A Deadly Business (A Mia Quinn Mystery)

by Lis Wiehl

  “How did she die? . . . In her own blood?” Her voice was filled with disbelief. “What was the number?” Then she repeated, “Nine three seven oh. That doesn’t mean anything to me either . . . Okay, I’ll talk to you soon.” She ended the call and then looked up at Eli. “Sorry about that.”

  “I couldn’t help overhearing. Did someone you know die?”

  The look she gave him wasn’t easy to decipher. Embarrassment, anger, fear? A little of everything? “My late husband’s girlfriend.”

  CHAPTER 57

  TUESDAY

  Mia had spent the last few days in a blur. Everyone was still adjusting to having two more people in the house. Charlie was keeping her up-to-date on his hunt to find Betty’s killer, but so far it was coming up empty. Today was the election, and tempers were running high at the office as everyone wondered whether they would wake up to the news of a new boss.

  On her way home from work, Mia started sneezing. Great. She was getting a cold. Leaning forward, she rummaged through the glove box for a packet of tissues, careful not to take her eyes off the road. Instead, her fingers touched the black jewelry box that held the engagement ring Scott had planned to give Betty. She had put it there after meeting with Oleg, not able to bring herself to bring it back into her house.

  But what if one day Gabe rummaged for a tissue or a pair of sunglasses? Even though it was so small, it felt like the box gave out a toxic glow, like something radioactive that would slowly poison bones and blood.

  When Oleg had told her the truth about the ring’s value, Mia had originally thought she should keep it to remind her of Scott’s bone-deep perfidy. Not only to her, but even to his mistress.

  But really, what was the point of that? Every day she was reminded of how he had lied to her, how he had already begun to abandon her and their children. She was reminded when she worried about whether she could afford new tires for the car. When she wished that her kids would stop growing out of their clothes. When she had to pay a bill that Scott had run up. For all she knew, this ring had been put on one of the many credit cards he had left behind.

  Mia hadn’t yet gotten on the freeway, so she pulled over and Googled “jewelry stores” on her phone. There was one only a half mile away.

  Located in a small shopping area with stores on three sides of a parking lot, Streeter’s Jewelry wasn’t nearly as nice as Oleg’s Jewels and Gems. But it had a sign in the window that said, “We pay cash for your jewelry,” and that was all she cared about. Oleg had told her Scott had paid seven or eight hundred for the ring, that the setting was 18-karat gold. She thought of the heft of it. Once you pried out the cubic zirconia, the rest could be melted down.

  A bell jingled overhead when she walked in. It was a small store, with glass cases on three sides of the room. A man stepped out from the back. He was older, Hispanic looking, with a dark suit like a banker’s and long silver sideburns to show that he also had an artistic side.

  “May I help you?”

  “I’d like to sell this ring.” She held out the black box. It was a relief to put it in his palm.

  “Oh?” He raised an eyebrow.

  She said evenly, “It reminds me of a past relationship.” Just not hers. “Could you tell me how much it’s worth?”

  Screwing a jeweler’s loupe to his left eye, he snapped open the box, then plucked the ring from inside and leaned down to look at it under a light.

  Even though it would be a relief to be rid of it, realistically, how much could she expect to get? Oleg had probably exaggerated the value, trying to help a widow in need without embarrassing either of them.

  Then again, even a couple hundred dollars would be welcome. And it would be out of her life, which was even more important.

  He lifted his head and took the loupe from his eye. “It’s a beautiful piece,” he said slowly. “The cut, the clarity, the color. Of course, we can only offer you the wholesale value, not the retail.” His eyes were a very light brown with gold flecks. “To be honest, you might try selling it as a private party. You might be able to get more for it.”

  “I’d feel kind of strange about that,” Mia said. “I mean, I would tell them right up front that it’s a fake, but I’d still feel like one of those men with the watches hung up inside their raincoats.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about? This is no fake.”

  “What?” The room seemed to be rotating around her, and she put her hand on the counter to steady herself. “Are you saying it’s real?”

  “Very much so. I could give you maybe twenty thousand for it, but if you sold it as a private party, you could probably get thirty.”

  “But I was told by another jeweler that it was a fake. He said it was a very good fake, but still a fake.”

  He snorted. “He was right about it being very good. Just not about it being fake. Let me ask you something. Did he offer to take it off your hands?”

  Mia remembered how alarmed Oleg had looked when she had started laughing at the news. “He told me he could buy it back if I was having a problem with money.”

  “Buy it back?”

  “He has two shops. One sells gems, the other costume jewelry. He said my husband had bought the ring from the costume jewelry one.”

  “He lied to you,” he said flatly. “He was trying to cheat you. You should report him to the Better Business Bureau.”

  Mia felt off balance. What else might Oleg have lied about?

  CHAPTER 58

  Charlie sat at his desk staring at a photograph of the number: 9370. Betty had used her last few heartbeats to leave a message, a message so vital that she had chosen to write it in her own blood.

  But he had no idea what it was.

  He typed 9370 into Google.

  It was a BlackBerry model number. So had Betty been trying to hint they needed to look at a phone?

  But it turned out to also be the model number of a radar detector, an International truck, and an IBM mainframe computer released in 1986. In addition, it was the name of a gene that was involved with metabolic and hormonal processes. None of these seemed like anything Betty would care about.

  Remembering Doug’s theory that it might have only been a partial number, Charlie Googled 937 to see if it was an area code. It was—in Ohio. 937-0. So had she wanted them to call the operator in Ohio?

  The number was the only real clue he had. As for Betty herself, there was no yellow brick road to follow. She had no family and had grown up in a series of foster placements. The clothes she had been wearing when she died were expensive, but not exclusive enough to be traced back to a single buyer. The last friend she’d had seemed to have been Jared. And according to him, Betty had dropped out of sight the day Scott was murdered. April was also the last month she seemed to have had a cell phone contract, a job, any activity on her credit cards, or gone to school.

  So something must have happened to Betty around the same time, or even the very night Scott died. Both airbags had been deployed, so if she had been in the car and wearing her seat belt, she could have survived in much better shape than Scott had. Especially assuming no one had taken a club to her head afterward. Had someone caused the accident, taken her, and then gotten tired of her?

  With a groan Charlie pushed himself back from his desk and walked over to the break room. He came back with a cup of sludgy coffee that smelled like it had sat on the burner since Monday. His grandma would have said it was the kind of coffee that would put hair on your chest.

  He walked around his desk to get back to his chair, his eyes still on the photo.

  And suddenly Charlie saw what Betty’s last message had been.

  He pictured Betty, her heart pumping erratically, lying on her back, not strong enough to get to her feet. Not even strong enough to sit up or roll over. Dipping her finger in her own blood, reaching back, writing her note with the last of her strength. Her brain already affected by a lack of oxygen before it finally shut down altogether.

  She had writte
n it so that it was right side up for her.

  It wasn’t 9370.

  It was OLEG.

  CHAPTER 59

  Vin waited for the three men to emerge from the workroom. As required, they had stripped before they walked into the room as naked as the day they were born. Inside the room, his boss supplied everything they needed: the bunny suits, the gloves, the breathing masks. As well as the hammers, the gaudy necklaces, the scales, the packaging.

  Even with the masks, when they were done they would still stagger out of the room with pupils so wide they looked like those Japanese cartoon characters that he thought were called anime. Then he would search them, put his own gloved hands on their sweating, trembling bodies to make sure they hadn’t hidden any of the precious commodity in an orifice.

  From inside the room the rhythmic tap, tap, tap still echoed. Each of the men gently striking one of the huge necklaces shaped like hearts and covered with rhinestones. The necklaces that had been chosen not for any sense of beauty, but solely for how much they could hold.

  There was a cracking sound as one of the necklaces finally yielded. Revealing its own white, powdery heart.

  Pure cocaine.

  Then his phone rang.

  In the old days everyone knew if you wanted something done right, you went to Vin. A bank robbery that happened minutes after the casino made a deposit? He was your man. Did you want someone dead but no one to be suspicious? Let Vin take care of it, and no one would even guess it was a hit. He had been responsible for five “accidents,” two missing persons, and one businessman who was believed to have run off with his mistress.

  The key to being successful, to keeping out of prison, was to plan everything in advance. Before you did any kind of job, whether it was a hit or a robbery, you began by familiarizing yourself with the routine you planned to disrupt.

  You figured out one quick escape route, but you also had another, longer one, in case some Joe Citizen looking for a merit badge decided to follow you and you had to shake him loose. You mapped and timed both primary and secondary routes. You stole license plates from parked cars. You stole parked cars. You rented garages to park the stolen cars with the new stolen plates.

  When you did a job, you never carried anything that if dropped could later be traced back to you. No cell phones. No scraps of paper with your girlfriend’s phone number. No nothing, up to and including your wallet. And you never touched anything with your bare hands.

  The last time he had done a job in haste, it had gone wrong. Terribly wrong. Nineteen years of prison wrong. He had gone in a strong man, a man in the prime of life, a man who could scare people just by looking at them, and had come out an old man.

  But it wasn’t like he had a pension plan. He was going to have to work until he was dead.

  Now all Vin’s rules, produced by years of careful study and thought, kept being broken. Not because of anything he did, but because of his new boss. Oleg was unpredictable. Oleg made messes. Oleg was jovial, until very suddenly he wasn’t.

  Vin was just Oleg’s errand boy. Sixty-two years old and this was what he had been reduced to. Shakedowns, threats, bribes. Low-level muscle. Sometimes even playing the part of a driver, dressed in a black suit that was too tight across the shoulders. He was also the guy who pulled on vinyl gloves and did cavity searches. And, very rarely, there was the termination that called for his special skills. Planning Scott Quinn’s murder, making sure it looked like an accident, had been the most interesting thing he had done all year.

  Now what Oleg was demanding of him was hasty, pulled together far too fast for Vin’s taste. It was too haphazard to even be called a plan. He didn’t like the sound of it at all. It was one thing to be sicced on someone who should have known what they were getting into, but civilians were a different matter. They had their world, and he had his. He didn’t like overlap.

  Of course there were people who tried to straddle both sides. Like that Scott Quinn. Letting himself be eased from one thing to the next until one day he woke up and had second thoughts a little too late. Tax evasion was one thing, he had actually told Oleg, but cocaine was another.

  In the last few seconds of his life, as Vin took a baseball bat to his head, maybe he had realized they weren’t that far apart.

  CHAPTER 60

  Mia parked her car in the U-Dub parking lot, then got out and went over to the passenger side. As she leaned in to gather her papers and books, she was overcome with exhaustion. The last thing she wanted was to teach tonight.

  She realized a man was standing behind her. Too close. With a gasp, she straightened up and whirled around. Then she recognized him. It was Alvin Turner. The older man who had stopped and tried to help Scott. Tried to help him even after Scott had bullied him.

  Only why was he here? At the University of Washington?

  And something about his face had changed. It was harder somehow. Except for his blue eyes. For some reason, they just looked . . . dead.

  “Alvin?” she said uncertainly.

  “Call me Vin,” he said, and then pressed the gun into her side.

  CHAPTER 61

  Eli pulled into the law school’s parking lot. A few rows ahead of him, he saw Mia. She was standing next to the passenger side of her car. An old man with white hair and a ruddy face was talking to her. As Eli watched, Mia’s hand flew to her mouth and her eyes went wide.

  Was something wrong? Had the man brought her bad news? Eli squinted. Was that guy maybe Mia’s dad?

  Still talking, the old man took her left arm just above the elbow and pulled her closer to him. Then the two of them began to hurry through the parking lot and away from Eli. Mia moved oddly. Her body was stiff and her feet scuffed the ground.

  Eli slowly got out of his car, his eyes never leaving them, still trying to figure out what was happening. The two got into an old blue Ford. The weird thing was they both got in on the passenger’s side, Mia first and then the older man. Then she scooted over—it must have a bench seat—until she was behind the wheel.

  Eli felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. Something was wrong. He didn’t know what, but he had learned to trust that sixth sense. Instead of going into the law school or even calling Mia on her cell, he got back in his car and followed the Taurus back out of the lot and onto the street.

  Mia was driving a little too fast. Soon they were heading west. Eli tried to keep two cars between them, even though he didn’t think either of them knew he was there. The old man wasn’t turning around to look behind him, and Mia seemed to be staring straight ahead. It looked like she was talking.

  At a stoplight Eli yanked out his phone and dialed Mia’s number. No answer. He was staring at the back of her head and she didn’t even move. But the times he had been with her, she had kept her phone on vibrate mode. Maybe she hadn’t noticed his call. Maybe she was busy talking to the man about whatever urgent business had caused her to leave campus when her class would be starting in only a few minutes. He hung up without leaving a message.

  If Eli called 911, what would he say? That this woman he knew slightly was now driving off with a man he didn’t know at all? Instead, he called 411 and asked for the number for the Seattle Police Department. When he got through, Eli said, “I need to speak to a detective in the homicide department. His name is Charlie . . .” What was Charlie’s last name? He ground his teeth in frustration.

  “Carlson,” the woman supplied.

  “Yes, yes. Carlson. And it’s urgent.”

  “Carlson,” the guy growled into the phone a few seconds later. Eli felt a nibble of irritation. It sounded like Charlie had watched one too many movies about tough-guy cops.

  “Charlie, this is Eli Hall, from the public defender’s office.” Charlie started to say something, maybe to mention something about the shopping cart case, but Eli overrode him. “Mia and I were supposed to be teaching together tonight at U-Dub. But as I was driving in, I saw her getting into a car with this older guy. It wasn’t her car and I’ve neve
r seen the man before. And there was something about his face and her body language. Like he had hold of her arm and they both got into the car on the passenger’s side, and then she scooted over to drive. Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think she’s going willingly. I tried calling her, but she didn’t answer.”

  Charlie’s voice sharpened. “What does this guy look like?”

  Eli felt both relieved that he believed him and worried that he wasn’t dismissing him out of hand. “Older. He had white hair.”

  “Did you notice anything else about him?”

  “He had a reddish face. Like maybe he had bad skin a long time ago.”

  Charlie swore. And then swore again. “Did you get the license number of the car?”

  “Hold on a sec.” Eli pressed down on the accelerator. “I’ll see if I can get close enough to make it.” He cut around a white Jetta in front of him, then winced when it honked.

  “Wait a minute,” Charlie said. “You’re following him?”

  “Yes.” Eli got into the left lane, hoping the change looked natural. He didn’t want the guy guessing Eli was on his tail.

  “Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all.” Charlie was now talking between gasps. It sounded like he was running.

  “I’m not leaving her.” Eli felt ridiculous, like he was saying, You’re not the boss of me.

  “Think about it. What if you’re right and something is wrong? What if you spook him?”

  “Look,” Eli said as he squinted at the back of the car, “do you want his license number or not?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  Eli rattled it off.

  “Okay,” Charlie said. “Great. Now you need to back off and let the professionals take over.”

  “What, are you telling me you can get a squad car here right this second? I don’t think so. And if I let them drive off, then we’ll have no idea where she is.”

  “If he realizes you’re tailing him, he might panic. And people who panic tend to do stupid things. So back off!”