by Lis Wiehl
Applause broke out from those assembled, and Judge Rivas let it go on for a few seconds before banging his gavel and putting on a stern face. “I would ask for silence. This isn’t a sporting event.” Then he was back to business.
He offered the opportunity to make statements to the families of the two girls Young had killed. One girl’s family just shook their heads, all of them weeping. But the other girl’s mother took the witness stand.
“I will never forgive the act,” she said, her voice so low and trembling that even with the microphone Mia had to strain to hear her. “But I am slowly finding it possible to forgive you, Mr. Young. If I don’t, then I might as well have died with my daughter.”
As she spoke, Mia was watching not her face, but Young’s. Was there the tiniest flicker of emotion in his eyes? Was it possible to still reach someone whose soul was as dark as midnight?
Looking at Young made Mia think of the three boys who had sentenced Tamsin Merritt to a different kind of prison, the prison of her own body. Still, Tamsin was slowly breaking free. She could now walk and talk and dress herself, even if all of these things were done slowly. Mia had gone to visit her a week ago in the rehabilitation facility. The other woman had trouble enunciating, and she cried easily, but then again she had twice faced death, once at the hands of her husband. The doctors said she had some short-term memory loss and that it was impossible to say if she would ever be back to normal. Still, Tamsin had been sure that Mia had done the right thing in not charging the boys as adults. She had spoken passionately, one painful syllable at a time, about the economic conditions that she felt had contributed to the three boys going off track.
Now Judge Rivas looked at Young. “Mr. Young, this afternoon you have the right to address the court prior to the imposition of sentence. You are not required to say anything, should that be your choice, but the law does afford you that opportunity. Is there anything which you wish to state to the court this afternoon?”
Rivas looked at the two families, and then at Mia. But when he opened his mouth, all he said was, “No.”
A few minutes later Young was sentenced to life, and then it was all over.
Both Charlie and Eli got up and headed in Mia’s direction. The two men had little in common, other than Mia. Both had saved her life. Both had become her friends. And both, she sometimes thought, might want to be something more. She looked from one to the other.
But then the courtroom doors opened and Brooke and Gabe came in—and it was for them that Mia opened her arms.
Lethal Beauty
For Dani and Jacob. You are my inspiration.
Love always, Mom
CHAPTER 1
A faint scream drifted up from the basement. Lihong shifted from foot to foot on the peeling linoleum, waiting in line to use the tiny bathroom. The girl named Chun bit her lip and avoided his eyes. A muscle flickered in Feng’s jaw.
Was it a shriek of pain or fear? Or simply a continuing protest? Ying was probably okay, Lihong told himself. She was just getting acclimated. Life in America was not what she had expected. Ying must still be thinking that if she made enough of a fuss, things would change. That she would get what she had dreamed of, the American life where she would drive a Mercedes and live in a big house and wear expensive clothes.
What she had gotten instead was the expectation that she would work nearly one hundred hours a week at a restaurant that served “Chinese” food that tasted nothing like what they ate at home and live crammed in a small house with eighteen other people.
Ying had been handcuffed in the basement for refusing to work. It had been explained to her over and over. Both with words and with blows. She owed a debt to the snakeheads for smuggling her over here, and her life would not be her own until she paid them back.
They all owed so much. Every day simply pushed them deeper into debt. It wasn’t cheap, their owner explained, to put them up in this house, drive them to work and back each day, provide them with food. So he would have to charge them for all these things. Lihong had tried to work out the total on scraps of paper, but he had learned only a little math in his few years in school. Whatever the answer was, it was a lot. It would take years to earn it back.
And to make sure they all kept up their end of the bargain, they were warned that their families would be killed if they did not. None of them had known each other back home, and some of them spoke dialects that were hard for the others to follow. There was no loyalty among them, not when whispering a secret to the owner might earn favor.
Lihong never left the house by himself. Even if he went to the store, it was as part of a big group, while one of the minders watched them and translated as needed. Of course, it didn’t take much watching. Not when everyone was so afraid.
Hu slipped out of the bathroom, her dark head tilted down so that her hair fell over her eyes. The bathroom didn’t have a door, just an orange window curtain tacked onto the frame to give the illusion of privacy. It was the only curtain in the house. The other windows were either bare or covered with yellowed Chinese newspapers. Chun slipped into the bathroom and they all shuffled forward. Ping took her place in line behind Lihong. There were only two bathrooms, and to get to them you had to wend your way through bunk beds filling every space.
When he first came to America, Lihong had agreed to the terms, made his mark on the paperwork, and handed over his identification. So had everyone else in this house. They all worked at the restaurant, taking orders, busing tables, refilling pots of hot tea, or standing for hours over flaming woks. Lihong washed dishes and sometimes cooked if they were shorthanded. He was clumsy, though, and often burned himself.
Lihong had worked with Ying on her first—and so far, last—day. She had been filling one of the metal tea carafes with nearly boiling water when Lihong dropped a plate that exploded into shards. She jerked at the sudden clatter. The hot water burned her forearm, immediately forming a red fluid-filled blister. Ying had started weeping and wouldn’t stop, not even when the manager came back and hissed at her that the customers could hear and were asking questions.
Lihong had tried to help her. He had taken her to the sink and run cold water over the burn. Patted her shoulder awkwardly. Then whispered warnings to her that she had to be quiet.
Now another hoarse scream floated up.
“I wish she would just shut up,” Feng muttered. “It’s impossible to sleep with her wailing down there.”
“She’d better be careful,” Ping said from behind Lihong. “There’s a lot worse things she could be doing than working in a restaurant.”
“She’s not pretty enough for that,” Feng sneered.
“I hear that the men who come, they don’t care so much about pretty.” Ping bit her lip. “They could send her there as soon as her burn heals up.”
Another shriek.
“That’s it!” Feng balled his hands into fists. “If the neighbors hear, she’ll bring the police down on us. All of us rotting in prison or sent back home.”
“The freeway is so loud,” Lihong offered, trying to placate Feng. He had found he could sleep better if he thought of it as a river. “It covers the sound.”
Feng clenched his fists. “If she won’t shut up on her own, I’ll make her shut up.”
“No, no,” Lihong said hastily. “Let me talk to her.”
Abandoning his place in line, he went back down the hall. When he ducked under the rope hung with drying laundry, a pair of damp pants slapped him in the face.
In the kitchen he washed out a glass and filled it with water. The basement stairs were next to the back door. On the door was posted a sign handwritten in Chinese. EMPLOYEES, PAY ATTENTION! TURN LIGHT OUT AT 12. PLEASE DON’T YELL, TALK LOUD, OR MAKE NOISE BECAUSE IT WILL DISTURB THE NEIGHBORS.
Lihong would be fine with disturbing the neighbors if he thought they might help. That was all he thought about now. How to get out of this place, this position he was in, before he was an old man. To make it so that the enforcers wo
uld leave him in peace—or at least not know his whereabouts.
He had thought of asking the people at the nearby businesses if they could help him get away. They came in to eat. It would not be hard to slip away and talk to them for a few minutes. But his English was very poor. And they were all friendly with the owner, and he bought them meals.
Lihong knew what would happen if he asked a policeman. Beaten, maybe killed. Or at best, jailed and then deported. The owner had explained it often. Just thinking about it made him long for a cigarette to calm his nerves. But he had smoked the last one from his pack today. Cigarettes were so expensive, costing nearly as much as the owner gave him in a day, but they blunted his hunger, tamped down his anxiety.
It was a cigarette that had led Lihong to his one hope, a man he called Mr. Scott. They weren’t allowed breaks, but sometimes when it was slow he would slip out the back door and smoke for five minutes. A few months earlier, Lihong had gone outside with a cigarette already between his lips, but in the spot where he normally stood was a white American man. Smoking. Lihong had started to hurry back inside, but with gestures and smiles and words he didn’t understand, Mr. Scott had indicated that he should stay. After exchanging names, they had smoked their cigarettes together. When Mr. Scott was finished, he had unwrapped a stick of gum that stank of chemicals and mint, then chewed it furiously. The whole time he talked, first asking Lihong questions that he could only answer with a smile and a shrug. Eventually it became a monologue that hadn’t seemed to require anything from Lihong but an occasional nod.
Mr. Scott was well dressed, his clothes fitting him without a wrinkle, the stitching and the fabric very fine. And later, Lihong had seen him getting into his car. It was huge and shiny and raised high off the ground, without a single scratch or dent. Mr. Scott was like a vision of the America that Lihong had thought he was coming to. Maybe this was the sign he had been hoping for.
The next time Lihong saw him, Mr. Scott asked, with a combination of words and gestures, for a cigarette. Despite the cost, Lihong handed it over without hesitation.
Mr. Scott grimaced at the taste, and they had laughed, and somehow through the few words they had in common they started to become something like friends. Whenever he came to the restaurant, Mr. Scott would talk, long runs of words that flowed past Lihong like water. They were oddly soothing.
The fourth time he saw Mr. Scott, Lihong tried to ask for help, using words he had gleaned from TV.
But then Mr. Scott had so many questions. He had asked about “minimum wage.” About “sick leave” and “health insurance.” Words and concepts that Lihong didn’t understand. You worked every day from ten in the morning to ten or eleven p.m. You worked if you were sick or hurt or exhausted. You would probably still work, they often joked, if you were dead.
And before Mr. Scott could help them, he had been killed in a car accident. A few months later, his wife had come to the restaurant. Lihong had been overjoyed. He thought she must be there to follow up on Mr. Scott’s promise. But when he risked everything to ask her, she seemed not to understand. Later, she had come back with a magic phone that understood them both and translated from English to Chinese and back again. They hadn’t gotten very far when the owner came out back and nearly caught them.
He hadn’t seen the woman he called Mrs. Scott since. But he had seen the concern in her eyes, the caring. He was sure she would help if she knew what was happening.
Now Lihong’s hand was slick on the stair rail. If the owner knew he was coming down here . . .
In the basement, Ying sat with her back against the wall. One arm was handcuffed to a pipe. The other had been roughly bandaged, although the once-white wrapping was now stiff and dirty. Her face was swollen, her eyes so puffy she could barely see.
Lihong put the glass of water in her free hand. She gulped it down greedily, and then he took the glass back. The last girl who had been put down here had tried to kill herself.
“You have to stop crying,” he told her in a low but firm voice. “Stop shrieking, stop crying, apologize, and start working.”
“My whole village saved up to send me here. This is not what I thought it would be.”
Bitterness welled up in him. “Do you think it was for any of us? Besides, do you know what they’ll do if you keep this up? You’ll end up in a massage parlor or a nail shop.”
She shook her head. “But I don’t know how to give massages or do nails.”
The girl was as stupid as she was stubborn. “That doesn’t matter. You won’t be doing either of those things. You’ll be entertaining three or four men an hour, fourteen hours a day.”
The one eye that wasn’t quite as bruised widened. “Please. You have to help me. You have to save me.” She raised the bandaged arm toward him, the one she had burned when he dropped the plate.
Lihong still had the small white cardboard rectangle that Mrs. Scott had given him. The printing on it seemed to be letters and numbers, and he was nearly certain it held her address. He would go there, he decided, with a sudden surge of fear and daring. He would go there and she would use her magic phone and they would understand each other.
And then she would help. Help free Ying from the dark basement. Help free Lihong from his days spent as a slave.
CHAPTER 2
Back home they had a saying. “Paper can’t wrap up a fire.”
And, thought the man who had brought Lihong here, Lihong was a fire. He could no longer paper over the problems Lihong kept causing.
If something wasn’t done, he would burn everything down.
CHAPTER 3
TUESDAY, TEN DAYS LATER
Have you wondered what Dandan Yee’s last thoughts were before she died?” asked King County prosecutor Mia Quinn. As she spoke, she was careful to make eye contact with each juror in turn. That morning she had pulled back her shoulder-length blond hair so that no strand would fall into her eyes. She wanted nothing to distract from the picture she was about to paint.
Mia had planned, she had prepared, but now she set that planning aside and let the words come from her heart. She needed the jury to see things through her eyes, and that wouldn’t come from a rote presentation.
Sitting at the prosecution table behind her was the lead detective in the case, homicide detective Charlie Carlson. They had worked this murder together from the beginning. Now she could sense him willing her to get justice for Dandan Yee.
The case should have been open-and-shut, but two things were not in Mia’s favor.
First was that the defendant, David Leacham, had used a good portion of the fortune he had made in the dry-cleaning business to hire one of Seattle’s best criminal defense attorneys, James Wheeler. No crime, not even the murder of a teenage prostitute, was too low for Wheeler to take on. And Mia had to admit that he had done an excellent job, sowing confusion, countering every witness, and casting doubt and aspersions far and wide. Wheeler had even managed to get Leacham released on bail, despite Mia arguing that the man was a flight risk and could pose a threat to the community. Leacham had surrendered his passport, put up a million dollars bail, and walked out of jail with just an ankle monitor.
The second thing that had hurt the prosecution’s case was that Mia and Charlie’s key witness had been a no-show. She was a street kid and sometimes streetwalker with the unfortunate name of Sindy Sharp (and it was her real name, too, according to Charlie). But Sindy had disappeared from her new foster home before she could testify that Leacham had been one of her regular customers, and that he had liked it rough.
The massage parlor where Dandan worked turned out to have been rented under a false name. It never reopened after her death. The other girls gave the police fake names and addresses, claimed to have seen and heard nothing, and then disappeared.
To convict Leacham, Mia now had to nail her closing arguments and make the jurors face the hard truth: that a defenseless young woman had been purchased, used, and then brutally murdered by a rich businessman who thought him
self above the law.
Mia continued, “Do you imagine that Dandan thought, Why are you stabbing me? I have already done what you wanted. I have already given you my body. Did she think, My whole life I dreamed of coming to America to be reunited with my mother, and now I am being murdered by this man?”
Several jurors cut their eyes to Bo Yee, Dandan’s mother, who sat in her usual place in the front row, directly behind the prosecutor’s table. She had been here every day, wearing a long, shapeless black dress and tinted glasses, clutching a neatly folded handkerchief that she never used. Sixteen years ago, when Dandan was three, Mrs. Yee had paid smugglers to spirit her out of China. She had been granted asylum in the United States, but had not been successful in getting her husband and daughter to join her.
A few weeks earlier, her daughter had gotten off a plane with a fake Indonesian passport, then promptly disappeared into Seattle’s bustling Asian population. After she died, Bo Yee’s name and address were found in Dandan’s few belongings, but the two women had never reconnected. No one knew why. Had Dandan been unable to find her? Or had she been ashamed that the only job she had been able to find was as a prostitute?
All Mia and Charlie knew for sure was that less than two weeks after her arrival in America, Dandan had been stabbed to death by a client, David Leacham. Who then had the gall to claim self-defense.
Mia gave Bo a small nod before turning back to the jury. “Mr. Wheeler has tried to tell you that the whole thing was a terrible misunderstanding. That Mr. Leacham walked into a massage parlor”—she emphasized the last two words—“expecting to get a massage and nothing more.”
A juror named Sandra, a secretary close to retirement, shook her head in disgust. Her caramel-colored hair didn’t budge. Jim, a balding accountant, pressed his lips together.
