MQuinn 03 - Lethal Beauty

by Wiehl, Lis

  When he made the decision to start taking steroids, he had acted just like a kid. Like a stupid kid. Wanting something for nothing. If left to her own devices, Brooke would have Doritos for breakfast and follow that up with a candy bar. Was he any more mature?

  But he wasn’t a stupid kid. He was nearly an adult. Maybe he should act like the adult he now nearly was. The adult he already looked like, at least for a while.

  It wasn’t enough to say he was sorry. It wasn’t even enough to stop using. But maybe, Gabe thought, feeling something unfurl in his chest, maybe there was a way to redeem himself. Maybe even to become a hero.

  CHAPTER 40

  In the cab, Bo leaned back against the black faux leather seat and closed her eyes against the weak late-afternoon sun. She wanted to hate Warren, but found she couldn’t. Why hate the puppet? It made much more sense to hate the man who had pulled the strings. Who had made the puppet dance. And clearly, that was David Leacham.

  After the cab let her out, she pushed open the door to the apartment lobby with a sigh. She went up the shallow stairs to the second floor, her feet screaming at every step. At the top of the stairs, her elderly neighbor, Georgina Frye, shot her a suspicious glance and then darted back into her apartment. Bo was sure she was still staring at her through the peephole, probably judging the scantiness of her outfit.

  Mrs. Frye lived to complain, to find fault. If she didn’t have anything mean to say, then she just avoided Bo altogether. She didn’t like the smell of the garlic and ginger that Bo cooked with—or, as she put it, “all those foreign spices.” Mrs. Frye had complained to the manager about Bo keeping her bicycle outside her apartment, even though the hallway was eight feet wide. So now Bo kept her bike in her living room, where it always seemed to be in front of something she needed to get to, like the bookcase or the closet.

  The first thing Bo did after she walked in the door was to take off her shoes. As her feet tried to settle down into place, her arches began to cramp. Moaning a little at every step, she hobbled forward, her shoes dangling from her fingers. Before she called Mia, she needed to download the recording from her glasses into her computer, make sure it was clearly audible. And while she was doing that, she would try to massage some life back into her feet.

  She paused at the door of her bedroom. Where was her laptop computer? She thought she had left it on the little desk, but she didn’t see any sign of it. In fact, she thought she had left the bags from Macy’s in the bathroom, but there they were on the bed. Now why would—

  Without any warning, something pink and white dropped in front of her eyes. Bo blinked in surprise. Before her eyes even opened again, unseen fingers viciously yanked whatever it was straight back so that it bit into her neck.

  She stumbled backward. One of her shoes fell from her hooked fingers. Her heavy glasses tumbled from her face and landed on the carpet. Then her bare foot came down on them and she felt them snap in half.

  Her attention had narrowed to the thing wrapped around her neck. The thing that was killing her. It was, Bo realized, a scarf. In fact, she recognized it as her own long silk scarf, patterned with pink peonies. When she wore it, she liked to loop it loosely around her neck. Now someone had taken it from her bedroom drawer and was using it to strangle her.

  With her right hand, she tried to claw the fabric away from her neck, but it had already sunk deep into her flesh, cutting a groove. The world began to spin around her like water swirling down a drain.

  “Let go,” a voice hissed in her ear. A man’s voice. She didn’t recognize the voice, but she did the language. His words were in the Guandong dialect. “Go and join your daughter. Everyone will understand. Go join Dandan.”

  In an instant, Bo saw what would happen next. First she would die. Then this man would drag her body to someplace where he could tie the scarf. From the ceiling fan in the living room, perhaps, or from the highest rail in her closet. He might take one of the chairs from the dining room and knock it over, as if Bo had stepped off into death.

  In China, by far the most common method of suicide was hanging. And there, suicide was considered not just an act of grief but of revenge. The spirits of the dead were thought to torment the living. It would be easy for people to think that Bo had believed killing herself would make David Leacham suffer, or that she was striking back against the authorities for not avenging Dandan.

  Everyone would shake their heads, not in confusion, but in sorrow. With Dandan dead and her daughter’s killer set free, why shouldn’t Bo Yee take her own life?

  Years ago, Bo had taken a self-defense course offered by the church. The whole time she had pictured the enemy, not as some stranger in a dark alley, but instead as the people who had killed her baby. Now if this man killed her, then Dandan’s death would never be avenged.

  Shifting her hips to the left, she made a fist with her right hand and thrust her elbow back as hard as she could into the man’s solar plexus. She was rewarded with an explosion of air. But the scarf did not loosen in the slightest. In fact, it tightened. Her vision was going fuzzy.

  Then she remembered the single shoe she was still clutching in her left hand. Pressing it against her thigh, she shifted her grasp until the tall pointed heel was turned back. Then, summoning the last dregs of her strength, she hammered it back over her head. She heard it knock against her attacker’s skull, but his grip didn’t loosen.

  “No. Let go,” he whispered. “Stop fighting.”

  Bo’s knees began to sag and she let them. At the same time, she arched her back. Mouthing her daughter’s name to give her strength, she swung one more time, only this time she aimed farther back—

  And was rewarded with the man’s high-pitched scream, right in her ear, as the heel met something soft and yet substantial. It stuck. And then it slid.

  Finally, finally, the scarf loosened. She dropped the shoe, yanked off the scarf, and stumbled around to face her attacker. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps that hurt her throat. The man was slender and about her height, with his hands cupped over his eyes. Blood as red as paint was running between his fingers. But how soon until he straightened up? How soon until his pain turned to anger?

  She had to get out of here. Were there more men out there? Waiting to make sure the deed was done?

  Her bike was leaning against the wall. Bo yanked open the door, threw one leg over the seat, and began to pedal out the door and down the hall.

  Heedless of the fact that in about ten feet she was going to come to a flight of stairs.

  CHAPTER 41

  MONDAY

  What is that?” Gary Newman asked Charlie with a curled upper lip. Gary had recently been promoted to homicide detective, and he hadn’t quite acclimated to the squad room yet.

  “It’s a sandwich.” Charlie didn’t look up. On a sheet of scratch paper he had written Abigail Endicott and circled it. Around it were other circled words and phrases with lines leading back to the dead woman’s name. One said Revenge? Another Money? A third read Jealousy? and a fourth To hide a secret?

  “But there’s no bread,” Gary said.

  Charlie shifted a mouthful to one side. “It doesn’t need bread. It’s got two chicken breasts instead.”

  Gary leaned closer. Charlie had seen the guy regard spattered blood and brain with more enthusiasm. “With what in between? Cheese and bacon?”

  Charlie took another bite. “And special sauce.” Which, like most special sauces, seemed to be some variation on Thousand Island dressing. The result was still delicious. His eyes went back to his paper. Picking up his pen, he added Shooter mentally ill?

  Gary finally looked at the paper, which was the only really interesting thing on the desk, in Charlie’s opinion. “That’s the case of the lady killed in the church?”

  “Yeah. My problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a good motive. No one generally goes around killing little old ladies.”

  “Unless it’s a by-product of the real crime, like stealing their purses or their
cars.”

  “This guy gunned her down in front of dozens of witnesses and walked away empty-handed.”

  “At least it’s interesting,” Gary said. “I keep getting the people who get drunk and do stupid things cases.”

  “There’s something to be said for the simple things,” Charlie said, taking the last bite of his sandwich just as his phone rang. The caller ID showed that it came from the medical examiner’s office. This morning he had attended Abigail’s autopsy, but it had not revealed much. For someone in her early seventies, the victim had been in fairly good shape. Doug thought she might have lasted another fifteen or twenty years if the bullet had not gone ricocheting around in her skull.

  “This is Carlson.” He swallowed the last chewy bite.

  “You’re not going to believe it,” Doug said.

  There was not a lot Charlie didn’t believe. “Try me.”

  “It’s about our dead organist.”

  “I think she actually played the piano,” Charlie said.

  Doug was undeterred by this minor detail. “You saw that bullet I took out of her brain. Too mangled to be any good. Luckily drywall is a lot softer than bone. The bullet you got forensics to pull out of the wall was in excellent shape. She was definitely shot with a .22.”

  So why did Doug sound so cheerful? Saying the gun was a .22 was about as useful as saying the shooter had been a white man. Hundreds of handguns and rifles were chambered for that round. Both .22 ammunition and the guns themselves were cheaper than guns that fired bigger rounds. Lots of shooters also liked them because both the noise and the recoil were less. The crime lab had already looked for fingerprints on the cartridges and found nothing.

  “And?” Charlie prompted. The other man was clearly enjoying drawing out the suspense.

  “The crime lab scanned the bullet into NIBIN, and it came up with a possible match to another crime. One of the techs just confirmed it.”

  “To what crime?”

  “That’s the crazy thing. It matches to the last murder you and I worked.” When Charlie didn’t rush to fill in the blank, Doug clarified, “The dead Chinese guy.”

  Charlie’s mind was working overtime. What did a quiet retiree who basically only went to church and the grocery store have to do with a young Chinese illegal immigrant who worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week? He thought of how many immigrants attended the church. That had to be the connection. Lihong must have been one of the people who attended services there. Maybe he had managed to go to an early Sunday service and met Abigail there? Although even if they had known each other, why would someone have killed them both? For different reasons? For the same reason?

  The moment Charlie had looked at the young man’s body, he had had the feeling that it was not a one-off. But he hadn’t expected this. It still felt to him like the two victims had little to nothing in common. The next step would be to show the pastor the photo of Lihong’s face. See if he could help him connect the dots.

  He called Mia. “Want to take a field trip?”

  CHAPTER 42

  As soon as Mia got in the car, they both started talking. Mia let Charlie go first. It only took him a couple of minutes to drive to the church, which wasn’t enough time for them to update each other. They sat in his car parked at the curb so that he could tell her about the matching bullets and about how he could find no reason for Abigail’s murder. In turn, Mia told him what Luciana had said.

  “I’m starting to think that Lihong and Chun and the others were trafficked,” she said. “What Luciana said got me thinking: Kenny Zhong’s only been here for seven years and yet he already has four restaurants. That would be a lot easier to do if you didn’t have to pay for labor. If your workers were paying you for the privilege of being here in the first place.”

  After talking to Luciana, Mia had seen everything in a new light. The crowded, unsafe house Lihong had shared with Chun and the others was not the result of new immigrants seeking out a cheap place to live, but instead something closer to slaves’ quarters. The men who had taken Lihong from the coffee shop had been the modern version of slavers hunting down escaped property.

  “Maybe Lihong has been coming to church here,” she said. “Maybe Abigail was trying to help him.” With a flush of shame, she imagined the older woman being more patient with his queries than she had been. She sighed and started to open her door. They were parked next to the reader board, and now she focused on the church’s name, which was printed on the top.

  She turned back and clutched his arm. “Charlie?”

  “What?”

  She shivered. “I’m 99 percent certain this is the church Bo Yee attends.”

  His brow furrowed. “Really?”

  “And more than that—she told me once that she played the piano for services.”

  The pieces in the kaleidoscope were falling into a different pattern, but Mia couldn’t quite see it yet.

  “Abigail was wearing a black wig,” Charlie said slowly. “She’s got to have thirty years on Bo, but from a distance …”

  Mia completed the thought for him. “The shooter might have seen what he had been told he would see. Bo Yee at the piano.”

  “The witnesses said that after Abigail was shot, he stopped in his tracks and stared at her, then fled. I saw the body, and her wig came off when she collapsed. He must have realized he made a mistake.”

  They hurried into the church, where they found Pastor Bob Ho in his office. He got to his feet to shake Mia’s hand while Charlie introduced her. He was wearing a turtleneck and jeans, the casualness undercut by the fact that the jeans had been ironed into sharp creases.

  Before the pastor had even settled back behind his desk, Charlie asked, “Does Abigail normally play the piano for services?”

  The pastor’s eyes widened as he grasped the meaning of Charlie’s sentence. “She always plays for the early service, but it’s another woman who plays for the second. Her name is Bo Yee.”

  Before he even had time to ask why, Mia had turned away and was dialing Bo on her cell phone. It went straight to voice mail. “Bo,” she said. “It’s Mia. Mia Quinn with the King County Prosecutor’s Office. Please call me right away. You may be in danger.” Fear squeezed her heart.

  “No,” she heard the pastor say. He looked bewildered and afraid. “Dear God, no.”

  Next she tried the tea factory where Bo worked, but a woman in human resources told her Bo was still out on leave. As she listened, Mia pinched the bridge of her nose and hoped against hope that Bo was still okay.

  “Do you think Bo was the real target?” the pastor asked after Mia left another message for her. Another message she feared Bo would never hear.

  “It’s hard to say,” Charlie said, “but it’s definitely a possibility we need to explore. And there’s someone else we need to ask about.” He took out his phone and scrolled through his photos before selecting the one of Lihong’s face and handing the phone over. “Do you recognize this man?”

  He looked at it for a long time. “No. I’ve never seen him before.”

  “He worked at a restaurant called the Jade Kitchen,” Mia said.

  The pastor’s expression changed.

  “So you know that restaurant?” she asked.

  “I’ve never eaten there.”

  “That’s not exactly what I was asking.”

  His mouth crimped. “One hears things.”

  “And those things would be …,” she prompted.

  “A lot of his workers might be undocumented. It’s not the kind of thing I concern myself with. But I hear rumors.”

  “Could they be more than undocumented? Could they be trafficked? Enslaved?”

  He pressed his lips together. “I don’t know about that.”

  But Mia thought he did.

  They excused themselves and left. “I know everything is connected,” Mia said. “I just don’t know how. All I know is that I’m really worried about Bo. We need to warn her.” If it wasn’t already too late.
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  Charlie was already on the phone with the phone company’s security division, asking what they could tell him about the location of Bo’s phone. Since this was an exigent circumstance, they didn’t need a warrant to get the information. Charlie listened to the answer and said thanks. He turned to Mia. “Her phone has been turned off. It’s been off since Saturday afternoon. The last recorded location was at her apartment.”

  Bo lived in an apartment building that had seen its best days more than a century ago. An overhang sheltered the first-floor apartments and the stairs leading up. As they went up narrow, shallow steps, Charlie unbuttoned his jacket. He reached back and rested his hand on the butt of his gun. Once they got to Bo’s door, he motioned for Mia to stand on one side while he took the other. He rapped hard with his free hand. Mia held her breath but didn’t hear anyone. He knocked again. “Bo? It’s Charlie Carlton. Bo?”

  “I don’t like this,” Mia whispered. “Not one little bit.”

  As they were standing in front of the door, an old woman with a small, white dog on a leash walked past them, looking at them with narrowed eyes. She was putting her key into the lock of the apartment two doors down when Charlie flashed his badge.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, can we talk to you?”

  The woman walked back to them. Mia tried to ignore the dog’s small wet nose snuffling her ankles.

  “What is this about, Officer?”

  “Do you know your neighbor, Bo Yee?”

  “Just by sight, I guess.” Judging by her expression, she didn’t even like looking at Bo. “I didn’t know her name until just now. Just that she’s one of them Chinese people.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  She looked up, remembering. Her dog suddenly licked Mia’s ankle, causing her to let out an involuntary squeak as she jumped backward.