. I don’t dare remind him of other cases in which he said the same thing and led us down a primrose path to a conclusion that couldn’t have been more wrong. This time, however, I want him to be wrong. I want more than anything to believe that Mia was researching because her husband had piqued her interest.
Not because she was part of the plot. Even though I’m not a mother and I have no road map in my own life to fall back on, I know in my bones that motherhood is an elevated honor. It’s clear to me every time I look in Emma’s eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Tuesday, August 22
It’s late at the office. Emma is staying with Carrie Anne and her brood. It’s Simone’s fifth birthday. I have never been the kind of mother—though I know I’m not really one—who longs for nights away from her child. Indeed, I feel skittish when Emma’s beyond my reach. I don’t want to be overprotective, but the pendulum swings hard sometimes. My own parents were completely disinterested in me and Stacy. Mostly me. Stacy, quite obviously, is more like our mother than I am. Sometimes I wonder if she ever even thinks about her daughter. Before the postcards came, I tried to imagine where it was that she and Julian had taken their insidious and toxic relationship.
My mind ricocheted to all the best places in the world. Stacy always liked the sun. She loved the beach because she loved having all eyes on her when she walked a stretch of sand, her teeny-tiny bikini holding on for dear life. She looked great. I’ll give her that. Like Snow White’s poison apple. Like an angler’s new fishing lure, sparking silver in the water and calling for an unwitting salmon. Like the weather forecast for a June wedding in Seattle.