A Matter of Trust

Chapter 34





Mia Quinn. Tipsy. Well, Charlie supposed he couldn’t blame her. What with everyone she loved being dead and all.

Taking off his jacket, he settled on the grass next to her. The ground was cool and slightly damp, but the air was warm enough to offset it. Warm enough that he could pretend summer wasn’t over. Mia’s short-sleeved black dress set off her golden skin. Earlier, her blond hair had been pinned up in a tight bun, but some of it must have snagged on the bark of the tree she was leaning against. Pieces now curled softly around her throat.

“I talked to Vincent,” Charlie said. “He said that he was at home Thursday and Friday nights.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I’m leaning that way.” Which was about as good as it got for him. “I’m still gonna pull his cell site location records and look for any cameras that might have caught the guy you saw at the university or at the football game. The thing is, I can’t see why Vincent would have wanted to attack you before we even talked to him. And then there’s the matter of the locations. If I wanted to harm someone, the UDub parking lot after dark wouldn’t be a bad place. At a high school football game, though, doesn’t make much sense. Which makes me wonder if it was even the same guy, or if we’re putting the wrong spin on things, seeing patterns that aren’t really there.”

“Don’t you mean me?” Mia narrowed her eyes. “That I’m putting the wrong spin on things?”

“I didn’t say that,” Charlie said mildly, although he had thought it. “And it would be natural for you to be a bit jumpy. A lot’s been going on in your life.” He looked around. “Where are Gabe and Brooke?”

“My dad’s watching them.” She lifted the glass to her lips and took another sip. “I’m thirty-seven years old and I’m still relying on my dad to do things for me.”

“Yeah, but you’re also lucky that you still have him in your life and that he wants to help you out.” Both of Charlie’s parents had been dead for years.

“Oh yeah, Charlie, I feel lucky. Real lucky.” Her eyes skewered him. “My best friend is dead and my husband is dead and I’m broke. Scott was always promising me that we would spend more time together. But it turns out the reason he was so busy was that he was juggling our finances. And then when he died, all the balls got dropped. I’m just trying to pick up the pieces.”

He pointed at the bottle. “Mind if I share that with you?” Mia certainly didn’t need any more.

She shrugged. “I don’t have another glass.”

“That’s okay, I don’t need one.” Charlie picked the bottle off the grass and took a swig. Shifting his weight, he tugged his shirttail free, then wiped the neck before passing the bottle back to her.

Mia gave him a cockeyed smile, then raised the bottle to her own lips, forgoing her glass, and took a long swallow. So much for keeping some of it out of her system, Charlie thought. Now she seemed bent on competing with him. But she didn’t have his leathery liver to protect her.

“And meanwhile”—she raised the bottle toward him in a mock toast—“I’m teamed up with this homicide detective who wants to go riding off like some cowboy. And I’ve got to keep reining him in.”

“So you’re saying I’m really the horse?”

“All right, I’m mixing my metaphors.” She poured a handful of sesame cashews into her palm. “I’m just saying he’s just not interested in doing everything by the book. Like almost getting in a fistfight with a suspect at the victim’s funeral is probably not on anyone’s list of proper investigative techniques.”

“I was breaking up that fight, not starting it.” Charlie pushed away the memory of how his vision had narrowed until all he could focus on was Reece’s face. And how all he had wanted to do was see it bleed.

“And didn’t you tell me you took home Stan’s murder book? I’m pretty sure those aren’t supposed to leave the office.”

“Every homicide detective would be in trouble if we really got dinged for that.”

Mia finally cut to the chase. “Okay, then what about the last time we worked together? When you screwed up my case?” Grabbing another handful of cashews, she began to chew furiously.

Charlie had wondered when she would bring this up. Before answering, he tossed a cashew in the air and caught it in his mouth. “That was a long time ago. Donny Jackson has been dead for years.” Donny had died from an overdose after making a career, if you could call it that, of burglarizing small businesses. “Things have a way of taking care of themselves.”

“Taking care of themselves?” Mia sat up, eyes narrowed, jaw clenched. She didn’t look so soft and pretty—or even so tipsy—anymore. “What, so you thought it didn’t matter that you screwed up my case, because eventually karma would take care of it?”

“Why don’t you tell me what you think I did that was so awful?”

“You know what you did.” She gritted her teeth and exhaled. “We knew Donny was behind the burglary of that computer repair place. We got a search warrant for his house, and we found the computers he had stolen. And then Donny said he had seen you take something, and you wouldn’t say what it was, only admit that you had taken it. And of course the case was thrown out. Everyone always said you must have helped yourself to a laptop or two. If the union hadn’t stood behind you, you would have been out of the force. But no, pretty soon all was forgiven and forgotten. But I never forgot.” Mia spit the words at him. “When I saw you eating Colleen’s candy the other day, I was reminded of that all over again. About how you never think about the consequences of your actions. You just think about yourself.”

Her misplaced anger slipped past his guard. “Is that what you really believe? That I’m some petty thief no better than Donny? Okay, Mia Quinn, you want to know so badly, I’ll tell you. Not that you need to know. Not that you deserve to know. When we went through Donny’s house, I found the computers he’d taken in the robbery. I also found a bunch of pictures of a girl. Let’s call her Liz,” Charlie said, which was actually the girl’s name, although she went by Elizabeth now. “You can imagine the kind of pictures they were. But since those pictures had been taken, Liz had gotten off the street and out of the life. She was respectable, and no one in her new life knew about her past. She had a responsible job at a bank, a husband, and a new baby girl. And I knew if those photos got entered into evidence, the cops would track her down, and it was possible she might lose everything. So I took them. And then when Donny said what he did, I told the truth. I said I had taken something from his home that wasn’t directly related to the case. I didn’t do it knowing the case would be dismissed. But I figured tomorrow was another day, and Donny was for sure gonna steal again, but that girl, when was she ever gonna get another chance?”

Mia bowed her head, put her hand over her eyes, and was silent for a long time. When she spoke, all the anger had leached from her voice. “Why didn’t you tell me what was really going on?”

“I was trying to keep it a secret, Mia. The more people who know something, the less chance it will stay a secret.”

Mia shook her head. “But then secrets just come back around to bite you, Charlie. Look at Scott. He thought he was protecting us by not telling me how bad things were. But he wasn’t protecting us at all. He let his life insurance lapse, and he didn’t tell me. He didn’t tell me much of anything those last few months. He didn’t have enough clients, and some of them were starting to look like they were never going to pay, but instead of talking with me about it, he just pulled away from me.”

“He probably didn’t want to worry you,” Charlie said. “He probably hoped he could fix things and you would never know.”

“I feel like the last year of our marriage was nothing but a big lie. He betrayed me in so many ways. He’d supposedly been sober for three years, and yet last weekend, when I was on the phone with Colleen, I found a bottle of whiskey hidden in the basement.”

Charlie didn’t point out the irony of Mia’s wine bottle. “Was the seal broken?”

“What?” She wrinkled her nose. “No.”

“Look, people who are alcoholics hide liquor all the time. With my second wife, I used to find bottles hidden in the back of the bathroom cabinet, in her laundry hamper, in the bag of birdseed. Just because you found a bottle doesn’t mean your husband was still drinking. It might just have been one of his old backup cache bottles he’d forgotten about.”

Mia’s shoulders relaxed a bit. Then she must have run back over his words in her mind. “Second wife?” She raised one perfectly arched eyebrow. “How many times have you been married?”

“Three.” Charlie let his head hang down a little, as if he were embarrassed. But it seemed to him that each marriage had had good reasons for beginning and good reasons for ending. Too young for the first one. They’d both been nineteen, and it had lasted five months. The second had gone three years, three years of Charlie trying to save her, and her not loving herself enough to want to be saved. The third one had foundered when she realized that Charlie’s job came first and probably always would.

“Three?” A little laugh spurted from Mia. “Scott and I were together for sixteen years. Things were rocky between us this last year, but I just figured things would come back around, because they always do. But I guess you never waited long enough to know that.”

“None of the divorces were my idea,” Charlie said, which wasn’t exactly true. He hadn’t fought any of them. He would never make a woman stay if she didn’t want to. He had seen what happened when a man did that.

And here Mia was acting like her relationship with Scott had been one for the ages, when just last night he was pretty sure he had caught her kissing that new public defender, Eli Somebody, under the hood of her car.

Mia picked up the wine bottle and tipped it over her glass. Only a drop came out. “Looks like it’s time for a refill,” she announced and stood up. Charlie caught a quick glimpse of her thighs and looked away. Maybe a little slower than he should have.

But Mia hadn’t noticed. Instead she was staring at something. Something across the street. He followed her gaze.

It was the white house that was for sale. On the top floor, one of the blinds was pulled halfway up.