A Matter of Trust

Chapter 6





Mia walked Charlie downstairs. To compensate for her suddenly wobbly knees, she kept a firm grip on the handrail.

“So you’re going back to Colleen’s?” she asked.

“Yeah. I need to get a search warrant so the crime-scene techs can do their thing.” He ran a hand through his hair, somehow managing to leave it even messier than it was before. “Sure you’re gonna be okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Charlie tilted his head and looked at her without speaking.

Mia laughed a little, surprised she was capable of it.

“Of course everything’s terrible. I mean, Colleen’s dead and Brooke just had the worst nightmare I’ve ever seen. But my family is safe. And if the past couple of months have taught me anything, it’s how important that is.”

Sadness pulsed through Mia at the thought of her little family, just the three of them. It was like she had lost a leg but had somehow gotten used to hopping and lurching, grabbing on to whatever she could for balance while still feeling the ache of the phantom limb.

Charlie held out his hand. “Give me your keys. I’ll have someone run your car back here tonight and put the keys through the mail slot.”

Her car. Mia blinked. She had completely forgotten that it was still parked on Colleen’s block.

“Oh, thanks. That will be twice you’ve saved me tonight.” Only where were her keys? She patted her flat pockets. The entry table was bare. “The thing is, I don’t remember where I left them.”

Charlie opened the door and there was a telltale jingle. The keys were still dangling from the lock. He pulled them out. “Be sure to lock up after I leave.”

Mia felt a flash of irritation. She wasn’t so far gone that she would see him out the door and then forget to throw the bolt. And to have Charlie, of all people, giving her advice about being cautious. She knew her annoyance was irrational, her subsiding adrenaline looking for an outlet, but it felt right.

“Don’t worry, I will.” It was all she could do not to roll her eyes, like Gabe at his worst, but Charlie didn’t seem to notice.

“I’ll be in touch tomorrow.” He took his own keys from his pocket.

After turning both locks on the door, she climbed the stairs. Brooke was still asleep, curled on her side, breathing evenly. Gently, Mia closed the door.

She tapped on the door to Gabe’s room. He grunted in answer. When she went in he was looking at Facebook.

She put her hand on his shoulder, then leaned down to hug him. When he stiffened, she straightened up.

“Look, Gabe, about tonight . . .”

Her son kept his eyes on the computer screen. “What?” How was it possible that a single syllable could contain so many layers of disdain and anger?

“I just want to say I’m sorry about what happened. What I asked you to do.”

“Okay.” He still hadn’t turned in his chair. Hadn’t looked her in the eye.

Mia took a deep breath. “Colleen didn’t say anything, did she? Before she . . . she died?”

He bit his lip. “No. There was just that weird sound of her breathing. And then even that”—Gabe hesitated for a long time, and Mia’s heart broke a little—“that stopped.”

“Oh, Gabriel.” She touched his shoulder, and he shrugged off her hand.

His voice twisted. “I was listening so hard, just, you know, hoping she’d start breathing again, but all I could hear was some classical music. And then Brooke started screaming.”

“Maybe I should have stayed here. All I could think was that maybe there was a possibility I could help her.” She sighed. “I’m sorry that I just ended up leaving you to deal with everything.”

“Yeah, I know, Mom.” A flick of the eyes, not quite an eye roll. The vulnerability had disappeared.

Thinking about her last conversation with Colleen, Mia gestured toward his Facebook page. “You know not to say anything about this, right, Gabe? It’s an active murder investigation.”

“Mom! What do you think I’m going to do, put it on my status update?”

“I was only making sure,” she said, hearing a whine creep into her voice that was more appropriate to someone Gabe’s age or even younger. How had everything turned around so fast? She had meant to comfort him, compliment him. Now all they were doing was irritating each other. “I’m going to bed soon, and you should too.”

He nodded. Mia thought it likely they were both lying. There was no way she could go to sleep now, not after everything that had happened. She needed to get some distance from it, find a way to let some of the adrenaline dissipate. It was all too much—the house, the bills, Colleen dead, Brooke’s nightmare, Gabe’s standoffishness.

Maybe she’d get something to eat. She wasn’t at all hungry, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that food would help quiet her thoughts. It seemed like most people couldn’t resist chocolate, ice cream, cookies, candy. Mia liked sweets just fine, but she didn’t crave them. Instead it was Ritz crackers that called to her, Pringles, Doritos coated with spicy powder that turned her fingers orange. Scott used to joke that Mia had been born with a salt tooth.

She went back down to the basement, planning to grab one of the bags of Kettle potato chips she had hidden in the Rubbermaid cabinet behind a twenty-five-pound bag of basmati rice from Costco. A few weeks earlier PCC Natural Markets had had a special, so she had bought a half dozen bags of chips with flavors like Backyard Barbecue and Loaded Baked Potato and squirreled them away.

She told herself it was a bargain, but it was like an addict stocking up on crack cocaine because it was on sale.

At the bottom of the stairs Mia stopped. The plastic tub she had pried the lid from just before Colleen was shot, the one that had revealed Scott’s little secret, was still open. She didn’t have the energy to think about it tonight. After snapping the lid back on, she lifted the tub back into place. Just one more thing Scott hadn’t quite been honest about.

Just one more hard truth she had learned since he died.

Back upstairs she sat at the dining room table with the bag of chips in front of her. Now that Scott was gone, no one really ate in here. Their house had a dining room nobody used, a living room she only dusted, and a family room that lived up to its name. She faced the sideboard that displayed a framed, enlarged photo of her family, the four of them on a beach in Kauai.

Two weeks after that photo was taken, Scott had died in a single-car accident after meeting with a client.

She ripped open the bag and stuffed a chip into her mouth. “I can’t do this, Scott,” she whispered around shards of chip. “It’s too much.”

He kept smiling, his eyes hidden by sunglasses. One arm was slung around her waist while the other rested on Brooke’s shoulder. Gabe stood a bit to one side, as if already anxious to flee the family unit.

Mia and Scott had just . . . fit. Like two puzzle pieces, they had filled in the empty places of the other. Scott was methodical. Mia more impulsive. Scott came from a stable family. Mia only dreamed of one. At college freshman orientation they ended up seated by each other, and after that they hadn’t looked at anyone else.

And now Scott was dead and everything was a mess. Mia put another chip into her mouth. How could she be both mother and father when it felt like half of her had died along with Scott?

Brooke would never remember her dad. Gabe was going to have to find his way to manhood without his father’s advice, or even his presence.

She shoved three chips in at once. The crunch, the salt, the spices, the way they immediately turned to mush on her tongue—it answered some need. Or numbed it.

She reached for another handful.

And now Colleen was dead. And something terrible had happened to Brooke. And all Mia had were questions with no answers.

There was nothing to do with the energy and the emotions. Nothing to do but eat.

Mia knew she was eating her feelings. So what? It made her feel better. Emptied out her mind. As long as she was chewing and swallowing and licking spices from her fingers, there wasn’t room in her head for thoughts.

She had talked about it with Colleen only a few days ago, complaining that her pants were getting hard to button. “Sometimes you just need a good food coma,” Colleen had said with a smile that pushed up her plump, ruddy cheeks until they nearly obscured her blue eyes. Colleen loved to eat too.

Had loved to eat.

They had met when Mia joined the King County Prosecutor’s Office right out of law school. She liked Colleen right away, first as a mentor and then as a friend. Colleen called herself a lifer. She had never worked anywhere else. Divorced, with one daughter, she was funny, smart, kind. Honest and real.

Mia had kept working after Gabriel was born, but after Brooke’s birth a month too early, Scott had asked her not to go back, citing Stan’s murder as just one reason. Mia had listened in something of a daze. Even though she had been on bed rest, the baby was so little. Not even five pounds. Brooke nursed and slept for a few minutes and then woke again, mewling.

Scott had left his accounting firm to start his own business two years earlier, and now, he pointed out, he was making good money. And hadn’t they both agreed that these years were so important?

Mia said yes. Colleen had congratulated Mia with her mouth and asked questions with her eyes. Questions Mia couldn’t answer.

For the last four and a half years Mia had put the nutritious food on the table, washed and ironed the clothes, taken Gabe to football practice and Brooke to Tumble Tots. And if there were times she missed putting on her suits, missed arguing in front of a jury, missed the challenge and the struggle of putting together a case, well, everything was a trade-off, wasn’t it?

Then Scott died and Mia learned that Scott had been juggling trade-offs too. There had been far fewer clients to notify than she had thought. Now Mia wondered how often Scott had sat in his rented office space and only pretended to work. She had been lucky to get rehired at King County. She was sure Colleen had had a lot to do with that, even if she denied it.

A lot of staff had turned over in the time Mia was away. If you really wanted to make good money—or you had to, because of the law school debts you were carrying—your ultimate aim was to work in the private sector. Lawyers often started at the county, picked up a few years of experience, and left. Many a defense attorney bragged about the “insider knowledge” they had gained before crossing over to the other side.

But when Mia returned, Colleen was still at King County. In the two months since she started back at work, their friendship had blossomed again as if she had never been away.

And now Colleen was dead. Stan and Colleen. Was it possible that their deaths were related?

The two had been a study in contrasts. Every time Stan had a big trial, he lost thirty pounds in what was known around the office as the Slavich Trial Diet. He simply forgot to eat. He grew a beard for the same reason. For Stan, life had been black-and-white. The people he prosecuted were guilty and deserved to be punished. He didn’t rest until they were behind bars for the maximum sentence he could get.

Colleen saw the shades of gray. For certain defendants, the ones who had grown up with no dads or a string of them, people who had never had a single decent role model, Colleen had exercised her discretion as a prosecutor, tried to find solutions that didn’t leave them without a chance of turning their lives around.

Mia felt sorry for whoever got assigned to investigate and prosecute Colleen’s case. It would be high-profile, nonstop. She remembered what Colleen had said only a few hours ago about Frank. He would want this solved before voters went to the polls.

As Mia reached for another handful of chips, a car pulled up in the driveway, followed by a second.

She froze, even as her heart began to beat wildly. Footsteps echoed on the porch. Who was it? What was wrong now?

She jumped as keys clattered through the mail slot. For the second time she had forgotten about her missing car. She tiptoed to the front door and peeped out. Charlie. Getting back into a patrol car. He hadn’t delegated this errand but done it himself. Her earlier irritation was gone.

Charlie Carlson had always been prone to a generous interpretation of the rules. Early in her career, his actions had even resulted in one of Mia’s cases being thrown out and Charlie being reprimanded. Charlie, for reasons of his own—or for no reason, you never really knew with him—had flushed Mia’s case down the toilet. Even though he had been reprimanded, she had never quite forgiven him.

Tonight, though, she appreciated how he had bent the rules for her, not even hesitating to leave a fresh crime scene when he thought her children were in trouble.

She reached into the bag for more chips but found only crumbs. Folding the bag down as small as she could, she stuffed it into the garbage. Then Mia went upstairs to bed—but not to sleep.