The Mia Quinn Collection

by Lis Wiehl

  Finally, finally, the scarf loosened. She dropped the shoe, yanked off the scarf, and stumbled around to face her attacker. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps that hurt her throat. The man was slender and about her height, with his hands cupped over his eyes. Blood as red as paint was running between his fingers. But how soon until he straightened up? How soon until his pain turned to anger?

  She had to get out of here. Were there more men out there? Waiting to make sure the deed was done?

  Her bike was leaning against the wall. Bo yanked open the door, threw one leg over the seat, and began to pedal out the door and down the hall.

  Heedless of the fact that in about ten feet she was going to come to a flight of stairs.

  CHAPTER 41

  MONDAY

  What is that?” Gary Newman asked Charlie with a curled upper lip. Gary had recently been promoted to homicide detective, and he hadn’t quite acclimated to the squad room yet.

  “It’s a sandwich.” Charlie didn’t look up. On a sheet of scratch paper he had written Abigail Endicott and circled it. Around it were other circled words and phrases with lines leading back to the dead woman’s name. One said Revenge? Another Money? A third read Jealousy? and a fourth To hide a secret?

  “But there’s no bread,” Gary said.

  Charlie shifted a mouthful to one side. “It doesn’t need bread. It’s got two chicken breasts instead.”

  Gary leaned closer. Charlie had seen the guy regard spattered blood and brain with more enthusiasm. “With what in between? Cheese and bacon?”

  Charlie took another bite. “And special sauce.” Which, like most special sauces, seemed to be some variation on Thousand Island dressing. The result was still delicious. His eyes went back to his paper. Picking up his pen, he added Shooter mentally ill?

  Gary finally looked at the paper, which was the only really interesting thing on the desk, in Charlie’s opinion. “That’s the case of the lady killed in the church?”

  “Yeah. My problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a good motive. No one generally goes around killing little old ladies.”

  “Unless it’s a by-product of the real crime, like stealing their purses or their cars.”

  “This guy gunned her down in front of dozens of witnesses and walked away empty-handed.”

  “At least it’s interesting,” Gary said. “I keep getting the people who get drunk and do stupid things cases.”

  “There’s something to be said for the simple things,” Charlie said, taking the last bite of his sandwich just as his phone rang. The caller ID showed that it came from the medical examiner’s office. This morning he had attended Abigail’s autopsy, but it had not revealed much. For someone in her early seventies, the victim had been in fairly good shape. Doug thought she might have lasted another fifteen or twenty years if the bullet had not gone ricocheting around in her skull.

  “This is Carlson.” He swallowed the last chewy bite.

  “You’re not going to believe it,” Doug said.

  There was not a lot Charlie didn’t believe. “Try me.”

  “It’s about our dead organist.”

  “I think she actually played the piano,” Charlie said.

  Doug was undeterred by this minor detail. “You saw that bullet I took out of her brain. Too mangled to be any good. Luckily drywall is a lot softer than bone. The bullet you got forensics to pull out of the wall was in excellent shape. She was definitely shot with a .22.”

  So why did Doug sound so cheerful? Saying the gun was a .22 was about as useful as saying the shooter had been a white man. Hundreds of handguns and rifles were chambered for that round. Both .22 ammunition and the guns themselves were cheaper than guns that fired bigger rounds. Lots of shooters also liked them because both the noise and the recoil were less. The crime lab had already looked for fingerprints on the cartridges and found nothing.

  “And?” Charlie prompted. The other man was clearly enjoying drawing out the suspense.

  “The crime lab scanned the bullet into NIBIN, and it came up with a possible match to another crime. One of the techs just confirmed it.”

  “To what crime?”

  “That’s the crazy thing. It matches to the last murder you and I worked.” When Charlie didn’t rush to fill in the blank, Doug clarified, “The dead Chinese guy.”

  Charlie’s mind was working overtime. What did a quiet retiree who basically only went to church and the grocery store have to do with a young Chinese illegal immigrant who worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week? He thought of how many immigrants attended the church. That had to be the connection. Lihong must have been one of the people who attended services there. Maybe he had managed to go to an early Sunday service and met Abigail there? Although even if they had known each other, why would someone have killed them both? For different reasons? For the same reason?

  The moment Charlie had looked at the young man’s body, he had had the feeling that it was not a one-off. But he hadn’t expected this. It still felt to him like the two victims had little to nothing in common. The next step would be to show the pastor the photo of Lihong’s face. See if he could help him connect the dots.

  He called Mia. “Want to take a field trip?”

  CHAPTER 42

  As soon as Mia got in the car, they both started talking. Mia let Charlie go first. It only took him a couple of minutes to drive to the church, which wasn’t enough time for them to update each other. They sat in his car parked at the curb so that he could tell her about the matching bullets and about how he could find no reason for Abigail’s murder. In turn, Mia told him what Luciana had said.

  “I’m starting to think that Lihong and Chun and the others were trafficked,” she said. “What Luciana said got me thinking: Kenny Zhong’s only been here for seven years and yet he already has four restaurants. That would be a lot easier to do if you didn’t have to pay for labor. If your workers were paying you for the privilege of being here in the first place.”

  After talking to Luciana, Mia had seen everything in a new light. The crowded, unsafe house Lihong had shared with Chun and the others was not the result of new immigrants seeking out a cheap place to live, but instead something closer to slaves’ quarters. The men who had taken Lihong from the coffee shop had been the modern version of slavers hunting down escaped property.

  “Maybe Lihong has been coming to church here,” she said. “Maybe Abigail was trying to help him.” With a flush of shame, she imagined the older woman being more patient with his queries than she had been. She sighed and started to open her door. They were parked next to the reader board, and now she focused on the church’s name, which was printed on the top.

  She turned back and clutched his arm. “Charlie?”

  “What?”

  She shivered. “I’m 99 percent certain this is the church Bo Yee attends.”

  His brow furrowed. “Really?”

  “And more than that—she told me once that she played the piano for services.”

  The pieces in the kaleidoscope were falling into a different pattern, but Mia couldn’t quite see it yet.

  “Abigail was wearing a black wig,” Charlie said slowly. “She’s got to have thirty years on Bo, but from a distance . . .”

  Mia completed the thought for him. “The shooter might have seen what he had been told he would see. Bo Yee at the piano.”

  “The witnesses said that after Abigail was shot, he stopped in his tracks and stared at her, then fled. I saw the body, and her wig came off when she collapsed. He must have realized he made a mistake.”

  They hurried into the church, where they found Pastor Bob Ho in his office. He got to his feet to shake Mia’s hand while Charlie introduced her. He was wearing a turtleneck and jeans, the casualness undercut by the fact that the jeans had been ironed into sharp creases.

  Before the pastor had even settled back behind his desk, Charlie asked, “Does Abigail normally play the piano for services?”

  The pastor’s eyes w
idened as he grasped the meaning of Charlie’s sentence. “She always plays for the early service, but it’s another woman who plays for the second. Her name is Bo Yee.”

  Before he even had time to ask why, Mia had turned away and was dialing Bo on her cell phone. It went straight to voice mail. “Bo,” she said. “It’s Mia. Mia Quinn with the King County Prosecutor’s Office. Please call me right away. You may be in danger.” Fear squeezed her heart.

  “No,” she heard the pastor say. He looked bewildered and afraid. “Dear God, no.”

  Next she tried the tea factory where Bo worked, but a woman in human resources told her Bo was still out on leave. As she listened, Mia pinched the bridge of her nose and hoped against hope that Bo was still okay.

  “Do you think Bo was the real target?” the pastor asked after Mia left another message for her. Another message she feared Bo would never hear.

  “It’s hard to say,” Charlie said, “but it’s definitely a possibility we need to explore. And there’s someone else we need to ask about.” He took out his phone and scrolled through his photos before selecting the one of Lihong’s face and handing the phone over. “Do you recognize this man?”

  He looked at it for a long time. “No. I’ve never seen him before.”

  “He worked at a restaurant called the Jade Kitchen,” Mia said.

  The pastor’s expression changed.

  “So you know that restaurant?” she asked.

  “I’ve never eaten there.”

  “That’s not exactly what I was asking.”

  His mouth crimped. “One hears things.”

  “And those things would be . . .,” she prompted.

  “A lot of his workers might be undocumented. It’s not the kind of thing I concern myself with. But I hear rumors.”

  “Could they be more than undocumented? Could they be trafficked? Enslaved?”

  He pressed his lips together. “I don’t know about that.”

  But Mia thought he did.

  They excused themselves and left. “I know everything is connected,” Mia said. “I just don’t know how. All I know is that I’m really worried about Bo. We need to warn her.” If it wasn’t already too late.

  Charlie was already on the phone with the phone company’s security division, asking what they could tell him about the location of Bo’s phone. Since this was an exigent circumstance, they didn’t need a warrant to get the information. Charlie listened to the answer and said thanks. He turned to Mia. “Her phone has been turned off. It’s been off since Saturday afternoon. The last recorded location was at her apartment.”

  Bo lived in an apartment building that had seen its best days more than a century ago. An overhang sheltered the first-floor apartments and the stairs leading up. As they went up narrow, shallow steps, Charlie unbuttoned his jacket. He reached back and rested his hand on the butt of his gun. Once they got to Bo’s door, he motioned for Mia to stand on one side while he took the other. He rapped hard with his free hand. Mia held her breath but didn’t hear anyone. He knocked again. “Bo? It’s Charlie Carlton. Bo?”

  “I don’t like this,” Mia whispered. “Not one little bit.”

  As they were standing in front of the door, an old woman with a small, white dog on a leash walked past them, looking at them with narrowed eyes. She was putting her key into the lock of the apartment two doors down when Charlie flashed his badge.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, can we talk to you?”

  The woman walked back to them. Mia tried to ignore the dog’s small wet nose snuffling her ankles.

  “What is this about, Officer?”

  “Do you know your neighbor, Bo Yee?”

  “Just by sight, I guess.” Judging by her expression, she didn’t even like looking at Bo. “I didn’t know her name until just now. Just that she’s one of them Chinese people.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  She looked up, remembering. Her dog suddenly licked Mia’s ankle, causing her to let out an involuntary squeak as she jumped backward.

  “Oh, Rascal, stop that!” The older woman jerked on his leash, but not enough to actually move him away from Mia. “Friday? The thing is, I saw someone going into her apartment a few hours ago, but it wasn’t her. Some young Chinese girl with lots of makeup and clothes that looked like they were spray-painted on, if you know what I mean. She wouldn’t even look me in the eye. In fact, she seemed to be in a real hurry.”

  Mia and Charlie exchanged a look.

  “What apartment number does the landlord live in?” Mia asked.

  “Downstairs. 1F.”

  “Thanks,” Charlie said. “We might need to talk to you again. Maybe have you work with a sketch artist to get a drawing of that girl you saw.”

  “I’ll try to help if you need it.” The woman shrugged. “But I have trouble telling those Orientals apart.”

  Mia waited until they were out of the woman’s earshot. “Bo’s already dead,” she hissed. “She’s already dead and someone came by to search her things.”

  “Don’t borrow trouble,” Charlie said. “Maybe . . . maybe Bo has taken some girl under her wing, a girl forced into prostitution like her daughter was?”

  For once it was Mia who was dubious and Charlie who was clutching at straws.

  When he knocked on the door to 1F, a man with a long white ponytail and a white beard answered the door.

  “I’m Charlie Carlson with the Seattle Police.” Charlie pulled his badge off his belt and passed it in front of the guy’s eyes. “This is Mia Quinn with the King County District Attorney. We need you to let us in so we can do a welfare check on one of your tenants, Bo Yee.” He pushed the badge back into place. “And your name is?”

  “Nelson. And let me see that badge again.”

  With a sigh, Charlie pulled it off and handed it over.

  “This says ‘detective.’ What kind of detective are you?”

  “Homicide.”

  Nelson’s eyes widened, but he still said, “You’re not with immigration? Because she’s legal.”

  “That would be ICE, Nelson, and it’s federal. I don’t care about anyone’s immigration status. I just want to make sure this lady is okay.”

  Once they were upstairs, Nelson knocked and called several times before he finally put a key from his huge ring in the lock. He started to step in, but Charlie put up his arm, barring the door. “Step back and don’t touch anything else. This is a crime scene.”

  Mia saw what he had seen. In the middle of the living room floor were two high-heeled shoes, a matched set, except they were twenty feet apart. And in between them were fat, round drops of blood. Someone had been bleeding—and bleeding hard.

  “I’ll go in and see if Bo’s here,” Charlie said. Left unspoken was whether she might be dead or alive. “We need to minimize who goes in until after the techs have been here.”

  He was back a few minutes later, shaking his head.

  “Did you check the closets and cupboards?” Mia knew it was a dumb question, but she still asked it anyway. What if she had been injured and tried to hide?

  “She’s not there, Mia. It’s kind of a mess, though. Makeup scattered all over the bathroom counter. And shopping bags with no clothes in them. And a silk scarf with blood on it. Soaked with it.”

  Mia’s heart sank. In all the months she had known Bo, she had never seen her wear makeup.

  CHAPTER 43

  The crime scene techs had just arrived to process Bo’s apartment when Mia’s phone rang. It was Eli Hall. Before she could tell him it was a bad time to talk, he said something that changed her mind.

  “I’ve got a client I think you might want to talk to,” he said. “Her name’s Jiao. She’s Chinese, and in the country illegally. She was picked up for prostitution. But the thing is, she says she used to work with your victim. The case where the jury hung?”

  “Dandan Yee,” Mia supplied. For a moment she forgot her worry that she would never see Dandan’s mother again.

&
nbsp; “Yeah. Dandan. Anyway, I think you need to talk to her. She says she was there the night Dandan died.”

  The words jolted Mia. She tried to be cautious. “Is she looking to cut a deal?”

  “Well, it’s starting to look like she might have been trafficked, so you putting in a word with ICE wouldn’t hurt. But she’s very anxious. Very afraid.”

  Charlie decided to come with her. Uniformed officers had started going door to door in Bo’s neighborhood, asking if anyone had seen her. The crime scene techs were swarming over the scene. But until there were new leads, there wasn’t much that he could do.

  Eli met them after they went through the metal director. He and Charlie exchanged a wordless look. It wasn’t particularly friendly.

  “Dandan’s mother, Bo Yee, is missing,” Mia told Eli. “We just came from her apartment. There was blood on the floor and signs of a struggle, but no body. It’s possible that whatever happened to her is related to the trial. Bo’s been pretty adamant about wanting to see justice.”

  “What about my client?” Eli looked from one to the other. “Will this mean she’s at risk?”

  “It’s hard to say.” Mia was worried the girl might not talk. “I’d rather you didn’t mention it to her. And we won’t take any notes. That will give her some protection. If she ends up implicating someone and they are charged, then at some point any notes we made would have to be turned over to that person’s defense. If there’s no records, that won’t have to happen. If she ends up not making a deal, I don’t want to put her life at risk for nothing.”

  “Hmm.” Eli gave her a half smile. “First of all, I appreciate you looking out for her. And second of all, I have to say that’s a pretty tricky way of doing it.”

  “Don’t tell me that you don’t use the rules to your advantage,” Mia said. “Because we all do.”

  The Chinese interpreter, a woman named Kwong, came hurrying down the hall toward them. She looked to be in her fifties, with a flat face and square bangs. They went into the interview room. A few minutes later, a deputy brought in the girl. Jiao couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen. She was petite, with a high forehead, hunched shoulders, and nervous, heavily lidded eyes.