The Mia Quinn Collection Page 27

Charlie’s voice was unhurried. “I know that your son Willy was wrongly convicted of murder.”

  Mia risked another peek over the hood. Charlie had lowered his gun, but not holstered it.

  “I know that he was murdered in prison. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  “The guy’s name is Seth Mercer,” Mia told the dispatcher. “And he’s got a rifle pointed right at Charlie Carlson from Seattle’s Homicide Division.”

  “Too little and far too late.” Mercer shook his head. “I’ve been waiting for you guys to show up for nearly five years.”

  “Why don’t you put the gun down and we can talk about it.” Charlie’s tone was conversational. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

  “We’ve got units on the way,” the dispatcher told Mia.

  “Even the Bible talks about an eye for an eye,” Mercer said. He kept the rifle where it was, so close that if he moved it forward four inches it would touch Charlie’s chest. Touch the skin right over his beating heart.

  “So because your son was wrongly convicted and then murdered in prison,” Charlie began, “you . . .”

  “I shot Stan Slavich.” There was no emotion in Mercer’s voice. He was simply stating a fact.

  “Why did you shoot him?” Charlie’s voice was as steady as if he were in an interview room and not a second away from being shot himself.

  “Didn’t I just tell you?” Mercer said angrily, and everything inside Mia tensed as the distance between the end of his rifle and Charlie’s chest narrowed to nothing. She ducked back down behind the wheel well, praying without words that Mercer wouldn’t pull the trigger.

  “Slavich decided my son was guilty, when he was innocent. Not only that, he charged him with first-degree murder. Because he said Willy had planned it. When Willy couldn’t plan what to have for dinner. But Slavich had the power to do that. One person—one—decided to put my son on trial and what the charges would be. And the moment he did that, he ruined my son’s life forever. Even if Willy had been found not guilty, that’s not the same as being found innocent.”

  “You’re right,” Charlie said simply. “It’s not.”

  In the distance sirens began to wail.

  “Right!” Mercer agreed. “Everyone would have looked at him sideways, even if he was acquitted. But of course even being acquitted didn’t happen. And then he was murdered by a piece of scum. Murdered for something he didn’t do. And all the guards did was watch.”

  “So you decided to do something about it.”

  Mia risked another look. The rifle was no longer pressed against Charlie’s chest. Mercer had moved it so that it pointed off at an angle. The barrel drooped. Now if he fired, the bullet would punch a hole through Charlie’s liver and intestines. But maybe he would live. Could Charlie rush Mercer and push the rifle even farther down so that it fired only at the ground?

  “When Willy was murdered, I thought about how Slavich would continue to walk through this world untouched. He showed Willy no mercy, so I showed him no mercy.”

  “And so you shot him?” Charlie prompted.

  “Yeah. A clean kill. Not like my boy, left to bleed out in the yard until the guards decided it was safe enough to drag his body away.” Mercer made a grating sound, a nightmare version of a laugh. “And then I waited for you guys to come looking for me. But it was like you’d already forgotten about what you had done. When the truth came out about who really killed that poor little girl, no one even apologized to my family. My son paid the price for Slavich’s mistakes. My family did. We went bankrupt trying to defend our boy. And after he was dead, my wife and I divorced.”

  The sirens were getting louder, converging from all directions.

  “And then what happened?” Charlie prompted, his voice still conveying no urgency.

  “Nothing. I just waited for you guys to show up. Waited and waited.”

  “What about Colleen Miller? When she convicted Laura Lynn Childer’s stepfather, did you feel that she should have known from the beginning that he was the real killer? Did you decide that justice called for something to be done about her too?”

  Silence. Mia peeked again over the car’s hood.

  Mercer tilted his head, squinting. “What?”

  And then three police cars screamed into the trailer park, light bars flashing. Cops spilled out with guns drawn, crouching behind their open doors. Charlie took one step back, two, and then his hips were against the white wrought-iron railing. The cops shouted commands for Mercer to put down his gun, to put his hands up.

  Charlie shouted, “No! No! Don’t do it!”

  But Mercer kept raising the rifle, pointing it past Charlie to the cops who had just arrived.

  Charlie rolled back off the railing and onto his belly.

  And nearly half a dozen shots drilled into Seth Mercer.

  As they waited to be debriefed in a sad cinder block building that was rather grandly known as the trailer park’s community center, Charlie sat with his arm around Mia. He smelled of blood and gunpowder, and his clothes were freckled with red. Outside the investigators and crime-scene technicians buzzed around Mercer’s trailer, measuring, photographing, videotaping. The man at the center of their activity lay covered with a white sheet.

  Every time Mia thought she was finished crying, it would start up again. The horror of thinking she would die, the horror of truly watching Mercer die. The fear she had felt for herself and for Charlie. The sadness for all the lives lost: Laura Lynn, Willy, Stan, Colleen, and Seth Mercer. One of the cops had come up with a box of tissues before leaving them in this room with a Ping-Pong table, a pile of old magazines, and a half dozen folding chairs. Mia had already gone through half of the box.

  She scooted a little bit away from Charlie, who took back his arm. She blew her nose. At each loud watery honk, he flinched—and then smiled, just the slightest bit.

  The crumpled tissue went into the nearly full wastebasket. “You heard him, Charlie. Seth Mercer didn’t know anything about Colleen’s murder.”

  “He didn’t say that.” Charlie rubbed his temple.

  “He clearly didn’t know what you were talking about. That’s the same thing.”

  “Maybe he was stalling for time. Maybe he was embarrassed that he shot a woman.”

  “Or maybe he didn’t kill her,” Mia insisted. “We’ve got nothing to tie him to Colleen’s killing.”

  “So? We’ve got nothing to tie him to Stan’s murder either, except for his confession.” Charlie repeated the aphorism. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” He shook his head. “Just because we don’t have any physical evidence linking Seth Mercer to Colleen’s murder doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

  CHAPTER 44

  I’m sorry, but you can’t smoke in here,” Eli told Ben McFadden, one of Tami Gordon’s former clients. Judging by the stink of cigarette smoke that wafted from Eli’s chair cushion every time he sat down, this rule had not been enforced by Tami when it had been her chair and her office.

  From what Eli had heard about Tami, she had not been much for following rules. The only thing she believed in was her clients’ absolute innocence. In Eli’s view, it was the judge or the jury’s job to determine guilt or innocence based on the evidence and the arguments presented; it was his job to make as effective a case as possible. Most defendants were neither completely innocent nor completely guilty. The truth was a slippery thing.

  The skinny man sitting across from Eli plucked the unlit cigarette from between his lips and began to tap it on the edge of the scarred desk, flipping it over and over. The tips of his fingers were stained yellow with nicotine.

  “I still don’t understand.” McFadden’s hazel eyes flashed up to Eli’s and then back to his cigarette. “Who are you? Why did you call me to come down here? Where’s Tami?”

  “Tami’s no longer employed by this office. I’ve been asked to take over her cases. She left in something of a hurry.” This was a euphemism for what happened when you w
ere caught having sex with one of your clients—a suspect in a double homicide—in an attorney-client visiting room on the eleventh floor of the King County Jail.

  Eli had heard that Tami claimed it was all a misunderstanding. That while she took full responsibility for not stopping her client from hugging her, all that had happened was a simple embrace. That the deputy hadn’t understood what he was seeing.

  “But I want to talk to Tami,” McFadden said, chewing on his lower lip. “I need to.”

  Eli’s gut clenched. Was McFadden another “special” client of Tami’s?

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

  “Am I still going to be able to plead out? She promised I wouldn’t go back to prison.”

  “I’ll be talking later today to the prosecutor, Katrina Nowell. I’m going to make sure she’s still on board with the offer she made you.”

  McFadden’s hands stilled. “Why wouldn’t she be? It was her idea.”

  According to Tami’s notes, the plea deal called for McFadden to give up the names of the people in the identity theft ring, plead guilty, and accept eighteen months of probation. It was a very good deal. Maybe better than McFadden, who had never managed to keep his nose clean for more than three months in his adult life, deserved.

  “I just need to make sure we’re all on the same page,” Eli said patiently.

  “I can’t go back to prison. I won’t.” McFadden had been in and out of prison since he was nineteen. Now he was thirty-four and could pass for fifty-four. With trembling fingers, he pushed up the sleeves of his gray long-sleeved T-shirt. His right bicep was tattooed with SS lightning bolts. The underside of his left forearm bore a spiderweb tattoo, common among racists who had spent time in prison. Sometimes you earned it by killing a minority inmate, although when he looked in McFadden’s haunted eyes, Eli hoped fervently that this was not the case here.

  “So you’re in the Aryan Brotherhood?” The white power group preyed upon the confused, the angry, the troubled, and the weak. It made men who had never felt special for a single day in their lives believe that they were part of something important, something bigger than themselves.

  “I was. But I’m not anymore. Not since I got me a half-black girlfriend. But the Brotherhood says the only way you really leave them is in a body bag. If I go back to prison, both sides will be after me. I’ll be lucky to come out alive. You need to remind Katrina that I kept up my end of the deal.”

  “You’ve already given up the names of your accomplices?” There had been nothing about it in Tami’s notes. If you could call them notes.

  His nervous eyes skittered over Eli’s face. “Right. That’s what I did.”

  From what Eli had been able to figure out from Tami’s fragmented files, Tami had made a number of plea deals with Katrina Nowell, more than with any other prosecutor in Violent Crimes. Maybe Tami had found the sweet spot in the King County District Attorney’s Office—a prosecutor with a kind streak.

  While a defense attorney couldn’t steer a case to a certain prosecutor, you could request that a case be assigned to one who had been involved in any area of your case—even just a bail hearing. Tami might have taken advantage of that perfectly legal tactic to ask for Katrina whenever possible.

  Some prosecutors were mirror images of Tami, viewing all defendants as guilty, guilty, guilty. They saw it as their job to demand a maximum sentence with no leniency or allowances. As a defense attorney, you wanted a prosecutor who understood that while clients were often no angels, many had also suffered from chaotic upbringings, lack of schooling, and crippling addictions that sometimes led them to make poor choices.

  But it was the prosecutor alone who ultimately decided whom to charge, what to charge, and what sentence to recommend—or whether to accept or offer a plea bargain. Frank D’Amato and the heads of the various departments didn’t have time to monitor everyone’s cases. It was called prosecutorial discretion. And Katrina had exercised hers on McFadden’s behalf.

  “I’ll talk to Ms. Nowell today and let you know what she says,” Eli said.

  But McFadden didn’t seem reassured at all.

  The secretary gave Eli directions to Katrina’s office. When he turned the corner, he saw a woman with a long, slender back and blond hair pulled back into a low bun walking ahead of him. Eli’s heart took a stutter step.

  “Mia?”

  She turned. “Eli.” Her smile didn’t reach her shadowed eyes. This morning word had gotten around his office that the man responsible for murdering Mia’s friend and another prosecutor had killed himself just as he was about to be arrested.

  “I’m here for that meeting with your co-worker.” He hesitated and then said, “I heard about what happened. You must be relieved that it’s over.”

  Instead of answering him right away, Mia closed her eyes and pressed her lips together. Finally she said, “You might not have heard everything. He committed suicide by cop, right in front of us. It was awful. This was one of those cases where there are no winners.”

  “I’m sorry.” Eli wished he had more than just two overused words to offer her.

  Charlie Carlson came up behind Mia, standing a little closer than Eli thought was strictly professional. As if he and Mia were a team, and Eli the interloper. He thought about that moment Friday night under the hood of her car, that second when they had nearly kissed. How much of an accident had that really been?

  “Charlie,” Eli said, nodding. The bottom of Charlie’s tie bore a yellow stain that looked like mustard.

  “Eli.”

  A woman with a head full of frizzy blond curls popped her head out of an office a few doors down. “Did I hear someone say Eli?”

  “That’s right. You must be Katrina.” Nodding at Charlie and Mia, Eli walked past them to shake Katrina’s hand.

  As they settled in her office, she said, “So you’re the new Tami?”

  “I guess you could say that. Without some of her”—he hesitated—“quirks.”

  “I actually like Tami. I also realize I might be the only one in this office who would say that. She’s caring. Committed. And very smart.” One corner of Katrina’s mouth turned up. “Except maybe when it comes to matters of the heart.”

  Eli chose to neither confirm nor deny. “Well, as you probably heard, she left rather abruptly, and as a result her files are a little disorganized. I just wanted to make sure you were still on board with the plea bargain for Ben McFadden.”

  “Yes, he was very helpful. He’s provided some information that’s going to help us roll up the whole thing.”

  “He’ll be glad to hear that. He was in my office today, and he was quite anxious.”

  “Anxious?” Katrina’s brows pulled together. “Why?”

  “It’s not really what he said. It’s more what he showed me.”

  She cocked her head. “Oh?”

  “His tattoos.”

  Her face cleared. “Oh yes. I was thinking about them when Tami and I were discussing the plea bargain. I knew that once he got into prison he’d probably end up dead or in solitary confinement for his own safety. What can I say?” She smiled and shrugged. “If someone seems like they just made a mistake, I’m willing to think about going outside the box a bit, especially if he could help us catch some bigger fish. Plus, the courts are clogged enough as it is. Why go to all the expense of a trial when I can guarantee he’ll be supervised for the next eighteen months?”

  “It’s a good deal,” Eli said. “A very good deal.”

  “I was feeling generous that day.” Katrina’s eyes went oddly flat, like a doll’s. “I can stop feeling generous, if that’s what you want.”

  Eli hurriedly backtracked. “No, no, I didn’t say that.” If there was one thing he didn’t want to do, it was to get off on the wrong foot with the one prosecutor who might be more inclined to be on his side.

  CHAPTER 45

  Come in, come in,” Frank called to Mia when she peeked in his half-open door. Judy had said he wanted to
see her. “Come in and sit down.”

  Mia took a seat in the visitor’s chair, wondering if the Frank she had first worked with years ago would even recognize this man who had other people do his summoning.

  He reached across the desk to give her a two-handed shake. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier to congratulate you on tracking down the man who killed Stan and Colleen.”

  Mia’s morning had been filled with her co-workers’ attaboys and applause and a few tears. Frank had been out of the office in meetings—including a quickie press briefing where he announced that the killer had chosen death over arrest, and promised to reveal more details later.

  “Charlie Carlson’s the one who figured out where Seth Mercer was. And he’s the one who almost got killed.” Mia pictured Seth slumping to the ground, his chest a red mess, but in her mind’s eye he wore Charlie’s face.

  “From what I hear, you were smart enough to get out of the line of fire and then alerted more cops before Mercer could kill anyone else.” Frank made Mia’s panicky dash sound smart and nearly heroic.

  “Charlie pushed me out of the line of fire, and then he got Mercer to confess. And Jonah’s the one who figured out what Colleen and Stan had in common.” Mia decided to simplify things by not mentioning Ophelia’s contribution.

  “You’re the one who thought to ask for Jonah’s help,” Frank said. “You’re the one who wouldn’t stop digging.”

  Mia was beginning to realize there was no point in arguing. “This is Colleen we’re talking about, Frank. Of course I didn’t.”

  “That’s why I asked for you.” He blinked rapidly and then sniffed. “Because this is Colleen we’re talking about.”

  For a minute Mia saw a flash of the old Frank, the one who gathered with them around takeout pizza in the break room on crazy nights. Back when Frank was passionate instead of carefully calibrated. Back when he was one of the team instead of the man who had his secretary summon you to his office.

  Then Frank’s expression shifted, became unreadable. The switch made Mia tense.