by Wiehl, Lis
“Okay,” a girl’s voice called.
Before Emily opened the door, Charlie said, “Would you mind if it was just us? She might tell me more if she doesn’t have two adults staring at her.”
“That’s fine. I’ll be in the living room.”
Teal was on her feet next to the bottom bunk she had clearly just vacated. She had dyed black hair that fell to her shoulders and two tiny gold rings in her left nostril. Looking at her, Charlie realized he didn’t need to worry about catching the sickness that was keeping her home from school. Teal looked like she was about five months pregnant, her belly high and tight on her thin frame.
She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.
She saw him noticing and crossed her arms over her abdomen, carefully not making eye contact. She took the only chair in the room, a wooden one in front of a small matching desk. There was another bunk bed in the room, both beds neatly made. Charlie didn’t want to perch like a hunchback on the other lower bunk, and he didn’t want to loom over the girl either. There was only one other place to sit, an orange beanbag chair. He crossed his ankles and managed to sit down without plopping too much. He just hoped he could get back out of the darn thing without looking like a fool.
Behind her hand, Teal hid a smile.
“So Sindy shares this room with you?”
She guessed what he was thinking. “Mother Emily already went through her things. She didn’t leave any clues about where she went.” After a moment’s hesitation, she added, “You’re not the only one who’s come looking for her. There was a man who asked me about her when I was walking to the bus stop. I told him the same as I’m telling you: I don’t know where she went.”
“Can you tell me about this guy?”
“He was old.”
“Old as me?” Charlie asked.
“No, you’re way older.”
He tried to let that one slide off. “When was this?”
“A few days ago?” Teal said. “Maybe a week?”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. A white guy. Really big. Like … hulking.”
The word hulking sounded almost exotic coming out of Teal’s mouth. “What did you tell him?”
“Just that no one knew where she was.” She raised her shoulders and shivered. “Something about him was creepy. I didn’t let him get too close, and I was ready to scream if I had to.”
Charlie was glad for her sake that she hadn’t had to find out if anyone would actually respond. “Did Sindy say anything to you before she left?”
Teal rolled her eyes. “Sindy was always talking. She thought she was all that and a bag of chips. She said she didn’t need a pimp. She was so proud of herself because she said she didn’t need to share her money with anyone. But she wasn’t as smart as she thought. When she showed up here she had bruises on her throat and her arms. She said some guys like to tie her up before they had sex, even pretend they were going to kill her. I was like, ‘What’s to stop them from just doing it?’ but she was so sure she knew what she was doing.” Teal snorted. “Guess she didn’t.” Her face belied her harsh words. She looked frightened. “Right before she left here, she starting saying she was going to get rich.”
“Rich?” Charlie sat up straighter, which was not easy to do in a beanbag chair. “What did she tell you about getting rich?”
“Not that much. She just started talking about how her life was going to change. That she was going to come into a whole lot of money.”
Had someone representing David Leacham offered Sindy money not to testify?
Or, Charlie wondered bleakly, had it been a bait and switch?
Had they offered her money—and taken her life?
CHAPTER 22
And what are we doing today?” The hair stylist swirled a black plastic cape around Bo’s neck and then snapped it into place.
Bo pulled the pins out of her bun and shook her head. A black river of hair tumbled down, falling past her shoulders, past the arms of the chair, and finally ending only a foot from the floor. For a moment, everyone in the shop went silent, just looking at it.
“Chop it all off,” she said bluntly. “Cut it to here.” Bo put the blade of her hand against her neck, right below her ears.
“Are you sure?” Looking reverent, the stylist gathered the weight of it in his hands. His own yellow-tipped black hair stood up in short gelled spikes. “It must have taken you a really long time to grow your hair this long.”
She lifted her chin. “All my life.”
His brows drew together. “Then why do you want to cut it off?”
The answer she gave was doubly true. “I don’t want to be me anymore.”
In the mirror his eyes met hers, and she saw a muted understanding. “Okay, then. Let’s make you not you.” From a drawer he took a black hair elastic and made a low ponytail. It took a long time for him to pull the yard of hair through. “If you want, I could donate your hair to Locks of Love. It’s a charity that makes wigs for children who are sick and have lost their hair. They could really use hair that’s this long.”
Bo imagined a girl who looked like a younger Dandan, the Dandan she had only seen in a few snapshots. She pictured her with a drawn face and a vulnerable, naked head. Imagined how the warmth and the weight of the wig would cradle her. As if someone had laid their two hands on top of her head, like a blessing. For a moment, the thought comforted Bo. But only for a moment.
She nodded. The stylist picked up his scissors in one hand and the ponytail in the other. He began to cut just above the hair elastic. A few minutes later, the hank dropped into his hand. Freed from her, it looked like a horse’s tail. Bo’s head suddenly felt weightless, like it might float up to the ceiling. She closed her eyes.
She was doing this for Dandan, she thought as the hairdresser began to comb and snip and ruffle. She would do anything for her. When she had seen her daughter’s body in the funeral home, seen her daughter for the first time in sixteen years, she had promised her justice. But the courts had failed her.
She had thought of trying to get to David Leacham. Sneaking up behind him as he pressed the fob on his keychain to unlock his car on some dark street. Imagined saying Dandan’s name so that he turned. Imagined plunging a knife into his chest, just as he had done with her daughter. And then she would whisper her daughter’s name in his ear again as he died. She would erase him from the world, and he would die knowing why.
Or if Bo were to dress a certain way, make up her face, she was sure she could catch his eye. And then all it would take would be a few moments alone.
But after watching the trial, she guessed his attorney and his wife would keep him on a short leash. They would never let him get close to another Asian woman.
So what did that leave? Leacham had thought he could buy justice by bribing that juror with the ugly hair. The paper had identified him as Warren Paczkowski. Mia Quinn had said that without any proof of what had happened, there was nothing she could do.
But if Bo could expose what Paczkowski had done, then Leacham would be punished for both things: killing Dandan and bribing Paczkowski. And Bo had seen the hungry way that Paczkowski looked at one of the other jurors, a young women dressed in clothing that was too revealing, heels that were too high, makeup that looked like a clown’s. He had ogled her like a starving man outside a mansion, staring at a feast with his nose pressed against the window glass. With his two-toned hair, it was no wonder the girl had clearly not returned his interest.
In the phone book, Bo had found Paczkowski’s address. He lived in an apartment not that far from her, in a little neighborhood filled with restaurants, coffee shops, and pubs.
Bo had already talked to the people at her job and at her church. Everyone understood, their voices soft with sadness. Of course, if she needed some extra time to recover, she should take it. It wasn’t fair, they told her, what had happened. They had reassured her that in the next trial, Leacham would surely be convicted. They didn�
�t know that Mia Quinn’s boss had said there would be no next time. Not without more evidence.
So it was true that Bo needed extra time away from work and her duties at the church. But it wasn’t to come to terms with what had happened. It was to get the proof of what she knew to be true.
Forty-five minutes later, she had bangs cut straight across, just above her eyebrows. The stylist offered her a mirror, and when she took it from him, her hair swung back and forth. He had cut it into a short, slanted bob that ended in points on either side of her chin. Slowly he spun her chair so she could see how he had layered it in the back so that it followed the curve of her skull, angling down to the shaved nape of her neck.
“Wow, that’s quite a change,” the woman in the next chair said. “No one would even recognize you.”
Bo allowed herself something that was not quite a smile.
At Macy’s she bought a padded push-up bra, two low-cut sweaters, high-heeled shoes, large hoop earrings, a fake leather jacket, and a pair of jeans so tight she could barely pull them over her feet. She regarded herself in the mirror.
She looked nothing like what she was: a mother, an immigrant, a woman who worked on an assembly line at a tea factory wearing a smock and a hairnet and blue rubber gloves. Too many Chinese who came over eventually “ate American,” ate food that came from cans, went to McDonald’s, and it showed. Bo still kept to the old ways. It took time to prepare good food, and you did not eat too much of it.
Her skin was unlined. Her figure slender. She looked like a college student. A fresh-faced college student.
Too fresh-faced for Paczkowski.
Carrying her bags, she went back down to the first floor and looked at the various white-coated women selling makeup. She chose the one who looked the most colorful.
“I’d like a makeover,” Bo said. She never wore makeup.
The saleswoman began, “So do you want smoky, colorful—”
Bo interrupted her. “Both. Everything. I want it to be dramatic.”
She nodded. “And what feature would you like to emphasize? Lips, eyes, cheeks …?”
“No, you don’t understand,” Bo said patiently. “I want lots of makeup on every part of my face. I want people to look at me and notice my makeup.”
The girl clapped her hands. “A woman after my own heart! Dramatic, mysterious, adventurous.” She had Bo sit in a black swivel chair and then set to work.
Thirty minutes later, thick strokes of black eyeliner emphasized Bo’s tip-tilted eyes. Purple and green eye shadow shimmered on her lids. Her lips were a scarlet slash.
“Wow.” The girl stepped back to admire her own work. “You don’t even look like yourself. If I hadn’t been the one who did it, I would say you were not the same person who walked in here.”
Bo smiled. That was the point. She looked garish, like the picture on the first TV set she had owned, where the colors had all been too bright and slightly wrong.
“Show me again how to make those rings around my eyes.”
The girl picked up the black pencil and pulled down her own eyelid as she leaned toward the mirror. “When my mom used to get all dolled up before going out to dinner, she would say she was putting on her war paint.”
“War paint?”
“Like Indians do? Um, Native Americans?” She held her palm out flat and then tapped the insides of her fingers against her lips, making the faintest ululation. “They would paint their faces before they went to war.”
Bo nodded. She liked the idea. War paint.
CHAPTER 23
It was after five, and Charlie was driving Mia to the Jade Kitchen to see if they could track down Lihong. Driving in theory, anyway. On this stretch of I-5, nobody was doing any driving, just sitting. Seattle rush hour traffic was notoriously bad, and on a Friday night it was even worse. They hadn’t moved more than a couple of car lengths in the last ten minutes. Times like this it was pretty tempting to use the lights hidden in his grill. But this wasn’t exactly official business. It was a hunch.
“Even though it’s clear Warren was the only holdout,” Mia said with a frown, “Frank still doesn’t seem persuaded that we should refile.”
“Let me guess,” Charlie said. “Did he tell you that you need to look at the big picture? Because I hear that all the time. Finite resources, need to prioritize, if this were a perfect world, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, we’re the ones dealing with the victims’ families. We’re the ones trying to explain that justice is sometimes just too expensive. That sometimes you have to forget it and walk away.”
Charlie never forgot, though. If you pulled the pencil drawer in his desk all the way out, tucked in the back you would find photos families had given him of victims, photos from cases that were so far unsolved. And every four or five years or so, he was able to close a case that everyone else had long ago written off.
“Reading between the lines of the Seattle Times story,” Mia said, “it’s clear that Warren simply refused to participate. But based on the voir dire, I would never have guessed that he was going to be the lone crazy holdout.”
“Don’t second-guess yourself, Mia.” Charlie feathered the accelerator. Traffic was finally moving again, if you called thirty miles an hour on a freeway moving. “I didn’t hear anything that made me doubt him. Maybe the power of being able to have the final word went to his head. Maybe he secretly has something against capital punishment.”
“The thing is, Bo Yee thinks he was tampered with.”
Charlie stiffened. If that was true, this was a whole different ball game. “What makes her say that?”
“Bo says she saw Warren talking in a low voice to some guy in the hall the day the trial began. And a few days later, she saw that same guy with Leacham’s wife, Marci.”
“Did she hear what they said? Did she see them shaking hands, exchanging a package, anything like that?”
“No, the guy took off after she noticed him.”
Charlie settled back into his seat. “There could be a million explanations. And it’s not like I could get a warrant to go trolling through Warren’s bank accounts, see if he’s picked up a new life for himself. Not unless there was a lot more proof.”
“That’s what I told Bo.” One hand briefly covered her eyes. “I talked to her a long time. Bo told me that when Dandan was three, Bo got pregnant with a second child, but the Chinese government forced her to get an abortion when she was seven months along.”
“Seven months?” Every part of him recoiled.
“And now both her children are dead. I look at her and try to put myself in her shoes, but I can’t stand even to think about it.”
By the time they finally reached the Jade Kitchen, it was bustling. But they weren’t going into the restaurant. At least not yet. Instead, they were lurking behind the Dumpsters, trying to spot Lihong.
“And I thought the dead guy smelled bad,” Charlie complained. The reek of rancid cooking oil, rotting shrimp, moldy rice, and a few other smells he was pretty sure he did not even want to identify filled the air.
A middle-aged man came out with a white bucket full of shrimp shells. Charlie looked over at Mia, but she shook her head.
Even though Charlie would have said it was impossible, when the man lifted the lid of the Dumpster, the stench got stronger. Beside him, Mia was shielding her mouth with her cupped hand, breathing shallowly.
Five minutes later, a younger man came out, this time with a bulging black plastic garbage bag. Again Mia shook her head. But this time when the man was done, he leaned against the wall, pulled a hand-rolled cigarette from his pocket, and lit it. The flare of his lighter showed a thin, tired face. And something else. Mia nudged Charlie at the same time that he noticed it. On one wrist, two dark lines. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought they looked like the burn marks on the floater.
They waited another fifteen minutes, but no one else came out. Time for Plan B. They walked around the corner and in the front door. Inside the restaurant smelled of gin
ger and garlic and red chiles. Charlie took deep appreciative breaths, trying to scour the old fetid air out of his nasal passages.
“It’s kind of disconcerting that it smells so good in here and so bad out back,” Mia whispered.
“Yeah, but have you ever smelled a potato when it goes bad? That’s got to be one of the worst smells in the world. And I still love potatoes.”
At the host stand, Charlie gave his name to the manager, a Chinese guy sporting a clip-on bow tie. They waited in the small entryway along with a family of seven, a couple who appeared to be on their first date, and two tired parents who couldn’t keep their eyes off their sleeping newborn.
A few minutes later, a couple of muscle-bound teenage boys swaggered in to pick up a takeout order. When one of the kids caught sight of Charlie, he froze for a half second. Even dressed in plain clothes and with his hair touching his collar, Charlie was identifiable as a cop to some people. They seemed to have a sixth sense about it. He was willing to bet there was beer in the kid’s car or a joint in his pocket, or maybe both. They were minors, but they also didn’t seem inebriated, so he figured he didn’t have a dog in this fight. After picking up their food, they hurried out.
Seated near the waiting area was a family with two kids, an older boy and a younger girl. The dad reached for a dish of string beans just as the teenage son, grinning mischievously, put out his hand and spun the lazy Susan built into the middle of the table, rotating the beans out of reach. Smiling, the dad lifted the serving spoon mock-threateningly.
When Charlie looked over to see if Mia had caught the scene, she wasn’t smiling. Instead, she looked on the verge of tears.
“How’s Gabe?” Charlie asked, guessing she was thinking of the family she used to have. The family she might still have if Scott hadn’t decided to cheat her and the government.
“I definitely know I’m living with a teenager. He’s gotten so moody. I never quite know what’s going to upset him.”
“I can remember being so embarrassed by my mom when I was his age. Once she took me shopping for school clothes, and I insisted she stay a minimum of fifty feet away from me at all times.” His face got hot, remembering. Poor woman had complied too.