LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Thirteen

      April 13, 4 p.m.

      Port Orchard

      Donna Solomon did not fit the profile of a mother of a prostitute. She had never had any problems with men, drugs, or the law. To look at her was to see the very image of professionalism and personal accountability. At fifty-two, Donna worked as a charge nurse in the maternity ward of Harrison Medical Center in Bremerton, a job she’d held for more than fifteen years. She was a round presence with stick legs and a slight bulge around her tummy and a butt far bigger than she wanted. Heredity, she figured, thinking of her own mother and the scourge of a large buttocks and piano legs. She worked out four days a week at the Port Orchard Curves, doing a mild weight circuit and twenty-five minutes of cardio to Moby songs. Her butt was always going to be big, but she didn’t think it had to get any bigger. And yet despite all the things she tried to do to better herself—Curves, continuing education classes at Olympic College that had nothing to do with nursing and the New York Times crossword puzzle online every day—she had her hard luck too.

      She divorced her husband, Zachary, after their adopted daughter, Marissa, put them through the wringer in ways that no parent could or should endure. Marissa had set a fire in the kitchen when she was six, run away from home at ten. By thirteen there was no more room for pretending that there was anything they could do to be the close family they had desired when they had brought her home in a private adoption from a Russian orphanage.

      Donna Solomon rarely spoke of Marissa, although hospital administrators and other nurses at Harrison would happily have lent a sympathetic ear. When Marissa, who stopped using her given name in favor of Midnight Cassava, was arrested in a Bremerton Police Department prostitution sting at a local park, she was given her second chance. It turned out she wasn’t the target of the sting, but a Bremerton cop had been. Midnight was one of the chief witnesses in a case and ended up with a lightning-fast plea deal.