by Lis Wiehl
His words were starting to sound like they were coming to her at the bottom of a tunnel. Desperate to steady herself, Mia sagged forward, reaching for the back of the couch.
Suddenly a strong arm was around her shoulders. Charlie started barking orders. “Okay, Mia, I think you need to lie down for a second.” As he maneuvered her around the couch, he took out his wallet with his free hand and handed Gabe a credit card. “Call up Pagliacci and order a couple of pizzas to be delivered. Whatever you want. And, Brooke, can you go up to your room and play by yourself for a little bit? Your mom needs a bit of peace and quiet.” He turned to the two cops. “And why don’t you guys write up your reports outside. If you need to leave her a copy, stick it through the mail slot. If you need her to sign it, come back tomorrow. Right now she needs a little bit of a break.”
And because it was Charlie, everyone did as they were told and left the room. Mia plopped on the couch, but even sitting seemed like too much effort, so she ended up stretching out after Charlie cleared a space. She was too far gone even to be embarrassed by the mess. Putting her arm over her eyes, she said, “Thank you. All of a sudden I just felt so dizzy. I don’t even understand why you’re here. I’m just glad that you are.”
“Gabe called me when he couldn’t get hold of you. I was on the phone with him when I heard someone yelling, and then Gabe dropped the phone. Must have been the first officer who responded. The one who seems to be trying for rookie of the year award.”
“This has been one crazy day.” She debated telling Charlie about what had happened, but she didn’t want to relive it. What Young had tried to do to her would stay in the box she had put it in, at least for now. Tonight she would take one of the sleeping pills the doctor had given her after Scott died and hope she didn’t dream about what might have happened. “And right before all this happened, Frank wanted to talk to me about a case and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.” She took her arm off her eyes and propped herself up on her elbow. “You’ll be hearing about it soon because he wants us to work together on it. Kids dropped a shopping cart onto a woman who was four stories below a pedestrian walkway.”
Charlie grimaced. “So they killed her?”
“No. She’s not dead. At least not yet. Right now I need to decide whether to charge them as adults or juveniles. I need to figure out what kinds of kids they are. But not until tomorrow.” Mia let her head drop back down, reminding herself that she was safe now, that her kids were safe. “I would say this was the worst day of my life, but it wasn’t. It’s not even the worst day of this year.”
Charlie cleared his throat. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been looking closer into your husband’s death. I don’t think it was an accident.”
CHAPTER 10
Mia’s mouth opened, but no words came out. It was like the day the earthquake had rippled up from Olympia all the way to Seattle. Like she was frozen in shock.
But she had always been afraid of this, hadn’t she? Scott had been in debt up to his eyeballs, and then he had started secretly drinking again. He must have known it wouldn’t be long before the debt collectors began calling the house, before Mia learned about the whole sorry mess. Unable to see a way out of his predicament, had he made an impulsive decision to end it all rather than face the consequences?
If Scott had killed himself, it certainly hadn’t been done in hopes of their benefiting. He had let his life insurance lapse, so his death had left them with nothing. Nothing but debts. The kids got Social Security benefits, that was all. But Scott had been spared watching their lives fall apart.
The seven months he had been dead sometimes felt like seven days, at other times like seven years. He had hidden so much from her. Was suicide his final deception? If Scott suddenly were to appear before her now, Mia thought she might be tempted to kill him herself. As it was, she had no place to put her anger.
“I took a look at the accident report.” Charlie glanced down at his empty hands and then back up at her. “There are things that don’t add up.”
Heat rushed from Mia’s heels to her hairline. How dare he! What made him think he should stick his big nose in? The knowledge could do nothing but hurt her. She swung her legs off the couch and sat up. “You looked at the report? Let me get this straight. You looked at the accident report for my dead husband, a man you never met?” The skin on her face tightened. “What business is that of yours, Charlie Carlson?”
“After I met you, I got curious. What was supposed to have happened didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Don’t you want to know the truth?”
Truth? The truth was that being obsessive might be what made Charlie such a good homicide detective—and maybe a bad human being. The idea of Charlie poring over the details of Scott’s death, of smashed glass and smashed bone, seemed nearly obscene.
“What’s next, Charlie?” Mia was fisting her hands so hard her nails dug into her palms. She wanted to take one of those fists and smash it into Charlie’s nose. “Are you going to start going through my garbage? My underwear drawer? You don’t get to go pawing through things that have nothing to do with you. This is my life you’re talking about. My life. And my children’s lives.” Even though she was alive with anger, she kept her voice a low, hissed murmur. If they learned that their father had killed himself, what would that do to Gabe’s and Brooke’s mental health? “Let the dead bury the dead.”
She would never forget that night. Wasn’t that hard truth enough?
“I won’t be home for dinner,” Scott had told Mia over the phone. “And don’t bother waiting up for me.”
“Working late again?” Her stomach twisted. He had been working so many hours lately, sometimes until late into the night. She had asked him a half dozen times if anything was wrong, and he always brusquely assured her that everything was fine.
As Mia waited for his answer, she stared at Brooke’s head, bent over the dolls spread over the carpet in the family room. Their daughter would soon turn four, and she had recently become captivated by the idea of friends. She could spend many minutes pairing up appropriate plastic friends. Just pairs, though, no groups of three or more. In Brooke’s world, each doll or toy had only one soul mate.
Could Scott be seeing another woman? Mia gripped the phone so hard it cut into her fingers. It would explain his silences, his bad moods, the way he could be sitting right beside her on the couch in front of a sitcom and seem a million miles away when she spoke to him. There were times he came home so late that she was already in bed. But she always roused herself and wrapped him in her arms, nuzzled his neck.
She was sniffing for the scent of another woman, or even another soap, some brand stocked by a hotel.
But so far he had always smelled only of Scott.
“I’m having dinner with a client.” His voice was colored with some emotion she couldn’t name. Impatience? “I need to go over some things with him, but he’s been too busy to meet during the day.” His tone didn’t encourage any questions.
She went to bed a little after ten and finally fell into an uneasy sleep, futilely reaching out for him every time she shifted. When the doorbell rang just before two in the morning, part of Mia wasn’t even surprised. Part of her had known something bad was coming—just not what form it would take. She stumbled downstairs and looked through the peephole. Two cops. One wore a white clerical collar with yellow crosses embroidered on the points. She let out a single sob, then bit her lip. Hard. Gabe and Brooke were still asleep upstairs. When they woke, their lives would be irrevocably changed. Let them sleep as long as they could.
With the taste of blood fresh on her tongue, Mia opened the door.
And now Charlie wanted to rub her nose in the truth. What was true, anyway? That she and Scott had been married for sixteen years and had become strangers? That she now carried an almost unimaginable burden—debts, worries about her children, and the knowledge that Scott hadn’t
felt he could confide in her?
Or that Scott had abandoned her long before he died?
CHAPTER 11
Mia rounded on Charlie. “Did you ever think that there are some truths people don’t want to know? I’d rather believe it was all an accident than to know my husband was in so much emotional pain that he killed himself.”
Charlie’s forehead wrinkled as he raised his hands as if to protect himself. “That’s not what I was saying, Mia. Not at all.”
“So what are you saying? Scott was drunk and he went off the road and hit a tree. It was either an accident or deliberate.” She took a ragged breath. “I’ve made my peace with the idea that I’m never going to know why he kept so many secrets from me, like the fact that he’d started drinking again.” When he had sworn on the lives of their children that he had stopped. “But this is one secret I would really rather not know.”
“He was only .06,” Charlie said. Given Scott’s body weight, it was the equivalent of about three drinks. “Not enough to be legally drunk.”
“But enough to be impaired. And he’d probably lost his tolerance.”
“That still doesn’t explain what you can see in the reports. Scott’s injuries don’t make sense.” Charlie took a deep breath. “What I’m trying to say, Mia, is that I think he might have been murdered.”
Mia tried to take this in, but it was impossible. Murdered? “What exactly did you see in the reports?”
“They’re out in the car.” He stood up. “Let me go get them.”
While he was gone, Mia put her head in her hands. She wished this were a dream. Even a nightmare. Today had been like a nonstop roller coaster, but one with only sickening drops. She heard a car pull up outside.
Charlie came back with a file folder in one hand and two pizza boxes balanced on the other. He called the kids downstairs, then asked Gabe to supervise Brooke while the kids ate in the kitchen. When he returned to the family room, he had the file folder tucked under his arm and was carrying paper plates topped with two pizza slices. Mia was embarrassed to see that Gabe had taken full advantage of Charlie’s credit card, ordering two different combos instead of cheaper, single-ingredient pizzas.
From his pocket Charlie produced two crumpled paper towels, handing one over with a flourish. “Your napkin, madam.” He settled down next to her. “So have you seen any of the reports?” He kept his voice low.
“No.” Mia shook her head. “I figured looking at them wasn’t going to change anything. All I know is they didn’t do an autopsy.” She had been grateful for that. She took a bite of pizza, oddly ashamed that her body could still be hungry after everything that had happened today. Still be hungry when they were discussing her husband’s death.
“They don’t do an autopsy if they figure the cause of death is self-evident. So what they did in Scott’s case was take a chest tap, test his blood for alcohol, snap some photos, and write up a short report about the external condition of the body. I got that and the accident report.”
“Okay.” Mia waited for the rest.
“In a case like this, when you’ve got no witness, figuring out what really happened depends on the competency of the CSI who processed the scene and the forensic pathologist who did the exam. Only in this case, there was no CSI, just a patrol officer who responded to the 911 call. And the guy who did the exam wasn’t a pathologist, but a death investigator. Who knows how much training either one of them had or whether they’re certified and by whom.”
He pulled out the accident report, which had a freehand sketch of the accident scene. Mia had to work to swallow what suddenly felt like a wad of cotton in her throat. Two lines curved to the left, indicating a road. A rectangle representing the car sat on the right-hand side just after the curve. A row of triangles showed the line of trees, one of which overlapped the front passenger side of the car.
“How much do you know about car accidents?” he asked.
She lifted one shoulder. “When you work in violent crimes, most of those aren’t committed with a vehicle.”
“How about physics?”
“Probably not my forte either.”
“Accidents basically follow Newton’s first law of motion,” he said, “which says that an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless something acts on it.”
“Okay.” Mia drew out the word. It was strange to hear Charlie sounding like a professor.
“So. Scott’s car failed to completely negotiate the curve and left the road here.” He tapped on the illustration. “He hit gravel and then slid into one of these trees. The impact was on the front passenger side door—the right side. The airbags deployed, but he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. So he was—”
Mia sucked in her breath. “What did you say?”
“Scott wasn’t wearing a seat belt,” Charlie continued. “So he was thrown from the driver’s seat into—”
“That’s not possible.” Mia shook her head so hard she felt dizzy for a second. “Scott always wore a seat belt. Always.”
“Even when he’d been drinking?”
“Especially when he’d been drinking. He got super cautious behind the wheel when he was drunk.”
Charlie paged through the paperwork. “But the first responder told the police that Scott passed him earlier and he was speeding.”
“No.” Mia knew Scott. “No. He never took chances when he was drunk.”
Charlie leaned forward. “Wait a second. You sound like you’ve been in the car with him when he was drunk.”
“I was.” She met his eyes. “Not with the kids, never the kids, but sometimes just me.”
“So you let him drive when you knew he was drunk?”
Mia tucked in her lips. “We both know that alcoholics can handle amounts that would put other people under the table. Of course if Scott was too drunk, I didn’t let him drive, no matter how angry he got. But there were times it wasn’t worth arguing with him if it was only a few miles and the roads were quiet. Especially since I knew how careful he was.”
Charlie looked disgusted. “Maybe he was only careful when you were in the car.”
She sighed. “You could be right. But I know Scott would never not wear a seat belt. The only time he didn’t wear one was after the doctor gave him sleeping pills. The whole next day he drove around unbelted, and he didn’t even realize it until evening. He told me he was never going to take another one of those pills again. That he couldn’t get into as much trouble with alcohol. So for a long time, he used that as his sleeping pill.”
Charlie shrugged like he didn’t believe her but didn’t want to argue.
“Well, for whatever reason, he wasn’t wearing a seat belt,” he reiterated. “And when the car hit the tree, that part of the car stopped while the rest kept moving, just like Newton said it would. Basically that means the rest of the car started to rotate around the tree. Meanwhile, because Scott wasn’t wearing a seat belt, his body kept moving forward at the same speed and in the same direction while the car was starting to move around him. His body hit the interior of the car’s passenger side, which caused a lot of damage to the right side—head, shoulder, ribs, and hip.” He touched the spots as he named them. “But that’s not all that happened. My friend who’s a forensic pathologist says that there’re really three collisions in any accident, even though they all happen in the same split second. First there’s the car hitting something. Then there’s the body hitting something inside the car.”
“So what’s the third collision?” Mia asked. Hadn’t everything stopped at that point?
“The internal organs. They follow the first law of motion too. They keep moving until they tear away or hit something hard inside you, like your ribs or your skull. In this case, when the death investigator did a chest tap, he got a syringe full of blood.” Charlie touched his chest. “That means Scott’s aorta got torn.”
“And he bled out inside.” Every word was making her flinch. “I know that part, Charlie.”
He took a second report from the file. “But in addition to the injuries on the right side of his body, there were blunt-force injuries to the left side of his head. Not the right. The left. His left cheekbone and his left jaw were broken.” He again touched the spots as he named them. “Both upper and lower.”
“Then he must have hit the dash or the steering wheel.”
“I thought of that. Which is why I talked to my friend. The fractures were depressed. He told me that means the head was probably stationary and something moving hit it. Like if you clubbed a block of Styrofoam. The Styrofoam wouldn’t crack in half. Instead, the club would leave a sunken imprint in the Styrofoam. And that’s what my pathologist friend thinks happened to Scott. He thinks he was hit twice on the side of the head with some sort of club.”
“Wait.” Mia’s thoughts were whirling. “First Scott was in an accident, and after that someone hit him in the head?”
“Well, it’s hard to see how it could be the other way around. Because he wouldn’t have been able to drive after receiving two blows like that.”
“Let me just repeat this so I can get it straight.” Mia straightened up. “You think Scott was in an accident.”
“I think his car left the road and hit a tree, yes.”
“And that hitting the tree caused his death by tearing his aorta.”
“Yes.”
“Then why would someone come along and hit him in the head if he was already dead? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“My friend said he might have lived for several minutes, maybe longer. I think someone wanted to make sure Scott was good and dead. Maybe they forced him off the road. Maybe they tampered with his car. But whatever happened, they—”
Mia caught her breath.
Charlie’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
“The reason Scott was driving a loaner that night was because his car was in the shop. Its brakes had failed a week before.”
