Could the man in the morgue be Lihong? Mia’s stomach seized up as if someone had just kicked her. A bitter taste flooded her tongue. She dimly realized she was squeezing her cell phone so hard that it was hurting her fingers, but she still didn’t loosen her grip.
“How long did Doug say that body had been in the water?” she asked Charlie.
“He said if you’re fatter, you float sooner. But this guy was skinny. So a week, maybe two. No more than that.”
And the barista had talked to Lihong about ten days ago. Still, the place where the body had been discovered was at least a mile from the coffee shop. But who knew exactly where it had gone into the water? The current could have carried it a long way.
Mia remembered how Lihong had tried to tell her something about Scott promising to help. But the communication between Mia and the Chinese man had been so sketchy that she had never quite understood what Scott was supposed to have been doing.
Lihong had also said his boss was a bad person. Or at least that was how her five-dollar phone app had translated it. Judging by the mangled English it had given her when translating Lihong’s other words, its accuracy was more than suspect. But the idea had been underlined when Mia secretly witnessed Kenny Zhong, the Jade Kitchen’s owner, deliver a stinging slap to Lihong’s face. Now the memory stung her as well. She had honestly planned to follow up with Lihong, but then life had gotten in the way.
Less than ten blocks separated the courthouse from the morgue. It hardly seemed worth it to pull her car out of the parking garage. Outside of Mia’s window, the sky was the kind of pale gray that any Seattlite could tell you promised neither sun nor rain. At least no more than a sprinkle.
“I think I’m going to walk it,” she told Charlie. “It probably won’t take any longer than driving, and I need to clear my head. But if the jury comes back in while I’m there, could you drive me back?”
“I could drive you back either way if you wanted. See you soon.”
Mia shrugged into her coat and picked up her purse. Before she even made it out the door, three colleagues asked her if the jury had returned a verdict. She just shook her head and didn’t make eye contact, making it clear she didn’t want to talk about it.
It was a relief to be out in the cold air and away from familiar faces. Away from sitting in her office, time moving so slowly the clock might as well be ticking backward.
Every time she was waiting on a verdict, Mia entered a fuzzy zone where she couldn’t think about anything else. In another trial, when the deliberations had gone into their fourth day, she had gone to the grocery store, shopped, paid, walked out, gotten in her car, and driven back to the courthouse—leaving her bags behind at the store.
Knowing that the jury might be hung was like having a throbbing cavity in her mouth. No matter how much she tried to ignore it, her thoughts kept sneaking back to probe. Was the jury still hung? In whose favor? Why? Would Judge Ortega’s instructions shake things loose?
The idea of having to go through all the work again was disheartening. And next time Wheeler would know every one of her arguments and fine-tune his counters. With the help of Leacham’s deep pockets, he would bring in new and better experts. As for Mia, she couldn’t change the evidence. She only had the truth, and lies came in a million flavors.
As she walked over I-5 she thought about Eli. She was still in shock that Eli Hall—someone who was so upstanding that he sometimes seemed rigid—was not officially divorced, despite the way he acted toward her. She thought of how his face lit up when he saw her and how he dawdled after classes so that they would walk out to the parking lot together. He always insisted on opening doors for her and helping her on with her coat. But maybe that was simply the way he treated women. And the time he had asked her to brunch? He had never actually said the word date. Maybe she was the only one who had seen it as one. She didn’t know whether she was angry or disappointed—and if so, who those emotions were directed at.
And then there was Charlie. The two men didn’t have much in common, except Mia. In fact, they were like some sort of reverse mirror image of one another. Eli had close-cropped blond hair; Charlie’s was dark and worn as long as his bosses would let him get away with. Even more than a decade out of the service, Eli had kept his military bearing, while Charlie just switched from one slouch to another.
Both men were devoted to justice, but in very different ways. That military aura of Eli’s was more than physical; it showed in his systematic approach to life. Charlie played by the rules only as far as he thought they made sense.
Both, she sometimes thought, wanted to be something more to her than a friend. But maybe she was as deluded about Charlie as she evidently had been about Eli. Maybe friendship was all either of them wanted. Or should want.
At the morgue, she showed her ID. Charlie came out to meet her and then brought her back to where Doug was waiting next to rows of galvanized-steel body refrigerators.
“I understand you might know the identity of our floater,” Doug said.
Mia nodded. She only had eyes for the closed steel doors.
He pulled one open, releasing a wave of cold air and a smell so thick it was almost a taste. It was rotten and sweet and ultimately indescribable, furring her tongue. Doug slid out the top shelf, revealing the body of a young, skinny Asian man.
The Y-incision in his chest had been stitched closed with thick black stitches. Mia forced herself to focus on the young man’s face, not to think about how he had been taken apart and reassembled. Even though the eyes were closed, the lids sagged over what seemed to be empty sockets. His face was not only scraped and battered, it was also starting to decompose.
She had only seen Lihong twice. At night. In the dark. When both of them were nervous, jumping at every sound. When they were focusing on trying to communicate, not on what the other person looked like. Focused on their lack of connection, their frustration.
Now they would never connect. But was this Lihong? She looked at the man’s wreck of a face, tried to match it up with her memories—and found that she didn’t know.
“These are the burn marks on his wrists.” Doug lifted the dead man’s wrists to show her.
“The thing is, I can’t tell if it’s him or not. It could be. Or it could be someone else. This guy’s face is just too”—she sought a word besides disintegrating—“damaged.” She looked from Charlie to Doug. “I’m sorry if I wasted your time.”
With a shrug, Doug slid the body back and closed the door. “It’s not a waste if it would have helped narrow things down. Because right now we don’t have much to go on.”
“I think our next step is to go back to the Jade Kitchen,” Charlie said to Mia. “See if Lihong’s there. And if he’s not . . .” He let his words trail off. “So do you want a ride back to work, or do you want to walk it?”
She wasn’t sure she wanted to be alone with her thoughts again. “How about a ride?”
After saying good-bye to Doug, they walked out to Charlie’s car. “It’s strange,” she said, “to think that a couple of weeks ago that guy, whoever he was, was walking around, breathing, talking.”
“Are you thinking about Scott too?” He clicked the fob to unlock both doors and climbed in.
She was thinking about Scott, she realized, as she waited for Charlie to lean over and relocate a half dozen discarded fast food wrappers scattered on the passenger’s seat. With a sigh, she got in. “It’s just hard to believe that you’ll never see someone again, at least not in this world.”
As she turned to buckle her seat belt, Charlie’s eyes met hers. He was so close, she involuntarily caught her breath. He didn’t move, his eyes studying her. She met his gaze for a second, then turned away.
Charlie broke the silence. “You didn’t see Scott’s body before it was cremated, did you?”
“Everyone told me it was a bad idea, with his face so broken.” For a moment she pressed her fingers to her lips. “The problem is that you only get one choice, and you’ll never know if it was the right one.”
“That describes a lot of life,” Charlie said as he started the car.
He was just pulling up to the courthouse when Mia’s phone rang. It was the judge’s clerk, telling her the jury had sent out another note. Her mouth went dry as chalk.
“That’s it, Charlie. They’re hung. I know it. They’re hung. It’s going to be a mistrial.”
“You don’t know that,” he said reasonably. “It could be they’re just asking for clarification on something.”
But even Charlie didn’t sound like he believed it.