MQuinn 03 - Lethal Beauty

by Wiehl, Lis

“Judge not lest ye be judged.” Mia put her phone away.

  “Hmm?” He tilted his head.

  “My dad took me out to lunch today. I thought it was going to be just us. But it turned out he wanted me to meet his new lady friend. She’s only a few years older than I am. She’s obviously from another country. I was worried he was being taken advantage of by some illegal alien scam artist. But it turns out she was brought here and forced into prostitution. Now she’s got a T visa.”

  “I’ve had clients who have been brought to the States like that. They come here thinking they’re going to be working as maids or hostesses, and then they wind up in a cubicle servicing men ten hours a day.” Eli sighed. “It’s good that she’s found a way to reclaim her life. A lot of those women wind up too broken to go on.”

  “I probably shouldn’t have stuck my nose in my dad’s business.” It was a painful admission.

  Eli didn’t contradict her. “Your dad’s been around the block a time or two. He probably knows what he’s doing.”

  She crossed her arms. “Love can blind you.” She thought of how Scott had lied and cheated and left her up to her neck in debt. “It can make you see only what you want to see.”

  “You sound like my wife.” The words were out of Eli’s mouth before he could call them back. He hadn’t planned to say that. He hadn’t planned to say anything at all. “Lydia thought love was basically just some kind of bait and switch.”

  Mia looked up at him, her eyes wide with surprise. “Don’t you mean ex-wife?”

  Heat climbed Eli’s neck. If only he could relive the last thirty seconds, suck the words back into his mouth. “Not quite, to be honest,” he said, knowing he hadn’t been honest for far too long. “Lydia just took off, and I don’t really know where she is. The last time I heard from her, she was in Vegas. Before that, Houston. And before that, I think it was St. Louis.”

  Mia stood frozen. “So you’re not actually divorced?”

  “No. Not really. Not yet.” He knew it didn’t count if it was only in his head. Only in his heart.

  She took a step back from him and crossed her arms. “What about divorce by publication?”

  Mia was talking about a procedure that had been drawn up for cases just like his. He would have to get permission from the court to publish a notice of the divorce in the newspaper. And to do that, he would have to show the judge that he had tried to find Lydia and tried hard. Asked her mother, her sister, her friends, the Portland middle school that had once employed her. Checked with the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission. Looked in online directories and phone books. Even prove that he had checked Facebook.

  “I know I should.” But for reasons he couldn’t even articulate to himself, Eli hadn’t yet done any of those things. Shame? Guilt? Inertia? “I just haven’t yet. It’s really just more of a formality.”

  “You know when a good time to tell me that would have been?” Mia demanded.

  He held his breath, his heart beating in his ears. Was she going to say that a good time would have been before she had fallen in love with him?

  “When?” he managed to ask.

  “A long time ago!” And with that, Mia turned and walked away.

  CHAPTER 14

  THURSDAY

  Charlie took another bite of his bear claw, savoring the sweetness of the icing, the flakiness of the pastry, and the crunch of the toasted almond slices.

  He was sitting in the observation room that overlooked King County’s autopsy suite. Below him was the corpse of the runner who had been fished from Puget Sound, lying faceup on a stainless steel autopsy table. Under the bright lights, the body looked vulnerable and small. Gathered around the table were a pathology assistant, a photographer from the forensics division, and Doug Pietsch.

  Now Doug looked up. “Seriously, Charlie?” His surgical mask hid most of his expression, but Charlie could still see the raised eyebrows. “It’s not like this is a double feature.”

  Charlie shrugged. “A guy’s gotta eat.” He took a sip of his twenty-four-ounce coffee, then raised it in Doug’s direction. “And drink.”

  “You should just be glad you’re up there and not down here and that there’s a glass window between us. Because if you were down here you would be trying very hard to forget about the very concept of food. Being out of the water has not improved this guy’s condition any.”

  “Don’t come crying to me.” Charlie spoke around another bite of pastry. “I’ve heard you say before that the smell of corpses is the smell of job security.”

  The criminalist and the assistant tried to hide their smiles.

  Doug was undaunted. “Maybe today I wouldn’t mind a little less job security. I’m just glad I printed him on scene. Time is definitely not improving things.”

  Charlie felt a surge of hope. “So did you get a match on the prints?”

  “No. I would have told you first thing. But at least I know I have them and they’re clear.” Doug cleared his throat and looked at his team. “Okay, let’s get this show on the road.”

  He pressed a pedal on the floor and began to dictate into the transcribing machine. “The body is that of a somewhat undernourished Asian or Hispanic male who appears to be in his early twenties. Decedent was found unclothed. The body weighs a hundred twenty-nine pounds and measures sixty-four inches from crown to sole. The hair on the scalp is black and straight. The eye color is unknown; the eyes are mostly absent due to predation from fish or crabs.”

  He peeled back what remained of the lips and peered into the mouth. “Both upper and lower teeth are natural. Several are missing, and there is evidence of untreated caries.” He tapped the pedal again to turn off the transcriber and then looked closer. “It looks like I might just owe you a beer.”

  “What are you seeing?” Charlie asked.

  “The upper incisors are shovel shaped, which means this guy’s Asian. But the thing is, Charlie, he’s got no dental work. Zero.” He looked up. “Do you know how unusual that is?”

  “Maybe he was too poor to see a dentist.” Charlie swept his tongue over his back molars, dislodging an almond slice. Over the years, his teeth had been supplemented and buttressed with a variety of fillings and crowns. He was glad that the City of Seattle offered a decent dental plan.

  “Yeah, but it’s mostly adults that fall through the safety net, and this guy hasn’t been an adult for that long. Minors can usually get dental care, unless their parents are totally negligent. I would expect to see at least an old filling or two, not missing teeth.” Doug shook his head. “I’m starting to wonder if we’re dealing with an undocumented immigrant. Someone poor enough that he wouldn’t have had dental care in his home country. And then once he came here, he certainly wouldn’t have been able to afford it.”

  “If that’s true, we may never figure out who he is.” This idea bothered Charlie far more than the prospect of watching Doug pick up the saw and open up the dead man. “We can’t identify him by matching his prints. We can’t identify him by matching dental work. And there’s no point in running DNA if we don’t have a missing person to match him to.” He squinted at the man’s thin face. “And so far I can’t find a single report that comes close to sounding like this guy. Someone’s going to have to tell us he’s missing first.”

  But what if they never did?

  “If we totally come up blank, there may be another way to narrow things down,” Doug offered. “The water you drink deposits isotopes in your hair. So we could have his hair analyzed to see what part of the world he’s from. It takes awhile, though, to get results.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Charlie said.

  The autopsy resumed. Doug carefully swabbed under the fingernails, in case there was still a fragment of the killer’s skin under them. He examined the man’s skin from head to toe, noting injuries that were both pre-and postmortem. Some might have come from the body scraping rough surfaces, others from fish. He took note of multiple blunt force traumas in varyi
ng sizes and varying stages of healing. Rows of oval-shaped fingertip bruises dotted the man’s wrists and upper arms where someone had grabbed him, with slightly larger bruises marking the thumbs. Pinch-mark bruises marred the soft skin of his inner arms. And then there were the lines of burns on his wrists—three on the right and two on the left.

  “I’m going to have to look at these under the microscope,” Doug told Charlie. “But like the bruises, these burn marks also look like they may have been made at different times.”

  Charlie wondered if that ruled out torture. Or maybe it had been more a type of punishment, the burns doled out along with the bruises? He had seen more burns on bodies, living and dead, than he liked to remember. Burns from cigarettes and cigarette lighters. Burns from clothes irons and hair irons. Once from a blow torch. Usually the shape of the burn revealed something about its source. So what would leave a line like that?

  As Charlie took the last bite of his Danish, Doug made the Y-incision in the chest, opened the guy up, and began the process of inspecting and weighing and measuring what he found inside. Midway through, he held out something on his red-streaked glove, offering it like a prize. Charlie leaned closer to the glass. It was a bullet.

  “I think you’re in luck, Charlie. It severed the aorta but it didn’t hit any bone, so it didn’t get too dinged up. Looks like it came from a .22. We’ll get the crime lab to put it into NIBIN and see if they can get a match.” NIBIN, the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network, was like a fingerprint database for bullets. It held scans of markings from bullets and cartridge cases found at crime scenes across the nation. With luck, there might be a match.

  “Maybe we’re finally catching a break.” Charlie swallowed the rest of his coffee. “Because I’ll tell you, Doug, this doesn’t feel like a one-time thing.”

  On his way out to the parking lot, Charlie called Mia. Knowing she was anxious, he didn’t ask about the jury’s deliberations.

  “Doug just finished the autopsy on that floater.” He pulled his keys from his pocket. “It looks like wherever he was before he ended up in the water, someone got mad at him pretty regularly. There were lots of bruises, plus these weird burns shaped like lines on his wrists. At first I thought someone had tortured him, but Doug says they were made at different times, just like the bruises. So maybe he wasn’t tortured. Maybe he was being punished.”

  “What was the cause of death?”

  “Definitely a gunshot. He was dead before he even went into the water, which Doug thinks happened a week ago, maybe two. His fingerprints don’t match anything on file. And he’s never had any dental work, so Doug’s wondering if he might be undocumented.”

  “What nationality did you say he was?” Mia asked.

  “At first I said he was Asian and Doug thought he was Latino.” As he spoke, Charlie realized Doug hadn’t actually made any plans for that promised beer. “But with the shape of the teeth and the skull and the eyelids, it looks like I was right.”

  Mia’s voice sharpened. “Tell me some more about these marks on his wrists.”

  “Second-degree burns. About two inches long, but not very wide. Like lines. Doug says they’re consistent with someone having brief contact with a very hot surface.” He opened his car door and climbed in. “Why are you asking?”

  “Do you remember that guy at the Jade Kitchen who talked to me about Scott helping him? The one who called me Mrs. Scott?”

  “He worked in the back as a cook or a dishwasher? Yeah, what about him?” Charlie put his key in the ignition but didn’t turn it.

  “One of the baristas at a coffee place near work told me he came in super early one morning about ten days ago, asking for me. She could barely understand him, but he showed her my business card.”

  “But you never saw him after she talked to him?”

  “No. She said he left with friends. But, Charlie—?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The last time I saw him, I noticed burn marks on his wrists. Like from the dishwasher or maybe an oven.”

  Charlie pulled his keys from the ignition. “Can you meet me down here? Now?”

  CHAPTER 15

  Could the man in the morgue be Lihong? Mia’s stomach seized up as if someone had just kicked her. A bitter taste flooded her tongue. She dimly realized she was squeezing her cell phone so hard that it was hurting her fingers, but she still didn’t loosen her grip.

  “How long did Doug say that body had been in the water?” she asked Charlie.

  “He said if you’re fatter, you float sooner. But this guy was skinny. So a week, maybe two. No more than that.”

  And the barista had talked to Lihong about ten days ago. Still, the place where the body had been discovered was at least a mile from the coffee shop. But who knew exactly where it had gone into the water? The current could have carried it a long way.

  Mia remembered how Lihong had tried to tell her something about Scott promising to help. But the communication between Mia and the Chinese man had been so sketchy that she had never quite understood what Scott was supposed to have been doing.

  Lihong had also said his boss was a bad person. Or at least that was how her five-dollar phone app had translated it. Judging by the mangled English it had given her when translating Lihong’s other words, its accuracy was more than suspect. But the idea had been underlined when Mia secretly witnessed Kenny Zhong, the Jade Kitchen’s owner, deliver a stinging slap to Lihong’s face. Now the memory stung her as well. She had honestly planned to follow up with Lihong, but then life had gotten in the way.

  Less than ten blocks separated the courthouse from the morgue. It hardly seemed worth it to pull her car out of the parking garage. Outside of Mia’s window, the sky was the kind of pale gray that any Seattlite could tell you promised neither sun nor rain. At least no more than a sprinkle.

  “I think I’m going to walk it,” she told Charlie. “It probably won’t take any longer than driving, and I need to clear my head. But if the jury comes back in while I’m there, could you drive me back?”

  “I could drive you back either way if you wanted. See you soon.”

  Mia shrugged into her coat and picked up her purse. Before she even made it out the door, three colleagues asked her if the jury had returned a verdict. She just shook her head and didn’t make eye contact, making it clear she didn’t want to talk about it.

  It was a relief to be out in the cold air and away from familiar faces. Away from sitting in her office, time moving so slowly the clock might as well be ticking backward.

  Every time she was waiting on a verdict, Mia entered a fuzzy zone where she couldn’t think about anything else. In another trial, when the deliberations had gone into their fourth day, she had gone to the grocery store, shopped, paid, walked out, gotten in her car, and driven back to the courthouse—leaving her bags behind at the store.

  Knowing that the jury might be hung was like having a throbbing cavity in her mouth. No matter how much she tried to ignore it, her thoughts kept sneaking back to probe. Was the jury still hung? In whose favor? Why? Would Judge Ortega’s instructions shake things loose?

  The idea of having to go through all the work again was disheartening. And next time Wheeler would know every one of her arguments and fine-tune his counters. With the help of Leacham’s deep pockets, he would bring in new and better experts. As for Mia, she couldn’t change the evidence. She only had the truth, and lies came in a million flavors.

  As she walked over I-5 she thought about Eli. She was still in shock that Eli Hall—someone who was so upstanding that he sometimes seemed rigid—was not officially divorced, despite the way he acted toward her. She thought of how his face lit up when he saw her and how he dawdled after classes so that they would walk out to the parking lot together. He always insisted on opening doors for her and helping her on with her coat. But maybe that was simply the way he treated women. And the time he had asked her to brunch? He had never actually said the word date. Maybe she was the only one
who had seen it as one. She didn’t know whether she was angry or disappointed—and if so, who those emotions were directed at.

  And then there was Charlie. The two men didn’t have much in common, except Mia. In fact, they were like some sort of reverse mirror image of one another. Eli had close-cropped blond hair; Charlie’s was dark and worn as long as his bosses would let him get away with. Even more than a decade out of the service, Eli had kept his military bearing, while Charlie just switched from one slouch to another.

  Both men were devoted to justice, but in very different ways. That military aura of Eli’s was more than physical; it showed in his systematic approach to life. Charlie played by the rules only as far as he thought they made sense.

  Both, she sometimes thought, wanted to be something more to her than a friend. But maybe she was as deluded about Charlie as she evidently had been about Eli. Maybe friendship was all either of them wanted. Or should want.

  At the morgue, she showed her ID. Charlie came out to meet her and then brought her back to where Doug was waiting next to rows of galvanized-steel body refrigerators.

  “I understand you might know the identity of our floater,” Doug said.

  Mia nodded. She only had eyes for the closed steel doors.

  He pulled one open, releasing a wave of cold air and a smell so thick it was almost a taste. It was rotten and sweet and ultimately indescribable, furring her tongue. Doug slid out the top shelf, revealing the body of a young, skinny Asian man.

  The Y-incision in his chest had been stitched closed with thick black stitches. Mia forced herself to focus on the young man’s face, not to think about how he had been taken apart and reassembled. Even though the eyes were closed, the lids sagged over what seemed to be empty sockets. His face was not only scraped and battered, it was also starting to decompose.

  She had only seen Lihong twice. At night. In the dark. When both of them were nervous, jumping at every sound. When they were focusing on trying to communicate, not on what the other person looked like. Focused on their lack of connection, their frustration.