The Mia Quinn Collection

by Lis Wiehl

  Oleg led Mia to the end of the hall, past a bathroom and a tiny kitchen area. His big office was cluttered and windowless. On top of the desk sat both a microscope and a magnifying lamp. The wing-back leather chair behind the desk looked like it belonged in a home, not an office. The leather was scarred from hard use, although there was a shiny spot in the middle where Oleg must rest his head.

  A black-and-chrome chair faced the desk, but a woman’s black leather jacket was draped across it. “So sorry,” Oleg said as he picked it up and hung it on the back of the door. “My girlfriend can be very careless with her things.”

  Mia nodded. What was the best way to approach this? “It’s actually Scott I wanted to talk to you about,” she ventured.

  “He was my accountant for two years. A very good one. I put everything into his hands and I trusted his advice.” Oleg smiled, one side of his mouth moving higher than the other.

  Mia thought of the IRS letter. Was he saying that any errors had been Scott’s and Scott’s alone?

  She took a deep breath. “After Scott died I cleaned out his office, but I didn’t have time to go through the paperwork until a few days ago. I found some papers I think are yours.”

  She had sorted through it all a second time, setting aside anything with Oleg’s name or the name of his business. She had gathered ledger sheets, receipts for various bills, utility statements, and bills of lading for shipments of jewelry from all over the world: Belgium, Columbia, South Africa.

  And before she had come here, she had photocopied them all.

  Mia handed over the file. “I know it’s not really my business, but I couldn’t help but notice that the IRS sent you an audit notice about two weeks before Scott died. I hope he was able to get things resolved before, um, before the accident.”

  Oleg waved one hand. “Yes, yes, we had a meeting, but it was all a simple mistake. Once your husband went over the paperwork with the IRS agent, he realized they were in error.”

  She nodded. Had Scott told the IRS the truth? She remembered what Charlie had said, about how easy it would be to hide profits in Oleg’s line of work.

  “There’s something else I wanted to ask you about,” she said slowly, reaching into her purse. She brought out the black jeweler’s box and handed it to him. “Can you tell me how much this is worth?”

  Oleg snapped it open. His face betrayed nothing. He turned on the light on the magnifying mirror and began to examine the ring, turning it back and forth.

  “I know this ring,” he said, turning off the light. “It is very well made. For what it is.”

  “What do you mean, for what it is?” Mia’s stomach started to churn.

  “The band is eighteen-karat white gold, but the stones—I am afraid they are cubic zirconia.” He slipped the ring back into its box and snapped it shut.

  “You mean they’re fake?”

  “I am so sorry.” He looked at her pityingly, and Mia realized he thought that Scott had given her the ring, told her it was real. “Scott bought it from me a few months before the accident. We have another store that sells well-made costume jewelry. Not everyone wants or appreciates the real thing.” He made a face. “But as I said, for what it is, it is well-made. Often you will see these types of rings made with cheap silver and flimsy settings, but I will not carry those. Even if it is costume, it is high-quality costume. Of course, if it were real, with that cut and clarity, it would be worth about thirty.”

  “Thirty what?” Mia asked incredulously.

  “Thirty thousand.”

  She started to laugh. It all seemed so ironic. Ironic and stupid. Scott had bought his girlfriend a fake ring to commemorate their equally false relationship.

  Oleg pushed back the magnifying mirror. “Are you all right?”

  Mia was still laughing. But when she put her hand to her cheek, it came away wet with tears.

  Oleg looked alarmed. “If there is a problem with money, I could buy it back. It cost seven or eight hundred.”

  Mia knew that this time he meant dollars. “No, no. I’ll keep it.” And every time she was tempted to feel sorry for Scott, she would take it out and look at it. Remember how he had cheated on her. And how he had planned to cheat his stupid, starry-eyed girlfriend with a ring that only looked like the real thing.

  Oleg cleared his throat. “Is there anything else I could help you with today?” He appeared anxious for her to leave.

  “No. I guess that’s it.”

  They got to their feet, and he ushered her out into the corridor. The young woman had opened the top box of the delivery she had signed for. Inside were large rhinestone-encrusted pendants in bright yellows and blues, so gaudy they could qualify as bling.

  Oleg barked a few words in Russian, and the woman hurriedly closed the box and set it aside. He turned to Mia. “For our other shop. Costume jewelry. No one dresses up anymore. Women do not want the cocktail rings, the tennis bracelets, the statement necklaces. They don’t understand the value of having something real. It’s all disposable these days.”

  Mia raised an eyebrow. “Yes. It certainly seems that way.”

  CHAPTER 32

  With a groan Charlie opened his eyes. He was on the ground, and someone was leaning over him. An astronaut? He blinked, and the figure resolved into the gardener in his silvery-gray coat, the air tank his leaf blower. He was dabbing at Charlie’s nose with a crumpled tissue, now spotted with bright red blood.

  “You want I should call the police?” the gardener asked.

  “I am the police.” Charlie put his hand to his nose and gingerly moved it from side to side. He didn’t think it was broken. When that happened, it felt crunchier. He was just lucky that he had landed next to the walkway instead of on it.

  Jared was leaning against the concrete wall with his head in his hands. Now he stared at Charlie. “Wait. You’re not Scott?” If he was acting, he was doing a good job of it.

  “No.” He slowly got to his feet, ignoring how the world swayed and righted itself. The gardener stretched out his arms as if he were either going to catch Charlie or prevent him from hitting Jared in turn. Charlie pinched just below the bridge of his nose, but when he swiped the fingers from his other hand underneath, the blood already seemed to have stopped.

  There was a way to mumble his name so it was a single blur. He did that now, since he wasn’t exactly here in an official capacity. “I’m Charliecarlson.” Then he turned to the gardener. “It’s okay. You can go back to your leaf blowing. Everything’s fine.”

  “I’m really sorry, dude,” Jared offered, looking miserable. “Are you a real cop?”

  Charlie started to nod, then stopped because he didn’t like the way it made him feel.

  Jared shook his hand, winced, and blew on his knuckles. “I’ve never done anything like that before. It’s just that I thought you were the guy my girlfriend left me for.”

  “Is her name Betty? Betty Eastman?”

  “I called her Bets, but yeah, that’s her.” His eyes got wide. “Why? Is she in trouble?”

  “Can you tell me where she is?” Charlie persisted.

  Jared made a noise that was not quite a laugh. “I wish I knew. Awhile back she left me for some guy named Scott.”

  “We’re looking for her because she may have witnessed an accident.”

  “The last day I saw her was back in April. April fourteenth.”

  Charlie blinked. That was the day Scott had died. “Would you mind if we went inside? I kind of feel like I need to sit down.” He also wanted to see the interior of the apartment for himself, look for any clues that Jared was lying.

  “Oh, shoot, of course. I’m sorry, man.”

  The small apartment was decorated in flesh tones—pinks and beiges and ivories. Everything was jammed together. They walked in through the kitchen, where gold-speckled linoleum peeled up at the corners. What passed for a dining room was a space about five feet across, just big enough for a tiny round table and two armless chairs. In the corner, a fa
ke fern provided the only spot of color. The whole thing was fairly tidy. Messy, it would have been claustrophobic.

  Jared offered him some water, which Charlie declined. They sat at opposite ends of a small cream-colored couch.

  “How did you and Betty meet?” Charlie corrected himself. “Bets.”

  “We had an anthropology class together. I told her I liked her laugh. Of course, I liked a lot more than that. But I figured ‘laugh’ was the best thing to say.” Jared smiled at the memory. He seemed as pretty as a Ken doll, but just as empty-headed. “Have you ever met her?”

  “I’ve seen her picture.”

  “It’s not the same. Sometimes she would talk to me and I wouldn’t be able to hear her.” Jared raised his knuckles to his mouth and absently kissed them. “I would just watch her mouth move and get lost.”

  That certainly sounded like the basis of a solid relationship. “Why did you think she was with this guy you mentioned? This Scott?”

  “He’s an accountant. She got a part-time job working for him. An internship. She said she was getting hands-on experience. Hands-on.” He snorted. “Now I know what that meant. And then she started sneaking around, being mad at me, pushing me away if I even tried to hug her.” His mouth twisted.

  “Did she know that Scott was married?”

  “She wouldn’t care about that.” He shrugged. “She’s very single-minded. Her full name is Elizabeth, but when she moved in with me she started calling herself Bets. She would say that with her, all bets were off. She said if you saw what you wanted, you should just go for it.” His ears reddened. “That’s how we ended up together. I sort of had a girlfriend, but Bets said she knew she wanted me. At the time she was dating her manager at Taco Time and he was married. When I met Bets, I kind of let her think I had more money than I did. After she moved in with me, she never paid for anything. She never even asked if she could. She was very good at getting people to buy her things.”

  Mia had told Charlie that Scott had left her in debt. How much of that money had gone to Betty, gone on her back or in her mouth or, for all Charlie knew, up her nose?

  Jared encircled one wrist with the thumb and middle finger of the other hand. “One day she came home wearing this diamond bracelet.”

  “A diamond bracelet?” In his mind’s eye, Charlie saw the diamond ring go skittering across the floor of Mia’s basement.

  “She got mad when I asked about it, where it had come from. Tried to tell me it was an old family heirloom.” Jared snorted. “Which was such a crock. I know she grew up with nothing and nobody. Just bouncing around from one foster family to another.”

  Unexpectedly, Charlie felt a flash of sympathy.

  “She started being gone a lot, and when she came home her mouth was swollen, like from kissing. And I’d see her talking on her phone and she would be all giggly and flirty, and then when she saw me she would hang up.”

  “Did she tell you she was leaving you?”

  “No. She just didn’t come home that night. And the next day she sent me an e-mail. She said she wasn’t coming back, that I should just forget about her, that she would only cause me unhappiness.” He snorted. “Like leaving me wasn’t going to hurt.”

  “Have you talked to her since then?”

  “No.”

  “Communicated with her in any way?”

  Jared shook his head.

  “Let me ask you something,” Charlie said slowly. “And think about it before you answer. Are you 100 percent certain it was Bets who sent that e-mail?”

  “Who else would know my e-mail address?”

  “Just think about it.”

  Jared was only able to keep still for a few seconds. Then the words tumbled out of him. “It sounded like her. She was always kind of dramatic. She should have majored in acting instead of accounting. But she said she liked accounting because it was about money, and she’d never had any.”

  “Did you keep the e-mail?”

  “No. I deleted it.”

  That meant Charlie couldn’t look at the IP address, at least not without a warrant. And since this wasn’t an official case, he wasn’t going to get one.

  “Did you e-mail her back?”

  “I did a couple of days later, but it bounced back, saying it was an unknown user. She must have closed the account.”

  “So she just packed up and moved out and left you nothing but an e-mail?”

  “No. She left her things here.”

  A chill went down Charlie’s spine. It was beginning to sound as if someone just wanted Jared to think Betty had left.

  “In the e-mail she said I could just sell her stuff at a garage sale or give it to Goodwill—that she didn’t need it any longer.”

  “And did you?”

  “Not yet. I put it all in a box in the closet.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Sure.” He got up and came back a few seconds later with an old banana box.

  Charlie sorted through it quickly. Nothing but clothes, a few textbooks, makeup, a dozen photos of herself, both with and without Jared. Charlie lifted up a few pieces of clothing. They all seemed absurdly small. Although maybe on Betty they had been just right.

  Jared held a blouse to his nose and sniffed deeply. “They still smell like her.”

  Had Betty run because she was worried she would be next?

  Or had she run because she was the one who did it?

  Or had she been unable to run?

  CHAPTER 33

  Mia inched the car forward, gaining a whopping six feet before the car ahead of her again put on the brakes. The University of Washington was only five miles from the King County Courthouse, but today was one of those days when it might be faster to walk. From the seat beside her, she grabbed a handful of Lay’s barbecue chips and stuffed them into her mouth. She hadn’t had time for lunch today, but before climbing into her car she’d ducked into the convenience store that was kitty-corner to the courthouse. She’d bypassed the cheese sticks, the glossy apples, and the sole sad, bruised banana and gone straight to the junk food aisle.

  In twenty minutes she would be teaching the ten students in her law school session the finer points of cross-examination, expanding on what she and Eli had modeled on Monday. She reminded herself not to get too close to anyone in case her barbecue breath overwhelmed them.

  In the cross, she would tell them that each question needed to be brief and limited to a single topic. The more complicated a question was or the more loaded with clauses, the more easily the witness could quibble or deny.

  If only she could reduce Scott’s death into a simple yes or no, up or down, black or white. She stuffed another handful of chips into her mouth.

  Her phone rang. “Mia Quinn.” Pressing the Bluetooth into her ear, she tried to chew more quietly. She eased her foot off the brake and slowly rolled forward, gaining a few more yards.

  “How’s traffic on the 405?”

  Her scalp prickled. And then she recognized the voice. “Charlie?”

  “Just trying out that phone tracker app. Plus I wanted to see how things went with Oleg.”

  “Things went . . . okay. Scott had already straightened out things with the IRS before he died.” She took a deep breath. “I also showed Oleg the ring.”

  “What did he say?”

  Mia managed a laugh. “Get this. It’s a fake. The stones are cubic zirconia.” If only it had been real, she could have sold it and used the money to fill in the hole Scott had dug her.

  “Maybe he bought it to match Betty’s breasts.”

  Trust Charlie to be coarse, but right now she welcomed it. Much better to be coarse than to cry. “What I don’t understand is why he bothered to hide it.” Putting on her turn signal, she managed to sneak into the middle lane, which promptly stopped moving.

  “He must have been afraid that you would drop by the office and find it.”

  Mia thought of the girl’s pretty, sulky face. “Or that Betty would, prematurely. Maybe he was plan
ning some big dramatic presentation.” She wondered when he had been thinking of giving it to the girl. Before or after he asked Mia for a divorce?

  “The thing is,” Charlie said, “Betty hasn’t been seen since April.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I tried to track her down, but she doesn’t seem to be anyplace. She’s not working. She was going to school in accounting, but she stopped attending classes in the middle of spring term. The closest I came to finding her was finding her boyfriend.”

  A tiny pulse of hope beat in Mia’s chest. “Betty had a boyfriend?” Maybe she hadn’t understood the photo or the meaning of the ring. Maybe the photo had shown two friends at dinner. Maybe he had planned to replace Mia’s ring.

  “It sounds like she has a history of overlapping relationships. The boyfriend, Jared, was a student at U-Dub with her. He said that when he met her, Betty was dating her Taco Time manager. After that she moved on to—and in with—Jared. Then she started out as Scott’s intern, but he said it was clear she was seeing someone else. He was sure it was Scott.”

  “So Betty was cheating too? She and Scott made quite a pair.” Mia let out a little bark of a laugh. Even to her own ears it sounded ugly. “So our girl Betty was working her way up the food chain. Taco Time manager to student to accountant. So who’s she with now? Some midlevel manager?”

  “The thing is, Mia,” Charlie said, “Jared said the last time he saw her was the night Scott died.”

  “Then where is she?” A shiver ran over her skin.

  “Jared said he got an e-mail from her the next day, saying he should just forget about her. But anyone can send an e-mail. Plus, she left all her stuff behind.”

  “Do you think Betty was murdered too?” Her thoughts were whirling.

  “I don’t know what to think. But if she was killed, then why hasn’t her body turned up?”

  “Maybe she’s the one who killed Scott, and then she ran off?” Mia startled as someone behind her honked. A space the length of three cars had opened in front of her. She jackrabbited forward, then hit the brakes. “Maybe Betty figured out that he was all flash and no substance, just like that fake engagement ring he was planning on giving her even though he was already married.”