by Lis Wiehl
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.
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 near 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.
“What’s the RP like?” he asked Kirk. They both looked over at the guy, who was blowing on his hands trying to warm them.
“For someone who probably drinks all day, he seems pretty with-it,” Kirk said. “He had to go about half a mile before he managed to find someone with a cell phone. Then he came back here and waited for me. There’re a couple of cars patrolling the neighborhood, looking for the guy he spooked. But I’m betting whoever did this is long gone.”
“Do you think he could ID him?”
Kirk twisted his lips. “You could try asking him, but I don’t think he was ever close enough.”
Pulling on vinyl gloves he took from his belt, Charlie ducked under the crime-scene tape. He turned on his flashlight and swept it back and forth over the tarmac. All he saw were a few pieces of windblown trash, which would still have to be collected in case they turned out to be evidence. Finally he reached the dead woman and let the flashlight play over her. She lay on her back next to a loading dock, her head only a few inches from the concrete ramp. She wore black high-heeled boots, skintight dark-wash jeans, and a tight red sweater that showed off both her outsize breasts and the two-inch hole over her heart. Judging by the pool of blood she was lying in, she hadn’t died right away. There was enough blood that the smell hung in the air and the coppery taste furred Charlie’s tongue.
No coat, even though it was too cold not to wear one. The coat that covered her head had to have come from the guy who found her. It was stained and matted with layers of food and dirt.
Her left hand drew Charlie’s eye. Three fingers bore a French manicure. The other two, the pinky and the ring, had been cut off at the first knuckle. He leaned down until he was a few inches away. White skin at the base where rings had been. Had the fingers been chopped off to make it easier to rob her? But even the intact fingers still showed the ghosts of rings. Whatever the reason, Kirk was right—there was very little blood. That meant the injuries had been inflicted after she was dead, or postmortem, as the medical examiner would phrase it.
Charlie scanned the ground but didn’t see the fingertips. A bloodstained pair of pruning shears lay on the asphalt next to a hammer. It was all too easy to imagine what was under the coat—a face smashed into pulp, teeth turned into chips of ivory.
But he wasn’t going to look. While the scene was Charlie’s to investigate, the body belonged to the medical examiner. Charlie wasn’t allowed to move it, take property from it, search its pockets for ID, or fingerprint it. Those tasks were the medical examiner’s.
Whoever she was, someone had hoped to make her anonymous. A few minutes more and he might have succeeded.
He dipped back under the tape and went up to the homeless guy. “I’m Charlie Carlson with the Seattle PD. Homicide.” He offered his hand.
“Hey, man. I’m Tom Lyle.” He was shivering in the brisk breeze, which smelled of diesel fumes.
“Can you tell me what you saw tonight?”
“I was walking around that corner”—Lyle pointed—“when I saw this dude bending over someone lying on the ground. He had something white clamped between his knees. His hands were bright yellow, like maybe he was wearing dishwashing gloves. And in one of them he had some kind of big pair of scissors. About then is when I realized he was cutting off someone’s finger.” He raised his eyebrows.
“What did you do then?”
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if the person was alive or dead. But I also figured that somebody who would cut off someone’s fingers probably wouldn’t care too much about hurting me. So I stepped back around the corner so he couldn’t see me, and I made my voice real deep and I said”—his voice dropped an octave—“ ‘Police! Stop right there!’ And when I looked again, he was booking the other way. After I was sure he was gone, I went over to see if I could help, but she was dead. At least she didn’t feel what he did to her.”
“Would you recognize the guy if you saw him again?”
Lyle blew air out of pursed lips. “He was white. That’s about all I know.”
“Big? Small?”
“Average.”
“What color was his hair?”
“He was wearing a black knit hat. All his clothes were black.”
Charlie was getting nowhere fast. “So you saw him run away? Was there anything distinctive about his run? A limp or anything?”
“Nah.”
“Did you see a vehicle?” Charlie asked. “Hear it?”
“Sorry.”
“Did you hear or see anyone else?”
Lyle shook his head.
“And why did you put your coat over her head?”
“I felt bad that somebody done her like that,” Lyle said. “It just seemed right to cover her face.”
“So her face is pretty messed up?”
“What?” Lyle looked surprised. “Nah. She’s a pretty thing. All he done to her was cut her two fingers off.”
So Lyle must have surprised the man just as he was beginning his work.
Charlie imagined Lyle shrugging out of his coat, laying it over the woman’s face as tenderly as a mother might cover a sleeping child. The charity of it surprised him. “We’re gonna need to keep your coat, I’m afraid. When we’re done here
, I’ll see if one of the officers can run you over to a shelter, maybe get you another.”
“I’d appreciate that.” Lyle rubbed his hands up and down his arms. “Not the shelter—I don’t like them—but a coat would be nice. It’s cold.”
Which was an understatement. Charlie made a note to ask if any of the officers might have an old blanket in the trunk that Lyle could use in the meantime. His old coat would go into a clean evidence bag. The girl would go in another. Locard’s Exchange Principle said that whenever there was contact between two items, there would always be an exchange, even if it might not be visible to the naked eye. So the coat would have left some fibers on the dead girl, and the dead girl must have left something on the coat, even if it was just a hair or two. They needed the coat to rule it out as the source of anything else they found on the body so they would know it hadn’t come from the killer. It was even possible that the killer had left some trace evidence on the girl, which had then been transferred to the coat. To help sort it out, the medical examiner would want Lyle’s fingerprints as well as a sample of his hair.
And speak of the devil. Here was the medical examiner, Doug Pietsch, his bald head gleaming in the lights that one of the CSIs was setting up. He and Charlie nodded at each other, then walked back together to look again at the corpse.
“Judging by the blood loss, I would say she was killed here.” Doug leaned down and wiggled her knee with his gloved hand. “Within the last two hours, maybe a little longer.” He started to straighten up, then stopped and pointed. “Hey, what’s that?”
Charlie lifted the beam of his flashlight and a chill went down his spine. There was blood on the wall. Not the fine mist from the gunshot. Not cast off from the amputations. No. This was deliberate. Someone had left a scrawled message behind. With gloved fingers, Charlie lifted the girl’s wrist and looked at her intact right hand. Like the left hand, tan lines at the base of every finger showed where rings had once rested. But it was her index finger that he focused on. It was a solid red to the second knuckle.
Before she died, the dead girl had written in her own blood, dipped her finger to the wound in her chest or to the puddle she lay in. Left behind a message so important that she had spent the last few seconds of her life writing it. In wavering letters three inches high, it read: