The Mia Quinn Collection Page 11

  Charlie tapped the butt end of the marker against his teeth. “We also need to follow the money. Violet and Martin both benefit financially from her death. Violet is the named beneficiary of Colleen’s life insurance and inherits everything from her mother. Martin had only an informal arrangement with Colleen to pay for Violet’s college. He could have figured that getting Colleen out of the way got him off the hook.”

  Mia nodded. Even if the idea of Violet killing Colleen made her queasy, she had to consider it. “We need to talk to Martin.”

  “I’ll set something up,” Charlie said. “Do you want to be with me for the interview?”

  “I didn’t know him that well, but it might be useful not to let him know I’m involved just yet. Why don’t you see if you can get him down to the station? Then I can watch from an observation room.”

  Charlie turned back to the flip chart. “How about Stan? Who benefited the most from his death?”

  Mia tried to remember. “I don’t think there was much of an estate. Stan had an older brother, but that was about it.”

  “I’ll track him down, see if there’s any other family I can talk to.” Charlie started to say something else, but Mia’s stomach let out a rumble and he broke off, laughing. “Sounds like someone’s hungry.”

  “Maybe a little.” Her cheeks were hot. “Do you mind if I grab something from the vending machine?”

  “No problem. I’ll make some calls to figure out where Stan’s murder book is. And if they have any Fritos, could you get me some?”

  In the break room Anne was heating a bag of microwave popcorn. She turned toward Mia. “I hear you’re going to be working on Colleen’s case. I sure hope you can get the guy who did it.”

  “Me too.” The sign for her garage sale was still posted on the bulletin board next to the vending machine. Surrounded by notices for piano lessons, coast house rentals, and cars for sale, it read: Cleaning out your attic, basement, or garage? Mia’s having a garage sale. Tears stung her eyes as she remembered how Colleen had offered to loan her money.

  She blinked and turned to scan the vending machine’s choices, looking for something vaguely healthy that would last for a few hours. After feeding bills into the machine, she pressed the button for Fig Newtons, figuring that they at least counted as a fruit. “I’m kind of worried about how I’m going to do it all and still take good care of my kids. How do you do it with four, Anne?”

  “Do it?” Anne laughed. “Some days I don’t. Some days it seems that no matter where I am, I should be someplace else. Like if I’m at work, I think of everything I need to do at home. And when I’m home, it’s easy to think of everything I should be doing here. But then I realized that the result was that no matter where I was, I was only half there. So what I tell myself now is, ‘Wherever your feet are, that’s where your heart is.’ ” Anne looked down at her flats. “So when my feet are at work, my heart stays at work. And when I’m at home, my heart stays at home. I don’t split my attention anymore.”

  The microwave dinged.

  “But what about when you’re at work and your kid texts you and says the coach doesn’t like him?” Mia needed protein. The closest thing the vending machine offered was Peanut M&M’s. Mia would kill Gabe if he ate this way, but she was an adult. She’d already been through her growth spurt. She stabbed the button. “Or when the only way you’re going to have time to read up on a case is to do it at home?”

  Anne’s smile was rueful. “I didn’t say it was perfect.”

  Mia pressed the button for Charlie’s Fritos. “Don’t worry, these aren’t all for me,” she said, pushing open the metal swinging door a third time. Anne smiled, but Mia didn’t know if she believed her. They left the break room together.

  Back in her office, Mia spread out her bounty. Charlie ignored the Fritos and opened the Peanut M&M’s instead. He nodded at the photo on her desk. “That your husband? I never met him.”

  “Yeah. That’s Scott. But that picture’s probably ten years old.” Sometimes Mia felt like she had stepped through the looking glass. Scott was dead, they were broke, her dad wanted to talk about his feelings, and her son no longer wanted to have anything to do with her.

  “Your kid looks a lot like him.” Charlie’s eyes flashed up to hers. “That must be hard. Good and hard, both.”

  Tears prickled in Mia’s eyes. She nodded, unable to speak. Charlie patted the back of her hand, still munching on her M&M’s, and for a minute she forgot that she didn’t like him.

  CHAPTER 18

  Charlie was a fast walker. Fast enough that Mia, who thought of herself as quick, was having a hard time keeping up. Although her pumps had sturdy two-inch heels, Mia found herself wishing she were wearing flats. Thinking of her shoes made her think of her feet, and Anne’s rule. Mia’s feet were on James Street. But where was her heart? Or maybe Anne’s rule didn’t apply, since the sidewalk was neither home nor work, but a place in between.

  Most of the people around them also did not seem to be heeding Anne’s advice. Aside from Mia and Charlie, no one seemed to be really present on this sidewalk in Seattle, underneath these maples turning scarlet, walking past these people with all shades of skin, including colors made by tattoo ink.

  The other people on this crowded city sidewalk seemed to be embracing distraction, as if they wanted to forget exactly where they were. A number were listening to music through white headphone wires. Some blundered forward blindly as they checked smart-phones. Most of the rest were talking animatedly on cell phones. Mia heard snatches of conversation ranging from “She said what?” to “It was ginormous” to “Tell me if he hits you again,” which made both her and Charlie do a double take. Not noticing their stares, the young man who had said it kept walking. Charlie and Mia looked at each other, then Charlie shrugged and they continued on.

  At the police station they passed through the metal detector and then went upstairs to Charlie’s office. It wasn’t really an office, just a cubicle in a large room filled with two dozen cubicles separated by tan chest-high walls. The air was filled with the buzz of conversations, the clack of computer keys, the ringing of cell phones and landlines—so much sound it was like white noise.

  “Looks like they turned up Stan’s murder book,” Charlie said.

  The fat binder sat in the middle of his desk. There were also two tall stacks of printouts bound by rubber bands, which Mia figured were from Colleen’s computer. Otherwise, the space was surprisingly neat. Mia had half expected to see a jumbled desk covered with discarded takeout wrappers and teetering stacks of paper.

  Charlie flipped open the murder book. As was standard, the first page was a color photograph in a plastic sleeve, a reminder that the victim had been a living, breathing person. It showed Stan in a maroon tie and a short-sleeved white tattersall shirt. Mia thought it might be an enlargement from his employee badge photo. He had gold wire-framed glasses, a bristly mustache, and brown close-cropped hair that stood straight up like fur.

  The next page showed Stan dead, sprawled next to a small desk. The contrast was almost painful. Charlie flipped it closed. “I’ll take this home tonight and read it.” Pushing one of the stacks of paper on his desk toward her, he said, “Now let’s see what was up with Colleen’s love life.”

  Mia sat in Charlie’s visitor’s chair, which was crammed in between the side of his desk and cubicle wall, and undid the rubber band. The first page was Colleen’s eHeartMatch profile. In her profile photo Colleen’s hair was a different shade of red than Mia was currently familiar with. Her face was thinner and her complexion creamy, without the flush that had marked her skin in the last few years. Only the bright blue eyes were the same.

  Mia looked up and met Charlie’s eyes. “How old do you think that photo is?” he asked.

  “I can remember when Colleen looked like this. You probably can too. But it was awhile ago.” A long while.

  Next to the photo was a list of stats. Colleen had taken years off her age and pounds off her frame
, while at the same time adding two inches to her height. Remembering Violet’s words, Mia felt her face heat up. If Colleen were still alive, she would have been mortified to know that friends, co-workers, and even strangers were poring over the hidden sides of her life. In pursuing Colleen’s killer, Mia and Charlie could end up exposing everything she had wanted to keep secret. All in the name of justice.

  Colleen’s profile read:

  I’m a redhead, with the temperament to match. I’m passionate about my job, Italian food, and movies and books that make you think—or leave you gasping in surprise. I believe sarcasm is a spice of life, so if you have a sarcastic sense of humor, bring it on. I’m looking for someone who says what he means and means what he says. Someone who already has a life he likes, but who would also like someone to share it with.

  Mia glanced up and met Charlie’s gaze. If he felt pity or disgust, she couldn’t see it. Just sadness.

  “A long time ago Colleen told me she had tried online dating,” she said, “but she gave up when she realized she was competing with women who were twenty years younger. I guess she decided to become one herself.”

  Charlie was paging ahead. “Well, it looks like the time-capsule photo worked. She got tons of responses. The way eHeartMatch works is that there’s a dedicated website where members read and respond to e-mails. That probably gives the company a little bit of cover in case one of their clients turns out to be a complete nutcase.”

  Mia looked at her own copies. Some were e-mails from men who offered to take Colleen to coffee, to dinner, to the movies. Others were from men who had sent back cruder offers along with self-portraits snapped in their bathroom mirrors with cell phones. The parade of headless torsos in various degrees of muscularity and hirsuteness made her queasy.

  “Ugh. I don’t remember Colleen saying this was what she was looking for,” she said, tapping on one photo of a shirtless guy with a hairy chest and beer gut. “She wanted a relationship, not some guy who was advertising himself like a hunk of meat.”

  Charlie exhaled through his nose. “I guess I’m old-fashioned. I like to know someone in person before I ask them out on a date. Plus, I’ve been in this line of work long enough to know that most people on these sites are probably lying about something—their weight, their height, their age . . .”

  Mia completed the thought. “Or all three.”

  “Or all three. You meet somebody online and you’d better leave room for surprises.”

  “Maybe Colleen figured that made it okay for her to fudge things a little.” Mia turned back to the photo of her old friend before time had knocked some of the shine off her. “Maybe she figured she would just be trading lies with someone.” Did lies cancel each other out?

  “You ever see that New Yorker cartoon?” Charlie asked. “It shows a dog sitting on a chair in front of a computer with its paw on the keyboard. And it’s telling another dog that’s sitting on the floor, ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.’ ”

  Heat rose in Mia face. “Colleen was hardly a dog.”

  Charlie sighed in exasperation. “I’m not insulting her, Mia. I’m just saying that you can’t trust people.”

  “You mean strangers.”

  Charlie thought about it. “No, I’m pretty sure I mean people. Now dogs, dogs you probably could trust. They’re not very good liars.”

  Together Mia and Charlie continued to read through the pages. Even though dozens of men had responded to Colleen’s ad, it seemed like she had only gone out with a handful of them. And then after one or two dates, one of them would come up with an excuse for the other as to why it wasn’t working. Mia wondered how many were really covers for Colleen or the guy—or both—being disappointed by reality.

  But one man kept turning up over and over again: Vincent. Mia paged back to his photo and profile, which was labeled Tall, Dark, and Handsome. He was in his midthirties, with dark straight hair, strong black brows, high cheekbones, and a wide smile. If Colleen had still been the same woman she had been in her photo, they would have made a beautiful couple.

  Colleen and Vincent had shared hundreds of messages, some as short as a sentence, some that went on for several pages. The e-mails were flirty, funny, serious, and romantic. Mia’s eyes picked out random phrases.

  Do you realize we’ve been e-mailing for an hour?

  What are you wearing?

  You are one fine-looking woman.

  You have got a wicked sense of humor.

  I can’t wait to get my hands on you.

  “Look at this.” Charlie stabbed at the printouts with his index finger. “They were e-mailing each other just an hour before Colleen was killed.”

  Mia found the same page.

  The surprise was that it seemed to have been Colleen who wanted to meet and Vincent who had demurred.

  Colleen: You’re married, aren’t you?

  Vincent: I’m not, I swear. It’s just that I think I would be a disappointment to you.

  Colleen: Don’t I already know you, Vincent? If there’s something you’re not telling me, let’s just try being honest with each other.

  Vincent: I like you, Colleen, I really do. But I don’t know if I can give you the kind of relationship you want. Give me awhile. Let me think about it.

  Colleen: I don’t know if I can. I want you so much. And I’m tired of waiting. I want to make this real.

  The pages ended there. That was the last thing either of them had written.

  “Maybe Vincent is married,” Mia said. “Maybe he was worried his wife would find out and figured he had to nip it in the bud.”

  “Or maybe he found out that the woman he was having an online relationship with was nearly old enough to be his mother,” Charlie said. “I’ll subpoena eHeartMatch for his full name and address. They should give it up pretty easily. They don’t want to get a reputation for being a great place for serial killers to meet their next victims.”

  Mia paged back and took another long look at Vincent’s open, handsome face. Had he snapped when he realized that Colleen was not what she had pretended to be? Or had he acted to protect his own secrets?

  CHAPTER 19

  Is your kid on Facebook?” Charlie asked as he parked in front of Darin Dane’s house. The neighborhood was a mix of houses—some a century old and stately, others reflecting the styles of more recent decades. Darin’s was a yellow ranch.

  “Gabe has an account, but he knows I can look at it anytime.” Although when was the last time Mia had looked at it? “Some parents don’t let their kids go on Facebook, but there’s a downside to that too. After my parents got divorced when I was in seventh grade, my mom wouldn’t let me go to the mall, which is where all my friends hung out. After a while I didn’t get invited to anything.” Mia remembered what it had been like to come to school on Mondays and hear about birthday parties and trips to the ice skating rink that no one had invited her to. “I guess my mom was worried about me hanging out with no supervision. But since she was at work, it wasn’t like I was being supervised when I stayed home. And the times I’ve worried about Gabe and Facebook, I imagined some pervy guy trying to friend him. I wasn’t thinking about what the other kids on Facebook might do to him.”

  Was Gabe being picked on? Was that why he was suddenly obsessed with bulking up?

  “How old does a kid have to be before he can get an account?”

  “Thirteen. But that’s a joke. Most kids can do enough math to figure out how many years to subtract from their real birth date to make themselves eligible. According to Gabe, half his friends were on Facebook before they were thirteen. And I read somewhere that there are five million Facebook users under the age of ten.”

  On Darin Dane’s doorstep, both of them went to push the doorbell, but Charlie got to it first. Typical Charlie, Mia thought. He hadn’t wanted to be part of this investigation, but now he wanted to be in charge. He had even insisted on driving, but since the county paid for his gas and not hers, she had been glad to say yes.


  She had thought she could simply give the Suburban back to the dealership, maybe pay a small fee after she showed them Scott’s death certificate. It turned out not to matter if he was dead. Even if she turned the car in, she would still owe everything he would have paid if he had driven it to the end of its lease, plus a penalty. His estate was on the hook for it—which meant she was. Just thinking about it made her stomach clench.

  A man in his midforties and dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans opened the door, releasing a fug of stale cigarette smoke. His face was unshaven, his eyes sunken. He looked even worse than when Mia had spoken to him last week.

  “Nate, this is Charlie Carlson. He’s a homicide detective. Charlie, this is Nate Dane, Darin’s father.”

  The two men shook hands, and then Nate stepped back and waved them inside with the hand holding an unfiltered cigarette. “Laurie should be home soon.”

  Nate had told Mia that his wife was a nurse, which seemed kind of strange given how much smoking he appeared to be doing. All Mia knew about Nate was that he didn’t currently have a job.

  The reek of cigarettes was overpowering. Not one but two overflowing ashtrays sat on the coffee table, next to a photo album and an inch-high pile of papers, facedown. The curtains were drawn, the blinds pulled down. It felt like dusk even though it was only four o’clock. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Nate took a seat on a plaid recliner, and Charlie and Mia sat on the navy blue couch. A gray tabby skittered around the edges of the room.

  Nate handed the photo album to Charlie. “These are photos of my son.”

  Setting it on his lap, Charlie started to flip through the pages while Mia leaned over to look. Darin as a big-eyed baby, wearing a yellow-and-blue-striped knit hat. A three- or four-year-old Darin, grinning while he piled sand on his dad lying stretched out on the beach. Darin, a slender blue-eyed boy with small gold hoops in his ears, showing off a plateful of decorated cupcakes.

  Then Charlie turned to the last photo and recoiled. Mia gasped, feeling like she had just been punched in the stomach. Darin lay on his back on the floor, a rainbow-striped scarf next to him, a wide red mark around his neck, his blue eyes half-open.