by Lis Wiehl
“Yeah, just you and your thousands of neighbors living in the hive.”
The open lobby had a floor made of large squares of white marble set off by smaller strips of black marble. The silver doors of the elevator slid open, and Charlie pressed the button for the twenty-third floor.
Even before he knocked on the door of the Millers’ condo, they could hear a baby crying inside. After a moment a woman opened the door.
Colleen had once shown Mia a picture of Martin with his new wife. In the photo Gina had had shiny dark hair that fell past her shoulders. Now, her gray-threaded hair, pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, looked like it needed to be washed. She was still slender and petite, only now there were hard lines around her mouth. She looked almost brittle.
“Gina Miller?” Mia had to raise her voice to be heard over the baby’s crying. The sound was monotonous and oddly devoid of emotion.
“Yes?” She stiffened slightly.
“I’m Mia Quinn with the King County District Attorney’s Office. And this is Charlie Carlson with the Seattle police.”
Her expression didn’t change. “Yes?”
“Can we come in?” Charlie asked. “We’d like to ask you a few questions. We’re gathering information on Colleen Miller. Your husband’s”—he lowered his voice, as if there were neighbors around who might hear—“first wife.”
Gina stepped back and let them in.
At one point the condo must have had a modern, stripped-down feel, with its recessed lighting, pale trim, and squared-off furniture floating on stainless steel legs. But all of that was now covered with a layer of baby paraphernalia: bottles, sippy cups, stuffed animals, a package of diapers, and receiving blankets in various pastel hues. An empty blue playpen was set up in a corner of the living room.
In the dining room a baby who looked about a year old was strapped into a blue-and-white plastic high chair. He put one hand in his mouth and began to flick his tongue with the tips of his fingers. On the smeared glass tabletop was a jar of bright orange baby food. A tiny blue spoon sat next to it. Suddenly Mia felt nostalgic for Pack ’n Plays and miniature rubber-coated spoons.
The overheated space had the sharp, sweet stink of diapers. Charlie sniffed and winced, and Mia hoped Gina didn’t notice.
“So what did you want to know?” Gina asked as she walked toward the baby.
“You do know that Colleen Miller is dead, right?” Charlie said to her back.
“Do you want me to pretend that I’m grief-stricken?” Gina leaned over to unbuckle her son from his high chair. “Colleen had everything, and she wanted us to have nothing. Violet wasn’t even planned, but here Colleen just goes and has this accidental baby and everything turns out fine. Then she got to raise her daughter while keeping a huge chunk of Martin’s salary. Meanwhile we had to spend twenty-six thousand dollars from our retirement fund on IVF. And all that got us was two pregnancies that lasted a few weeks each.” She hoisted the baby to her hip. He put his fingertips back to his tongue. “Sometimes she’d even call up Martin and ask him to come by the house to help her fix something. Say her pipes were leaking or whatever and she didn’t know how to fix it. When we’ve been married years longer than they ever were. I knew what she was doing. She was trying to get him back.” With an exasperated huff, Gina tugged her son’s hand from his mouth.
Mia tried to see Colleen through Gina’s eyes. She didn’t even recognize the person Gina was describing.
“So you felt the financial situation was unfair,” Charlie observed mildly.
“Do you know how expensive it is to adopt? It cost us sixteen thousand to adopt Wyatt after he had already spent the first twelve months of his life, the formative years of his infancy, living with his eighteen-year-old mom. His stripper mom. Who has a problem with meth, and more than likely used during her pregnancy. If we had tried to get a healthy newborn, we would have paid at least double. But we didn’t have that.”
“He’s certainly a cutie,” Mia said. “Do you mind if I hold him?”
Suddenly she remembered her dream from the night before. She had been in an empty house, walking long stretches of polished wood floor with sunlight streaming in through uncurtained windows, when she heard a baby crying. She could tell it was hungry. No problem, Mia had thought. She would find the baby and nurse it. But when she finally located the baby and picked it up, she realized she had no milk to give it. She was all dried up.
“Sure.” Gina handed him over, swamping Mia in memories. Brooke was only four, but she didn’t have the same warmth a baby did, the same smell. She held Wyatt so that they were eye to eye, and smiled. Wyatt’s face didn’t change. It was as if Mia wasn’t there.
Two kids didn’t make Mia an expert on anything, except knowing that every kid was different. But something about Wyatt felt . . . off. He seemed oddly heavy and floppy. She perched him on her hip, but his heels didn’t dig into either side as her own kids’ heels had done, some mammalian reflex that told a baby to hang on.
Mia did the math based on their earlier conversation with Martin. Wyatt was probably around fifteen months old. “So is he walking yet?”
“No.” Gina didn’t elaborate. Instead she said, “You said you were from the District Attorney’s Office. That’s where Colleen worked.”
“Yes.”
“So you knew her?”
“Yes.” Mia didn’t know where this was heading, so she kept her answers short.
“What did she say about me?”
“She really didn’t talk about you very much.” That was true, at least recently. In the beginning Colleen had despised Gina, obsessed about her looks, her age, the lies she must have used to lure Martin in.
Wyatt held his hand out in front of his face and began to turn it back and forth, back and forth, his eyes fixated on the rhythmic movement.
Gina said in a rush, “He never makes eye contact. He repeats the same sounds over and over. He flaps his hands for hours. He’s constantly flicking his ears and tongue. The doctors say it’s too soon to know for sure, but they think he’s autistic.”
“I’m so sorry,” Mia said, and Charlie mumbled his apologies. She looked down at the baby’s face again, his blank blue eyes. Her heart broke for Gina. For Martin. And for Wyatt.
And a little for herself. She had made a doctor’s appointment for Brooke, but she hadn’t been able to get in until next Tuesday. What if Brooke’s nighttime screaming fits were caused by something awful? A brain tumor? Epilepsy? Childhood schizophrenia? Bad things happened. Happened even to kids. Wyatt was proof of that.
How long would it be before she was just like Gina—irrational, sleep-deprived, angry, and broke?
“He needs play therapy, speech therapy, all kinds of therapies,” Gina said. “He’s going to need a lot, and we can’t afford to give it to him. But we have to. He’s our son. We can’t turn our back on him. This is our life now. Even if it’s not at all what we planned on.”
“So you went over to Colleen’s house on Sunday night,” Charlie said in a soothing voice. “To make her understand.”
Gina nodded, then scrubbed her face with her palms.
Mia froze. Gina had done it. She had really done it.
“I just wanted to ask her to think of our poor boy. Her own child’s as healthy as a horse, and Violet is now an adult for all intents and purposes. And Wyatt’s just a baby. But they’re both Martin’s children.”
“You just wanted her to listen,” Charlie said.
Gina’s expression was anguished, her lips trembling, the whites showing around her eyes. “Have you ever made a mistake? Made a mistake and then realized it was too late and there was no way to undo it and your life was ruined forever?”
“So you took the gun with you?” Charlie said, still in the same soothing voice.
Gina’s eyes widened as if the full import of what she had done had finally sunk in.
CHAPTER 28
Eli Hall was early for his first day as an adjunct professor at the University
of Washington—he still felt a bit funny saying “UDub”—School of Law. Ten students—the maximum number—were registered for his session, but he felt as nervous as if he were about to address a crowd of thousands.
He was in the faculty lounge pouring a cup of burnt-smelling coffee when Mia Quinn walked in. “Want some?” he said, holding it out to her.
Her smile seemed distracted. “I probably should say no.” But she still held out her hand.
He noticed it was trembling. If Eli hadn’t already been a little off balance himself, he wouldn’t have said what he did next.
“So are you nervous too?”
“What?” She tilted her head. “Oh no, it’s not the teaching that’s getting to me. I just came here from listening to what I thought was going to be a murder confession.”
Eli took a step back. “Murder?”
Mia leaned against the counter, which was cluttered with torn sugar packets and discarded sections of the Seattle Times. “I’m investigating the murder of one of my colleagues, Colleen Miller. I was just with the homicide detective at the home of a suspect. The second wife of Colleen’s ex-husband, if you can follow that. Anyway, we thought she was going to confess to murdering Colleen, but it turned out that she was really confessing to not wanting to be a mom anymore.”
“That must have been hard on both of you,” Eli said. “Does she by any chance have a teenager?” He thought of Rachel. She was sixteen and had figured out how to push every button he had. As he spoke, he poured another cup of coffee for himself.
“No.” Mia’s lips turned down, and he realized that his joking response was not quite in step with what she was feeling. “A baby they adopted three months ago when he was a year old. Only he hasn’t started to walk or talk, and now the doctors think he’s probably autistic. This woman’s looking at thousands of dollars of bills in early intervention therapy that may or may not work.”
Eli was getting a little lost. “So what does that have to do with Colleen’s murder?”
“As I said, this is Colleen’s ex-husband’s second wife. And her cell phone records showed that she was near Colleen’s house around the time of the murder. But she says she was just planning to talk to her about adjusting how much her husband pays in child support. And that when she saw the cop cars roaring up to Colleen’s house, she turned around and left.”
Eli cut to the heart of the story. “Do you believe her?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.” Mia took a tentative sip of her coffee and grimaced at its bitterness. “She didn’t try to hide that she disliked Colleen. It was not liking her baby that she had trouble admitting. I think for her it would almost be easier to confess to murder than to confess to not loving her child. They sacrificed everything to have a child, and now she’s feeling stuck with it. Like it wasn’t worth it.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not exactly like you can give them back.” For all the trouble she could get into, Rachel was healthy and smart. Eli sometimes lost sight of those blessings. And he had the hope that she would gain maturity, learn to make better decisions. A disabled child might never grow up, never leave home. “Having a kid is more permanent than anything. You can abandon your pet, you can get a divorce”—a touch of bitterness entered Eli’s voice at the thought of how Lydia had just walked out of their lives—“but unless you do something so bad the court takes them away, a kid is yours forever.”
“I’ve got two. It’s one of the reasons I’m so tired.” Mia took a deep breath and drank the rest of her coffee in one gulp. By the time she finished, her nose was wrinkled in disgust. Eli couldn’t help noticing it was a cute nose, straight and slightly snub. “I think she might be telling the truth, but the homicide detective isn’t too sure. This lady clearly had the motive and opportunity. And she and her husband even own the same caliber of gun as the one that killed Colleen. But she flatly denied taking it with her that night.”
“Too bad it’s way too late now to check for gun residue on her hands,” Eli said. There was also no way to figure out if a gun had been fired recently, despite what some TV shows would have you believe. “And wasn’t another King County prosecutor murdered the same way a few years ago? Wouldn’t that rule this lady out? After all, she wouldn’t have had any motive to kill him, would she? What’s your working theory on that case?”
“That’s the problem. We don’t have one. Or rather, we have too many.” Mia threw her cup in the trash. “Did I hear you just moved from Portland? What made you come up here?”
Mia’s honesty brought out his own. “I wanted to give my daughter a fresh start. She’d fallen in with the wrong crowd in Portland.”
Eli had felt they had to get away. Away from the kids Rachel was hanging around with. Away from Lydia. Maybe then it wouldn’t be so obvious that his ex-wife didn’t want to spend time with their daughter. After all, a sixteen-year-old did not exactly fit with Lydia’s new image.
“How old is she?”
“Rachel’s sixteen.”
“I have a fourteen-year-old myself. It’s an . . . interesting . . . age. It’s probably more challenging for Gabe because”—she began to turn her wedding ring with her thumb—“my husband was killed in a car accident a few months ago.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Eli was kind of surprised that Mia was teaching with all that on her plate. Although maybe she had to, now that her husband had died. His own caseload was already overwhelming, but he needed the extra cash. The flip side was that it gave Rachel a couple of hours where he couldn’t even stay in touch by text.
“So are you settling in?” Mia asked after the silence had stretched out too long.
“Kind of. Tami’s files are a bit disorganized.”
Calling them files was generous. Tami Gordon seemed to have kept much of what she knew in her head. And what little was in her files hadn’t been entered into a computer, but jotted down in her scrawled handwriting that seemed to substitute whole strings of letters for a single curvy line.
Still, she had been a good defense attorney. Not good in any way Mia would think of as good. But she had succeeded in striking plea deals for many of her clients, people who would otherwise have had to throw themselves on the mercy of a judge or a jury. People with track records and track marks. People with very few redeeming characteristics.
“I need to stop by and speak to one of your colleagues,” Eli said. “I think her name is Kristina?”
“Katrina?”
“That’s it. The morning of what turned out to be Tami’s last day, she offered a pretty generous plea deal for one of Tami’s—now my—clients. I’m just hoping she hasn’t changed her mind.” He realized he was probably saying too much. “I guess I probably shouldn’t be discussing that with you.”
“I’m just glad it wasn’t my case. I didn’t like dealing with Tami. She could be . . .”
“Very persuasive?”
“More like a pit bull. Her only priority was her client. She would bend any rule, make any wild accusation—for her the end always justified the means.” Mia sighed and looked at her watch. “I guess I had better get moving.”
Eli thought about how dark it would be when they finished. “Want me to walk you to your car after class?”
“That’s okay. I’ll be fine.”
Eli didn’t press it, even though he knew rapists liked college campuses. Lots of girls who were engrossed in their texts and Tweets and Facebook updates, headphones in their ears, or girls who had had a little too much to drink, girls who believed they didn’t even need to worry about being safe, that bad things only happened to other people.
“Then I’ll see you next Thursday. And I’ll bring some good coffee for both of us.”
She brightened at that. “Sounds like a plan.” She gave him a little wave as she left.
Mia Quinn. There would probably come a time when they were on the opposite sides of the courtroom. Eli didn’t know whether he was looking forward to it or dreading it.
“Welcome to Trial Advocacy,” Eli said a
few minutes later in the miniature courtroom that was actually a classroom. “In this course you are going to be on your feet for most class sessions. This is the one place where you really get to practice what we have taught you over the last three years. By the end of the semester you’ll have practical experience in jury selection, opening statements, direct and cross-examination, introduction of exhibits, use of expert testimony, and closing arguments. And we’ll be ending the course with a full-scale trial for which we bring in a real judge and a jury of laypeople.”
Eli looked from face to face as he spoke, almost in the way he would examine jurors. They represented a range of ages, races, and levels of attentiveness. This one seemed fully engaged, that one seemed distracted, this one nodded a little too eagerly.
He passed out white index cards. “I want you to write down the personality traits you believe you have that will help you be a successful trial attorney. When you’re done, put it in your pocket or purse. When class is over, I want you to check what you wrote to see if your self-image matches up with what we do tonight. I’ll give you two minutes to write your traits down.”
As they bent over their index cards, he wondered what traits Mia Quinn brought to her job as a prosecutor. Forthrightness, he guessed. Intelligence. Compassion.
And for himself? He was methodical and stubborn. Maybe those were great traits for a public defense attorney. But maybe not so good for his personal life. He needed to act on his gut more.
When they were finished, Eli said, “Now, when you think of the typical trial attorney, you might imagine some silver-haired, silver-tongued guy in a fancy suit who can quote you the law chapter and verse. But in point of fact, there are a hundred different ways to be an excellent attorney. I want you to pair up with someone you don’t know well. One of you will be the presenter, the other the subject. The presenter’s job is to interview the subject and figure out what personality traits he or she has that will bring them success in the courtroom. You need to uncover facts, examples, and stories, because the rest of the class is going to be sitting in the jury box. It’s not enough to say that Susan relates well to people; you need to be able to show the jury through a story that this is true.
