A Deadly Business (A Mia Quinn Mystery)

by Lis Wiehl

  9370

  The only problem was that Charlie had no idea what it meant.

  CHAPTER 55

  Ninety-three seventy,” Doug read aloud. “What do you think that means?”

  Charlie stared at it, suddenly wishing he had a big cup of coffee. Ideally, with four shots of espresso. “I have no clue,” he told the medical examiner. “I guess it could be a house number. Or maybe a locker number.”

  “Or the number of a safe-deposit box,” Doug contributed. “Or maybe the combination to a lock?” He leaned forward, his big head tilted to one side. He looked more interested than Charlie ever remembered him being. Dead bodies, even those missing two digits, were his workaday reality. But four numbers scrawled in blood? That was new. Or at least newish.

  Each number was shakier than the last. Maybe the actual number was even longer but the victim hadn’t had the strength to finish. “Maybe it’s part of her Social Security number?” Charlie guessed.

  “Or two of the winning Powerball numbers.” Doug grinned. “Maybe she’s trying to tell us we need to play them.”

  “It’s got to have been pretty important for her to write it in her own blood.”

  “Maybe it’s some kind of code, in case the guy noticed what she had done,” Doug said. “She might have figured that if he didn’t understand it, maybe he wouldn’t try to destroy it.”

  “If every letter is a number, then ninety-three seventy would be”—Charlie counted on his fingers—“I, C, G, and I don’t know what zero would be. I guess that wouldn’t work anyway. Not with twenty-six letters and only ten numbers.” An idea teased him, then faded when he tried to pin it down. “If it is a code, it won’t do us much good if we can’t figure it out.”

  While they were speaking, two Seattle PD criminalists—a man and a woman—drove up and parked outside the perimeter of the crime-scene tape. They got out of their car and began to put on shoe coverings, hairnets, and white Tyvek suits they took from the trunk. The white suits would keep them from leaving trace evidence, as well as protect them from any biohazards, which was what they called all the liquids that leaked out of dead people. Although as scenes went, this one wasn’t bad.

  It was going to be a long day. In his head, Charlie ran through everything he would need to do. He needed to walk around the scene again, picking out what he wanted the criminalists to photograph or process. He would note places where they should look for fingerprints, maybe even shoe impressions if there were any patches of dirt.

  When it came to photos, his rule was to document everything, even things that didn’t seem important. You only had one chance to work a scene. A photograph might offer the only clues they would ever have. It wasn’t like a lab sample that could be tested again as long as you hadn’t used it up. Once the photographs were done, Doug would bag the woman’s hands—or what remained of them—to preserve any trace evidence. He would then place the coat and the corpse in clean body bags.

  Meanwhile, Charlie would be assigning officers to search nearby Dumpsters and the warehouse itself, even though it looked like it had been shuttered for years. Closed didn’t necessarily mean empty. Empty spaces attracted human pests just as much as animal and insect ones. He also needed to re-interview Tom Lyle in more detail.

  It might be hard to figure out what was trash and what might be evidence. When in doubt, take it all, was Charlie’s motto. But his gut told him they would be lucky to find anything. In many ways, this felt like the work of a professional. Whoever it was had come prepared with gloves and tools. Most people would have had to work their way up to snipping off fingers, but Charlie had seen no hesitation marks on the girl’s hand. And there was no sign of his shell casings or the girl’s fingers, so he must have taken them away. What kind of man could slip two fingers in his pocket as if they were as commonplace as coins?

  Then again, if this had been planned, why hadn’t the killer taken the victim to some isolated place where she might never have been found and killed her there? Even if he had planned on dumping the body once he was finished obliterating any easy way to identify her, he would still be leaving behind a big pool of blood that would surely draw questions if anyone noticed it before the rain washed it away.

  Charlie needed to walk the neighborhood, looking for evidence and witnesses. Stop to talk to laborers and forklift drivers. The victim’s lack of a coat pointed to her coming here in some kind of vehicle. His mental to-do list got longer. Check with taxi companies. Check the registration of any parked cars in the area to see if they belonged to her. Seek out nearby security cams to see if they had any relevant footage. Send out a notice to law enforcement agencies. Check with missing persons.

  With luck, once Doug got her back to the morgue, the fingerprints on her remaining fingers would match someone in the system. If she was a prostitute—and the inflated breasts, high heels, and missing rings made him think she was—she had probably been picked up before.

  Whoever she was, once the victim had been identified, Charlie would learn everything he could about her. It was like a spiral, the beginning of the yellow brick road. You started at the center, with the victim, then worked your way out in a logical order, making wider and wider circles. And somewhere along the path you figured out the why, even if it really only made sense to the killer. Then you figured out the who.

  He and Doug backed off while one of the criminalists took establishing photographs of the body, Lyle’s coat still across the head. Then she took midrange photos, close-ups, and finally more close-ups of the bullet wound and the mutilated hand with a paper ruler laid down for scale. When she was finished, she called Doug over to lift up the coat so she could take photos of the woman’s face. After Doug moved her, they would take photos of the ground where she had lain.

  But when Doug slowly peeled back the coat with his gloved hands, Charlie sucked in his breath. “Wait a minute.” He leaned closer.

  He’d seen her only in pictures, but he was sure of it, even though her hair was now a brighter blond that looked nearly brassy in the bright lights the criminalists had set up. Even though the painted lips were no longer curved up in a smile.

  “I know this girl.”

  Doug and the criminalist were watching him curiously. “Who is it?”

  “Her name’s Betty Eastman.” The girl Scott had been having an affair with. The girl Jared said had disappeared the same night Scott was killed. “Her boyfriend told me that he hadn’t seen her since April fourteenth.”

  But this body was fresh. Clearly she hadn’t died that night seven months ago.

  Charlie tilted his head as he regarded Betty’s slack mouth and half-open eyes. Where had she been for the last seven months?

  Even if Betty had once been Scott’s killer, now she was someone else’s victim.

  CHAPTER 56

  Eli got to the Tilikum Place Café before Mia. Even though they only liked to seat complete parties, he talked the waitress into letting him snag the last table. While the restaurant wasn’t very big and every seat was now taken, the high ceilings and front wall of windows made the space feel larger than it really was.

  Five minutes later Mia walked in, cheeks pink from the cold. Under a long black North Face raincoat, she wore black pants and a turquoise sweater that set off her blue eyes.

  Eli stood up and stepped around the table to pull out her chair for her. As she sat down, she turned to smile over her shoulder at him. He was close enough to smell her hair.

  “What are you going to get?” he asked as she perused the menu. He poured her coffee from the carafe he had ordered.

  “A Dutch Baby.” It was the specialty of the house, cooked in its own individual frying pan. Eli had been considering ordering it, but then the waitress arrived and described the special: a house-made biscuit split open and filled with Beecher’s flagship cheddar, arugula, an over-easy egg, and bacon. And it came with home fries.

  “I’ll have that,” he said. “And she’ll have the Dutch Baby.” He looked at Mia. “Do you
want orange juice?” When she nodded, he added, “And two large orange juices.”

  “So has there been a lot of fallout from your decision not to charge them as adults?” Eli asked once the waitress had left. His hope was to get Jackson the help that he so clearly needed. The boy still had a spark of promise inside him.

  Mia looked around and then leaned close. “Oh, you mean besides Dominic Raines saying this was the proof the voters needed to kick Frank out of office?” Her voice was so low that Eli leaned in too. “I think people at the office are worried I’ve just pushed more votes Dominic’s way.”

  “Is Frank D’Amato one of those people?” Just the thought made Eli angry.

  “He said it was my decision and he would stand by it. But he didn’t look very happy.” Mia sighed. “The thing is, the public doesn’t understand how our office functions. Raines is saying we’re letting criminals off lightly. A lot of people have the misconception that offenders have been pled away. They think a plea is a reduction, but in King County a lot of people plead as charged. So that saves everyone time and money. But Raines talks about plea bargains like they’re bad things.”

  “What will you do if he wins?”

  “I don’t know. Even if Raines is elected, I’d still have a few months before he was actually sworn in. And I doubt he’d push me out the first week.” She gave him a crooked smile. “But maybe by the second.”

  He thanked his lucky stars that in Washington public defenders were appointed, not elected.

  Their food came, and for a minute they were too busy eating to say much. Eli’s sandwich was amazing: salty, savory, crunchy, chewy, cheesy, and delicious. Judging by the way she was closing her eyes and smiling while she chewed, Mia’s food was equally good.

  He spoke around a second mouthful. “Would you ever think of going into private practice?” Many a former prosecutor had, touting their insider knowledge of what it was like on the other side. “Maybe corporate law?”

  “One thing I know I couldn’t do is civil law.” She made a face and Eli mirrored it.

  Civil cases could last years, with hours devoted to the finer points of civil procedure. The rest of the time went to the process known as “discovery,” where lawyers got into huge fights over inherently uninteresting documents like tax returns. Once they finally obtained these documents, they then spent days, weeks, or months reading them—but most would never find their way into a trial.

  “Criminal law is way more interesting, that’s for sure,” Eli said.

  “I can honestly say I enjoy every day at work.” Mia pointed her fork at him. “How many people can say that? Every case is different. And the facts can be exciting or bizarre or tragic. But they are always interesting. And they are never the same.”

  “I totally get where you’re coming from.” Eli nodded as he spoke. “I could never work for a white-shoe law firm. For them, everything is the bigger, the better: the bigger house, the bigger car, the bigger salary.” That’s the way Lydia had looked at the world. She had thought it was a waste for Eli to pour himself into his cases, working harder and harder even though the money would never get any better.

  Mia snagged a home fry off his plate, and he mock swatted at her. After popping it into her mouth she said, “This might sound sappy, but I kind of like causes.”

  Eli thought of Rachel, who would be going to college in a year. He still wasn’t sure how he would be able to afford that. “Still, there’s something to be said for money.”

  “I should have told you”—Mia gave him a smile—“I’m paying for my half. Wouldn’t want anyone to accuse me of a conflict of interest.”

  “So you’re saying you could be bought for a Dutch Baby?”

  “When you put it that way, it really sounds wrong. And besides, you’re forgetting the home fries.” She snatched another one from his plate. “And the coffee.”

  A single blond curl framed her blue eye. Eli suddenly wanted to lean forward and kiss her in the worst way. Right here in the restaurant.

  Maybe she sensed it, because she sat back and said, “How long have you been divorced?”

  “Lydia left a little over a year ago,” he said, which was mostly the truth. “She thought we got married too young.”

  “Did you?”

  “I was nineteen, she was eighteen. So, yes, we were both too young.”

  Eli had volunteered for the army after high school graduation. The army, in its infinite wisdom, had trained him to be a paralegal, which actually turned out to be a pretty good fit for him. On one of his leaves, Lydia got pregnant. She was still in school. She graduated, but she was four months along when she walked down the aisle of her high school auditorium in a cheap green satin graduation gown. And five months pregnant when she married him, this time wearing a cheap white satin gown.

  Lydia had always complained that she had just moved from one house to another. She had never gotten to live on her own, never gotten to be independent. She had gone from being a child to being a mother.

  “You must look at Rachel and think about how young you guys really were. I mean, she’s, what, only a year younger than your wife was when you got married?”

  Eli did think about it, but he still felt defensive. “At the time, it seemed like the right solution.” He didn’t spell out the pregnancy, figuring Mia could read between the lines. “But Lydia always felt she missed out on being a teenager. So she started acting like she could still be one. The summer she left I would come home from work and find her hanging around the pool with our daughter and her friends.” In a bikini, no less. “Rachel was embarrassed, but I think the boys thought it was cool. One day I caught Lydia smoking pot with two of them.” His face flushed as he remembered.

  Mia winced.

  “I had already realized that Rachel was getting off track. But it wasn’t until that day that I realized it was my wife who was the one leading her down the garden path. She’d practically whisper in Rachel’s ear: ‘You’re young, you need to go out and have fun while you still can.’ ” He blew air through pursed lips, remembering. “I asked Lydia to go to counseling at our church. She refused, and then she stopped going to church.” He had pleaded, begged, promised—but it hadn’t done any good. And then she was gone. “And that was pretty much it.”

  Mia was silent for a long time, cradling her coffee cup in her hands. “Did you love her?”

  He was surprised. “Of course I did. You can’t live with someone for seventeen years and not love them. Of course, you can’t live that long with someone and not hate them too. And find them annoying and boring and wonderful and surprising and funny. I finally gave her a choice. Me or her new lifestyle.” He bit his lip. “She chose the lifestyle.”

  “So how’s Rachel dealing with it?”

  “She doesn’t say much, but it’s been hard. When her mom left, she didn’t just leave me, she left Rachel too. And the poor kid can’t help thinking it has something to do with her. When it’s really all about her mom. When we were still living in Portland, Rachel started getting into trouble, hanging out with a bad group of kids. So I decided to move up here, get a fresh start.”

  “Has it worked?”

  A heaviness settled in his chest. “Maybe. I don’t know.” He spoke before he had a chance to consider whether it was a good idea to tell the truth. “The other day I’m pretty sure she was high. Her eyes looked swollen and she couldn’t stop giggling. Then she tried to put her plate in the upper rack of the dishwasher even though it obviously wouldn’t fit.” He had watched her keep trying, though, while his dinner turned into a leaden lump in his stomach.

  Mia leaned forward. “Gabe’s had his problems too. A few months ago he was with a group of kids that robbed a convenience store. He didn’t take anything, and he came forward afterward, so he wasn’t charged. I just worry which way his life is going to go. What other choices he’s going to make.”

  Eli felt relieved. There were times when he talked to other parents, even other single parents, and he felt
like a loser. Their kids, at least according to them, always got good grades, never got into trouble, and volunteered to clean up without being asked. They even did real volunteer work.

  “It’s hard to be a single parent. And it’s hard to be a kid and not have two parents.” He hesitated. “You told me earlier that you thought your husband might have been murdered.”

  “Charlie has a theory,” Mia began.

  Eli nodded. He hadn’t been too impressed with Charlie, with his slouch and long hair.

  Mia explained it to him while Eli tried to look like he was keeping an open mind. Maybe homicide detectives started seeing murder everyplace they looked. The whole thing seemed complicated. Newton’s first law of motion? Plus, Eli had a feeling there might be parts Mia was glossing over. Still, she was an open book compared to Lydia.

  “If Charlie’s right and Scott was murdered,” he pointed out, “then whoever did it is not going to be happy that you’re trying to figure it out.”

  “I’m thinking it’s related to something Scott did. Not me.” She bit her lip. “I’m wondering if this restaurant owner who was one of Scott’s clients was involved. I was kind of sneaking around yesterday, talking to one of his employees, and then I actually saw the owner hit the poor man. He didn’t know I was there. I’m thinking of calling the state department of labor, only I’m worried I’ll just make this guy lose his job.”

  Sneaking around trying to solve Scott’s murder? This was exactly the kind of thing Eli was afraid of. “But, Mia, don’t you see that this can be—”

  Her phone rang, interrupting him. She looked at it, her finger hovering over the button to dismiss it, then she took a closer look and picked it up instead.

  “This is Mia.” As she listened, the smile fell from her face like a plate from a shelf. Eli felt himself tense as she asked a series of questions.