by Wiehl, Lis
“Oh, Rascal, stop that!” The older woman jerked on his leash, but not enough to actually move him away from Mia. “Friday? The thing is, I saw someone going into her apartment a few hours ago, but it wasn’t her. Some young Chinese girl with lots of makeup and clothes that looked like they were spray-painted on, if you know what I mean. She wouldn’t even look me in the eye. In fact, she seemed to be in a real hurry.”
Mia and Charlie exchanged a look.
“What apartment number does the landlord live in?” Mia asked.
“Downstairs. 1F.”
“Thanks,” Charlie said. “We might need to talk to you again. Maybe have you work with a sketch artist to get a drawing of that girl you saw.”
“I’ll try to help if you need it.” The woman shrugged. “But I have trouble telling those Orientals apart.”
Mia waited until they were out of the woman’s earshot. “Bo’s already dead,” she hissed. “She’s already dead and someone came by to search her things.”
“Don’t borrow trouble,” Charlie said. “Maybe … maybe Bo has taken some girl under her wing, a girl forced into prostitution like her daughter was?”
For once it was Mia who was dubious and Charlie who was clutching at straws.
When he knocked on the door to 1F, a man with a long white ponytail and a white beard answered the door.
“I’m Charlie Carlson with the Seattle Police.” Charlie pulled his badge off his belt and passed it in front of the guy’s eyes. “This is Mia Quinn with the King County District Attorney. We need you to let us in so we can do a welfare check on one of your tenants, Bo Yee.” He pushed the badge back into place. “And your name is?”
“Nelson. And let me see that badge again.”
With a sigh, Charlie pulled it off and handed it over.
“This says ‘detective.’ What kind of detective are you?”
“Homicide.”
Nelson’s eyes widened, but he still said, “You’re not with immigration? Because she’s legal.”
“That would be ICE, Nelson, and it’s federal. I don’t care about anyone’s immigration status. I just want to make sure this lady is okay.”
Once they were upstairs, Nelson knocked and called several times before he finally put a key from his huge ring in the lock. He started to step in, but Charlie put up his arm, barring the door. “Step back and don’t touch anything else. This is a crime scene.”
Mia saw what he had seen. In the middle of the living room floor were two high-heeled shoes, a matched set, except they were twenty feet apart. And in between them were fat, round drops of blood. Someone had been bleeding—and bleeding hard.
“I’ll go in and see if Bo’s here,” Charlie said. Left unspoken was whether she might be dead or alive. “We need to minimize who goes in until after the techs have been here.”
He was back a few minutes later, shaking his head.
“Did you check the closets and cupboards?” Mia knew it was a dumb question, but she still asked it anyway. What if she had been injured and tried to hide?
“She’s not there, Mia. It’s kind of a mess, though. Makeup scattered all over the bathroom counter. And shopping bags with no clothes in them. And a silk scarf with blood on it. Soaked with it.”
Mia’s heart sank. In all the months she had known Bo, she had never seen her wear makeup.
CHAPTER 43
The crime scene techs had just arrived to process Bo’s apartment when Mia’s phone rang. It was Eli Hall. Before she could tell him it was a bad time to talk, he said something that changed her mind.
“I’ve got a client I think you might want to talk to,” he said. “Her name’s Jiao. She’s Chinese, and in the country illegally. She was picked up for prostitution. But the thing is, she says she used to work with your victim. The case where the jury hung?”
“Dandan Yee,” Mia supplied. For a moment she forgot her worry that she would never see Dandan’s mother again.
“Yeah. Dandan. Anyway, I think you need to talk to her. She says she was there the night Dandan died.”
The words jolted Mia. She tried to be cautious. “Is she looking to cut a deal?”
“Well, it’s starting to look like she might have been trafficked, so you putting in a word with ICE wouldn’t hurt. But she’s very anxious. Very afraid.”
Charlie decided to come with her. Uniformed officers had started going door to door in Bo’s neighborhood, asking if anyone had seen her. The crime scene techs were swarming over the scene. But until there were new leads, there wasn’t much that he could do.
Eli met them after they went through the metal director. He and Charlie exchanged a wordless look. It wasn’t particularly friendly.
“Dandan’s mother, Bo Yee, is missing,” Mia told Eli. “We just came from her apartment. There was blood on the floor and signs of a struggle, but no body. It’s possible that whatever happened to her is related to the trial. Bo’s been pretty adamant about wanting to see justice.”
“What about my client?” Eli looked from one to the other. “Will this mean she’s at risk?”
“It’s hard to say.” Mia was worried the girl might not talk. “I’d rather you didn’t mention it to her. And we won’t take any notes. That will give her some protection. If she ends up implicating someone and they are charged, then at some point any notes we made would have to be turned over to that person’s defense. If there’s no records, that won’t have to happen. If she ends up not making a deal, I don’t want to put her life at risk for nothing.”
“Hmm.” Eli gave her a half smile. “First of all, I appreciate you looking out for her. And second of all, I have to say that’s a pretty tricky way of doing it.”
“Don’t tell me that you don’t use the rules to your advantage,” Mia said. “Because we all do.”
The Chinese interpreter, a woman named Kwong, came hurrying down the hall toward them. She looked to be in her fifties, with a flat face and square bangs. They went into the interview room. A few minutes later, a deputy brought in the girl. Jiao couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen. She was petite, with a high forehead, hunched shoulders, and nervous, heavily lidded eyes.
Kwong took a notebook and a ballpoint pen from her purse.
“Why do you have those?” Mia asked. “I don’t really want you taking notes about what we say here today.” As she spoke, Jiao’s eyes went back and forth between them.
“It’s just for me. If her sentence is complicated it helps me remember parts of it so I can translate it the right way in English.”
“Okay,” Mia said. “You just have to destroy whatever you write before you leave this room.” Then she turned to Jiao and focused solely on her. Over the years, she had learned the best way to work with interpreters. You looked at the person you were questioning, not the interpreter who provided the English words. That way you did not turn them into someone being talked about rather than someone being talked to. Just because they weren’t able to speak much English did not mean they didn’t understand some. Facing Jiao also meant that she and the girl were less likely to miss any nonverbal communication—expressions, tone of voice, or body language.
“How did you come to be here in the United States?” she asked and kept looking at Jiao even when it was Kwong who answered.
“On a plane. The snakehead gave me a fake Thai passport and told me to pretend to be a Thai citizen. Only I don’t even speak Thai. No information in it matched with me, except the photo only. When the plane landed, I called a phone number I had written on the inside band of my bra.” Jiao’s eyes welled with tears as Kwong spoke for her. “If I had known what would happen next, I would never have called that number.”
“And what happened?” Mia prompted.
Jiao’s tone was halting, while the interpreter kept speaking at a steady pace.
“A man picked me up. I was very excited. I was looking at all the cars and the houses and thinking that soon I would have those things for myself. He took me to a busines
s. A massage parlor, only it was not really for massages. Do you understand?” A fine tremble washed over the girl.
Mia nodded.
Jiao’s words began to stumble and hesitate, but Kwong continued to speak evenly in a near monotone. “He took me in the back and he raped me. And then he threw a towel at me and told me to clean myself up. He said that this was to be my life now. That I owed them money, and I had to earn it back by letting men have sex with me.”
The trembling increased as Jiao slowly shook her head. “At first I said no. I said I would not do it. I was stupid”—Kwong corrected her own interpretation—“no, naive, naive to think that I had a choice. Because there was no choice. I had to do what the man said. Sooner or later. Now I wish I had done what he said sooner.”
Jiao held out her empty hands, and it took a second for Mia to see past the shaking fingers, to focus on the scars circling her wrists. “They handcuffed me and put me in a closet for six days. Finally I agreed.”
The girl’s next words were so low that Kwong had to lean forward to hear them. “Besides, where was I going to run to? I had no money, no papers. No English.” Mia heard the girl say the word English a half beat before Kwong. She thought of Lihong, desperately seeking her with only his handful of words.
Jiao hugged herself, but it didn’t stop her shivering. “I am in America, but all I’ve seen are a bunch of ugly white rooms. When we didn’t have customers, we slept on the massage tables. And sometimes the customers did not come there for us but to buy other things.”
“What things?” Charlie asked.
“Drugs.”
Charlie leaned forward. “What kind of drugs?”
The interpreter conferred with Jiao, making a few Chinese characters on the paper and pointing at them, then turned to Charlie. “Pills to make men able to have sex. It sounds like Viagra. And some kind of drug to make men strong. Not sexually. To give them muscles.”
“Steroids?” Charlie asked.
“I think so.” Kwong nodded.
Mia froze. Charlie had said that Gabe had gotten his steroids from someone he met at a restaurant. He couldn’t have really gone to a massage parlor to get them—could he? The palms of her hands were suddenly slick, and she rubbed them over her skirt.
“The men who come to those kind of places probably are looking for ways to feel more manly,” Eli said. “Viagra, steroids, prostitutes—it all makes a kind of sense.”
“How many times can you sell a pill?” Charlie answered his own question. “Once. But a human being? You can sell them over and over again.”
Mia imagined the head of this operation as a spider sitting in a web. Profiting from every base instinct. He had most of the seven deadly sins covered: lust, sloth, greed, anger, gluttony, envy, and even pride. He had found a way to make an enormous amount of money.
“What about Dandan Yee? How long did you know her?” Mia asked as Kwong translated. The girl’s story of how she had come here and what she had been forced to do would probably differ from Dandan’s in only a few details.
Jiao’s mouth drew down and she blinked away tears. “You are moved around. Every couple of months you are someplace new with new girls. I think it’s so you don’t make any friends. I’ve been in eleven or twelve different places. But I was working with Dandan the night she died. She was new. She was still in shock. She cried a lot. She said her mother lived in Seattle, had come to America years ago. But she was too ashamed to try to get word to her. Besides, she owed so much money she figured there was no way her mother would be able to buy her freedom.” Jiao paused, her hands twisting in her lap. Her eyes darted around the room.
“I know this is hard,” Mia said, “but by telling us what happened that night you can help us make sure this never happens again. And of course we will explain to ICE how helpful you have been to us.”
“It was early in the evening when the man came in. I recognized him, but I didn’t know his name until later.” Jiao then said the name, giving each syllable equal weight. “Da-vid Leacham.” She put her own hands to her neck as the interpreter said, “Once he tied me up and put his hands around my throat until the world got dark. I thought I would die. When I woke up, he was smiling at me.”
To demonstrate, the girl pasted a dead grin on her face, and Mia shivered inwardly.
“So when I saw him come in that night I was just hoping he would not pick me. I think he liked girls who were sad. Who were afraid. Maybe that was why he picked Dandan. I do not know. I was just glad he did not choose me.” Jiao’s trembling was becoming more pronounced.
“The other girl and I, we were still waiting for customers. About fifteen minutes later, we heard Dandan shouting, ‘Help me! Help me!’ and then we heard a fight.
“The woman who was our boss ran in. The man was yelling that it was not his fault, that she shouldn’t have moved. That he hadn’t really planned to hurt her. The other girl there that night was too scared to look, but I looked. Dandan was still alive, or sort of alive. She was moving a little and making these bubbling sounds.” Jiao pressed her hands to her mouth, as if she were seeing it again and had to stop her own screams.
Out of the corner of her eye, Mia saw Eli wince. “What happened then?” she asked gently.
“The madam pulled the knife from her chest and wiped the handle clean on a towel, then wrapped Dandan’s hand around it before letting it fall on the floor.”
Mia didn’t let her expression reflect the elation she was feeling. David Leacham would certainly be going back on trial now, and this time she was sure he would be going to prison.
“What was David Leacham doing while she did this?”
“He ran outside. We could hear his car racing out of the parking lot.”
“What happened after that?”
“We had to gather up our things and leave in a hurry. All of us. We just left her there.” Jiao’s face was a mask of sadness and fear. “Then they put the other girl and me in different places. Told us if we ever talked about what had happened they would kill us. Because …”
Kwong stopped even though Jiao was still speaking. And in the welter of words, Mia thought she heard two she knew.
Kwong seemed to be asking the girl a question. Or maybe she was telling her something. All Mia knew was that there was now a torrent of words from both sides, so fast that Mia couldn’t pick out a syllable.
Moaning and whimpering, Jiao pressed her fists to the sides of her head.
“What’s the matter?” Mia asked, while Eli said, “What’s wrong?”
Suddenly one of Jiao’s hands shot out and grabbed the pen from Kwong’s hand. She threw her head back and without hesitation drove the pen into her own throat. Everyone was on their feet, yelling. Except for Jiao, who lay sprawled back in her chair, the pen buried deep in her neck as her body began to convulse.
“Don’t pull it out,” Charlie yelled.
Just as Kwong did.
CHAPTER 44
Yesterday, as she had careened down the sidewalk, peddling with bare feet, one knee throbbing from banging into the lobby wall after she bounced down the apartment stairs, Bo had frantically thought about where she could go. Who she could trust. After all their promises, the police and the prosecutor had let her daughter’s killer walk free. She was not confident that the police would do any better job of protecting her now.
If she went to friends from work or church, she would just be putting them in danger. And her purse with her money and her ID was still back at her apartment, so she couldn’t hide out in a hotel, even one that took cash and didn’t ask questions.
So she went to the last place they would look for her.
Outside the building, Bo’s hands were shaking so badly she barely managed to wedge her bike into a corral, and she completely forgot about the lock. All she could think about was whether people were driving down this street right now, looking for her, hoping to finish her off.
Inside, she took the stairs with legs almost too weak to hold her. One of
her feet felt oddly wet. When she looked back down the stairs, she saw a red smear of blood on every other step. She must have cut her foot when she stepped on her spy glasses.
On the second floor, she pounded on the third door.
No answer.
Her heart was beating nearly as loudly as her fist. She tried again. What if there was no one there? Where would she go? Where could she be safe?
And this time Warren answered, mouth half open in a yawn. His eyes widened when he realized it was her and he started to smile. Then he took in her tearstained face, wild hair, and bare feet.
“What’s the matter, Song?” Warren put his hands on her shoulders.
His touch tore a sob from her chest. And then another. He tried to pull her toward him, but instead she doubled over. Reliving those terrible moments when she had been unable to think. Unable to breathe. Unable to do anything except realize that she was dying.
Warren put his arm under her elbow and steered her inside. The bolt thunked when he shot it home.
“What happened?” He began to stroke her hair. She was still bent over, her elbows braced on her knees, one hand on her hot, wet cheek, the other stroking her poor neck. “What’s wrong? Song, talk to me.” He tried to pull her upright, but she wouldn’t straighten up, wouldn’t take her hands away.
Finally she managed to choke out a few words. “When I walked into my apartment, a man was waiting for me. He tried to strangle me.”
“What?” Warren’s voice cracked. “Are you all right?” When she didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, he put his hand under her chin. This time she let him raise her head. “Let me see.” He sucked in his breath. A fingertip lightly brushed her throat’s skin right above the line that still throbbed. “That almost looks like a cut. That can’t have come from his hands.”
“He used a scarf. A silk scarf.” She made a sound like a laugh. “My silk scarf.”
He sucked in air with a hiss. “It looks deep. We need to get you to the hospital and get an X-ray or something. See if your throat is damaged.”