The Mia Quinn Collection

by Lis Wiehl

  When she turned the corner, she stopped short. It wasn’t the knot of people huddled at the end of the hall that made her hesitate. It was the sight of Colleen’s office, the closed door crisscrossed with yellow crime-scene tape. A fist closed around her heart and squeezed.

  This was real. It was more than office politics. More than her career. Her friend Colleen was dead.

  Scott was dead and Colleen was dead and there might be something wrong with Brooke.

  Mia forced her feet to start moving again. As her co-workers caught sight of her, they fell silent, looking at her and then at each other. Mia realized she had never taken off her coat.

  Holding a file folder, Katrina came out of Mia’s office. “Oh, I was looking for you.” She drew her into a one-armed embrace. Mia hadn’t really gotten to know Katrina that well—she had started at the office while Mia was home with her kids—but now she found herself clinging to the other woman as if she had just saved her from drowning.

  Anne, Leslie, Jesse, Tracy, and DeShauna crowded around, murmuring their own condolences. Mia closed her eyes as she felt light pats on her hands and shoulders.

  Finally she opened her eyes and pulled back. She looked at Colleen’s office and then away. “It’s just going to take a long time for it to sink in.”

  “I know,” Katrina said. “Colleen was just such a life force.” She leaned in closer. “What did Frank want to talk to you about?” Katrina’s parents were German immigrants, and she seemed to have inherited a practical bluntness from them, along with her frizzy blond curls and bright blue eyes.

  Mia cast around for a truth that would avoid a lie. “We were discussing Darin Dane.”

  Katrina’s eyes lost their sparkle. “That boy who killed himself? You should let that one go, Mia. It’s too hard to prove it crossed the line, and the other parents will fight it every step of the way. It’s terrible, sure, but those kids’ parents will make sure little Johnny and Janey don’t even get a slap on the wrist.”

  It was Colleen’s argument, slightly rephrased.

  “We’re all wondering which one of us Frank will assign Colleen’s case to,” DeShauna said.

  Tracy snorted. “Someone with no home life.” Tracy, with her talon-like nails and her ever-changing cast of boyfriends, had more of an away-from-home life than a home life, but everyone knew what she meant.

  Anne nodded in agreement. “At least they won’t have one after this. It’s going to be a lot to take on.” She and her husband had four kids, two of them younger than Brooke. Whenever Mia thought she couldn’t do it, she thought of Anne, who always looked put together, with her long dark hair pulled back into a low bun. Anne would never come to work in one brown pump and one blue, the way Mia had last month.

  Jesse said, “It’s an election year. Frank will want this wrapped up as soon as possible. He doesn’t want anyone saying that not only can’t he keep Seattle safe, he can’t even manage it with his own staff.”

  “Still, the assignment could be worth it,” Katrina said thoughtfully. “It could be a career-maker.”

  “Or a career-ender,” Leslie countered, putting her hands on her hips. “Four years ago they couldn’t figure out who killed Stan, and the trail’s only gotten colder since then.”

  “But now there’s a new trail,” DeShauna pointed out.

  Leslie shrugged. “And who knows if it even leads back to Stan? By trying to make the evidence fit two cases, you could end up muddying the waters on both. And say the shooter was the same person—then who do you think they’re going to want to kill next? No, I wouldn’t want to put myself in this guy’s targets.”

  Frank came around the corner to talk to Judy, and the conversation broke up as people went back to their offices. Only Katrina stayed. Her office lay just past Colleen’s.

  She put a hand under Mia’s elbow and steered her into Mia’s office, then took her purse, set it down on her desk, and helped Mia off with her coat. Mia let it all happen. Katrina might be nearly ten years younger, but right now Mia felt like she needed a mother.

  Or what she really needed, she thought, sitting down heavily in her chair and closing her eyes, was Colleen. If Colleen were here right now, she would listen to her without asking too many questions. And only when she was all talked out would Colleen give her excellent advice.

  Mia started when Katrina spoke. “So you were on the phone with Colleen when it happened?”

  Mia thought back. “We were talking about that garage sale I’m going to have.” It seemed so ordinary. So banal. “And about Darin Dane. And then I heard the shot.”

  Katrina shook her head. “That must have been awful.”

  Mia tilted her head back to meet the other woman’s concerned gaze. “It was awful.” She swallowed. “I could hear her trying to breathe.”

  Katrina’s eyes widened. “The connection wasn’t broken when she dropped the phone?”

  “No. I tried to talk to her, but she couldn’t answer. I guess the phone didn’t fall too far away, though, because, like I said, I could hear her breathing.” Mia thought of how she had handed the phone to Gabe, forced him to listen to Colleen’s last, labored breaths. The fewer people who knew that, the better. It had been traumatizing enough for him to hear it. If he had to testify about it, it would be even worse.

  “First Stan and now Colleen.” Katrina walked over to Mia’s door. “It just doesn’t feel safe. Who knows who will be next?” With a shake of her head, she turned and walked down the hall, leaving the thought hanging in the air.

  Finally Mia was alone. Normally her day would have been filled with phone calls, texts, e-mails, preparing witnesses for trial, and meeting with investigators. But she had just plea-bargained a big case the week before, and now she couldn’t summon the energy to focus on any of the many less-urgent items that remained on her to-do list. If she took Frank up on his offer, she would be buried again tomorrow.

  Mia went to KIRO-TV’s website to see what was already out in the media. They hadn’t released Colleen’s name yet—Mia’s heart contracted when she thought of Sue, Colleen’s mother, and Violet, her daughter—but they did have the bare facts of a local prosecutor dying at home after being shot through a window.

  It was the anonymous and often angry comments on the story that sickened her. Half of them weren’t even rational.

  Sweetbob wrote: What was she thinking, not having her curtains closed? She was just asking for some weirdo to come along and target her.

  Rainyday said: If she had been armed, this wouldn’t have happened.

  And Lilywhite opined: All liberal cities are garbage dumps for insane thinking and actions. The devil has taken over the minds of these godless heathens. The Bible teaches that Satan goes about seeking who he may destroy.

  But it was True Patriot’s comment that made the hair on Mia’s arms stand up: Now if only the same would happen to a few thousand more anti-American, anti-constitutional traitors mooching off the public’s dime. She made a mental note to see if there was any way to track down True Patriot’s IP address—and real identity.

  Mia was still shaking her head when her phone rang. When she answered, Judy said, “Charlie Carlson’s here to see you.”

  Didn’t he know to call first to give her a heads-up? Typical Charlie, playing by his own rules. Mia ground her teeth in annoyance as she walked back down the hall.

  CHAPTER 10

  At Starbucks, Charlie leaned back in his chair and rested one foot on a low table off to one side. Across from him, Mia Quinn shot him a look.

  His shoe was only on the edge, for crying out loud, and it wasn’t as if anyone was using the table anyway, except as a place to pile old sections of the Seattle Times. Still, his foot went back down on the floor.

  He slurped his mocha, enjoying the sweet, dark taste. The sugar and fat would help keep him going. In the old days, three hours of sleep would have been plenty, but those days were gone.

  Mia took another dainty sip of her nonfat latte. Didn’t she know that
fat was the good part? The only surprise had been her request for an extra shot of espresso.

  She was wearing a navy suit and a white blouse with an extra-wide collar. Last night, dressed in faded Levi’s and a scoop-necked blue T-shirt streaked with dust, Mia had seemed a different person. Today she had reverted to the conservatively dressed, by-the-book prosecutor he had long known, if not exactly loved.

  “I still don’t understand why we couldn’t do this in my office,” Mia said, tapping her fingers on the round white faux-marble table.

  Charlie took another sip. Say what you wanted about ’Bucks, they made pretty good coffee. And Charlie enjoyed this location, with its floor-to-ceiling windows showcasing Pioneer Square’s usual mix of tourists, office workers, and homeless people. “We’re less than three blocks from your office, and anyone who needs you can call your cell. Besides, I don’t know about you, but after last night I desperately need some good coffee. Right now there’s far too much blood in my caffeine stream.”

  One side of Mia’s mouth quirked, there and gone so fast he almost missed it.

  “How late did you have to stay?”

  “I was at the house for about six hours, and back there again after the autopsy.” Charlie took another gulp from his cup—he had ordered the venti size, with enough caffeine for a whole pack of Mias—and followed it up with a bite of his double-iced cinnamon roll. It was the first thing he had eaten since—since when? He wasn’t sure. He had been eating last night when dispatch called. Leftover pad thai while watching a Seinfeld rerun. The pad thai was probably still sitting on the coffee table next to his remote.

  Once he got back from Mia’s, it had taken an hour to get a search warrant. It was legal to make a warrantless entry to aid a victim or search for a killer. After that, you needed a warrant. During that time he had posted two officers outside the house and then drafted another into helping him return Mia’s big SUV. He’d been surprised—and oddly pleased—to see how much of a mess it was, with broken crayons and plastic toys and a couple of those sippy cups scattered around the booster seat strapped in the back.

  “So tell me more about when you were on the phone with Colleen.” Charlie sucked an errant wad of icing from his thumb. A little noisily, because he could tell it bugged her.

  Pausing only to take measured sips of her coffee, Mia talked. There wasn’t much to tell. She and Colleen had spoken about Facebook, about a case Mia wanted to pursue, and about a garage sale Mia was planning. The garage sale explained the old albums he had found under Colleen’s body.

  “But after she was shot, she never said anything. I don’t think she could.”

  Charlie nodded. The autopsy had confirmed this. Speech would have been nearly impossible. The bullet had caught Colleen just below the hollow of her throat. It was a .22, which meant that each time it hit bone it had bounced around inside her like a pinball. He tried to divorce this knowledge from any thought of the real Colleen he had known and liked, with her loud laugh, red hair (dyed, he was pretty sure), and perpetually flushed cheeks. They had worked six or seven cases together over the years, the last one a double homicide that proved an open-and-shut case—an ex-husband who had taken offense to a current boyfriend.

  “Was Colleen still audibly breathing, moaning, anything like that, when you handed your son the phone?”

  A long pause. Mia gave him the stink eye and finally, reluctantly, nodded.

  “So your son heard her stop breathing?” He thought of the panicked kid he had seen last night, hair hanging in his eyes.

  An even longer pause. “Yes. But you and I both know that just because he couldn’t hear her breathing, that doesn’t mean he heard her die.”

  Charlie thought she was talking to herself as much as him.

  Mia squared her shoulders. “It was bad enough I handed him the phone. I should have just stayed put and called 911. I don’t want Gabe dragged even further into this.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice, even though the espresso machine and the dozen conversations around them gave her plenty of cover. “Look, Charlie, Colleen didn’t say anything to Gabe. Can’t we just keep him out of the report?” The word triggered a thought, and her brows pulled together. “In fact, shouldn’t you be taking notes?”

  “I don’t need to.”

  She sat back. “Come on, everybody needs to.”

  He set down his now-empty cup and raised his hands. “If I take notes, they just get subpoenaed.”

  “But if you don’t take notes, how do you know what was said?” She looked like a disgruntled schoolmarm.

  “Oh, that’s not a problem.” He pitched his voice high, higher than hers, and quoted her own words back to her. “But you and I both know that just because he couldn’t hear her breathing, that doesn’t mean he heard her die.”

  Mia looked taken aback. “You have a photographic memory?”

  “Not quite. But it’s pretty good. And if I don’t put something in my report, it’s not discoverable.” The defense couldn’t subpoena Charlie’s memory. Not yet, anyway. And her kid had to be traumatized, after everything that had happened last night as well as this past summer. No point in making it worse.

  He watched Mia wrestle with this. If it had been anyone but her son, would she have had such difficulty? Finally she said, “Thanks. It would be too harrowing for him if he had to take the stand. You’ve probably heard about Scott. My husband.”

  “Yeah. Look, I should have said something earlier, but I’m sorry about what happened to him.” What Charlie had heard was that it wasn’t too clear what had happened. A little bit of alcohol in the guy’s system, but not enough to be drunk. A cloudy night, but visibility hadn’t been bad. So why had he left the road, hit a tree, and died on impact?

  “It’s been a tough year.”

  He could believe it—losing her husband and now her friend, a few months apart. “I turned up a neighbor who heard the shot. She was watching TV, and she remembers what was happening in the program. So we’ve got the time pinned down pretty well.” Charlie popped the last bit of cinnamon roll into his mouth. “Do you know if anyone was in the house with her?”

  “No. Colleen lived alone.”

  “That doesn’t mean someone wasn’t with her last night,” Charlie pointed out. “Did you hear any noises in the background—voices, a doorbell or a knock?”

  “No.”

  “Has Colleen received any threats?”

  “Not that I know of.” A lawyer’s answer.

  “Any problems at work?”

  She shook her head.

  “Had her demeanor changed in the past few months?”

  At this Mia hesitated. “Maybe. A little. I knew something was bothering her, but she hadn’t said what it was—oh!” She started as a memory hit her. “She said something about turning over rocks and not liking what you find underneath. I just thought she was talking about the people we prosecute. Sometimes the victims and even the witnesses aren’t as lily-white as you wished they were.”

  “But it could have been about something else?”

  “It could have been. But if it was, I don’t know what. Colleen could play her cards awfully close to her vest.”

  “How long have you known her? How close were you?”

  “Were,” Mia echoed with a sad smile. “You can’t imagine how strange it feels to use that word about Colleen.” She took a deep breath. “I met Colleen when I got hired by King County about fifteen years ago. It was my first job out of law school. Initially Colleen was more like my mentor. She was married and had a five-year-old, and I’d just gotten married. She loved it when I got pregnant. She wanted to have another baby and her husband didn’t, so I think she was living vicariously through me. Then her husband wanted a divorce, and it really blindsided her. And after that, we were more friends than anything.”

  Charlie was familiar with work friendships, how you could be so tight with a partner but then find you had nothing to say to each other when you no longer worked together. “Did you and
Colleen stay friends when you left the office?”

  “We kept in touch, but it wasn’t really the same while I was at home. But when I came back to work a few months ago, we picked right up again.”

  “Did she have any problems in her personal life? Drugs? Alcohol use?”

  Mia snorted. “Colleen?”

  “Her cheeks were always so red.”

  “She had rosacea, Charlie.” Whatever rapport they had been building a moment ago seemed to have broken. “It’s a skin condition.” Her tone was condescending.

  “Oh. Okay. Any other problems? Gambling? Debts? Any known enemies?”

  “No.”

  “Was she dating anyone?”

  “Colleen hasn’t dated in a while. She tried some of those online sites, but she said it was impossible, that women in their fifties were competing with women in their twenties and thirties. And of course for a long time her daughter came first. Violet’s in college now, at Evergreen.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, “we had campus police and a chaplain notify her last night. She’s coming home tomorrow, after we release the crime scene. I’ll interview her then. What about Colleen’s ex-husband?”

  “Martin? He’s married to the woman he left Colleen for. There was a lot of drama at the time, but that was almost fifteen years ago.” She drank the last of her coffee and wiped her lips with a napkin. “Were there any clues at the scene?”

  It was weird to be questioned by a witness, but given the circumstances and her job title, he supposed Mia had the right. “As far as we can tell, there was no entry. The responding officer had to break down the door to get inside.”

  Pristine crime scenes didn’t exist. TV CSIs were the only ones who investigated crimes where every thread or hair was an important clue. In this real-life scenario, you had officers responding to the report of shots fired, forcing entry, searching for suspects and victims, and trying to render aid to the woman they found. Only then had they looked for evidence of a crime.

  The problem with a killing without a clear motive was that they didn’t know what was or wasn’t evidence. Still, last night Charlie had gone through Colleen’s bedside drawers, desk, and filing cabinets. Her computer had gone to the forensics lab. After he was done talking to Mia, he would conduct a similar sweep of Colleen’s office.