by Lis Wiehl
“Things weren’t perfect between us, darling,” he said in a low voice. “I’m sorry for that.” He unclipped the pulse oximeter from her finger and clipped it onto his own, then glanced up at the monitor. His pulse was a steady 62. Having that home gym installed had paid off.
There were still the five leads glued to her chest, but with the alarm turned down, no one would hear when it sounded.
With his free hand, he pulled the tracheotomy tube loose, as he had seen the nurses do for a few seconds to suction mucous out of her throat.
There. Her chest no longer moved. With no air being pushed into her lungs, she should be gone in a minute or two. He would wait until he was sure, then put the tube back in, return the monitor to her finger, and call for help.
Only she wasn’t quite dead yet. The hair rose on the back of his neck as he watched her.
Tamsin opened her mouth wide. The cords in her neck stood out like wires under her skin. All from some futile, primitive effort to breathe.
It was horrible. He did not want to do this. She was making him do this. Her mouth opening and closing like a fish’s. Why couldn’t she just go quietly? Hiding her face with his upper body, he covered the hole in her throat with his palm. With the other, he pinched her nostrils between his fingers and covered her mouth with his palm.
He was doing her a mercy.
He would want the same if it were him.
CHAPTER 52
Mia slowly turned her head from side to side, trying to ease the kink in her neck. Then she bent over the scratch paper on which she was writing her grocery list. She had spent the morning helping Kali and Eldon pack up and then ferrying their belongings over. Now everyone was more or less settled. Kali was taking a nap, and Gabe had gone out for a run.
Eldon had turned out to be even bigger than Mia remembered. Maybe she should just buy everything she normally did, only at three times the quantity. But she had no idea what he and Kali liked to eat.
She went upstairs. The door to Gabe’s room was ajar. She heard voices speaking a language that wasn’t English. But she was sure Eldon was alone. Maybe he had called someone and was using the speakerphone. But one voice sounded mechanical. It was reciting a string of syllables. Then Eldon repeated what the first voice had said.
Her curiosity got the better of her. Rapping lightly on the door, she called out, “Eldon?”
“Yeah? Come on in.”
Eldon was sitting at Gabe’s desk with his cell phone in front of him.
“Oh, sorry, are you on the phone?” Mia was already backing out.
“No, it’s okay. I’m practicing talking to my grandma.”
Which just raised more questions. Mia settled on the first one. “Why do you have to practice?”
“I talk to her every Sunday. She likes it if I speak Samoan with her, but since I don’t speak it that much, I’m not that good. But there’s this app I got on my phone. You can speak in English to it and it will say it back in Samoan. I use it to practice stuff I want to say to her, especially if I don’t know all the words.” He handed her the phone. “Try it.”
The phone was in landscape mode. On one side it read English, on the other Samoan. In the middle was a large pink button.
“Press the button before you start speaking and then when you’re done.”
Mia pressed the button. “This is cool,” she said. “But does it really work?” She pressed the button again.
Detecting language appeared at the top, and then her words showed up on the left-hand side of the screen. After another few seconds more words showed up on the Samoan side. Only now she couldn’t read them. A mechanical voice spoke the syllables.
“There’re apps for all different kinds of languages,” Eldon said.
A light bulb went on for Mia. “What about Chinese?”
“Oh sure, there must be. Probably more than one. Way more people speak Chinese than speak Samoan.”
Apps could do so many things. Say where Gabe was. Pick out a good restaurant. Catch her up on the news. Tell what the weather would be tomorrow. And maybe figure out exactly what sort of help Scott had promised the dishwasher at the Jade Kitchen.
After talking to Eldon for a few more minutes, Mia went back downstairs and picked up her own phone. She typed in Chinese-English translation in the app search bar. A half dozen choices appeared. Speak a sentence and hear the translation! read the first one. Requires active Internet connection to work.
After clicking to download it, she went back to her grocery list and added coconut milk, pineapple, and green bananas—all requests she had gotten from Eldon. Her phone rang.
“Guess who’s just been charged with attempted murder?” Charlie asked without preamble.
“Who?”
“Wade Merritt.”
“Oh no!” Her heart seized. “Did he go after one of the boys?” At least Charlie had said “attempted.” So Wade must not have succeeded.
“No. His wife. He tried to kill Tamsin this morning.”
The idea made Mia recoil. “What?”
“He’s claiming it was supposed to be a mercy killing, that they had had a pact that if either of them was incapacitated, the other would be there to pull the plug. Only in this case it was her ventilator tube. Before he took that out, he disconnected some of her monitors or hooked them up to himself. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for Tamsin, he didn’t realize that the ventilator also has an alarm that has a bit of a delay. The doctor who responded held him until hospital security could get there, and then they called the cops.”
“So did he do any damage?”
“As far as they can tell, he didn’t do any more damage. She was only without oxygen for a minute or so. Now they’re actually beginning to try to bring her out of her coma and wean her off the ventilator. So time will tell.”
“What a mess. Poor Luke.” Her heart broke for him. “What’s going to happen to him?”
“Tamsin’s mother was already staying in a motel nearby. I guess she’s gonna move in with the kid until things are settled.”
How could things ever be settled, with his mother in a hospital bed and his father in jail? Mia was just thankful he had someone else to turn to.
“Speaking of settled, what are you doing tonight, Charlie? Want to take a little field trip with me to settle what Scott was really up to?”
“Where to?”
“Back to the Jade Kitchen in Coho City. I think I’ve figured out how to talk to the dishwasher.”
“You found someone who speaks Chinese?”
“In a way,” Mia said. “I downloaded a translation app onto my phone. You can talk into it in English and it says the words in Chinese.”
“They have those?”
She felt briefly superior, even if she hadn’t known any different herself an hour ago. “Yup.”
The smells behind Jade Kitchen’s Dumpsters were so strong Mia felt like she could chew them. Overlaying the sweetish stench of rotting food was the reek of oil that had been used a thousand times. Used until it burned, then used some more until it went rancid, and then used until it was a black sludge before finally being discarded.
When the dishwasher had talked to her, it had seemed like he had thought of Scott as some sort of force for good. Scott, who had cheated and lied and broken the law.
And it was that—the hope that maybe Scott had not been as reprehensible as she feared—as much as anything that had drawn Mia back here.
The back door opened with a squeal. She peeked around the Dumpster. A man she didn’t recognize came out caring a sloshing metal pot. It slopped onto his already stained white uniform, and he let out what must be a curse in Chinese. While Mia pressed herself even tighter into her hiding spot, he propped open the lid of the trash receptacle—unleashing a new set of smells—and poured in the fetid slop. It was hard to believe that the delicious food they had eaten would ultimately become the source of this horrible stench.
When Mia was beginning to despair of ever seeing
him, the dishwasher finally came out. He leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. In the flare of the lighter, his face was drawn and thin.
Mia made a hissing noise. He straightened up and she hissed again, then stuck out one hand and beckoned.
He looked both ways before coming back around the Dumpster. When he saw her, he seemed both fearful and eager.
Mia held out her phone with the app already open. “What is your name?” she said. “If you talk into the phone, it will speak to me.” She pressed the button and then handed him the phone.
His expression changed as her phone began to speak in Chinese. After a pause, he rattled off a series of words, all the while shaking his head and looking back over his shoulder. Then he stopped and looked at the phone expectantly.
Since he hadn’t pressed the button, she did.
After a pause, the tinny voice said, “My name is Lihong. What are you doing here? This is not you and me security.” The evenly accented words stripped the message of any urgency.
“Do you mean it’s not safe?” Mia asked. “Why is it not safe?” She waited impatiently while the machine translated her words into Chinese and his into English.
“Zhong is a bad person. He hurt us.” Lihong nodded as the computer spoke for him. “He would hurt me to talk to you. If he knows we said, he will be very angry. But you must complete your husband start.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What did Scott do for you? How did he help you?”
“We still need someone to help us this terrible man.” Lihong’s eyes never left her face as the voice spoke for him. “You need that person.”
Mia was getting a headache—and she was also beginning to understand why people used human translators instead of apps.
“You need me to help you?”
Lihong nodded emphatically. “His pay, so they will look the other way. Your husband is trying to help us.”
“Look the other way? What are they looking the other way about?”
A man started shouting from the back door. Lihong’s head whipped around. His eyes were wide with fear.
Mia froze. Her heart was beating so loudly it was a wonder they didn’t hear it in the kitchen.
The man called out again. He sounded like Kenny Zhong. He also sounded closer.
Lihong pointed at his chest and then inside, put his finger to his lips, and backed away.
Mia risked peeping around the corner of the Dumpster. When Zhong saw Lihong, he shouted at him again, then slapped him full force across his left ear. The dishwasher cowered, holding the side of his head.
From her hand, the phone began to speak the words Kenny had yelled. “Who were you talking to?” Mia frantically pressed the volume. “Do you want to live . . .” Finally the mechanized voice died away to nothing.
Zhong had stopped speaking. He stood with his arm raised over Lihong, but he was staring right at Mia.
Or had been. Because she was running back to Charlie as fast as she could.
CHAPTER 53
SUNDAY
When his phone rang at one in the morning, Vin groaned. Nothing good happened at this time of night. He resisted the urge just to let it ring.
“Hello?”
“I have a problem,” his boss said. A long sigh. “And I need you to clean it up.”
“What is it?” He was already stepping into his pants, reaching for his gun.
“It is not my fault.” The man was really too old to whine, but he was whining now.
“What’s not your fault?” Since no one could see him, Vin rolled his eyes.
“She is always after me. Always. And whatever I give her, it is never enough. Tonight we had a fight. She kept saying she wanted to go back to where she was before. That she was tired of living a secret life.”
The boss’s girlfriend. A blonde, but not really. Big breasts that the boss had bought and paid for even before she left Scott Quinn to become his full-time girlfriend. Pretty, but not stupid. Or not stupid enough. She had snagged herself a rich businessman, but not one who could afford to flaunt his riches in a way that would attract the tax man. But she was the kind of poor and pretty girl that dreamed of being photographed, of being gossiped about, of her own reality show. The kind of attention that someone living on the wrong side of the law most certainly didn’t want.
His boss had more money than he knew what to do with. From the outside, his home looked modest. Inside, it was filled with expensive rugs, antiques, artwork, and furniture. The girl had designer clothes on her skinny back, expensive rings on her fingers, diamonds around her neck and in her ears. Occasionally she even demanded that Vin be her driver, like he was a chauffeur. And then she filled his ears with nothing but complaints.
She hadn’t been happy with any of it, not even the loads of cash his boss dropped on meals and trips to exotic places.
She wanted a nicer house. A much nicer house. Say an Arts and Crafts style, something in the three-million-dollar range. Or one of those electric roadsters. A Tesla, was that what they called it? George Clooney had one. She didn’t seem to be able to get it through the thick skull underneath all that dyed hair that cash transactions over $10,000 had to be reported to the IRS. That George Clooney made his money legally and everyone expected him to flash it around. So of course he had an Italian villa.
His boss had managed to buy her a boat. An actual yacht. Found a private buyer who was willing to accept cash and look the other way. But she still wasn’t happy.
The girl wasn’t that old, but she must have figured out that her sell-by date was fast approaching. And that maybe she didn’t want to spend what was left with a man who was at least twice her age.
“She saw what was coming and she actually jumped out of the car,” his boss continued. “But she didn’t get far in those stupid heels of hers. I always told her those things would kill her.” A laugh like a seal’s bark. “It seems I was correct. Now I need you to make her go away. I took her purse, took the rings from her fingers, took anything that might identify her.”
That wasn’t enough, which he was sure his boss knew as well as he did. She still had a face. She still had teeth. She still had fingerprints.
He was going to have to change all that. And fast. And then dump the body someplace where, with luck, it might not be found, at least not for a long while.
These things should be done with finesse. Planning. If you wanted to kill someone, you thought about it beforehand. You did not get into an argument with a piece of fluff. And when she made you angry and ran from you, you did not impulsively shoot her down and then call someone else to clean it up.
Seven months ago his boss had been so hot for this girl, with her blond hair and her snub nose like a child’s. Her arms and legs, perfectly shaped and flawless as a doll’s. Now he had broken her.
“I wish you had let me handle this from the beginning,” he said. His boss liked to keep those soft hands of his clean. He was tired of his boss making messes and expecting someone else to pick up after him.
There was a long silence from the other end of the phone. Long enough that Vin had time to regret what he had just said.
CHAPTER 54
When dispatch called at a little after three a.m., Charlie resisted the urge to pull the covers over his head and ignore the shrill trill of the phone. Nothing good happened at this hour of the morning.
In this case, a homeless man searching an industrial area for a place to bed down had instead found the body of a young woman. The report was a little garbled, but it sounded like he might even have surprised the killer in the act.
In Charlie’s experience, people were more afraid of crime than ever, even though the reality was that by year’s end fewer than thirty people would be murdered in Seattle. This girl would be number twenty-three, maybe number twenty-four, something like that.
Of course, if you were one of the dead, that statistic was of no comfort.
When Charlie got to the scene, he found a half dozen patrol cars parked n
ear a long ribbon of yellow crime-scene tape. He talked to Kirk Snell, who had been the first uniform to arrive. He had frozen the scene and interviewed the witness, a middle-aged guy with a matted, grizzled beard that hid most of his face. Now the homeless man stood shivering in a dirty sweater, pants held up with what looked like a purple bathrobe tie, and worn boots without laces.
“The medical examiner and the CSIs are on their way,” Kirk said.
“Did you find anything other than her body?”
“She was shot, but I didn’t find the gun. There’s pruning shears and a hammer next to the body, though. And two of her fingertips are missing.”
Charlie winced. “What’s her head look like?” Someone had obviously gone to some work to make her anonymous.
Kirk shrugged. “No idea. The RP”—he meant reporting party—“put his coat over it. Even though her fingers weren’t bleeding, I still checked her wrist for a pulse, just in case. But she’s for sure dead, and I didn’t want to disturb the evidence. Then I called it in, put up the tape, and called you.” He turned and looked at the yellow tape. “You okay with where it is?”
Charlie eyeballed the distances. His back-pocket rule was to rope off at least one hundred feet from the farthest item of visible evidence. Here the crime-scene tape was at least two hundred and fifty feet from the body, so that was good. It was easier to decrease the size of an area than to increase it, and he didn’t need any press onlookers destroying any evidence. If this had been a high-traffic area, he would have had Kirk set up a second perimeter, one where bigwigs and the press could feel like they were getting better access. But few people came to this industrial area.
Right now, Charlie’s money was on her being a prostitute. It was even possible the mutilation hadn’t been done to hide her identity. A few years earlier a serial killer in Oregon had killed prostitutes and cut off their feet for twisted reasons of his own.