A Matter of Trust

Chapter 27





When Mia went back to her office, she was surprised to find Charlie waiting for her. On his face was an expression she hadn’t seen there before, a kind of glee. “I just got the cell site location information for Martin.”

“And?” Mia waited for the other shoe to drop.

“And it matched what he said. He was at home all evening.”

For how indispensable cell phones had become, they could still be dispensed with. “Or at least his cell phone was,” Mia pointed out, wondering why Charlie seemed so happy. Had he found a witness or footage from a nearby security cam that had showed Martin near Colleen’s house that night?

He gave her a Cheshire grin. “I didn’t just run Martin’s phone. I ran all the phones on his account.”

Comprehension dawned. Not Martin. His wife. “Gina.”

“Exactly.” Charlie got to his feet. “Gina’s cell phone was within a two-block radius of Colleen’s house around the time of the murder.”

“So either Martin was there with Gina’s phone or Gina herself was there. Either way, Martin lied.”

“Yup.” Charlie pulled his car keys from his pocket. “Now we’ve got motive, means, and opportunity.” In two quick strides he was at her door. “Let’s go talk to her.”

As they hurried down the hall, Jonas came up to them.

“Mia, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“Um . . .” She looked at Charlie, who was shifting from foot to foot. “Can it wait?”

“I’m not sure that it can. I believe there’s some facet of the data regarding Colleen and Stan that I’m overlooking. I looked for common defendants. I looked for affiliations with fringe groups. But I fear there’s something’s missing. With your permission, I’d like to ask an outside computer expert for help. She specializes in database searches.”

Mia flashed back to Frank’s talk about money. “Unfortunately, Jonas, I don’t think there’s room for that in the budget.”

“That won’t be an issue,” Jonas said. “If she’s interested, she doesn’t charge.”

That was certainly unusual, but Mia didn’t have time to ask more. Charlie was jingling his keys impatiently. “Okay, sure,” she said, waving her hand. “We’ll talk about it more later.”



Martin and Gina lived in a thirty-story silver-and-glass condo building layered with jutting balconies that made it resemble a giant electric razor.

“It looks like a giant piece of medical equipment,” Charlie said, craning his neck.

“I think it looks great,” Mia said. “All those clean lines. And just think—no lawn to mow, no gutters to clean, no roofs to keep the moss off of.”

“Yeah, just you and your thousands of neighbors living in the hive.”

The open lobby had a floor made of large squares of white marble set off by smaller strips of black marble. The silver doors of the elevator slid open, and Charlie pressed the button for the twenty-third floor.

Even before he knocked on the door of the Millers’ condo, they could hear a baby crying inside. After a moment a woman opened the door.

Colleen had once shown Mia a picture of Martin with his new wife. In the photo Gina had had shiny dark hair that fell past her shoulders. Now, her gray-threaded hair, pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, looked like it needed to be washed. She was still slender and petite, only now there were hard lines around her mouth. She looked almost brittle.

“Gina Miller?” Mia had to raise her voice to be heard over the baby’s crying. The sound was monotonous and oddly devoid of emotion.

“Yes?” She stiffened slightly.

“I’m Mia Quinn with the King County District Attorney’s Office. And this is Charlie Carlson with the Seattle police.”

Her expression didn’t change. “Yes?”

“Can we come in?” Charlie asked. “We’d like to ask you a few questions. We’re gathering information on Colleen Miller. Your husband’s”—he lowered his voice, as if there were neighbors around who might hear—“first wife.”

Gina stepped back and let them in.

At one point the condo must have had a modern, stripped-down feel, with its recessed lighting, pale trim, and squared-off furniture floating on stainless steel legs. But all of that was now covered with a layer of baby paraphernalia: bottles, sippy cups, stuffed animals, a package of diapers, and receiving blankets in various pastel hues. An empty blue playpen was set up in a corner of the living room.

In the dining room a baby who looked about a year old was strapped into a blue-and-white plastic high chair. He put one hand in his mouth and began to flick his tongue with the tips of his fingers. On the smeared glass tabletop was a jar of bright orange baby food. A tiny blue spoon sat next to it. Suddenly Mia felt nostalgic for Pack ’n Plays and miniature rubber-coated spoons.

The overheated space had the sharp, sweet stink of diapers. Charlie sniffed and winced, and Mia hoped Gina didn’t notice.

“So what did you want to know?” Gina asked as she walked toward the baby.

“You do know that Colleen Miller is dead, right?” Charlie said to her back.

“Do you want me to pretend that I’m grief-stricken?” Gina leaned over to unbuckle her son from his high chair. “Colleen had everything, and she wanted us to have nothing. Violet wasn’t even planned, but here Colleen just goes and has this accidental baby and everything turns out fine. Then she got to raise her daughter while keeping a huge chunk of Martin’s salary. Meanwhile we had to spend twenty-six thousand dollars from our retirement fund on IVF. And all that got us was two pregnancies that lasted a few weeks each.” She hoisted the baby to her hip. He put his fingertips back to his tongue. “Sometimes she’d even call up Martin and ask him to come by the house to help her fix something. Say her pipes were leaking or whatever and she didn’t know how to fix it. When we’ve been married years longer than they ever were. I knew what she was doing. She was trying to get him back.” With an exasperated huff, Gina tugged her son’s hand from his mouth.

Mia tried to see Colleen through Gina’s eyes. She didn’t even recognize the person Gina was describing.

“So you felt the financial situation was unfair,” Charlie observed mildly.

“Do you know how expensive it is to adopt? It cost us sixteen thousand to adopt Wyatt after he had already spent the first twelve months of his life, the formative years of his infancy, living with his eighteen-year-old mom. His stripper mom. Who has a problem with meth, and more than likely used during her pregnancy. If we had tried to get a healthy newborn, we would have paid at least double. But we didn’t have that.”

“He’s certainly a cutie,” Mia said. “Do you mind if I hold him?”

Suddenly she remembered her dream from the night before. She had been in an empty house, walking long stretches of polished wood floor with sunlight streaming in through uncurtained windows, when she heard a baby crying. She could tell it was hungry. No problem, Mia had thought. She would find the baby and nurse it. But when she finally located the baby and picked it up, she realized she had no milk to give it. She was all dried up.

“Sure.” Gina handed him over, swamping Mia in memories. Brooke was only four, but she didn’t have the same warmth a baby did, the same smell. She held Wyatt so that they were eye to eye, and smiled. Wyatt’s face didn’t change. It was as if Mia wasn’t there.

Two kids didn’t make Mia an expert on anything, except knowing that every kid was different. But something about Wyatt felt . . . off. He seemed oddly heavy and floppy. She perched him on her hip, but his heels didn’t dig into either side as her own kids’ heels had done, some mammalian reflex that told a baby to hang on.

Mia did the math based on their earlier conversation with Martin. Wyatt was probably around fifteen months old. “So is he walking yet?”

“No.” Gina didn’t elaborate. Instead she said, “You said you were from the District Attorney’s Office. That’s where Colleen worked.”

“Yes.”

“So you knew her?”

“Yes.” Mia didn’t know where this was heading, so she kept her answers short.

“What did she say about me?”

“She really didn’t talk about you very much.” That was true, at least recently. In the beginning Colleen had despised Gina, obsessed about her looks, her age, the lies she must have used to lure Martin in.

Wyatt held his hand out in front of his face and began to turn it back and forth, back and forth, his eyes fixated on the rhythmic movement.

Gina said in a rush, “He never makes eye contact. He repeats the same sounds over and over. He flaps his hands for hours. He’s constantly flicking his ears and tongue. The doctors say it’s too soon to know for sure, but they think he’s autistic.”

“I’m so sorry,” Mia said, and Charlie mumbled his apologies. She looked down at the baby’s face again, his blank blue eyes. Her heart broke for Gina. For Martin. And for Wyatt.

And a little for herself. She had made a doctor’s appointment for Brooke, but she hadn’t been able to get in until next Tuesday. What if Brooke’s nighttime screaming fits were caused by something awful? A brain tumor? Epilepsy? Childhood schizophrenia? Bad things happened. Happened even to kids. Wyatt was proof of that.

How long would it be before she was just like Gina—irrational, sleep-deprived, angry, and broke?

“He needs play therapy, speech therapy, all kinds of therapies,” Gina said. “He’s going to need a lot, and we can’t afford to give it to him. But we have to. He’s our son. We can’t turn our back on him. This is our life now. Even if it’s not at all what we planned on.”

“So you went over to Colleen’s house on Sunday night,” Charlie said in a soothing voice. “To make her understand.”

Gina nodded, then scrubbed her face with her palms.

Mia froze. Gina had done it. She had really done it.

“I just wanted to ask her to think of our poor boy. Her own child’s as healthy as a horse, and Violet is now an adult for all intents and purposes. And Wyatt’s just a baby. But they’re both Martin’s children.”

“You just wanted her to listen,” Charlie said.

Gina’s expression was anguished, her lips trembling, the whites showing around her eyes. “Have you ever made a mistake? Made a mistake and then realized it was too late and there was no way to undo it and your life was ruined forever?”

“So you took the gun with you?” Charlie said, still in the same soothing voice.

Gina’s eyes widened as if the full import of what she had done had finally sunk in.