The Mia Quinn Collection

by Lis Wiehl

  By the time Gabe thought to say anything, the cheese was already half-eaten. His mom had been complaining lately about how much he ate. Zach was opening cupboards now, looking for crackers to go along with the cheese. It seemed like a good time to remind them about what was in the basement.

  “So you want to check out the weight set?”

  “Let’s go,” Zach said, grabbing his pack and another hunk of cheese.

  “Yeah, bro,” Rufus said.

  The basement smelled musty, a smell that must have always been there but that Gabe had never noticed before. Some people had basements with carpets and TVs and gaming systems, but in this part of Seattle during the rainy season most basements were, at a minimum, damp. The weight bench was in a dry corner, along with a rack of dumbbells that ranged from ten pounds all the way up to fifty.

  Zach sat on the bench, hooked his legs behind the pads, and started doing leg extensions. Eldon picked up the twenty-pound weights and began doing bicep curls. Rufus did the same thing, only with thirty-pound dumbbells that he handled with ease. That left the ten, fifteen, forty, and fifty-pound dumbbells for Gabe to choose from. He grabbed the fifteens, glad he hadn’t been the first to pick up weights. Nobody could blame him for not taking the forties. Even still, if the other guys ended up doing more than twenty-five reps, it was going to be hard to keep up.

  Zach already seemed bored. He stopped lifting, got off the bench, and started walking around the basement, touching things while Gabe bit back the urge to ask him not to.

  “I saw you hanging out with that Tyler McCabe at lunch today.” Zach picked up a bottle of paint thinner, undid the cap, and took an experimental sniff. “Are you friends with him? Because he’s queer. You can tell.”

  Gabe smiled uneasily. “Tyler’s not gay.” He had known Tyler since kindergarten. “He’s just a little different, that’s all.”

  “Different as in gay,” Zach pronounced. He put the cap back on the paint thinner and set it down.

  “Different as in he’s just a little intense. He’s got some specialized interests.” One of them was Legos. Ty still played with Legos, only now he incorporated little motors inside so the things he made actually moved. Over the summer he had made a spider that skittered across the floor. Gabe hadn’t known it would move, or even that it could move, so when Ty had shown it to him, he had screamed like a girl.

  “Specialized interests like other boys, you mean.”

  Gabe realized it was futile to argue.

  “We did something fun over the summer.” Zach grinned.

  “What?” Gabe was just thankful that he had changed the topic.

  “All I can tell you is that we were on the news.”

  Gabe tried to think of what it could be. He imagined a party with hot girls, a keg of beer, and a swimming pool. “Come on—what?”

  Rufus said, “Dude, if we told you, we’d have to kill you.”

  Zach added, “But maybe we’ll let you join in sometime.” He was still fidgeting, picking things up and putting them down.

  Eldon gave Gabe a look he couldn’t read.

  Zach walked over to the door and opened the lock. Three stairs led up to the backyard, which was empty except for their old wooden play structure. The nearest neighbors were behind a tall hedge.

  Rummaging in his pack, Zach came up with a small brown pipe, a lighter, and a baggie half full of gray-green crumbles. Rufus put down his weights.

  Zach filled his pipe and fired it up. He took a long drag, held it, and then exhaled. He offered the pipe and lighter to Gabe. “Here you go.”

  Gabe waved it off. “That’s okay.”

  “Come on, take a hit. It won’t hurt you. All it will do is make you hungry, and that will help you put more weight on. And they don’t ever drug test at our school.”

  Gabe tried to think of a reason to say no. “My mom’s always hugging me. If she smelled that on me, she’d ground me for sure.”

  “Trust me,” Zach said, “moms are clueless.” He passed the pipe and lighter to Rufus, who lit up and sucked on it eagerly, while Eldon lay back on the weight bench and started doing chest presses.

  Zach was taking his third hit on the pipe when there was the sound of a car stopping outside their house.

  “My mom’s home!” Gabe’s heart felt like it would burst out of his chest. The basement reeked. He began to frantically fan the door open and closed, open and closed.

  Eldon dropped the weights he was holding and they crashed to the floor. Rufus swore.

  “We’ve got to get upstairs and pretend like we’ve been there the whole time. If my mom smells this, she’s going to kill me!”

  Zach calmly picked up a can of WD-40 from the workbench, shook it twice, and pressed the button. The metallic scent filled the air.

  CHAPTER 21

  In the driveway next to her Toyota was a maroon Forrester Mia didn’t recognize. After parking the Suburban on the street, she hurried onto the porch. The door wasn’t even locked, and when she went in, loud male voices were coming from the family room. Then Mia realized that they were laughing.

  Gabe and three big teenagers she didn’t recognize were sprawled on the couch and chairs. Brooke was sitting on the floor in front of the TV set. Her little face was only six inches from the screen, which was showing someone making an ill-advised effort to jump a bike over a wooden fence.

  One of the boys turned and saw her. He jumped to his feet and came over with his hand outstretched.

  “Hey, you must be Mrs. Quinn. Sorry if we surprised you. We’re Gabe’s friends from the football team. My name’s Zachary Young, and that’s Rufus Sledge and Eldon Reid.” Eldon only nodded and gave her a sleepy smile, while Rufus slowly got to his feet. Rufus was a mountain of a boy, and even the other two made Gabe look small in comparison. Now the protein powder made more sense.

  She felt uneasy that these boys she had never met before had been in her house. “It’s nice to meet you guys,” she said, smiling. “You can call me Mia.”

  “Mia.” Zach nodded. “It’s great to meet you. Gabe said you’re a prosecutor, right? That must be a cool job, putting away the bad guys.”

  “It can be.” Mia was impressed. Had any of Gabe’s friends ever talked to her about her job before? She almost felt a little misty. If Gabe’s friends were growing up, he must be too. She could only hope that with other adults, Gabe was able to rise to the occasion as this boy was.

  “So I’ve always wondered—do you get to decide who to go after? Like, can you pick which bad guy you want to put away?”

  And Mia had wondered if the kids on the football team would be less interested in academics. “My boss assigns cases, but there’s still something called prosecutorial discretion.” She tried to find the right words to explain it. “Sometimes what someone is charged with depends on the circumstances. Say the cops find a man standing over the body of his dead wife—and he has blood on his hands. Did he hit her over the head on purpose? Then he should be charged with murder. Did he get angry and push her, and she fell and hit her head? Then the charge should be manslaughter. But what if he’d just been talking to her when she slipped and hit her head and his hands got bloody when he tried to help her? In that case, he’s not guilty of anything. That’s where I come in. It’s my job to review the evidence, determine what happened, and decide what the charge should be. I mean, sure, I have a boss, but he doesn’t have time to go through all my cases. I get to make a lot of the decisions.”

  Eyes shining, Zach turned to Gabe. “You should definitely have your mom come talk for Career Day.”

  Gabe nodded. His cheeks were red, and he wouldn’t make eye contact with Mia.

  “Well, we should probably be going,” Zach said, and Eldon heaved himself to his feet. They muttered good-byes as they passed her, and Eldon did some kind of fist bump thing with Gabe.

  After the door closed, she turned to him. “Gabe, you need to be more careful about keeping the door locked and the curtains drawn when you’re home. Do
n’t ever let in anyone you don’t know. And I know I haven’t said anything about it before, but I really don’t feel comfortable with you having friends over when I’m not home. Same thing with you being over at a friend’s house. I don’t want you to be there if there isn’t an adult home.”

  Gabe snorted. “What—you don’t trust me?”

  “I do trust you. But kids take more chances when parents aren’t around. Sometimes they get stuck in situations and don’t know how to say no.”

  His face reddened. “I know what the issue really is. You just don’t want me to have any friends. All you want me to do is watch Brooke. You already get home so late, and it’s been even later recently. And most of the other parents work too. So with your rules, now I won’t have any friends.”

  Mia’s resolution to treat her son with kindness was forgotten. She gritted her teeth. “It’s about keeping you safe, Gabe. You may feel like you’re an adult, but you are not.” She went into the kitchen.

  Half the cupboard doors were standing open, and on the counter lay the orange plastic wrapper from a block of Tillamook, holding just a sliver of cheese.

  Her anger found an outlet. “Gabe, did you guys eat all of this cheese? That was a two-pound block.” She had been planning to make macaroni and cheese later in the week, the good, homemade kind, not the kind that came from a blue box.

  “Sorry!” Gabe called.

  She sniffed. “Come in here.” When he did, he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “What is that smell?” It was sweet, oily, metallic—and it seemed to be coming from the basement. She had caught a whiff of the same smell, only not as strong, in the family room.

  “It’s WD-40. Me and the guys were lifting weights in the basement. I need to bulk up and they were giving me tips. The leg extension piece was sticking, so we sprayed it.”

  How big of a mess was it down there? It was embarrassing to think of strangers seeing it. She definitely had to hold the garage sale soon, in case Gabe kept having friends over to lift weights—when she was home, of course.

  “I’m going to run out to the store and get bread and cheese. Is there anything else we need?” Maybe she would get a rotisserie chicken. That would save time making dinner.

  “Can you pick me up some protein bars? All the guys say I need to eat more protein.”

  And how much would those cost? Still, she nodded and jotted it down.

  The next few hours passed in a blur of shopping, pulling dinner together, cleaning, giving Brooke a bath and putting her to bed. Everything took longer than it should have.

  Mia had enlarged a photo of Scott and put it by Brooke’s bed, hoping that it would help him stay in her memory. Her chest ached when she thought of Brooke forgetting everything about her father. But tonight Brooke showed him a doll she liked, patted his face, and said good night, while Mia held back tears. When she bent over to kiss her daughter good night, she was sucking her thumb.

  “Brooke—thumbs aren’t for sucking.” But they sure had been recently.

  Obediently Brooke popped her thumb out of her mouth, but Mia was sure it would go right back in as soon as she left. She was a bad mother. She used to be a fairly good one, before Scott died, before Gabe stopped wanting to have anything to do with her. Now she needed to be mother and father both, and she was doing a poor job at both.

  After she closed Brooke’s door, she stuck her head in Gabe’s room.

  “Be sure to finish your history homework.”

  “That’s what I’m working on.”

  Maybe. But his computer was open too. Was he writing a report or checking social media? She thought about nagging some more but then changed subjects. “And be careful on Facebook, okay? Don’t ever say anything you wouldn’t in person.”

  “I am careful, Mom.” He made an irritated grimace. “It’s like you don’t trust me anymore.”

  “It’s not that, honey. It’s just that lately I’ve been seeing how much trouble someone can get into on Facebook. You have to realize that everything you do online, every place you go, every time you click on a link—it’s all being recorded and stored on a server somewhere. Nothing you do is private.”

  “I know that, Mom.” Gabe rolled his eyes at her, and she gave up.

  Mia made sure the house was locked up tight, the curtains covering every inch of window. What if the same person had killed Stan and Colleen? Was it possible he might be out there, watching the house? She didn’t want to give him any clues as to where she was. No one was going to shoot her through a window.

  Finally she was in her bedroom with the printouts from Colleen’s computer and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos she had bought at the store and managed to sneak into the house under a pack of toilet paper.

  She paged through Colleen’s documents. Most were mundane. A food diary that lasted for eleven days and then stopped. Tax forms that showed no surprises. A budget, a packing list, a family tree. She hadn’t kept a journal.

  The most interesting were the notes from the dating site. Flirty, friendly, funny. Sometimes more R-rated than PG.

  Mia fell asleep with her mouth tasting sour and spicy, her face pillowed on printouts.

  At 12:13, Mia started awake.

  Brooke was screaming again.

  CHAPTER 22

  Darin’s room felt like the kid had just left to grab a snack. His math book was open on his desk and an uncapped pen lay across his notebook. Lined up at the back of the desk were a small, red wind-up robot, a jar filled with agates and other unusual rocks, and a tin can covered with blue felt that held pencils and paintbrushes. Intricate ink drawings of crows were tacked above the desk.

  The desk itself was part of some sort of space-saving desk/dresser/storage unit combo made of blond wood, all of it topped with a bed. A shallow ladder led to the twin mattress, which was surrounded by a rail. The desk pulled out of a section of the middle, with a column of built-in drawers next to it.

  Charlie didn’t like heights. He told himself that’s why he felt a little dizzy clambering up to Darin’s bed on a ladder that offered only an inch of clearance for his toes. And it was a real trick to figure out how to look under the mattress when he could only reach the bottom end. He ended up perched precariously on Darin’s desk chair. Pulling off the sheets and blankets released the kid’s smell, a musky, slightly sour scent of sweat and feet. He could imagine Darin asleep, curled up in a ball. Hurting and afraid. Charlie knew what that was like.

  In the closet the clothes were still pushed over to one side. His parents hadn’t found a note, and so far Charlie hadn’t either. It was possible Darin hadn’t even meant to be successful. It was surprisingly easy to loop something around your neck and kill yourself. You didn’t even need the noose to be tight or to get your feet off the ground. By the time you realized that maybe you didn’t mean to be doing this after all, it could be too late. Death came fast.

  It took Charlie a couple of hours to finish searching Darin’s room. When he was done he had little to show for it except for three notes. Two were laced with expletives and threats. The first suggested Darin should do everyone a favor and die, and the second ended with Watch out, gay boy, we’re coming for you. The third was something completely different. It read I’ve been watching you and I like what I see. If you want to see if you’ll like what you see, meet me by the south entrance to the track at 5 pm tomorrow. All three notes had been crumpled and then smoothed out, as if Darin had thrown them away and then changed his mind before hiding them between some neatly folded T-shirts.

  What intrigued Charlie was that all three notes appeared to have been written in the same hand.

  He came out of the kid’s bedroom and managed to close the door behind him while juggling Darin’s computer, wrapped in a pink antistatic bag, and the three notes, which he had slipped into plastic sleeves.

  Nate was sitting in the living room in the dark. The air seemed to be made up only of exhaled tobacco smoke. Laurie was nowhere in evidence.

  “I found some notes in his room,�
�� Charlie said. “I’m gonna take them into evidence. As well as his computer.”

  He expected Nate to turn on a light, to ask to look at the notes, but instead he just grunted. Charlie heard more than saw him suck some more smoke into his lungs.

  Charlie said good-bye and let himself out. Back at the office, he handed the computer off to the techs. When he left for home he took with him the printouts from Colleen’s computer and Stan’s murder book. Technically the murder book was supposed to stay at the office, but what other people didn’t know didn’t hurt them. Technically you weren’t supposed to work sixteen hours straight either.

  At home Charlie checked the fridge, as if someone might have filled it while he was out. All he found was a half gallon of skim milk, packets of soy sauce, bottles of mixer—not much you could magically make a meal out of. In the freezer he discovered a microwave pizza, which turned out to taste as good as the circle of cardboard it came on. Chewing mechanically, Charlie flipped through the crime-scene photographs from Stan’s murder. In them, Stan sprawled awkwardly, like someone had just shoved him to the floor. His glasses were askew, one lens resting on his forehead. The left side of his sweater was soaked with blood.

  In the autopsy section, Charlie skipped over all the weights and measurements and descriptions of the actual procedure to the summary section and the corresponding photographs. There were no surprises. The bullet had hit Stan’s heart first, and then bounced from rib to spinal column to rib again, chewing up his insides.

  Carmen hadn’t had much to go on in finding Stan’s killer, with no evidence, no death threats, and Stan’s personal life devoid of lovers and even close friends. Interestingly, she had also considered if Stan’s activism in Safe Seattle might have made him a target, but hadn’t been able to come up with much more than speculation.

  Charlie read an interview with the neighbor who had first reported the shots and made a mental note to reinterview him. Other neighbors had reported that the streetlight had gone out the night before Stan was killed, and when the crime-scene investigators took a closer look, they found it had been shattered by a BB.