by Lis Wiehl
A plump, middle-aged woman answered the door two doors from Jackson’s apartment. Her blond hair had been dyed so often it looked like straw. After offering them seats on a wine-colored couch, she settled down into a recliner.
“I’ve seen that Dylan around, but I don’t know him well. The family hasn’t lived here long, and from what I hear they might be gone soon enough.”
“What do you mean?” Mia asked.
“I heard they were behind on rent. They have so many mouths to feed, I’m not surprised. Jackson and his mom have lived here two years. Maybe more. I used to let him come by, but I stopped about a year ago.”
“Why?” Charlie asked.
“Because he started changing.”
“What do you mean, changing?” Mia pushed her feet into the floor, trying to move into a more comfortable position. The couch was so overstuffed she and Charlie were in danger of rolling into each other.
“These days he hangs out at the mini mall a couple of blocks away.” She waved a hand over her shoulder to indicate the direction. “Sometimes late at night. Sometimes even during school hours. And half the time he has a cigarette. Once I said hello to him and he said something disrespectful back. I’m sure it was because he was with a couple of other boys, but still . . . As a mother, I feel he’s been given too much freedom.”
She turned out to be the last person who was home and willing to answer the door. It was time to go to try the boys’ apartments.
There was no answer at Manny’s. Charlie raised his hand to knock at Dylan’s door but then held off. A woman was yelling at someone, her voice rising and falling. As far as Mia could tell, it was a one-sided rant.
When Charlie did knock, it was more than a minute before anyone came to the door. The woman was scrawny, with thin, greasy-looking brown hair. It was hard to imagine how one baby had managed to come out of those skinny hips, let alone ten.
The apartment behind her was dark, all the blinds drawn. Two stained couches were jammed into the living room, facing a darkened TV and a coffee table piled with dirty dishes. Mia squinted. Were there other people in the room?
Charlie was only halfway through introducing himself and Mia when the woman shook a finger in his face.
“I know who you are! My baby’s gone and it’s all your fault.”
“I’m not the one who dropped a shopping cart on someone’s head, Mrs. Dunford,” Charlie said mildly.
She gritted her teeth at that. “It’s Clark now. Ms. Clark. And Dylan didn’t do it either. You’ve got the wrong boy. Even if he says he did it, that don’t mean anything. That boy will say anything people tell him to.”
“And will he do what anyone tells him to do?” Charlie asked.
“Yes,” she said, then realized the trap she had fallen into. “I mean no. I mean, he’s not right in the head. But he would never do what you people say he did. And I don’t have to talk to you and I don’t have to let you in.”
A familiar stench reached Mia’s nose. Her eyes had adjusted to the lack of light. In the far corner of the room, a little kid who couldn’t have been more than five was changing a baby’s diaper.
“But we want to hear your side,” Mia said. “We want to learn more about Dylan.”
“I’m sick of you people. You always think you can make things better by sticking your nose in. Well, not this time.” And with that she closed the door in their faces.
“No electricity?” Charlie said as they turned away.
“It looks that way. And I think I smelled more than poop in there. Maybe rotten food. So it might have been that way for a while.” What would it be like to live in a place where the fridge and the oven were nothing but useless boxes? Where having too many people in a bed was a plus because at least they kept each other warm? She pinched the bridge of her nose. “When we’re done here, I’ll call someone I know at Children’s Services. They can at least do a welfare check.”
Finally they knocked on the door of the apartment Jackson shared with his mom. She answered so quickly that Mia wondered if she had been secretly watching them go from door to door. She was a slight woman who covered her mouth with her fingers when she talked. Her nails had sparkly purple polish. She invited them inside, where they sat on a brown plaid couch that had seen better days. Better decades.
“My son is a good boy,” Regina Buckle told them. She must think they hadn’t seen Jackson’s records. Or maybe in her world a kid could have the kind of record Jackson did and still be a good boy. “But I haven’t been the best mom. I’ve had to work all kinds of hours at all kinds of jobs. It’s hard to find anything that pays good when you’ve only made it through ninth grade. That was why I was so proud of my baby when he started tenth grade this year. It means he’s doing better than me.” Her hand slipped, and for a moment Mia saw her teeth. One of her eyeteeth was missing.
“Are you working now?” Charlie asked.
“No. I was working at a food cart, but it, um, closed.”
“And Jackson’s dad?” Mia asked, even though she already had guessed the answer.
“He’s not in the picture.” Regina bit her lip and then looked up at them through thick dark lashes. “I should tell you something, though. My boyfriend just got busted for selling pot. He’s the one who owned the food cart. Now I don’t know how I’m going to pay rent this month.”
“So if your boyfriend smoked pot, what about Jackson?” Charlie asked.
“No! He knows I don’t put up with any of that.” She seemed unaware of any contradiction.
“Hasn’t he been picked up with pot and alcohol?”
“Those weren’t his. He has bad friends who asked him to hold things. He’s too trusting.”
And that’s how it went with Regina. Her son was a good kid who sometimes made honest mistakes. She didn’t believe—couldn’t believe—that he had done what they claimed he did.
As Charlie was driving them back, Mia’s phone rang. She listened without asking many questions, then hung up, her heart heavy.
“Who was that?” Charlie asked.
“Someone from my office. I guess the inpatient facility that was treating Manny decided he was ready to talk to us, but Manny must not have agreed. He locked himself in the bathroom and tried to cut his wrists.”
Charlie swore softly under his breath. “Did he succeed?”
“They said he didn’t cut deep enough to do any real damage.” Mia sighed. “But no matter what end of this case you look at, all you see is pain.”
CHAPTER 30
This coffee smells good and burnt.” In the squad’s break room Charlie dubiously sniffed the cup he had just poured. He was talking to Andy Gibbons, another homicide detective. Yellowing reminders taped to the walls exhorted them to clean up their spatters and to remember that their mother didn’t work there. Despite the homemade signs, the space was a mess, had always been a mess, and would always be a mess.
“It’ll put hair on your chest,” Andy said, reaching for the glass carafe.
“How’s it going with that double murder?” Charlie asked.
The other detective shrugged. “Seems pretty open and shut. Two dealers fighting over territory and the girlfriend was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He threw back a swallow of his coffee as if it were rotgut whiskey. “How about you?”
“I’m working that shopping cart case.”
“I saw that on the news this morning. So stupid. So the lady died?”
“No. At least not yet. Right now the focus is on deciding whether to charge the kids who did it as adults or not.” Charlie took another slug of his coffee. “And I’ve been looking into a traffic accident in Puyallup County that I’m pretty sure was no accident. But I guess they don’t see it the same way, even though the death investigator should have picked up on some discrepancies.”
“Good luck with that,” Andy said. “That place is positively inbred. If I remember right, their death investigator is married to the sheriff’s sister.”
Charlie bl
inked as a piece of the puzzle fell into place. No wonder the sheriff had been so adamant that no mistakes had been made. It wasn’t a cover-up. Or at least not a traditional one. Puyallup was covering up their own incompetence. They might have done the same no matter who was in the accident. And minus a literal smoking gun, nagging them to reopen it was not going to do any good.
Back at his desk, Charlie called the number listed on the accident report for the first responder. He had debated about using his work phone but decided on his personal cell.
“Hello?” The man had a thin voice with a bit of a quaver. Charlie pictured an old guy in a fishing cap.
“Is this Alvin Turner?”
“Yes?” He sounded suspicious, as if Charlie had interrupted his dinner hour to try and sell him something he didn’t need.
“This is Charlie Carlson. I’m a friend of Mia Quinn. Last April you were the first person on the scene after the accident that killed her husband, Scott Quinn.”
“Oh yes. That was a terrible thing. Terrible.”
“Mia is just now coming to terms with what happened. She is wondering if it might be possible to meet with you.”
After a long pause, the old man cleared his throat. “I’m not sure there’s much I can tell her.”
“It would really help to ease her mind.”
“But he was dead—or at least very close to it—when I got there.”
“Even knowing that would be good for her. And I promise it won’t take much of your time,” Charlie said, not knowing if that was true or not.
Turner continued to sigh and demur but finally agreed to meet them at the site of the accident the next day at six p.m.
Next Charlie turned his attention to the woman who might have best known Scott at the time of his death. Not Mia, but Betty Eastman, the young woman with the old lady’s name. It didn’t seem that long ago that Charlie would have started his search by looking up Betty’s phone number and street address in the white pages. Did anyone use a paper phone book anymore?
Sometimes Charlie felt like a dinosaur. He usually wasn’t home in time to watch the nightly news on TV, but when he was he got the feeling that no one under the age of fifty was in the audience. The ads were all for drugs for shingles or erectile dysfunction.
Newsweek was no more. Same for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. And the Seattle Times seemed awfully light these days. Even books had been turned into ones and zeroes.
Everything was online, but only when he was actively working a crime was Charlie allowed to search the law enforcement databases. Requests were audited, and if anyone saw activity that didn’t look like it belonged, they’d contact Internal Affairs in a heartbeat. He could get days off, maybe even fired. Technically he shouldn’t even have requested the reports about Scott’s accident. At least he had done that over the phone, so he hadn’t left any electronic footprints.
But luckily the Seattle PD also subscribed to LexisNexis. And since it was available to anyone willing to pay the subscription fee, requests to it weren’t audited. Charlie typed Betty Eastman into the search box. Up popped several choices, but only one in Seattle. Five seconds later he had more than enough information on Betty to track her down. Phone numbers, addresses past and present, education, marriage records, licenses, criminal records—even death records. Twenty-two years old, Elizabeth Eastman had never been married, and she hadn’t died. She had a Washington State driver’s license and had lived at a string of addresses. She had one criminal conviction, for drunk driving a year earlier.
With his personal cell, Charlie tried the phone number listed, but all he got was a message saying it had been disconnected. He went back to the computer.
Under education it showed that Betty had been an accounting student at the University of Washington. That might explain where Scott had met her. But it didn’t explain where she was now. Because the most recent term she had attended was last spring, and she hadn’t finished.
Betty’s job history was even older, a patchwork of various fast-food jobs ranging from McDonald’s to Pizza Hut and Taco Time. The last had been about a year ago, and the work she had done for Scott didn’t show up.
So, if Betty wasn’t working and she wasn’t going to school, what was she doing now?
All he was left with was her address. Because it included a unit number, Charlie assumed it belonged to an apartment. He clicked on it, which brought up other names associated with it.
There was just one. Jared Johannsen. Another U-Dub student, only he was majoring in marketing. He had lived in the apartment about three months longer than Betty. She had moved in about a year ago, about the same time she stopped working at Taco Time.
If Betty wasn’t working and she wasn’t at school, she might be at home.
Charlie pulled his keys from his pocket. It was time to take a little jaunt.
Was he stupid to be chasing after a theory he might never be able to prove, let alone arrest anyone for? But someone had left two children without a father, a good woman without a husband. Someone had wanted Scott Quinn dead and then made sure he was. A lot of murders were personal, stemmed from relationships gone wrong. And any relationship between a married man and a girl about half his age was sure to go wrong.
And there was Mia. Lately Charlie found himself thinking of her far more than he should. Of the way she nodded her head. The little humming sound she made when she was thinking. He had seen her angry, intent, questioning. What he most wanted was to see her happy.
The building where Betty and Jared lived had all the charm of a complex that catered to students. Low-slung, it was made of cement blocks and painted in various shades of beige that probably reflected an ongoing effort to cover up tags. A Hispanic guy dressed in a silvery-gray coat and with a leaf blower on his back was determinedly blowing approximately half a dozen leaves across a strip of muddy grass in the center of the courtyard.
Charlie knocked on the door of unit 103. The young man who opened it was tall, six two or six three. Straight black hair parted on the side. Piercing blue eyes. With his square, cleft chin, he looked kind of like Superman.
“I’m looking for Betty Eastman,” Charlie said. “Is she here?”
The kid tilted his head. “You’re him, aren’t you?”
Charlie decided to go with it. He nodded.
The last thing he saw was the kid’s fist.
Heading straight for his face.
CHAPTER 31
Mia had never been in Oleg’s Gems and Jewels before, even though the shop was only a few blocks from her office. She must have driven or walked past it hundreds of times, but all that was visible from the street were two heavy wooden doors with no windows, just the name of the store spelled out in ornate gold script. The O in Oleg had been replaced with the drawing of a diamond.
Now Mia pushed open one of the doors and caught her breath. Inside it was so light and airy it felt like stepping into a sunlit meadow. The carpet was a pale gold. Rows of recessed spotlights lit up the long display cases. Adding to the open feeling, the bottoms of the cabinets weren’t made of wood but mirrors. At the back of the room, a large white globe lamp glowed like the sun itself.
But what really drew the eye were the golden cutouts of butterflies and birds strung on clear filaments that ran from ceiling to floor along the sides of the room. As she moved they fluttered in the air, catching the light.
Mia was the only customer. She hadn’t heard any bell or buzzer, but a few seconds later a girl glided in from a door set flush with the wall and painted the same color. Her dark hair was pulled back into an elaborate low bun that showed off her long neck and dangling earrings. Her tall black sandals were held in place by two thin straps, and she wore a black, formfitting, cap-sleeved dress slivered with black lace inserts.
“Are you looking for something in particular, madam?” Her accent sounded Eastern European, the l coming from the back of the throat. Her skin was so smooth and poreless that Mia felt desiccated by comparison.
“Is
Oleg Popov available?”
“Whom shall I say is inquiring?”
“Mia Quinn. You can tell him that my husband was Scott Quinn.”
Not a flicker marred the girl’s face. She simply nodded and turned away. While she waited, Mia leaned over one of the glass cases. Inside were necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. They ranged from large stones in simple settings to elaborate pieces covered with dozens of glittering diamonds. A king’s ransom in a single glass case. Scanning the room, she spotted three cameras, and guessed there must be more that were hidden.
A stocky man entered through the same door the girl had used. His cheeks were red and round, and his hairline had receded into a perfect M, leaving a prominent widow’s peak. He wore a pale turquoise shirt open-necked under a black wool suit. When he walked around the counter, Mia saw the red Prada stripe on the heel counter of his shoes.
“Mrs. Quinn,” he said, stretching out a square hand that bore rings on every finger. “My heart broke for you when I heard about Scott’s accident. I am so sorry for your loss.” The syllables fell out of his mouth one by one in a low, slow monotone.
“Thank you.” She glanced over her shoulder. Even though they were ostensibly alone, she couldn’t help feeling they had an audience. “Is there a place we could talk in private?”
“Of course.” If he was curious, his still-smiling face didn’t show it.
He led her back through the same door. Mia was reminded of being backstage. Behind the scenes, the glamour fell away. Here the lights were fluorescent, the painted walls marred with scuff marks. Two old desks that didn’t match faced each other. A plump older woman sat at one of them, talking on the phone in a low voice. No one sat at the other desk, where the computer screen showed rotating scenes of the shop from a half dozen camera angles. It reminded Mia of the shopping cart case and the decisions she needed to make.
A second dark-haired young woman was signing for a delivery, but it wasn’t from UPS or FedEx. The driver was dressed all in black and wore a gun on his hip. Oleg paused to murmur something in the woman’s ear. The woman looked up at him with heavily lined dark eyes and nodded.