Murder One (3 page)

Sloane unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled the sleeves up his forearms. “Is there anything you don’t do well?”

“Parenting, apparently.” Reid turned her head and looked off, then back. “Sorry.”

“Is everything okay?”

She removed the sunglasses. “You don’t know, do you?” She seemed amazed by an unexpressed thought. “This has been so public, I guess I just assume everyone knows.” Sloane waited. “I lost my daughter to a drug overdose about seven months ago.”

The words brought the familiar hurt, a hollow, empty feeling that reminded him he was far from over the death of his wife. “I’m sorry. I took some time off; I’ve been out of the country.”

She looked on the verge of tears. “She was a good kid. It wasn’t her fault.”

He wondered if the overdose had been accidental or if Reid was simply protecting her daughter, a parental instinct.

She cleared her throat and sipped water. “Carly was a rock
climber . . . hiker . . . She loved anything outdoors, really. She and a friend were climbing, and one of her clips failed. She fell thirty feet before her safety rope caught. It jarred her back, like a whiplash. She had chronic pain and became addicted to Oxycontin.”

Sloane sensed the direction of the story.

“I didn’t know,” Reid said, her voice softening. “One of the hazards of running a large law firm. You think you can just throw money at problems and everything will be all right. I sent Carly to a facility in Yakima and thought that would be the end of it. What I came to learn, too late, is that certain people are predisposed to addiction. It’s part of their genetic makeup; they can’t help it. Carly would text me from college asking for money and say it was for a class or books. I didn’t think much of it. I always trusted her. But that’s just an excuse I use to get through the day. The truth is, I always had so much going on I didn’t have time . . .” She sighed again. “I accepted all the superficial evidence that she was back on track: honor roll, straight A’s, active in after-school activities.”

The waiter set two pints of Guinness on the table. Reid raised her glass and took a deep breath, regrouping. “Here’s to old adversaries and new friends.”

He touched her glass. She sipped the beer and used the napkin to wipe foam from her upper lip. Then, like a swimmer who had waded into cold water, she must have decided that having entered this far, she might as well get it over with and submerge herself.

“She was using the money to buy. When Oxycontin wasn’t available, she did something called ‘cheese.’” Reid explained that “cheese” was formed by combining heroin with crushed tablets of over-the-counter cold medications containing acetaminophen and is snorted. “The heroin content is usually between two and eight percent. Carly got a batch that was more than twenty.” A tear rolled down her cheek. She used the napkin to wipe it away. “She stopped breathing . . . the paramedics couldn’t revive her.”

As tragic as it had been to watch Tina die, Sloane couldn’t imagine the agony of a mother losing a child. It was against the natural order of things for a child to die before a parent, and he had read somewhere that a parent never gets over the loss. He wondered how
Reid found the strength to go on, and if she had been alone Saturday night because, like Sloane, she found it easier to be by herself than to pretend she enjoyed the company of others.

“The street dealer was a low-life, a punk. He’s sitting in the King County jail. The person I really wanted was a man named Filyp Vasiliev.”

Sloane recalled the name from an article on the front page of the metro section of the
Seattle Times
. “The guy who walked out of federal court last week. The car dealer in Renton?”

Reid’s voice hardened. “He’s not a car dealer. He’s a drug dealer. He uses his car dealerships to import the drugs and launder the proceeds.”

“What happened? How did he beat the charge?”

“You don’t want to talk about this now.”

Sloane sensed Reid did. “Only if you do.”

She drew a line in the condensation on the outside of her glass. “A King County sheriff—a canine unit—made a routine traffic stop, and the dog alerted for the presence of drugs. Turns out the driver had an outstanding warrant for assault. The sheriff arrested him and impounded the car, which had been purchased that day at auction and registered to Vasiliev’s used-car dealership. They found ten kilos of heroin in the spare tire. The DEA had been after Vasiliev for a while. They used the drugs to set up an operation that culminated in a raid of Vasiliev’s dealership. Judge Kozlowski ruled that the search violated Vasiliev’s Fourth Amendment rights. He threw out much of the evidence, too much to go forward.”

“Any chance of an appeal?”

She shrugged. “The U.S. attorney says she’s considering it, but you know how difficult the standards are to get a decision overturned.”

Sloane had no doubt Reid had discussed the issue directly with Margaret Rothstein, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, and wondered if it was the matter Governor Hugh Chang had been referring to.

“For weeks after Carly died I couldn’t function. Then I decided I wasn’t going to let her die in vain, you know? I found out that other states have what are called drug dealer liability acts. It allows for the use of civil laws and civil penalties against drug dealers.
Similar laws have been used to bankrupt hate organizations—neo-Nazi groups and skinheads. The rationale is, if you can’t put them in jail, you take all their property and get them out of the community. I’ve been lobbying the Washington legislature to enact a similar statute.”

“That would be a wonderful tribute to your daughter.”

“It doesn’t come close. She was so full of life; she could have done anything.” The muscles of her jaw undulated. “And a piece of shit like Vasiliev is living in a mansion in Laurelhurst, free to do it to someone else’s child.”

The glass shattered.

Beer splashed across the table.

Sloane slid back, knocking over his chair. He used his napkin to dam the flow of beer and took another napkin from a nearby patron to wipe at his shirt and the crotch of his pants. When he looked up, Reid, too, was wiping at her blouse.

That was when he saw the blood.

S
WEDISH
H
OSPITAL
E
MERGENCY
R
OOM

Looking more embarrassed than hurt, Reid avoided eye contact and touched the rust-colored bloodstains on her blouse, though it was well past saving. The hospital had the lemony odor of antiseptic, like a freshly cleaned floor.

“Am I a fun lunch date or what?”

The manager at Kells had wanted to call an ambulance, but Reid resisted. After Sloane applied pressure to stop the bleeding, he used butterfly bandages the manager provided to close the three-inch cut on the heel of her left hand, below the thumb. He wrapped it in gauze and accompanied Reid on the ten-minute taxi ride to Swedish Hospital, though she told him it wasn’t necessary.

“I’ve never left a lunch date behind,” he said.

In a strange way, the piece of glass, it seemed, had sliced through not only her skin but also the facade of control and composure she had undoubtedly developed from years of having to project herself
as the competent, successful businesswoman and lawyer. Sitting on the bed, her shirt and pants splattered with blood, she looked vulnerable, more the person Sloane thought she must be when she did not have to impress or entertain, when she let down her guard.

“You’re going to have to stop apologizing,” he said. “You’re the one who’s hurt, after all.”

“With no one to blame but myself.”

“I don’t know about that. We are lawyers, after all. I’m sure we could find someone to blame if we put our minds to it. Defective glass, perhaps.”

“Can I sue myself for stupidity?”

A hand specialist had stitched the wound after determining the cut had not severed any tendons or nerves. They awaited the paperwork to discharge.

“How does it feel?” Sloane asked.

She held up the wrap. “Given the size of the bandage, I wish I had a better story to tell at the office.” She smiled as if catching herself slipping back into Barclay Reid, attorney-at-law. “It’s fine,” she said. “Stings a little bit.” A tear escaped the corner of her eye and she wiped it away. “It hurts sometimes . . . you know?”

“I know.” And he did.

She cleared her throat. “You’re the first person who has said that to me that I didn’t feel like punching in the mouth.”

“Well, that’s a start.”

“How do you deal with it?” she asked.

He thought of the advice from the white-haired woman in the cemetery. “The best I can. Moment to moment. Someone once told me that time doesn’t heal all wounds, Barclay, it just deadens the pain.”

“I’m sorry about lunch.”

“We’ll reschedule. Never let it be said that David Sloane welched on a bet.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“No?”

“Let me make it up to you. I know a great restaurant. Let me take you to dinner.”

He shook his head. “Barclay, your hand—”

“It’s fine. My hand is fine. Please.”

“You’re sure? You feel up to it?”

“I’m sure. Good food, good wine . . . and no blood.”

Q
UEEN
A
NNE
H
ILL
S
EATTLE
, W
ASHINGTON

They took a cab downtown and Sloane retrieved his car, offering to drive Barclay home to change.

He angled the wheel and let the car roll until the tires nudged the curb, parking alongside a seven-foot wooden fence with Oriental trim and lanterns atop the posts. Bamboo stalks extended three feet above the fence line, and above the stalks he could see the upper floors of a modern glass and concrete structure.

Just north of downtown, Queen Anne was the tallest of the city’s seven “fabled hills.” At one time Seattle’s rich and famous resided there, building ornate Victorian homes, many of which remained untouched by developers. They reminded Sloane of the Victorians he had grown fond of while living in San Francisco.

At the wooden gate, Reid punched in a series of numbers on a keypad, and the lock buzzed. Sloane reached above her to assist in pushing open the gate, surprised by its significant weight. He let it swing shut, hearing it latch, but focused on the drastic transformation. Stone and moss footpaths lined by bonsai trees and Japanese maples meandered through the garden. Water babbled over rocks and trickled through a bamboo shoot into a koi pond surrounding a large boulder and, atop it, a pagoda. The tail of an orange and white fish flicked and darted, leaving ripples on the water’s surface.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

“I had to fight the city over the height of the fence. They gave in when I reminded them there was no limit on the height of the bamboo trees.”

“Why Japanese?”

“After college, I spent a year in the small village of my great-grandmother’s ancestors—Takeshi-muri, Chiisagatagun.”

“Easy for you to say. So you’re Japanese?”

“One eighth and proud of it, so don’t make any driving jokes, buster.”

Sloane raised his hands in mock surrender.

“I took a lot of pictures. I always wanted to build my own home, but I had to settle for doing a remodel.”

Sloane noticed rectangular boxes the size of Jake’s iPod mounted below each of the light fixtures and several more along the footpaths. Initially, he thought them to be solar panels, but that would be an ill-suited design for a city where gray skies dominated much of the year. He deduced them to be motion detectors.

A large Buddha greeted them in the foyer. The interior was also Asian decor: black marble, Oriental screens and fans, bamboo floors, plush furniture, and a white marble fireplace. Lanterns hung from the ceiling by nearly translucent wires, and recessed lights illuminated impressionist paintings on the wall.

“Be it ever so humble.” Reid shut the door, reapplied the deadbolt, and entered a series of numbers on a panel on the wall. “The alarm,” she explained. “I make it a habit.”

“You have motion detectors in the yard.”

“And on the doors and the windows. I’m a single woman on a crusade against drug dealers. I’ve made my share of enemies.”

She stepped out of her running shoes and left them in an impressive pile near the Buddha, exchanging them for slippers.

“Did you rob a shoe store?”

“When you’re running long distances, it makes a huge difference. They wear out quickly.”

She handed him a pair of slippers.

“House rule. The chef gets mad if you don’t.” She walked away, finishing the sentence with her back to him.

Sloane slipped off his shoes, considering her comment. He had thought she stopped to change clothes, but they weren’t going to a restaurant. He tried to cover his anxiety. “What, are you running a hundred miles a day?”

“Depends on my schedule.”

He joined her in the kitchen, where she used one hand to pull vegetables out of the refrigerator and put them on the black marble counter. “I was kidding. Tell me you’re not serious.”

“I do triathlons. The workout varies with the day of the week.” She handed him two bottles of Perrier.

He opened one and handed it back to her. “How do you find the time?”

“After Carly died, time seemed to be all that I had.”

Sloane knew the feeling.

She walked past him to a black wrought-iron staircase, climbing the concrete steps. “Make yourself comfortable. I’m going to change.”

Sloane sipped his water at a sliding-glass door leading to a small concrete patio that afforded a view of the Seattle skyline, the Space Needle nearly dead center.

“Much better.” Reid descended the staircase in a pair of black leggings and an extra-large gray sweatshirt with harvard in crimson across the front.

“The view is incredible,” he said.

She struck a pose. “Thank you, but what do you think of the skyline?”

He laughed. “The skyline isn’t bad, either.”

“Sounds like another of your ‘You look nice’ compliments. Hungry?” In the kitchen, Reid pulled two glasses from a cabinet and poured red wine. “The view is what sold me. I thought I’d prefer something with more land, but this just felt like it could be home.”