MQuinn 03 - Lethal Beauty

by Wiehl, Lis

  Red splotches of color appeared on Werther’s cheeks. “No, no, it’s the whole thing. She saw the leg first, but then she realized it was a body. She dragged it up on the beach, called 911, I was dispatched, and then I notified Homicide.”

  “Where’s the runner?”

  Werther pointed. Charlie turned and saw a woman in her forties clutching her elbows. She was pacing back and forth on a stretch of grass on the far side of the parking lot. She wore black running leggings, and her shoes and lightweight jacket were both neon green.

  “The criminalists and the medical examiner will be here soon,” Charlie told Werther. “You did a good job of setting up the perimeter. If anyone shows up, keep them well back. We’re just lucky it’s not a nice day.” Six months from now there would be hundreds of people in this park.

  He walked over to the witness and held out his hand. “Charlie Carlson. Seattle Homicide. I understand you’re the one who found the body.”

  Although she had the twig-like body of a dedicated runner, the woman still had a firm handshake.

  “Dee Sandoval.” She mimicked his no-nonsense delivery. “Seattle runner.” She had bright blue eyes. Her straight dark hair fell to her shoulders and was threaded with a few strands of gray. Now that he was closer to her, he could see that her shoes were sopping, her leggings wet to the thigh.

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened this afternoon?”

  “I went for a run. Part of it was along the beach. I like it because it’s such a good workout. The sand is always shifting under your weight. I saw something bobbing in the water, and I thought it might be a harbor seal. I’ve never seen one up close. Then when I came down to the water’s edge, I couldn’t figure out what it was. I was wondering if it was some kind of octopus.” She colored. “I guess that was dumb.”

  “Why did you drag the body out of the water?” It would take a certain amount of courage.

  “When I saw it was a person, I knew that whoever it was had a family. And that they deserved to know what had happened, even if the answer was terrible. I think he’d been in the water for a while.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  Her shoulders hunched. “His skin was … loose. At first I thought it was his shirt. But then I realized he wasn’t wearing one.” She shivered and rewrapped her arms around herself.

  The wind was picking up, slicing over the water like a cold knife.

  “I’m glad you towed him in. Otherwise he might not ever have been found.” Charlie took his notebook from his pocket. His memory was good enough that he didn’t often take notes, but when it came to strings of numbers, he needed pen and paper. “About all I need from you right now is your name, address, and phone number.”

  After Dee reeled off the last digit of her cell phone number, she added, “It’s been awhile since a man asked me for that.” She tilted her head to one side, making her hair swing back and forth.

  Charlie let out a startled laugh. The old Charlie might have taken Dee up on her hint. The new Charlie, well, he wasn’t quite sure what the new Charlie was all about. Just that he had lost interest in any woman who wasn’t Mia Quinn.

  He still wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  It was getting dark and the fog was starting to roll in. “Do you need a ride home?”

  “I’d love it, but I actually drove here.” Her grin was mischievous. “But if you have any further questions about anything at all, Officer, you know where to find me.”

  “That I do,” Charlie agreed. And just stopped himself from tipping her a wink.

  Dee was getting into her car when the medical examiner drove up and parked a few spaces over. He got out and walked over to Charlie, pulling on purple vinyl gloves as he went.

  “Hey, Doug,” Charlie said with a nod. Doug’s last name, Pietsch, was pronounced like the fruit. But with his bald head and stocky body, Doug looked a lot more like a fire hydrant.

  “What have we got?”

  “A floater. Runner spotted the body and dragged it onshore.” They walked over to the tarp. Charlie tried to step lightly over the sand, but he could already feel grains trickling into his shoes.

  Doug lifted a corner, and they regarded the corpse.

  The man was naked, half sprawled on his back. His build was slight, his complexion dusky. The mottled skin was beginning to decompose. His thick black hair had fallen over his eyes.

  “He’s not Caucasian,” Doug said, folding the tarp back all the way, “but I’m not sure of the ethnicity. Maybe Latino?”

  “I’d bet he’s Asian,” Charlie said.

  “You’re on. A pint of the winner’s choice?” Doug was something of a beer nut, always going on about ABVs and IBUs. Charlie just liked the taste and wasn’t too picky.

  “How long do you think he’s been dead?” Charlie asked as the medical examiner continued to circle around the body, looking but not touching. Not yet.

  “Ten days? In the Sound, it takes about that long for someone to come bobbing up, and he looks fairly fresh.” He made a humming sound in the back of his throat.

  “What?” Charlie asked.

  “This guy has got contusions in various stages of healing. And it doesn’t look like they’re from running into things or being hit by objects.” He pointed at some of the spots Charlie had thought were postmortem damage. “The edges are soft but the shapes are distinct. I think someone’s put their hands on him. Multiple times, multiple ways. See on his upper arm, those are fingertip bruises. Someone grabbed him. Squeezed hard.”

  Charlie could see them now, oval dots.

  Doug touched the ribs next to the spine. “I bet that one’s from a fist.”

  “So given all those bruises, what do you think?” Charlie still hadn’t seen any obviously fatal wounds. “Murder? Suicide? Accident?”

  “With all those bruises I can see why he might want to depart this life, but naked suicide is pretty unusual, especially in water. Sometimes people who have decided to kill themselves get naked because they don’t want to make a mess, but that’s usually when they’re using a gun or maybe a knife. Not the ocean. They’ll strip and get in a tub or shower with a weapon, but that’s just to contain the blood and such. I guess it’s possible he was worried his clothes would add buoyancy and interfere with him drowning.”

  “And it’s hard to imagine this was any kind of an accident,” Charlie said. “Who’s going to go swimming naked this time of year?” He pulled up his coat collar and tried to turn his back to the wind.

  Doug didn’t say anything, just nodded. He was still crouched down, lightly running his gloved hand back and forth over the man’s ribs. Charlie guessed he was checking for broken bones. Then he reached out to the thick dark hair, brushed it off the face. Charlie wished he hadn’t. The eyes were mostly gone, as were some bits of flesh.

  “Do you think he was dead before he ended up in the water?”

  Doug shrugged as he straightened up. “Probably. When I open him up, I’ll look for water in the lungs. Then we’ll know if it was a body dump or if it was the water that killed him.” He stopped, his gaze riveted on something. He lifted one of the dead man’s shoulders. “I think we just found our answer.”

  Charlie saw what Doug had spotted: the small, perfectly round hole in the man’s upper back.

  Charlie glanced from the wound to the hairless chest. As far as he could see, it was intact. “Where’s the exit wound?”

  Doug bent closer. “I think we’re in luck, my friend. I think the bullet is still in there.” He squinted at the wound. “And I don’t see any muzzle print or laceration.”

  “So he wasn’t shot at point-blank range?” Charlie had been wondering if they were looking at an execution.

  “There’s no stippling, but that doesn’t mean much if he was originally wearing clothes.” Stippling, or gunshot residue, occurred when power particles bruised or burned the victim’s skin if the weapon had been discharged in close proximity. “But in my experience, pe
ople who are shot in the back are generally running away.”

  But why? A payback? Maybe a lover’s quarrel? Or could the dead guy have been a kidnap victim? Was he a foreign national?

  In his head, Charlie started making a to-do list. Get a dive team out in case the victim had been dumped in the water at this location and there was evidence on the floor of the Sound. Check missing person reports. Check with Harbor Patrol and the nearby marina to see if they had any reports of altercations in the past week or so. Check the shoreline in case the guy’s clothes or any other evidence turned up. Check parked cars to see if any had been in the same place for a week or more.

  Doug sat back on his heels. “I think the clothes are gone to make it harder to figure out who he is. Or maybe they were worried about trace evidence. They could have been thinking of the Sound as a gigantic bathtub. That by the time someone found him, he would be washed clean.”

  His gaze sharpened. “What’s that?” He picked up a limp hand by a couple of fingers. Three angry parallel lines braceleted the inside of the man’s right wrist. “Those look like burn marks.”

  “So they hit him and then they held him down and burned him? They must have really wanted to know something.”

  “I’ve seen marks like those before.” Doug blew air out of pursed lips. “Just can’t think of where.”

  Maybe it was some kind of gang thing. Or a drug deal gone bad. Had the victim kept something he wasn’t supposed to keep and his killers had forced him to tell where it was?

  What had the man’s killers wanted, Charlie wondered. And had they gotten it?

  CHAPTER 13

  Is there anything else you feel I should know about you?” the red-haired woman asked the young man seated in the back left-hand corner of the jury box. He was wearing a faded green flannel shirt that was probably older than either of them.

  “There is one thing, yes.” For a second he pressed his lips together. “I am dying of cancer, so I might not be here for the whole trial.”

  The eyes of the pretend lawyer as well as the other pretend jurors widened.

  “Very good, Samantha,” Mia said. As Titus had the night before, she had given each of her students playing jurors an interesting fact to see if their classmates playing lawyers could suss them out during voir dire. “That question you asked is a great example of what some people call an oyster question. It’s called that because you have to shuck a bunch of oysters before you find a pearl, but when you do, it’s worth it. Some other oyster questions I like are, ‘Is there any other reason why you might not be a totally fair and impartial juror in a case like this?’ or ‘Is anyone thinking, “You know, if the lawyer had only asked me this question, he really would have found out something important about me”?’ ”

  As the students scribbled down her examples or typed them into their laptops, Mia tried to think back to the questions she had asked the potential jurors for Dandan’s case. Was there anything she could have asked that would have revealed Warren’s true nature? She was sure he was the holdout. The only question was, which way was the rest of the jury lined up? Was it possible Warren had voted to convict and the rest of them had wanted to let Leacham go free?

  Mia realized the students were waiting for her to continue speaking. Between worrying about the trial and her dad’s new friend, she was too easily distracted. She collected herself.

  “I actually once got that answer Lincoln just gave from a prospective juror. Some of the other ones I’ve heard are, ‘I was once accused of murder and acquitted,’ and ‘A cop beat me up when I was in college and now I don’t believe any of them.’ And my personal favorite has to be, ‘We went out once in high school but you don’t remember me.’ ”

  Everyone laughed. Mia joined in, a little painfully. At the time it had been humiliating, casting her in an unflattering light. She had gone on to lose that case, and part of her had always wondered if the jurors were punishing her.

  “One way to encourage the jury to be honest is, if you can, to reveal something about yourself before you ask anyone else to. During my first trial I was so scared that my legs were actually shaking during voir dire. So I didn’t try to hide it. In fact, I told the jury pool something like, ‘I have to confess that my knees are knocking because this is my first trial. But it is important that justice be done. I promise to deliver the evidence if you promise to listen to it.’ ” She let the more pleasant memory push aside the old one. “And you know what? We won!”

  Lincoln, the student who had pretended to have cancer, raised his hand. “So how often do people lie to you?”

  Maybe Mia was getting jaded, because there were days she thought everyone lied, at least to a degree. “I think it’s pretty common. If people hold views they realize are not as popular, they’ll often minimize them, if not outright lie. And you can all probably guess that potential jurors will also lie to get off a jury. They’ll claim financial hardships or vacation plans that don’t really exist. There are even times when people will lie to get on a case, especially if it’s high profile. Take the Scott Peterson case, the one where the guy killed his pregnant wife and then stood in front of the TV cameras and begged for her safe return. Later, his attorney claimed that three people lied to get on that jury so they could try to turn their experiences into a book or at least media exposure. There are even times when people will try to get on the jury if they don’t like the law. Before pot was legalized here, we used to see that all the time with marijuana cases. Some jurors would vote ‘not guilty’ even if they believed the person had smoked pot, simply because they didn’t like the law.”

  Her thoughts snagged on the idea. Could Warren have angled to get on the jury because he didn’t believe in the death penalty? But he had seemed equally checked out for both hers and Wheeler’s arguments.

  “So what do you do to make sure jurors are telling the truth?” another student asked.

  Mia blew air out of pursed lips. “It’s a balancing act. You’ve got to dig for the truth, but at the same time you have to be careful not to get to the point where you offend or embarrass people. Remember that some of your challenges for cause will be denied, and those folks could end up on the jury. Even if they don’t, the other jurors are watching—and judging you. One way to help is to remember what Mr. Brown said last night. Ask lots of open-ended questions and don’t jump in too quickly after they answer. Sometimes they’ll add something that’s very revealing. But at the end of the day, you might just have to go with your gut.”

  What had her gut told her about Warren? Nothing too bad. Compared to the people she had used up her preemptory challenges on, he hadn’t made much of an impression one way or another. Mia had actually been more worried about Jim, the accountant who was now the foreperson of the jury.

  Maybe she should still be. Accountants, and other people whose jobs required analytical thinking, such as engineers and computer programmers, tended to be very precise about the law and the facts. At times they could demand an almost unattainable level of proof to convict.

  After class ended, Eli stuck his head in the classroom. “Do you have a verdict yet?”

  So much for trying not to obsess about it. “Not only do we not have a verdict, but the jurors sent out a note saying they were hung. Judge Ortega gave them every good argument for continuing, but I don’t know if it’s going to work.”

  He grimaced. “All that work, and then you might just have to do it all over again.”

  Mia took her coat down from the hook. “The whole time I was watching the students practice voir dire, I was asking myself if there was something I could have done to avoid this mess.”

  “Sometimes it all seems nearly impossible.” Eli took her coat and held it open for her. “First you’re given just a couple of hours to decide if the people who got summoned are even capable of being unbiased. And then the jury system asks the resulting twelve people, these folks who are complete strangers, to decide the fate of a thirteenth. And then everyone wonders why it takes so lon
g!”

  “It’s not the easiest system.”

  Eli sighed. “Sometimes every part of it seems pretty crazy. You know how big my caseload is right now? Close to three hundred.”

  Mia’s mouth fell open. “That’s impossible! How do you manage it?”

  “The short answer is that I don’t. The longer answer is that I sometimes worry I’ll die trying. I’ve got clients charged with everything from juvenile delinquency to first-degree murder.”

  As they walked out to the parking lot, her phone buzzed. She checked the caller ID, knowing it was rude to do that in the middle of a conversation, but part of her always imagined it was Gabe facing some kind of emergency. And sometimes it was.

  This time, however, it was Charlie. “Sorry,” she said to Eli as she stopped walking. “It’s Charlie Carlson.”

  His expression altered ever so slightly. Mia liked both Charlie and Eli. As friends. She didn’t have time for anything more. At least that’s what she told herself.

  She pressed the button to answer. “What’s up, Charlie?”

  “Since I’m already at the office seeing if I can figure out who the floater was, I ran that Luciana for you.”

  “And?” She held her breath.

  “She’s forty-two. Born in El Salvador. Never married in the US. No criminal convictions. Valid Washington driver’s license. She’s lived in the same apartment for two years. And she’s got a T visa.”

  The pieces clicked into place. “She was trafficked?” Mia felt her face get hot.

  “It looks like she was freed from a brothel. She testified against her traffickers.”

  “Oh.” For a second she imagined what it had been like for Luciana to see Mia’s stare, her judgment. She tried to line up the reality of what Charlie had just told her with the quiet woman who had taken small bites and avoided eye contact, as if she was hoping to be invisible. “Thanks, Charlie.”

  “What was that about?” Eli asked after she hung up.