The Mia Quinn Collection

by Lis Wiehl

  He nodded.

  “Mr. Shiller, would you mind answering that question out loud for the court reporter?”

  “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Okay. They all play football.”

  “Did you know a boy named Darin Dane?”

  His shoulders tensed. “Yeah.”

  “For how long?”

  “Since sixth grade, I guess.”

  “What did you think of him?” Mia asked. Brandon might look like a cartoon character, but he probably wasn’t stupid. He knew he was suspected of bullying, so he would try to minimize the distaste he had felt for Darin.

  “I don’t know.” A shrug. “I didn’t know him that well.”

  “You just said you’ve known him since sixth grade.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like we hung out.” He pressed his lips together. “We were never friends.”

  “You seem pretty adamant about that. Did you dislike Darin?”

  “No.” He shook his head a little too hard.

  “No?”

  “We were just different types of people, that’s all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I play sports, like you said. Darin isn’t like that. Wasn’t.”

  “Well, what was he like?”

  “He was different. All his friends were girls.”

  “It seems like a boy your age might like to have a girlfriend.”

  His face reddened. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, it was like he was a girl too.”

  “And did you ever verbally tease him about these differences?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” Mia said. “Remember, you swore to tell the truth. It’s an oath. Is there anything you want to change about what you said, anything at all?” She would have loved to have leaned into his face when she asked the question, but in a grand jury trial the prosecutor always remained seated for the questioning.

  “Well, maybe I teased him a little bit. But it was just being funny and stuff. Anyway, if he had tried harder to act normal, maybe nothing would have happened.”

  A few jurors recoiled. Mia knew she had them now, that they were already making up their minds about this boy.

  “These things that just happened—did they involve any physical contact?”

  Brandon played dumb. “What do you mean?”

  “In PE, for example, did you ever snap him with a towel?”

  “Maybe a couple of times.”

  “Did you ever push him in the showers?”

  Brandon was silent for a long moment. “Maybe. Maybe once or twice.”

  “Did you ever trip him?”

  Silence.

  Mia repeated, “Did you ever trip Darin Dane, Mr. Shiller?”

  “A few times. Not that many.”

  “And did you ever strike Darin with a closed fist?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember.” She said it flatly, not phrasing it as a question.

  “I might have, once,” Brandon said. “But other people did that too. It wasn’t just me. I wasn’t the only one.”

  “Can you tell me their names?”

  “Those guys I said before. Reece. Zane. Conrad. A few more.”

  “Tell me, Mr. Shiller, is there a name for people that Mr. Jones beats up?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was nearly inaudible. “We call them Reece’s Pieces.”

  One of the jurors gasped.

  “I’d like you to look at three notes, Mr. Shiller.” She leaned forward and handed them to him. “They are numbered exhibits 39, 40, and 41. Now, first, looking at number 39—and please don’t take it out of the plastic—do you recognize the handwriting?”

  “Maybe. It’s hard to say.”

  “Whose handwriting does it resemble?”

  “Reece’s. Maybe.”

  They already had a handwriting expert who would testify the handwriting belonged to Reece, but there was no point spending the money twice on an expert witness. She would save it for the trial. Mia felt she had more than enough for the grand jury to indict. When it came to the grand jury, they weren’t looking for guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. They were simply looking for a preponderance of evidence.

  The exhibits were passed from hand to hand. A couple of the jurors shook their heads when they read the more violent threats.

  “And do you know what happened after Darin received the note labeled number 41?”

  “He went out to the track and someone beat him up.”

  “Do you know who did it?” she asked.

  Brandon bit his lip. “You won’t tell him what I said?”

  The jurors were quiet now, listening intently.

  “These grand jurors are all sworn to secrecy. They can’t talk about what happens in this room. So you are safe telling them everything you know and everything you believe.”

  “Reece beat him up.” He was talking to his lap now, shoulders slumped.

  “And what about Darin’s Facebook page. Did you ever post on it?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “What specifically did you post?”

  “Called him some names. You know, like queer.”

  “And did you hack into his Facebook page and post invitations as if you were Darin for boys and men to come to Darin’s house?”

  He looked her in the eye. “No, I didn’t do that.”

  If it hadn’t been Brandon, it had to have been Reece, although it really seemed more like something Brandon would have done. “Do you know who did?”

  The rule of thumb was that you should never ask a witness a question to which you didn’t already know the answer. But there wasn’t really a way around it when you had a hostile witness in front of the grand jury.

  “Yeah.” He looked up at her. “It was Jeremy. Jeremy Donaldson did it.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Charlie was just opening a big manila envelope holding an accident report he had ordered when his phone rang.

  “Detective Carlson.”

  “It’s Mia. I just finished questioning the two boys about Darin’s death in front of the grand jury. Reece Jones took the Fifth, but Brandon Shiller answered all my questions. He admitted to harassing and physically abusing Darin, and he also implicated Reece.”

  “That all sounds good.” So why did her voice sound so shaky?

  “There’s one problem, Charlie. He says neither he nor Brandon hacked Darin’s Facebook. He said it was Jeremy Donaldson.”

  “Jeremy?” Even as he phrased it as a question, Charlie knew in his bones that it was really a statement.

  “I want to reinterview him.”

  “In front of the grand jury?”

  “If I send him a target letter, he might lawyer up—pull a Reece and never admit to anything,” Mia said. “But I felt like you and I made a connection with Jeremy. He might still be willing to talk to us.”

  He wondered if she was right. “I’ll call his mom and see if we can go over there as soon as school lets out. I also think I’ve managed to locate Seth Mercer, Willy Mercer’s dad. The last report is that he’s living in a trailer park between here and Tacoma.”

  Less than an hour later Charlie and Mia were in Jeremy’s living room. On the coffee table was a tray of chocolate chip cookies. But today not even Mia was eating them.

  “So did you get those guys?” Jeremy asked. “Brandon and Reece and the rest of them?” He ran his thumbs up and down the outside seams of his pants.

  “Actually, Jeremy,” Charlie said, “we’re here because we’re wondering if you’ve told us the whole truth.” He didn’t say anything more. Silence could be a more powerful weapon than any accusation. To someone who was feeling guilty, it could be nearly unbearable.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” The kid’s legs began to jig up and down. “I told you what I know. About how those guys beat Darin up and stuff.”

  Charlie and Mia didn’t move, didn’t speak. They hadn’t planned this tactic in advance, but Charlie could feel Mia se
ttling into the silence along with him.

  The kid bit his thumbnail, scrubbed his hands across his face, raked his fingers through his hair. “Is this about Darin’s Facebook page?”

  Again they gave him no answer, just kept their eyes fixed on his face. And it was their calm expressions that broke him.

  When he spoke next, his voice was high and hesitant. “Look, I just wanted to teach him a lesson. That’s all. I didn’t think it would go as far as it did. And I never, ever, ever thought he would kill himself.” His voice broke.

  “Tell us what happened,” Mia said in a soft voice.

  “See, Darin came over to my house this summer. I guess he thought we were still friends. But we really don’t have anything in common anymore. I tried to tell him that he needed to change the way he acted. Maybe in middle school everybody accepted it if he wore blue sequined pants that he got at the thrift store, you know, ’cause people said, well, that’s just Darin. But I knew high school was going to be different. Kids from four different middle schools go there, and not everyone was going to be so understanding. I told Darin he had to try to be more normal. Even if he was acting.” His eyes swung from Mia’s face to Charlie’s. “You can do it, you know? You just watch how other people do things, and you do what they do. You don’t stand out. You don’t make a fool of yourself. And you don’t get beat up.”

  Old memories bubbled up in Charlie, but he tried to ignore them. His high school years were long behind him now, but there were times the memories were as fresh as newly spilled blood.

  Jeremy twisted his hands together. “But Darin wouldn’t listen to me. I mean, he wore that rainbow-striped scarf the very first day of school. And a few days later, when he saw me in the hall, he threw his arms around me and gave me this big hug.” At the memory, color rose in his cheeks. “Everybody stared. Guys don’t hug. Darin should have known that! So I decided to teach him a lesson. See, when he was here that one day over the summer, my mom said I had to take the garbage and recycling out to the curb before the truck showed up. So I said Darin could use my computer to check his Facebook. Later I realized that it saved his password.”

  “So what did you do to his Facebook?” Mia asked.

  “I posted some stuff. You know, like I was really Darin. I thought I could show him the way things were going. I thought he would notice and change how he was acting. But he didn’t. So the next day I made it worse. I know I shouldn’t have.” His hands twisted on his lap. “But then some other kids found out about it and started talking about it at school. Everyone was looking at his page and commenting on it and sharing it on other people’s pages. But you have to believe me, I didn’t know Darin would kill himself.” Jeremy’s voice cracked. “He always seemed so happy and clueless.”

  “But wasn’t there a reason that Darin didn’t know?” Mia’s blue eyes were flinty. “Why wasn’t he notified when people posted on his wall?”

  In a small voice Jeremy said, “Because I turned off notifications.”

  “And you unfriended his close friends, like Shiloh and Rainy.”

  He nodded and hung his head.

  How was Darin supposed to learn his lesson if Jeremy had systematically eliminated any way that he might?

  “Of course I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known what was going to happen. And I feel terrible.” He raised his head. “But it’s not all my fault. Darin just wouldn’t play along. He wouldn’t even try to fit in. And all those other things that happened to him—I didn’t do them. I never hit him. I never pushed him down. I never threatened him. I never called him names. All I tried to do was to give him some advice about how he needed to change. But he just wouldn’t—”

  “You mean he wouldn’t be the same as everyone else,” Mia said flatly.

  “Isn’t that the definition of normal?”

  She sighed. “Look, Jeremy, there’s one more thing I’m going to need you to do for me. I need you to go before the grand jury and talk about what you know. That would be about the assaults the other boys made on Darin. It would also be about what happened with his Facebook page.”

  Charlie noticed that she had switched to using the passive voice, as if the Facebook account had somehow managed to hack itself.

  “Will they understand that I didn’t know he would kill himself?”

  “You can tell them that yourself, Jeremy. You can explain it to them just like you did to us.”

  On their way out, Mia told Jeremy’s mother that her son would need to go before the grand jury. Charlie waited for her to object or say she wanted to get a lawyer, but she kept on chopping vegetables for some kind of stew and nodded.

  How much did she know about what her son had done? Charlie wondered as he drove them to the trailer park that was Seth Mercer’s last known address. How much did she want to know? His eyes focused on the road in front of him, but his mind was still back in the cheerful blue-and-green living room with the cowering kid at its center. Jeremy had done what he thought he had to do. When you were afraid of being bullied, sometimes the best thing to do was to become a bully yourself.

  Mia’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Charlie, every time we talk to these kids about what happened to Darin, I can see it on your face.”

  His shoulders tensed and his hands tightened on the steering wheel. “What?” There was no way she could see anything, guess anything, tell anything. That part of Charlie had been buried long ago.

  “Did something happen to you when you were in school?” Her voice was soft, coaxing, nearly maternal. “Were you picked on?”

  Charlie knew Mia wouldn’t stop asking questions until he told her the truth. And he found himself wanting to give it to her. To prove to her that she hadn’t been wrong about him. His lips twisted into a bitter smile. “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re right that Darin’s case brings back bad memories. But you’re wrong about what they’re of.” He took a deep breath. “The truth is, Mia, that in high school I was the bully. I was my high school’s Reece Jones.”

  Her eyes went wide. “What—what do you mean?”

  “When I was in high school, things happened.” Charlie heard himself minimizing, using the passive voice himself, and forced out the truth. “I made them happen. I didn’t get my growth spurt until I was a senior. So what do you do when you’re six inches shorter than everyone and you dress in clothes from the thrift store? I had already been jumped a couple of times. I decided that the best way to protect myself was by hurting other people first. I figured if I hurt them, they would be too scared to hurt me.” His voice roughened. “And you know what? It worked.”

  The rest of the drive to the trailer park was completely in silence. Charlie told himself it didn’t matter if Mia had lost every shred of respect she had ever had for him. He was sure it hadn’t been a lot to begin with.

  Twenty minutes later he checked the address again to make sure that this trailer was the one where Seth Mercer lived. If these homes in the Lonely Pines Park had ever been mobile, that had been years in the past. The one Mercer lived in was baby blue, about twenty feet long, with four tiny windows. Topping the flat white roof was a rusting TV antenna. Living in the trailer would be like living in a tin box.

  They got out of the car, still not speaking. Charlie knocked on the front door. It sounded hollow and flimsy, barely protection from the elements, let alone from anyone who really wanted to get inside. Mia stood behind him on the cement slab porch, which was set off by a six-foot-long wrought-iron railing painted white.

  “Who is it?” a man’s voice growled.

  “Seattle Police. We’re looking for Seth Mercer.”

  After a pause the man said, “Okay. Just give me a minute.”

  Time stretched out. Surely longer than a minute. Charlie was just turning toward Mia when the door began to creak open.

  “Took you guys long enough.” The man had three days’ growth of silvery beard and was dressed in jeans and a red-plaid flannel shirt
. But it wasn’t his words or his appearance that drew Charlie’s attention.

  It was the rifle in his hands. The rifle leveled right at Charlie’s chest.

  Charlie shouted, “Gun!” He pushed Mia sideways with one hand as he drew his Glock with the other. “Take cover!”

  CHAPTER 43

  Take cover!” Charlie yelled as he shoved Mia out of the way.

  She scrabbled sideways, her eyes fastened on the gun. Her toe caught on a crack in the cement. She fell to one knee, her hands scraping across the cement. Not feeling the pain, she pushed herself back to her feet, stumbled off the porch, and scrambled for the car and whatever cover it could provide.

  She couldn’t die. Not now. Not when her kids were so young. Not when they had already lost their father.

  Crouching behind the front wheel, she risked peeping over the hood. Seth Mercer still stood in the doorway, holding the long gun with the barrel only a few inches from Charlie’s chest. Homicide detectives normally wore plain clothes—which meant Charlie wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest under his shirt. Over the years Mia had seen enough autopsy photos to know that at this range, Charlie would be dead the second Mercer pulled the trigger.

  Only a few minutes earlier she had been sickened by Charlie’s admission that he had once been a bully. But now, as he stood nose to nose with a man bent on killing him, she knew she would do whatever she could to save him.

  “You don’t want to do this,” Charlie said calmly. He had raised both hands. The one holding his gun was turned so that it pointed off to the side.

  Yanking her phone from her purse, Mia dialed 911 by touch, then held it to her ear.

  “911. Police, fire, or medical?”

  “Police,” Mia half said, half whispered. “There’s a man holding a police officer at gunpoint.”

  “What do you know about what I want?” Mercer said. His lips twisted into a sneer. “You don’t know anything.”

  “What’s your location?” the dispatcher said in Mia’s ear.

  “A trailer park between Seattle and Tacoma. It’s called the Something Pines.” Think, Mia, think! “Whispering Pines—no, Lonely Pines. Unit Seven.”