A Matter of Trust

Chapter 43





Take cover!” Charlie yelled as he shoved Mia out of the way.

She scrabbled sideways, her eyes fastened on the gun. Her toe caught on a crack in the cement. She fell to one knee, her hands scraping across the cement. Not feeling the pain, she pushed herself back to her feet, stumbled off the porch, and scrambled for the car and whatever cover it could provide.

She couldn’t die. Not now. Not when her kids were so young. Not when they had already lost their father.

Crouching behind the front wheel, she risked peeping over the hood. Seth Mercer still stood in the doorway, holding the long gun with the barrel only a few inches from Charlie’s chest. Homicide detectives normally wore plain clothes—which meant Charlie wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest under his shirt. Over the years Mia had seen enough autopsy photos to know that at this range, Charlie would be dead the second Mercer pulled the trigger.

Only a few minutes earlier she had been sickened by Charlie’s admission that he had once been a bully. But now, as he stood nose to nose with a man bent on killing him, she knew she would do whatever she could to save him.

“You don’t want to do this,” Charlie said calmly. He had raised both hands. The one holding his gun was turned so that it pointed off to the side.

Yanking her phone from her purse, Mia dialed 911 by touch, then held it to her ear.

“911. Police, fire, or medical?”

“Police,” Mia half said, half whispered. “There’s a man holding a police officer at gunpoint.”

“What do you know about what I want?” Mercer said. His lips twisted into a sneer. “You don’t know anything.”

“What’s your location?” the dispatcher said in Mia’s ear.

“A trailer park between Seattle and Tacoma. It’s called the Something Pines.” Think, Mia, think! “Whispering Pines—no, Lonely Pines. Unit Seven.”

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.”