Sense of Deception

  Hurrying through the kitchen and into our bedroom, I found Dutch on his stomach, snoring softly while hugging my pillow. I debated with myself for a solid minute about waking him up before I shook his shoulder. “What’s happening?” he said, jerking to a sitting position and looking around blearily.

  “I need help,” I said.

  Dutch shot out of bed. Grabbing the gun he kept on his nightstand, he held it up with his right hand, and shoved me behind him with his left. “Intruder?” he said quickly. “In the house? Did you see him? Is he armed?”

  “Uh, cowboy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How about you ask questions first this one time, okay?”

  Dutch turned his head to look over his shoulder at me. “No intruder?”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Ducky.”

  Dutch blinked and glanced at the clock. “It’s four forty-five in the morning, Edgar.”

  I offered him my biggest, most apologetic smile. “There’s coffee.”

  Dutch made an indelicate irritated sound and moved to put his gun in his shoulder holster, which hung from the bathroom door. Yawning, he got back into bed, curled around my pillow, and pretended to ignore me.

  “I’ll make you breakfast,” I sang.

  He turned his head away from me.

  “And I’ll even do the dishes,” I sang some more.

  “Edgar?”

  “Yes, oh love of my life?”

  “Remind me later to call Cal and ask him for the name of a good divorce attorney.”

  “I will if you’ll help me,” I said sweetly.

  With a giant sigh Dutch pushed himself up to a sitting position again and switched on the bedside light. With drooping shoulders he said, “What is it that can’t possibly wait three hours on a Sunday?”

  I offered him the photo I’d pulled from Skylar’s folder.

  “What’s this?” he asked, with a yawn.

  “It’s a photo taken from Noah Miller’s murder scene.”

  “It’s a wall,” he said, eyeing the photo with no small amount of impatience.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s blood spatter,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  And then he dipped his chin a little to look a bit more carefully at the image. “And a void on the curtain.”

  “And on the window,” I said, moving over to one of our windows. Undoing the latch, I lifted the sash all the way up and took the curtain and shoved it up between the screen and the top pane to show him visually what I thought had happened. “The screen in that window is about an eighth of an inch too small to fit securely. It falls out with just a little prying. I think an intruder popped the screen, opened the window, and then maybe the wind pulled the curtain out, leaving a void right there.” For emphasis I made a hand motion around the left-hand portion of the wall where the curtain obscured the wall. “That’s how the blood spatter avoided staining the curtain and the window, but got the wall and the windowsill and everything else in that area.”

  “Could Skylar have had the window open while she killed Noah, then shut it after the deed was done?” he asked, rubbing his eyes to get the sleep out.

  “No.”

  “I like how you take the time to consider the scenario,” he said.

  “Actually, I have considered it, but I rejected it for three reasons. First, it makes absolutely no sense for Skylar to claim that an intruder killed her son, then shut the window to make it look like the intruder came in from . . . where? The front door? Or the sliding glass door? Neither of which had any obvious signs of forced entry. No way.

  “Second, what about the screen? It had to have been out for the curtain to have been pulled through and avoid the blood spatter, so how did it fall out, then get put back in? She couldn’t have reached over the windowsill to get at it, because there’d be blood all over the sill from her clothes, and she couldn’t have gone down the hall and outside to the backyard to put it back in, because there’s only one set of bloody footprints down the hallway, and they turn toward the front door, not the back.

  “And third, look at the curtain, Dutch. There aren’t any bloody fingerprints on it. If Skylar had pulled the curtain back through, somehow managed to replace the screen, and then shut the window to boot, where are all the bloody fingerprints? And yet, photos of Skylar at the scene show her hands smeared with blood. Did she kill Noah, wash her hands, pull in the curtain, replace the screen, shut the window, and then get her hands bloody again? It makes no sense.”

  Dutch looked at me, blinking a little. “I stand corrected. You have considered it. Carefully.”

  I came to sit down on the bed in front of him. “So, tell me something, Agent Rivers. If this here photo raises such huge red flags for you and me, then why didn’t it raise any red flags for either the detectives working the scene or Skylar’s defense team?”

  Dutch shrugged. “You know how circumstantial cases go, Abby. Once an investigation focuses on a suspect, anything that doesn’t fit the scenario becomes invisible or nothing but a distraction. We can never explain every single bit of circumstantial evidence at a scene. We go with a preponderance of the evidence to help us point the way to the killer, and I gotta be honest here, babe. . . . If I’d walked in on that scene with that little guy in the bedroom butchered like that and only one set of bloody footprints leading out from the bedroom, and his mother covered in her son’s blood with a knife from her kitchen with only her prints on it, I can’t say that I would’ve gone a different way than Dioli.”

  I frowned at my husband and lifted the photo out of his hands. “Yes, you would’ve, Dutch. You would’ve because not only are you a great detective, but it took you all of five seconds to pick out a discrepancy in one photo of the crime scene. And you did that half-asleep! These guys ignored a major piece of evidence because it was more work to go look for an unsub than it was to arrest the traumatized mother at the scene. That’s not overlooking evidence because there’s so much more in favor of another scenario—that’s ignoring the elephant in the room because you’re too fricking lazy to get off the couch.”

  Dutch sighed. “I don’t think it was laziness, doll,” he said gently. “I think that whenever you have the violent murder of a child, there’s a hell of a lot of pressure from up the ladder to solve the crime as fast as you can. And their scenario made sense to a jury, and to two appeals courts, who found Skylar Miller guilty, and then upheld that conviction.”

  “And because of their shoddy investigation, an innocent woman could get the needle,” I said angrily.

  Dutch put a hand on my shoulder. “Sometimes, innocent people become victims of the system.”

  I patted Dutch’s hand and got up off the bed. “I know. But it still sucks.”

  “Agreed. But now Skylar’s got the best advocate I can think of in her corner, and if you take that photo and your argument to Cal, maybe he can use it to get the appeals court to give her a new trial.”

  My brow lifted. “You think?”

  “Worth a shot.”

  I glanced at the clock. It was now only a little past five a.m. “It’s probably way too early to call Cal, right?”

  Dutch chuckled. “I think it’s too early to be awake period,” he said, sliding back down on the bed and wrapping himself around my pillow again. “Wake me in two hours for that coffee and breakfast you promised me.”

  Three and a half hours later I called Dutch’s cell. “Rivers,” he said, his voice froggy with sleep.

  “Hi, sweetheart. Listen, coffee and breakfast are in the kitchen, for you. I’m at the office waiting on Candice.”

  “You left?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not having breakfast with me?”

  “No.”

  There was a pause (in which I detected no small amount of
disappointment), then, “Okay. Call me later to let me know when you’ll be home and what you’d like for dinner.”

  “Will do!” I said cheerfully, then hung up.

  “You made Dutch breakfast?” Candice asked, sauntering into my office to drape herself elegantly into a chair.

  “‘Made’ is a rather loose term here,” I said. “But, yeah.” I’d set a package of powdered doughnuts on the kitchen table and a mug for the coffee that I’d prepared myself a few hours earlier next to the box. The coffeemaker had probably turned itself off by now, and the brew was likely to be cold, but when I’d promised Dutch coffee and breakfast, he hadn’t demanded that it be anything specific, so technically I figured I could get away with the bare minimum, especially since I had far more important things to do.

  “Is Oscar joining us?” Candice asked.

  I shook my head. “His niece’s quinceañera is today, so he won’t be able to join us till later if at all.”

  “Ah,” she said, crossing her legs and getting comfortable. “Then fill me in, Sundance.”

  I talked for the next hour, taking Candice carefully through everything that Oscar and I had discovered at Skylar’s old house, and then I showed her the photo of the blood-spatter void on the curtain and she took the photo and studied it closely without saying a word. At last she whispered, “Holy shit, Sundance. She’s innocent.”

  A small weight that I hadn’t known was even there lifted from my shoulders. It was one thing to convince others of my gut feelings, but when Candice got on board, it felt like charging into battle alongside Joan of Arc. “She is,” I agreed. “And if we don’t move quickly, she’ll die for the murder of her child.” I couldn’t imagine a worse injustice.

  Candice pursed her lips and tapped the desk with her index finger. Her usual “I’m thinking” pose. “We’ll need to cover multiple fronts on this,” she said, her eyes unfocused as I knew she’d be rolling through a list of bases to cover in her mind. “First, when was the last time you spoke to Skylar?”

  “Friday. I tried to reach her again yesterday on my lunch break, but she’d used up her two video calls for the week. I was told the next time I could videoconference her is tomorrow.”

  Candice cocked her head. “Besides you, who else did she talk to?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe her lawyer?”

  Candice nodded. “To fire him?”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “So we’re in a holding pattern on the legal front until Skylar retains Cal, is that right?”

  I sighed. “We are.”

  “Okay, well, that might not be a bad thing. The way I see it, we’ll need a whole lot more proof than just this one photo and the other oddities in the circumstantial case that Dioli missed or flat out ignored.”

  I squirmed in my chair. “You don’t think what we’ve got so far is enough?”

  Candice shook her head. “It might’ve been enough at the very first appeal, Abby, and it definitely would’ve been enough if Skylar’s defense counsel had done his job initially, but at this stage, I gotta tell you, it’s a long shot. This isn’t new evidence—it’s a spin on old evidence. Evidence already presented and argued upon at trial. I doubt the appeals court is going to buy the argument that just because the old evidence could be interpreted a different way, they should grant Skylar a new trial.

  “In other words, once you reach the Texas Supreme Court stage, you’re at the Hail Mary point, and you gotta have some very compelling evidence in hand, new evidence, or they’re gonna let you fry.”

  I gulped. “We’ve only got nine days left, Candice. What can we possibly dig up that wasn’t already presented at her first trial in time to save her?”

  “Don’t know,” she admitted. “That’s why we’re going to treat this case like it’s a brand-new investigation. We’re gonna look into Skylar’s life and find out who else could’ve done it. And I also think we need to accept here and now that Skylar had some sort of connection to the killer. An acquaintance, someone posing as her friend, an old enemy . . . someone who had a score to settle against her. No way was the crime committed by a random stranger. Noah’s murder was far too personal.”

  I pointed to the thick file on my desk. “In her initial statement to Dioli she swore for fourteen straight hours that she had no idea who could’ve invaded her home and killed Noah.”

  “And maybe that’s all true,” Candice said. “Or maybe she’s had ten years to think about it, and maybe all that time sparked a suspicion.”

  I frowned, thinking back to the brief time I’d spent with her in the cell. “I’m not so sure—and by that, I will totally agree with you that it was someone familiar with Skylar, because there was a hint of that in the ether around her when I was first pointing my radar at Noah’s killer—but when we spoke that first time in our cell, Candice, Skylar asked me if I could tell her who killed Noah. That’s not something you ask if you’ve formed any kind of opinion. If she’d asked me if so-and-so had done it, then I’d agree with you, over the years she would’ve formed a suspicion about who it could’ve been, but when I as much as said to her that she knew the killer, she stared at me in genuine confusion. I really don’t think she knows who did it.”

  “Well, then we’re gonna look at who was close to Skylar and maybe had something against her or her son.”

  I laid my head back against my chair. The world was a darker place than I liked to imagine it. “Who could’ve had anything against a nine-year-old bad enough to murder him in cold blood?”

  “I don’t know, Sundance. But in order to find out who the real murderer is, we need suspects. Someone knew how to get into that house and where that knife was. And if you’re right, and the knife was taken before Skylar vacuumed that hallway, that means he had access to the kitchen, either when Skylar and Noah weren’t home or when they were.”

  “You think it could’ve had something to do with her history?” I asked.

  “You mean the fact that she was an alcoholic?” Candice said. I nodded. “Possibly. Addicts like company, and if Skylar had overcome her addictions, maybe someone wasn’t too happy about that. Hell, maybe she even owed somebody money and they were pissed that she wasn’t paying up. We won’t really be able to isolate a motive until we look at a few people in her life that had means and opportunity.”

  “How do we start if we can’t talk to Skylar until tomorrow?”

  “We start with this,” Candice said, opening up the file to the statement Skylar had given to the police. “And we ask Dioli about who else he might’ve considered for the murder besides Skylar. While we’re at it, we also ask him about that window.”

  “When you say ‘we,’ do you mean ‘we’ as in ‘you and me,’ or ‘we’ as in ‘just me’?”

  “You and me,” she said. “I’m not gonna let that asshole intimidate me again. Plus, we already have the murder file. If he gets defensive, then so be it.”

  I sat back and chewed on my lip for a minute. “He wanted me to look into a case for him. That’s how I got the file.”

  “What case?”

  “Murdered girl here on a student visa. Found in Zilker Park about eight months ago. Dioli’s got no leads and due to the amount of decomp at the time the girl was found, the medical examiner isn’t even one hundred percent positive of a cause of death, so they’re labeling it suspicious, but Dioli seems pretty convinced it was murder.”

  “What’re your thoughts?” she asked me as I fell silent, thinking.

  “I think Dioli is likely to be more cooperative with us if I can give him a lead on the girl found in the park.”

  “Do you have the file?”

  I reached down for my bag and pulled it up. I’d stuck the file in there absently, and thank God I had. Opening it, I sorted through the notes and pictures. Candice leaned forward to peer at the file and I saw her make a face as one of the close-ups of the body slip
ped out. “Sweet Jesus,” she hissed, looking away.

  “I know,” I said, trying hard to ignore the photo. Finally I located Dioli’s notes, which were just a summation of the crime scene and all the leads they’d followed up on. I scanned the pages and as I did so, I clicked on my radar, allowing my sixth sense to travel over the file and seek out a clue, like a dog hunting for a scent. I closed my eyes to concentrate for a moment, and then I opened them again and reread Dioli’s notes.

  One sentence stood out. I took up a pen from the side of my desk and circled it. Then I lifted my phone and dialed the number that Dioli had left me on the front cover of the file. “Hey,” I said when he answered. “It’s Abby Cooper. I have a lead for you to follow up on for the murder of Tuyen Pham. When can we meet?”

  “We have to meet?” he asked.

  “Yep,” I said, without explanation. There was no way I was going to give up any information over the phone and lose my advantage.

  Dioli didn’t answer me right away. Maybe he smelled a trap, but at last he gave me an address and told me to meet him there at eleven. I hung up with him and pointed to Candice. “Let’s roll.”

  “He’s meeting us now?” she asked, getting to her feet.

  “Nope. In an hour. I figure that’ll give us just enough time for coffee and a pastry.”

  “I love how your stomach dictates our schedule,” she said with some mirth.

  “Hey, if I’m distracted by hunger pangs, my radar isn’t as effective.”

  “Oh, well, then,” she said dramatically, “by all means, let’s make haste to the pastry counter!”

  * * *

  An hour later we arrived at a bar that had definitely peaked sometime about three decades ago and since then had been gathering serious speed on its downhill decline. “Charming,” I said, popping the last of my Danish into my mouth before getting out of Candice’s car.

  Candice smirked and led the way to the wooden door. She had to pull pretty hard to get it to open, and we walked into the dim interior, alive with the sound of pool balls smacking against one another, country music wafting from a pretty crappy sound system, and the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke, which assaulted my nose. “And the charm continues,” I whispered while we scanned the faces of the patrons for Dioli.