A Deadly Business (A Mia Quinn Mystery)

by Lis Wiehl

  CHAPTER 12

  Charlie’s eyes bored into her. “What was wrong with the brakes?”

  “Scott left our driveway, but when he pulled up to that first intersection”—she pointed in its direction—“the one with the four-way stop, he said the brake pedal went right to the floor.”

  “Was there an accident?”

  “No. There weren’t any other cars in the intersection. It’s always so busy there, but he got lucky that day. He told me he pumped the gas, pulled the emergency brake, and turned into the curb.” Mia had been impressed by his quick thinking. “He just bumped along until he came to a stop. Then he walked home, told me what had happened, and called the tow company. He borrowed my car for the day, and at the end of it I took him to our mechanic and he got a loaner. That’s the car he was driving when he died.”

  Charlie cocked his head. “Didn’t you put two and two together?”

  “Put what together?” Mia’s thoughts were racing. “No. Because there was nothing to put together. Our mechanic said the undercarriage of the Suburban had some scrapes. He thought Scott must have driven over something that damaged the brake line.”

  For a moment Scott rose up in Mia’s mind, so strongly conjured it was like he was in the family room with them, leaning against the wall, regarding them with his arms crossed and his face expressionless. She was suddenly aware of how close she was sitting to Charlie, their thighs nearly touching. She scooted a few inches away. The low buzz of a headache was making it hard to think.

  Charlie spoke slowly, as if putting his thoughts in order. “The question is—did they tamper with the Suburban’s brakes in a failed attempt to kill him? Or did they tamper with the brakes so he’d end up in a car that they knew they could kill him in? Maybe that explains why Scott wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Maybe they disabled it.”

  Wheels within wheels. Charlie was starting to sound like some lonely talk show caller with an elaborate conspiracy theory.

  “But how could they know Scott was going to end up in a car from our mechanic? A lot of people would just take a car that new to the dealer, but we’ve had the same mechanic for a long time and we trust him. The loaner Scott was in when he died was a beater. It had something like two hundred thousand miles on it. I’m sure it didn’t have any side-curtain airbags or anything like that. But it wasn’t part of any conspiracy.”

  Scott’s Suburban, on the other hand, had been top-of-the-line—and it had also turned out not to really be Scott’s. After he died Mia had found out it was leased. And even though Scott was dead, she had still been on the hook to pay it off. She had been lucky to find someone to take over the payments. Even without that burden she was barely making ends meet, struggling to pay all the bills Scott had accumulated.

  “I think you’re adding one and one and getting eleven.” Mia wiped her mouth with the paper towel, signaling to Charlie and even to herself that she was done listening to crazy what-ifs. “Scott ran over something in the Suburban that cut the brake line. Then he got drunk and had an accident in an old car that bounced him around like a pinball. He had a run of bad luck, and he made some stupid decisions. End of story.”

  “But his face, Mia.” Charlie lightly tapped the left side of his face. “Nothing explains the injuries to the wrong side of his head. I want to ask Puyallup County to reopen the case.”

  “Then go ahead,” she said sharply. “You don’t need my permission. But I just can’t see why anyone would want Scott dead.”

  “I thought maybe you could help me with the why.” Charlie tilted his head. “You were his wife. You knew him better than anyone.”

  “I only wish that were true.” Her mouth suddenly tasted bitter. “I’ve realized Scott was hiding a lot of secrets from me. About our finances, about his business failing, about his drinking. There could even be more that I don’t know about.” And did she really want to?

  “Can you think of anyone who was mad at him?”

  “Mad at Scott?” She almost laughed. “He was so quiet. He wasn’t the type people got mad at. If anyone was mad at him when he died, it was me. You never met him, right?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “Scott was an accountant. An accountant. The most boring job ever. Staring at columns of numbers with a printing calculator under one hand. Because he was a one-man operation, his clients were people who didn’t need much in the way of an accountant, or who only really needed one at tax time. Which was why he was working crazy hours when he died.”

  Charlie looked down at the papers and then back up at her. “This is an awkward question to ask, but could there have been anyone else?”

  “Scott?” Mia tried to buy time to think. What did she want to tell Charlie? Suspicions were one thing, facts another. “We’d been together since college.”

  “Even people in good marriages sometimes fall into something unexpected.”

  She bit her lip and said, “To be honest, I used to wonder if he was seeing someone. He was working those long hours, and he was always irritable when I tried to talk to him. I knew he was hiding something from me.” Heat climbed her cheeks. She looked down at her hands, twisting in her lap. “After he died and I found out how much debt he left us in, I realized that must have been it. That we were living off credit cards and not what his business brought in. Although I guess it’s possible that he had more than one secret. More than two, when you count his drinking again.”

  “Maybe he tried to break something off and the lady got upset. Or she could have had a husband or boyfriend.”

  Mia tried to picture it. Was Scott so selfish that he would cheat on her physically and emotionally as well as financially? Of course, this was the same man who had broken his promises to her, lied by omission and commission.

  “I guess there’s the flip side.” Charlie glanced at her and then away. “Maybe some guy had fallen in love with you and wanted Scott out of the way?”

  Mia snorted. “If that’s the case, then where is he?” She mimed looking around. “No one’s exactly eager to put the moves on a widow with a preschooler and a teenager.”

  Charlie didn’t deny it. “How about enemies? Or friends he’d fallen out with?”

  “Scott didn’t have a lot of friends, but that was by choice. He was sort of a loner.” Mia thought of how Scott had pulled back into himself, like a snail retreating into its shell. He must have been afraid that his failure would slip out. “When he wasn’t working, he went on long runs or played music.” She saw Scott’s brown head bent over his guitar, his eyes closed. The memory brought pain so fierce and sharp it was like someone had slipped a knife between her ribs and given it a good twist. “Even when he was drinking, he was a quiet drunk. He wasn’t the kind of outspoken guy who made enemies.”

  “Robbery could be another possible motive. Was anything taken from him? Anything missing from his car?”

  Mia thought back. “His wallet was returned to me with all his credit cards—his maxed-out credit cards—and a hundred or so in cash. His phone never turned up, but you know how it is these days—some light-fingered ambulance guy or morgue tech or even the guy who tried to help him might have picked it up. I guess it’s possible he had something in the car that someone wanted, but if he did, I don’t know what it was.”

  “Puyallup can probably rule out a hate crime or a gang killing.” Charlie tapped the butt end of his pen on the papers. “It’s possible someone could have done it just for fun.”

  Mia’s mouth crimped. “In that case, they’ll never figure it out.” A thrill killing—stranger to stranger—was almost impossible to solve.

  “Maybe it was road rage. Someone forced him off the road and then finished him off.”

  Mia winced. “That’s pretty up close and personal.” Something else occurred to her as she pictured Scott laboring to breathe, writhing on the car seat. “This is a weird idea, but maybe they felt bad for him. You know, like the person who comes upon a dying dog on the side of the road and puts it out of its misery.�
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  Charlie grunted. “Puyallup needs to re-interview that guy who tried to give your husband first aid. Maybe he saw someone leaving the scene.” He looked around. “Did Scott work from home?”

  “No. He had an office in a small complex.” She remembered her dull surprise at how messy it had been. “I had to empty it out in a hurry or they were going to charge another month’s rent. I just dumped everything into banker’s boxes and stuck them down in the basement. Oh!” Mia put her hand over her mouth.

  “What?”

  “His office was a mess. I was too overwhelmed at the time to give it much thought. But Scott was the kind of guy who kept his ties sorted by color. Being neat was in his blood. So why was his office so messy?”

  Charlie’s jaw tightened. “If someone was looking for something after he died, then maybe somebody really did try to break into your house tonight.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Was Charlie right? Had someone been looking for something in Scott’s office?

  “It’s an awfully big coincidence that a day after I got Scott’s records someone tried to break into your house,” Charlie said. “We need to look through the stuff you brought home from his office.”

  Mia put her hand to her temple. “Tonight?”

  “I don’t think we can afford to wait.”

  After everything that had happened today, she was never going to get any sleep anyway. She got to her feet. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  To get through the basement, they had to walk through the kitchen, where Gabe had managed to wolf down almost a whole pizza by himself. Brooke, however, seemed to have concentrated on plucking off toppings and piling them on her plate, leaving her with a denuded yellow triangle missing only two small bites.

  “Charlie and I are going to look at something downstairs,” Mia told Gabe as she tossed Charlie’s and her paper plates in the garbage. “Could you do me a favor and get your sister ready for bed and read her a story?”

  Gabe looked from Charlie to Mia. “Are you checking on why the burglar alarm went off?”

  She didn’t want to scare him. Even if she needed to, it could wait until morning. Let him have one good night’s sleep. “It was probably just the wind, but we’re going to make sure.”

  The basement was lined with rows of heavy-duty plastic shelves filled with Rubbermaid totes. In one corner was Scott’s weight bench, which was now seeing far more use from Gabe than Scott had ever given it. A few months earlier Mia had sold Scott’s table saw and some other potentially dangerous tools at a garage sale, so at least now the basement was a little more navigable.

  She pointed at a row of cardboard banker’s boxes on a bottom shelf. “Those six are from Scott’s office.” When she leaned down and grabbed the first box, she was surprised by how heavy it was. Then she took off the lid. “Oh, and this one has his computer in it.”

  “You just left it down here?” Charlie looked around the room, which had a concrete floor spotted with damp patches.

  “I haven’t really had time to turn around, let alone think about what to do with the stuff from Scott’s office.” Mia felt a little defensive. “And it’s not like we need another computer. We already have one in our room”—when would she stop saying our?—“and Gabe’s got a laptop. So who would use this one? Brooke? I’m trying to keep her away from screens as it is.”

  Maybe she should sell it. Even a couple hundred dollars would be a welcome addition to her checking account. Between the fees for preschool and parking and school activities, plus feeding a boy who seemed to need to eat seven times a day, plus paying off the credit card mess Scott had left them in, she needed every penny.

  “Why don’t you start with the paperwork, and I’ll see what I can find on the computer.” Charlie set it on top of the workbench. In an official investigation, anything device related would be handled by a computer forensics lab, but that didn’t mean a homicide detective didn’t have some rudimentary skills.

  “What do you think I should be looking for?” Mia took the lid off another box.

  “Basically, anything that makes you think twice.” He looked down at the screen. “I need a password to get in. Got any ideas?”

  Mia’s first and second guesses were wrong, but her third wasn’t. How could she have known so much about Scott, down to his passwords, but not the important stuff? She turned back to the file box and began systematically examining each piece of paper she took out. Tax forms. Ledger sheets with entries for things like “project sales,” “direct labor costs,” and “property and premises assets.” Ads for exercise equipment ripped from magazines. Payroll records. Utility statements for various businesses.

  “So you said we’re gonna be working together on that case?” Charlie asked as he clicked through various screens.

  Mia was grateful for the change of subject. “The issue is whether the kids should be charged as adults. Frank says they haven’t arrested the suspects yet, but he thinks they’re close. As soon as they’re picked up, we’ll want to interview their teachers and neighbors. Maybe the boys themselves, if their lawyers will let us. And I want to talk to the victim’s husband and get a feeling for what he wants.”

  She finished up the first box and moved on to the next. At the top was a misshapen purple vase Gabe had made in preschool and that Scott had been using to hold pens and pencils. It didn’t have any special significance to her, but it didn’t feel right to just throw it out. She set it aside to bring into her own office. Under the vase were tax worksheets for various businesses. A list of places Scott seemed to be thinking about for vacation, which made her eyes spark with tears. And then she found a file filled with all the agreements for the credit cards he had taken out in both their names, which made her tears dry up.

  She flipped through the papers at the bottom of the box. One felt too thick, and she realized it was stuck to the page below it. When she peeled it apart, she saw it was an IRS letter of notification to Oleg Popov, doing business as Oleg’s Gems and Jewels. She showed it to Charlie, who made a little humming noise.

  “So the IRS wanted to audit one of his clients? A jewelry business is the kind that makes it easy to hide income,” he said. “A lot of jewelers offer a twenty percent discount for cash—and then never report the money. And if you don’t report it, you don’t get taxed on it. Even if a business is losing money, it still has to pay the sales tax it takes in. Seven percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but it can add up to thousands every month, and it’s on the gross.”

  Mia’s heart sank. “Do you think Scott was helping his clients cheat on their taxes?”

  He shrugged. “The audit doesn’t necessarily mean anything. That’s the kind of business the IRS likes to target. It could range from everything being aboveboard, to Scott just taking his clients at their word and not looking too closely at things, to his actively advising clients on how to cheat.” The thought didn’t seem to faze him. He turned back to the computer. “Do you know who Scott was with the night he was killed?”

  “No. A client. That’s all he said.”

  Charlie tapped on the computer screen. “He kept his calendar online. But all it says is that he had a meeting at eight p.m. at the Jade Kitchen in Coho City.”

  “He did have a few clients that were restaurants, like that Macho Nacho. I’m pretty sure that Jade Kitchen was another one.” Both were small regional chains. As time went on, Scott had talked less and less about his clients. Only after he died had Mia realized it must have been because there were fewer and fewer of them.

  “We should go out there,” Charlie said. “See if anyone remembers him and who he was with that night.”

  “Will it matter, though?” Mia asked. “Scott was alone when he died.”

  “Maybe whoever he was with followed him after he left. Maybe the staff could tell us if they were arguing.”

  Mia went back to looking through the papers, but for some reason she now found herself aware of Charlie’s presence, of the way he breathed, of the slightly swee
t way he smelled. She reminded herself that they were work partners, nothing more. It didn’t mean anything that he was a man and she was a woman. After all, fifty percent of the population was male. And when it came to the people she worked with, the percentage was even higher.

  Halfway down into the third box, she found a printout of a note Scott had sent to Kenny Zhong, the owner of Jade Kitchen, dated only a week before Scott’s death.

  In the paperwork you gave me, you’re reporting $650,000 of gross sales, but there are only $640,000 of credit card receipts. This lopsided ratio of credit transactions to cash transactions could be highly suggestive that your restaurants are underreporting cash. We need to discuss this immediately.

  Mia caught her breath. Maybe Scott had been keeping honest books. She turned to Charlie, but he was staring at something on the computer screen that she couldn’t see from where she was standing.

  “So who’s Betty?” he asked in a voice that wasn’t quite his regular tone.

  “Betty?” It took her a second to remember. “Oh yeah, a couple of months before he died, Scott hired this older lady to help out. It was tax season, which is the crazy time of year for CPAs, especially when you work by yourself.”

  “Did you ever meet her?”

  “No.” Mia had had a mental picture of her, though, a lady with her white hair in a bun and wearing mushroom-colored sensible shoes.

  “You didn’t talk to her after Scott died?”

  Mia felt her shoulders sag as she remembered the weight that had pressed down on her after the accident. So many people to tell, so many pieces to pick up, so many things to figure out. “I can’t remember. She might have come to the funeral—there were a lot of people there I didn’t recognize. I ended up just going through Scott’s address book and sending out one mass e-mail with all the names in the bcc field.” Mia swallowed down a sudden nausea. “Why are you asking me about her?”

  He answered her question with one of his own. “How’d you know Betty was older?”

  How had she known? Had Scott ever said? “I guess it was just from the name. I mean, really, who’s named Betty anymore?”