A Deadly Business (5 page)
As she staggered forward on hollow-feeling legs, Mia wondered what had been taken. Material things might not matter, but some things were still irreplaceable.
“See.” The cop waved his hand at the family room like a game show host extolling the features of a new car. “Someone started to toss it.” The room was a mess, as if it had been gone through in a hurry. Half the doors to the built-in cupboards stood open. Brooke’s pillow lay next to a wall. Scattered throughout the room were clothes, dishes, sections of newspaper, a single sneaker, a half-filled laundry basket, books, a game of Connect Four, and a random menagerie of stuffed animals.
“They must have been interrupted,” the cop repeated. “Do you want to look to see what’s missing?”
Mia’s cheeks got hot. This kid was too young to know what it was like when you had two kids and worked sixty hours a week. “Actually, um, this is normal. It’s how the house was when we left. We’ve just had a busy week.” She hoped no one pointed out that it was Monday.
“Oh.” The bright color was back in his face. “So I guess the whole thing was a false alarm. No burglar.”
“No burglar,” Mia echoed.
“Okay, so when it comes to false alarms, you should know that you’re allowed one freebie. But for any additional alarms, you’ll be charged a hundred-and-fifteen-dollar fee. Each.”
“We should figure out what caused it,” Charlie said. “Do you have motion sensors in the house? I’ve seen cats, balloons, even spiders trigger them. Anything that breaks the beam.”
“No. We just have alarms on the doors and the downstairs windows.”
“It was pretty stormy out there earlier. And this is an older home.” He walked back into the hall, grabbed the front doorknob,
and shook it. Even though it was still locked, it rattled in the frame. “That’s more than likely your problem right there. With the wind blowing, there’s enough play in it that it could have separated the contact from its reed switch for a second. You need to get some weather stripping.”
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.”
M
ia’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?
M
ia 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.