If life was like a play, then the director had the ultimate power. The power to blight men’s lives, or to give them what they most longed for. Even the power to utter the ultimate yes or no.
Tonight was a special engagement. One night only. Never to be repeated. The stage was a hundred-year-old two-story house, lit from top to bottom as if electricity cost nothing. The director watched from the quiet residential lane. At the director’s side was the killer. It was a walk-on role with no dialogue.
Now for the lead actress to make her entrance.
Anticipation grew, thrumming like a bow string.
But where was she? Ah, there. In the basement by the window, phone clamped between ear and shoulder, pulling a box from a shelf.
The director nodded, and the killer raised the gun.
The lead bent over and set the box on the floor. Then she knelt beside it, dropping from view before the killer could take aim.
The director motioned for the killer to wait. Exhaling slowly, the killer lowered the gun.
“It was all right there on Facebook,” Mia Quinn said into the phone as she tugged at the lid on the blue plastic eighteen-gallon storage tub. “Darin’s dad made screen captures in case anyone tries to take anything down. He showed me a few of them.”
“Facebook is God’s gift to prosecutors,” Colleen Miller said. “A couple of months ago I had this defendant on the stand. He swore on his mama’s grave that he didn’t sell drugs and that he’d never even held a gun. Then I asked him to explain why, if that were true, he had a Facebook status update showing himself holding a Glock, smoking a blunt, and flashing a sheaf of hundreds.” Colleen laughed. “It was all over right there.”
“It’s hard to argue with proof that we can put right up on the screen in front of the jury.” Mia finally managed to pry off the lid, revealing fishing supplies: a tan canvas vest, a tackle box, and a reel.
There, that wasn’t so hard, she told herself. This stuff can go in the garage sale, no problem. The cold from the basement’s cement floor seeped through her old jeans, worn soft as flannel. Outside, the dark pressed up against the windows, half set in the ground. Summer had passed in a blur, and now winter was coming.
Colleen said, “I love how defendants can’t help but post incriminating pictures of themselves flashing gang signs and all the stuff they’re not supposed to have. Now if only we could get our witnesses to stop using it. You know the other side is checking it as much as we are.”
As prosecutors for Washington’s King County District Attorney’s Office, Mia and Colleen didn’t get to choose their clientele. The hard truth was that sometimes the victims and the witnesses they built a case around were only a little bit better than the bad guys they were trying to put away. This was blue-collar law, not white-shoe. It was down and dirty, blood and guts, real people as opposed to companies squabbling genteelly over money.
But being a prosecutor also meant you made a real difference. Which was why Mia had been glad to go back to work at the same office she had left nearly five years earlier, even if the reason she needed to return was terrible.
“When I left, I don’t think we were checking the Internet nearly as much.” Still on her knees, the phone pressed up against her ear, Mia dragged over another box from the nearest shelf. No matter how much she didn’t want to face this, it had to be done. “Now everyone Tweets or has a blog or at least a Facebook page. Even my dad is on Facebook, although his picture is still that generic blue silhouette.”
Mia pulled the lid from the second box. It held the vintage black pin-striped suit Scott wore when they got married. In the wedding photos he had looked all ears and teeth and Adam’s apple—too young to be getting married. Over the years he had fleshed out to the point he complained about love handles.
Underneath the suit was a cardigan his mother had knit him in college, cream colored with two stags rearing on the back. He had never worn it. The sweater and the suit were like so much else down here, stuff Scott had never quite parted with.
“A lot changed while you were gone,” Colleen said. “Frank’s the district attorney, the murder rate is lower than it’s been since 1955, even though the economy is in the toilet, and now a killer is likely to be some crazy guy with a grudge and a bunch of guns and a plan to take out a whole restaurant full of people. And of course everyone’s on the Internet now, even bad guys. Right before you came back I prosecuted a guy who claimed he didn’t even know the victim. Only I found photos of them together on his friend’s Flickr account.” Colleen’s low laugh was tinged with sadness. “If there’s one thing this job has taught me, it’s to turn over rocks—but sometimes you don’t like what you find underneath. Lately I’ve been thinking how flat-out ugly it can get when you start looking.”
Mia nodded, forgetting for a moment that Colleen couldn’t see her. A familiar smell teased her. And suddenly it was like Scott was right there in the room with her. She closed her eyes and imagined him pulling her to her feet, slipping behind her to lift her hair and kiss the back of her neck.
How long had it been since he had done that?
“Still there, Mia?” Colleen asked.
She shook herself. “Sorry. It’s like every box I open is a surprise package. How about you? Have you found anything you want to add to my garage sale?”
“I’m rooting around in my basement, but all I’ve found so far are some old albums. I’m talking vinyl. Do you think anyone would want Fleetwood Mac’s Rumor and Sigh?”
“You never know. I wish Gabe would start playing that instead of whatever it is he does listen to.” Even from the basement Mia could hear her fourteen-year-old’s music two floors above. Discordant, angry. It wasn’t singing so much as yelling set to a thrumming bass line and pounding drums.
Colleen said, “You know, you could probably get more if you put your stuff on Craigslist.”
Mia had thought about this when she sat up late at night with her computer and her calculator and her file full of bills. “Yeah, but then I’d have to set up meetings with every potential buyer. That takes too much time and just lets a lot of people know too much about me. A garage sale will get it all over with at once.”
“Still, before you go pricing everything at a quarter, let me come over and look through it with you,” Colleen insisted. “Some stuff might do great on eBay.”
“Sure.” Mia lifted her head and scanned the basement. It was overwhelming. Boxes and boxes and boxes, some filled with Scott’s old files. A bench and a rack of weights. Gray Rubbermaid cabinets, some of them filled with pantry items, others with cans of paint, plastic bottles of automotive additives, baby food jars full of screws. And what about Scott’s power tools? In the corner was an electric saw. That should definitely go before Gabe decided to make something one afternoon and sawed his fingers off.
Colleen cleared her throat. “And, Mia, I know things have been hard, so if you’re tight for money, I could maybe—”
Mia cut her off. “We’re fine,” she lied. The hole was so big that no matter what she threw in, it would never be filled up. Just like the hole in her heart. She returned to her original question, the one that had prompted her to call Colleen on a Sunday night. “I want to file against those kids,” she said. “I know you didn’t get a chance to look at them, but their posts were like weapons. It hurt me to read them. I can’t imagine what it was like for Darin Dane.”
Mia was still trying to figure out exactly how the politics of her job had changed, and it was easier to ask Colleen off-line without worrying if she was stepping on toes. “Darin’s dad has more than enough proof that these kids hounded his son to death. We can charge them with cyberstalking, harassment, violation of civil rights . . .”
“I don’t know . . .” Colleen’s voice trailed off. She had been the first to talk to Darin’s father but had ended up asking Mia to step in because her caseload was too heavy. “I just keep imagining what Frank will say.” Frank was Frank D’Amato, once just Colleen and Mia’s co-worker, now the King County prosecutor. He prided himself on the office’s winning record. But key to that record was taking on cases you couldn’t lose. “This kid was fragile to begin with. He’s been in counseling since, what—since he was eleven or twelve? Frank will say his demons were all in his head, not at the school.”
“But those messages they posted about him were vicious. They said he was ugly, deformed, stupid, crazy. They urged him to kill himself.” Mia regarded the shop vac. If she kept it, what would she use it for? If she tried to sell it at the garage sale, would anyone buy it? Or should she just give up and haul it to Goodwill? And then there were the leaf blower, lawn mower, and extension ladder. She had never used any of them. Even before Brooke was born, Scott had taken care of the outside part of their lives. Now she would have to get over her fear of heights if she wanted to make sure the gutters didn’t overflow during Seattle’s rainy season. Which was pretty much November through May.
“Some of the posts said the world would be better if he were dead,” she continued. “It’s a hate crime. Darin was gay, or at least everyone thought he was.”
Her eyes suddenly filled with tears at the thought of Darin, the same age as Gabe, although the two boys could not be more different. And while she had no worries that Gabe was being bullied, Mia had made it clear to him that he had to show her his computer screen or share his passwords anytime she asked.
“Frank will say it’s normal for teens to have spats, to have hierarchies, even to ostracize one kid,” Colleen said. “And school’s only been in session for, what—two weeks? Frank will say that short of a time period isn’t enough to prove causality.”
Mia took a deep breath. “Yes, but these kids had been targeting him for months. And it didn’t let up just because school was out for summer. They were relentless, and the Internet made it easy to harass him around the clock. The only thing school being back in session gave them was easy access to his physical person. The autopsy found bruises consistent with his having been hit, kicked, and punched.”
The silence spun out so long Mia thought their connection had been dropped. Then Colleen said carefully, “You might need to be realistic, Mia. Frank’s up for reelection this fall. To win he needs a big war chest. And the kids you’re talking about, the ones who went to school with Darin Dane, also happen to be the sons and daughters of some of Seattle’s richest parents. People who are software engineers, doctors, lawyers. They’re not going to let someone smear their kids, especially not right when they’re trying to get them into good colleges. And they’re not going to support a DA who lets one of his attorneys do that.”
“Doesn’t Frank want to do what’s right more than he wants to win?”
“Nothing is black-and-white,” Colleen said simply. “Nothing.”
Mia lifted the top from the next box. It was filled with Scott’s ski clothes. Just another hobby they hadn’t had time for since Brooke was born.
Mia lifted a pair of black ski pants and blinked in surprise at what she found underneath. It couldn’t be—could it? She pushed herself to her feet.
Mia must have made a little noise, because Colleen said, “Mia? Is something wrong?”
A head bobbed at the bottom of the window. There. Finally. She was getting to her feet.
At a motion from the director, the killer stepped out of the shadows, lifted the gun, and carefully lined the sights up on the white column of her throat. The director watched dispassionately. The lead wasn’t a person anymore, but she hadn’t really been one for a while, had she? She was a problem.
A problem that could be solved with a single twitch of the finger.
The director nodded, and the killer pulled the trigger.