Sense of Deception

  A whistle cut through the din of pool balls and background music and Candice and I turned to see Dioli waving at us from a barstool. Candice’s shoulders stiffened slightly, but she walked purposefully forward, and I was right at her side. We got to Dioli and he eyed her without a hint of malice or suspicion. “Miss Fusco,” he said curtly.

  “It’s Mrs.,” she corrected. “As in Mrs. Harrison, Detective. You remember my husband, don’t you? Special Agent in Charge Harrison.”

  Dioli didn’t even blink. He simply flashed her a toothy smile and said, “Hell of a guy. Met him when he came to rescue you from my clutches.” And then he laughed like he thought that was really funny.

  Candice stared him down and for a second I wondered if she was going to clock him. “Thanks for agreeing to meet with us,” I said to Dioli, hoping to remind everybody why we were there.

  He continued to smile at Candice like he was enjoying rattling her cage, and God bless my bestie, because she seemed to realize it, and with two deep breaths I saw her rein in her temper and pull out a stool to sit down on. Waving at the barkeep, she ordered us a round of beers. Once everybody had a cold one in front of them, I pulled out the file on Tuyen and opened it to the notes I’d scribbled under his notes at the bottom of the page. “She was definitely murdered,” I said. Closing my eyes, I put my hand to my throat and added, “I think she was strangled. And I’m sure you’ve already guessed that she was sexually assaulted too.”

  “That’s what we assumed,” Dioli said, a skeptical glint in his eye. “The ME said the hyoid was intact, though.”

  Dioli was referring to the small bone in the throat that often snapped as a result of strangulation. “I figured as much, but sometimes it doesn’t break,” I said, stating something that the three of us most certainly well knew.

  Dioli continued to look skeptically at me, and I could tell he was disappointed by what I was offering. Little did he know that I was just getting started. “Your suspect is a male, of course, and I’m definitely leaning toward light skin. I think he’s Caucasian, not Asian. I also believe he’s connected to Tuyen’s work and not the school. From your notes I see that you looked deeply into her peers at UT and even into her professors, but I feel strongly that her killer wasn’t connected to the school. Again, I feel there was a definite connection between them through her work.”

  Dioli scratched absently at his shoulder. “She worked part time at a dry cleaner’s,” he said. “We checked the owner and the two other staff members, who’re also all Asian, by the way. Not a parking ticket between them.”

  I pushed the file back at him. “Don’t know what to tell you, Ray. The killer is connected to her work. Go back and interview everyone again. Someone knows something. There’s a clue there.” He continued to sort of look at me blankly, so I offered him a hint. “Did you check out the customers at the dry cleaner’s?”

  Dioli barked out a laugh. “Yeah, we checked out the customers. All three thousand six hundred of them. Took us six months.”

  “And?” I asked when he paused.

  “And we found the usual mix of mostly law-abiding citizens mixed with some guys with minor criminal offenses, and three with what I’d call questionable criminal credits, but all those guys alibied out for the night Pham disappeared.”

  I frowned. My intuition was insisting that Dioli had missed something. “No other red flags?”

  “Nope,” he said, clearly disappointed by my intuitive prowess as a crime fighter.

  Then Dioli offered me a one-shoulder shrug and said, “I was hoping you were gonna get a hit off of Pham’s lab partner.”

  “Her lab partner?”

  “Yeah. A research student named Len Chen Cheng. No, wait, maybe it was Len Cheng Chen. They mix their names up over there, so I don’t remember which way is right, but he went by Len as a first name. Anyway, we heard through the vine that he and Pham shared a lab, and they didn’t get along. Might’ve been a cultural thing, her being from Vietnam, and him being from China, but either way there were witness reports of arguments for lab time. Pham was the better student, and Cheng’s alibi was paper-thin. Supposedly he was home alone at the time of Pham’s disappearance, and similar to Pham, he was kind of a loner. We like him for the crime, but we’ve been having a hard time coming up with any evidence to nail him.”

  I sighed. “That’s because there is none, Detective. He didn’t do it.”

  Dioli took a defensive posture. “How do you know?”

  I pointed to my forehead. “My intuition says no way. There’s something at the dry cleaner’s. The murderer has a connection there.”

  Dioli gave me a rather challenging look. “How about I get you the list of customers and you can pick a name out of that haystack?”

  I crossed my arms. “No problem.”

  Candice coughed into her hand. Clearly she didn’t think the idea of me poring over a list of three thousand customers was an effective use of my time. But I also had to consider that while I was doing Dioli’s job for him, maybe he’d be a little more open with the info we needed to clear Skylar.

  “I’ll get you the list Monday,” Dioli said, his demeanor somewhat dismissive.

  “Awesome,” I said. Then, before he could tell us to buzz off until Monday, I pulled out my notes from Skylar’s file. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, mind if I ask you a few questions about Skylar Miller’s file?”

  Dioli raised his beer and took a lazy sip. “Ask away,” he said.

  From my purse I got out the photo of the window with the void on the curtain. “Can I ask you how you guys were able to explain this void?” I asked, pointing specifically to the white area around the curtain.

  Dioli arched a skeptical eyebrow. “Sure. We determined it was caused by Skylar Miller as she was stabbing her son. She blocked the curtain from the spray.”

  I nodded, as I’d sort of expected Dioli to say something like that. “See, I was thinking the same thing, but then I saw this photo,” I said, digging again in my purse and pulling out the next photo of the wall with the blood-spatter pattern that otherwise would’ve been on the curtain. “See how the spatter is intact from the middle of the window all the way to the far left? There’s no break in it. Which tells me that Skylar couldn’t have been standing there when she stabbed Noah. The void was only present on the curtain.”

  Dioli shrugged, and turned his gaze away from me to the TV above the bar. It was obvious that he knew about the spatter pattern and hadn’t been able to convince himself of the explanation he’d just offered me. “The curtain could’ve been up on the bed,” he said. “Out of the way of the spatter at the time of the stabbing.”

  I considered the photo again, and the distance from the curtain to the bed. “See, now, that’d make sense, except for the fact that in this picture . . .” I dug into my purse again and riffled through the photos I’d been over a dozen times. Finding the one I needed, I pulled it out and laid it on the bar. “. . . it shows the bedspread had some blood spatter on it too. And there’s no void where the curtain would’ve fallen, and no spatter on the curtain.”

  Dioli turned to me again and his brow furrowed while his eyes glinted with suspicion. “Why are you so interested in the curtain?” he asked.

  “Because I can’t explain it,” I told him. “And I don’t like it when I can’t explain things like this. I need to offer the readers of my book a good explanation, Detective. Something reasonable that will firmly lay the blame at Skylar Miller’s feet. This is a loose end, and I’m seeing some problems with it.”

  “You can leave that part out of the book,” Dioli offered. “No harm, no foul.”

  I wanted to push back at him, but decided that it might arouse his suspicions and he’d shut down on me, so instead I simply nodded and put the photos away. “Good advice,” I said. “Now, can I ask you if you ever considered anyone else besides Skylar for the murde
r?”

  Instead of answering me, Dioli propped one elbow up on the bar and cupped the side of his head with his index finger and his thumb. “Why?”

  “Because the readers are going to expect that I’ve looked at and dismissed other suspects in the case in favor of Skylar.”

  Dioli gave me that lopsided shrug again. “We did look into other people,” he said. “Miller kept questionable company, so we looked.”

  Next to me I saw Candice lay her phone facedown on the bar. I had a feeling she’d hit the Record button. “Who specifically did you look at, Ray?”

  “A couple of Miller’s exes, and her pimp.”

  I blinked. “Her what?”

  “Her pimp,” he said, clearly enjoying the fact that he got to share that fact with me. “Before her trial for the DWI charge, she was let out on bond, which Chris put up for her, maybe because he felt a little guilty that he’d called the unis on her for driving drunk. So, he’d gotten her out of jail, but he’d had it with her drinking and wouldn’t let her live in the house. She found work on the streets and spent four months in the company of a guy known for running girls.”

  I felt a pang of sadness in the center of my chest. I wondered how desperately addicted you’d have to be to resort to that, and silently whispered my thanks to the powers that be that I’d never been hit with the addictions that’d possessed so many members of my family, including my father, an uncle, two aunts, and a few cousins. “So,” I said, trying to get over my shock at Skylar’s checkered past. “About this pimp . . .”

  “Guy by the name of Rico DeLaria,” Ray said. “Nice guy, if you like slime buckets.”

  I scribbled down the name. “I’m assuming you interviewed him?”

  “Yeah. Once we caught up to him. He’s pretty slippery. He didn’t have much of an alibi, but there didn’t seem to be a motive. At least not one as good as the one we had on Skylar.”

  “You mean the whole being cut off from child-support payments,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Dioli said. “I mean, along with jail, she’d spent time on the street. I doubted she wanted to go back to that life.”

  Candice leaned in. “But wouldn’t killing her son bring about that end anyway? Killing off Noah meant no more child support, which, according to the argument made by the prosecution, was her only reason for keeping Noah around in the first place.”

  Dioli adopted a sly smile. “You guys don’t know about the trust, do you?”

  “Trust? What trust?” I asked.

  Dioli polished off his beer and motioned to the bartender for another before he explained. “Chris Miller’s parents were loaded,” he began. “When Noah was born, they set up a two-million-dollar trust in his name. The trust went through a few changes over the years, and the one that was the most interesting was set in place not long before Noah was murdered, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The trust itself had some very specific rules attached to it. The first rule was that it could only be accessed by his legal custodial guardian when Noah turned sixteen.”

  “Legal custodial guardian?” I asked. “It actually said ‘custodial’?”

  Dioli nodded. “Not long into the investigation, we learned about the trust. Grant Miller, Noah’s grandfather, was dying of bone cancer, and his wife, Lynette, was in the first stages of Alzheimer’s. I got to meet with Grant only the one time, and I asked him about the trust, and he said that they’d never have chosen Skylar for a daughter-in-law, but he said that he’d been impressed with how she’d turned her life around, so he and his wife amended the trust to reflect that should she continue to provide a good and loving environment for Noah in the coming years, then she could also be trusted with his money.

  “Grant explained to me that she wouldn’t just be able to write herself a blank check—the trust would have the oversight of a bank officer and an attorney, and Skylar would be required to submit to random drug and alcohol testing from the time that Noah was sixteen all the way until he was twenty-one, so in order to access the money, she had to be clean and sober.”

  “I still don’t see how that’s a motive if she couldn’t have access to the trust until Noah turned sixteen,” I said. “He’d have to have been alive for her to get any money, right?”

  Dioli’s eyes sparkled. “Nope,” he said. “The trust had a provision that—and I memorized it, so I can quote it—‘if Noah dies before he reaches the age of twenty-one, and it is deemed that his death is in no way caused by any negligence, purposeful neglect, or act on the part of his legal custodial guardian, then all monetary funds available within the trust shall revert back to his heirs,’ and at the end of all this other legal mumbo jumbo it lists Skylar Miller, specifically, as one of Noah’s heirs.”

  “Wouldn’t it also have named Chris?” Candice asked, mirroring my thoughts.

  “Yeah, and it did,” Dioli said. “But he didn’t need the money. He inherited everything after his parents died. Two million bucks was chump change compared to what I heard his folks were worth.”

  “Who else did the trust name as heirs?” I asked, hoping for a creepy cousin or long-lost uncle.

  “Just Skylar, Chris, Grant, and Lynette.”

  “So,” I said, trying to figure out Dioli’s argument, “what you’re saying is that Skylar murdered Noah and claimed it was an intruder so that she could get ahold of the money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why wasn’t that argument presented at trial?” Candice asked.

  “Grant Miller had passed away by the time the trial rolled around two years later, and Lynette’s mental state was questionable at best by then. The DA didn’t want to make things too complicated, and they didn’t want Skylar’s attorney dragging Lynette Miller into court as a rebuttal witness. There was also the minor issue that they’d sent Skylar a copy of the trust’s provisions along with a notice she needed to sign saying that she agreed to the terms, including the drug and alcohol testing, and she never returned the signed agreement, so there was no way to prove that she’d actually read the trust. But come on, she read it. So in the end we stuck with the motive that she’d fallen off the wagon, and killed Noah because she was worried he’d rat on her and she’d have her child support cut off and get sent back to prison for the violation of her parole.”

  I scowled. The prosecution’s argument sounded even flimsier the second time I heard it from Dioli. “It still seems a little far-fetched, Ray.”

  “Hey, when it comes to money and an addict, Abby, it’s been my experience that they’ll try anything to get their hands on it. Especially when they’re looking at a million bucks.”

  Another pang of sadness went through me. As a recovering alcoholic, Skylar had never had a chance with this judgmental detective. “Was there anybody else you looked at for Noah’s murder?” I asked, wanting to move off the subject of motive and back onto other possible suspects.

  “Yeah,” Dioli said, adopting a bored expression. “We looked at a guy named Connor Lapkus for about a minute. Skylar and he dated right after rehab. Turns out she owed him some money but not enough to kill a little kid over, only a couple of grand. Anyway, he alibied out. He owns a machine shop off Lamar, and four of his homies say he was with them the night of the murder.”

  “Could they be lying?”

  “Sure,” Dioli said. “But it’s still a better alibi than Skylar’s. You get placed at a crime scene covered in the victim’s blood and leaving a trail of bloody footprints down a hallway, with your prints on the murder weapon, and any other digging we do is simply to arm the prosecution should your lame-ass defense attorney try to interject reasonable doubt.”

  I nodded like I totally agreed with Dioli, even though a big part of me wanted to punch him in the nose. “So, just Rico DeLaria and Connor Lapkus,” I said. “Nobody else in Skylar’s life could’ve had a checkered past?”

  “The only other guy we did a background check on w
as her neighbor down the street. A guy by the name of John Thomas, who’s a registered sex offender. Turns out he liked little boys about Noah’s age, and he spent a dime up in Dallas before moving in with his mother in Miller’s neighborhood. He didn’t have much of an alibi either: claims he was playing video games all night. He was introduced as a possible suspect by the defense at the trial, but he’s a guy who, since he’s been out, has met every single probationary protocol, and there were no witnesses that ever saw him and Noah within a hundred feet of each other. Plus, nothing in his past indicated any use of violence. The defense tried to bring him forward as a possible suspect, but the jury dismissed him outright. After we presented all of our evidence, there was no room for them to doubt our story. Skylar did it. It was a slam dunk, really.”

  Getting up from the barstool, I left a twenty on the bar and said, “Thank you, Ray. I appreciate the time.”

  Candice got up too, and as we were turning to leave, Dioli called after me, “I’ll have that list of names for you on Monday.”

  I waved a hand over my shoulder and didn’t look back. I was kind of sure that if I did, I’d give in to the urge to go back up to Dioli, and punch him in the nose.

  Chapter Nine

  We drove away from the bar and toward the city in silence. Mostly because I was fuming. It wasn’t as much that I thought Dioli was a bad guy as I thought he was a narrow-minded, pigheaded, chauvinistic son of a bitch who’d run roughshod over a woman reeling from the murder of her young son. He’d seen those bloody footprints in the hallway, and he’d made up his mind then and there. That was the one thing he couldn’t get over. Those damn bloody footprints and no sign of forced entry in the house. He’d ruled out an intruder within a few hours of being at the crime scene.