Sense of Deception

  “Oh, bullshit,” I spat, and threw the paper into the trash can. “He’s got squat and he knows it. I’ll bet he’s trying to get a confession out of him as we speak! And this poor kid is an exchange student from China, where the police can torture a confession right out of you. I’ll bet Cheng’s not even aware he can ask for a lawyer and stop the interrogation.”

  Candice seemed to light up at that statement. “I’ll bet you’re absolutely right,” she said to me, turning on her heel to head out of my office.

  “Hey!” I said. “Candice? Where’re you going?”

  “To make a call,” she replied from somewhere deeper in the suite.

  “But I’ve got Skylar coming up for a video chat in thirty seconds!” I yelled.

  Candice said something, but I couldn’t take it in, and in the next moment my computer made a ringing sound. I hit the space bar, and the screen jumped to life, pixelating for a moment before filling with the image of Skylar Miller.

  I waved at her and tried to shrug off my irritation with Dioli. “Hi, Skylar,” I said. “Thanks for taking my call.”

  Skylar’s face held very little expression. It wasn’t that her features were flat and withdrawn, more that she put no energy into visually expressing what she was feeling. It gave her an intensely serene aspect, and I will admit that it made me a bit self-conscious. “Cal said you were still intent on working the case,” she said. It was less a question and more a statement of fact.

  “Yes. We’ve got some promising leads.”

  Skylar nodded and her serene expression never wavered. It made it difficult to tell if she believed me. “I’m assuming you want to hear my side of the story,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, and moved my mouse over to an icon I had on my desktop. Clicking it, I said, “Skylar, I’ve just hit the Record button on my computer. I’d like to record this discussion if that’s okay with you?”

  “That’s okay with me,” she said.

  I made a motion for her to continue and she rested her hands on the desk where the monitor was presumably mounted. “Noah and I had had a busy week,” she began. “I bought my house from a builder who’d painted everything vanilla, which is so boring to live with, and Noah was really excited about the idea of painting the house. I was on a pretty limited budget, but I knew a guy at Home Depot who let me pick through all the paint that got returned from other customers, and it was practically free. Anyway, Noah was an amazing little helper. He picked up painting really fast, and we cranked out the whole house in about a week. I also found a duvet and sheet set for him at the thrift store that was still in its original packaging, and you should’ve seen the look on his face when I brought it home. He thought I’d actually splurged on him.”

  For the first time I saw the same sweet melancholy in Skylar’s eyes that’d been present at my first encounter with her. Her gaze was far away and there was such a heartbreaking soulful sadness that I felt my own eyes mist a little. She continued. “That day—his last day—Noah and I made a few final touch-ups to the paint job, then picked up all the drop cloths, brushes, and paint cans and stored them in the garage. I would’ve just left the place somewhat picked up and headed for the couch, but my son wanted the house to be perfect, so we spent an hour vacuuming, and dusting, and mopping, until it was neat as a pin.

  “After that, we ordered pizza and watched a movie together. Noah called his dad to say good night, and I took a shower. Then I ordered him into the tub and he got ready for bed. I’ll admit that I was so beat from that week that I went to bed at the same time he did.”

  “What time was that?” I interrupted.

  “Around nine,” she said. “I got Noah tucked in; then I vacuumed the hallway just so the house would be absolutely perfect when we woke up the next morning, and turned in. I think I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.”

  Skylar paused for the briefest moment and for the first time the mask of serenity faltered, and her mouth curled down as her lower lip gave a tiny tremor. She blinked, and recovered herself, but I’d seen the flash of gut-wrenching heartbreak across her face. That instant display of vulnerability and truth was enough to convince me that I was right to believe in her.

  “I woke up sometime in the middle of the night. I don’t remember what woke me. Maybe Noah cried out. Maybe the murderer made some noise. Whatever it was I can’t be sure, but I do remember sitting straight up in bed and feeling like something was off, even though I couldn’t say what. And then I heard something from Noah’s room.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Skylar shook her head. “A thump, or a bump. Something like furniture being knocked against the wall. I figured that Noah was having a bad dream and maybe he’d fallen out of bed. So I went down the hall and his door was closed. I remember thinking that was so weird, because Noah never wanted his door closed. We had a small night-light plugged into the outlet in the bathroom, and he liked that he could see it from his bed. Anyway, when I opened his door, I saw him on the floor next to the bed. I thought he was sleeping and I even laughed a little. . . .” Skylar’s voice broke off for a second. Another flash of heartbreak washed over her face, but it was also gone in a moment. She cleared her throat and continued. “I thought he’d slept right through falling out of bed,” she said. “I went over to him, got my arms underneath him, and that’s when I felt how wet he was. My first thought was that he’d wet himself, but as I was trying to lift him, my hand got sliced on something and I jerked my right arm back in a reflex. That’s when Noah made this . . . this . . . sound.”

  I didn’t want to ask, but I knew I had to. “What kind of sound, Skylar?”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “It was like a gurgle,” she said. “But also a sigh. I think it was his very last breath. He breathed it in my arms, but I was pulling away from him in that moment, reacting to the cut on my hand.”

  I bit my lip. Man. To live with that had to be killing her. “I’m sure in that moment, Skylar, he wasn’t aware of much besides maybe that his mom was there.”

  She didn’t look at me, and I knew that what I’d said was probably a little lame, but it was also perhaps . . . just perhaps . . . the truth.

  She inhaled a deep breath and continued with her story. “After I sliced open my hand, I was sort of starting to add things up in my head. The synapses were firing and I began to realize that Noah wasn’t asleep, that he’d been hurt, and he hadn’t wet himself, it was blood on my hand, and then I saw that the window was open, and it was all clicking so fast, but it felt almost slow, and then I realized that Noah wasn’t breathing. I put my hand back under him to feel his chest, and it was warm and wet, and I put everything together in that one instant.”

  Skylar’s eyes met mine. The mask of serenity was gone and her face registered something horribly haunted, pained, and terrible to witness. She dropped her chin and it was a moment more before she was able to speak.

  “I think I must have screamed,” she said quietly. “But I can’t quite remember if I did. I know that when I replay that moment back in my mind, I’m screaming my head off, but the truth is, I can’t be sure that I did. I do remember trying to lift him into my arms again, but he was totally limp, and slippery, and I couldn’t manage it for a second. And that’s when there was a noise from behind me. I think it must’ve come from the closet.”

  “What kind of a noise?” I asked. I knew it might seem like minutiae to her, but no detail was too small to leave out.

  She shook her head. “A rustling, maybe? And then the door creaked a little, and that was another one of those instant knowings. I knew my son had been stabbed and that the person who did it was still in the room.”

  “What’d you do?” I asked.

  She stared at me and the pain had returned tenfold to her eyes. I felt she was on the cusp of confessing something to me. Something she felt deep regret over. I waited and offered her a nod to let he
r know it was okay. “There was an instant before the intruder came out of the closet,” she said, her voice quavering, “where I could choose to take an extra few seconds to pick up Noah and try to run, or I could leave him and go for help.”

  Oh, God. Oh, God, poor Skylar. This poor, poor woman. “You ran,” I said when she fell silent with her shame.

  She dropped her chin again. “Yes.”

  “And that’s the only reason you’re alive, Skylar.”

  She didn’t lift her gaze, but she did reply, “What good was it in the end, Abby? I should’ve stayed with my son. I should’ve died with him. That way, I’d never go to my grave accused of murdering him. And we’d be together.”

  “True,” I said. “But something tells me Noah never would’ve wanted it to end up like that. He would’ve wanted you to run. To get help. To fight for the truth.”

  Skylar shook her head, her curly blond hair falling forward to cover her face. “He’s up there all alone,” she said, lifting her chin. “So I’m not going to fight too hard, Abby. I’ll give you this chance, but I’m not praying for a reprieve or anything.”

  Whoo, boy. “Understood,” I told her. Then I began to ask her a few questions, mostly about what Dioli had documented in the file. “You escaped the house,” I began, “running down the hallway and out the front door.”

  “Yes. The intruder came out of the closet and lunged at me, but I was already running for the door. I felt him grab my shoulder, but I managed to get out of his grasp and keep going.”

  I jotted myself a note. “And you never saw his face?”

  She shook her head. “No. It happened way too fast and the room was dark.”

  “But at some point while you were in the room you noticed the window was open.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you notice it? I mean, if the room was dark, then how did you know the window was open?”

  Skylar thought for a moment. “I heard the wind and felt the breeze,” she said.

  I nodded. If she’d been faking her answers, she would’ve gone for some visible clue, like that she’d been able to see the curtain fluttering by the light given off from the night-light in the bathroom. To give me what she heard and not what she saw meant she was remembering, not creating.

  I wrote myself a note and moved on to my next question. “At any point did the killer say anything to you?”

  Skylar shook her head. “No.”

  “Did you notice anything about him, like his height, or his weight, or even if he was wearing cologne?”

  Skylar stared off for a moment, then turned her attention back to me and said, “No. He was just a shadow. A shape. The boogeyman who came into my home and murdered my son.”

  “Okay,” I said, accepting that if there was anything else she could think of, she’d tell me. “Let’s talk about the knife.”

  Skylar shifted uncomfortably in her chair, but I pretended to ignore it. “The police say it came from your kitchen—”

  “It did,” she admitted.

  “You’re positive?”

  She nodded. “They showed me that knife a dozen times, Abby. It was my knife. It came from my kitchen drawer.”

  “A lot of kitchen knives look alike, though,” I said.

  She shook her head. “That knife was part of a culinary set that’d been a wedding present from my dad. In our divorce, Chris had actually been fairly generous. He’d not only given me my fair share of the household assets, but he’d also given up all of the wedding presents we’d gotten to complete the kitchen, because, between us, I’d always been the cook. Anyway, once I was out of jail, I’d furnished the house with my half of the belongings from the divorce, and it’d worked out perfectly because my house had been so small that I hadn’t needed much.

  “So that’s how I know that the knife came from my kitchen. I wish it hadn’t, but I have to be honest at this point—it did. It was my knife. It even had my fingerprints on the handle—the ones not smeared in Noah’s blood. That part of the prosecution’s case is ironclad, and I know it. So, somehow the killer managed to get into my house without any obvious signs of forced entry, take the knife from the drawer, then sneak back out and climb through Noah’s window to murder him, again without any sign of forced entry.”

  “Could Noah’s window have been unlocked?” I asked, remembering how easily the screen popped out.

  “No way,” she said. “Never. Noah knew never to open his window at night, and I always kept them locked. The area to the east of our sub was a little sketchy, and neither of us took that lightly.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to think up my next question. “Back to the knife, did you maybe notice it missing in the days leading up to the attack?”

  “No,” she said. “It hadn’t been. I remember using it that night to cut up vegetables for a salad to go with our pizza.”

  “So the killer got it out of the sink?” I asked, trying to figure out how the killer had first come by the knife.

  Skylar rubbed her temples. “No,” she said. “He got it from the drawer. I washed the knife and put it away right before the pizza got there.”

  And then an idea occurred to me. “Skylar, was there anything about the pizza delivery guy that maybe struck you as odd?”

  “It wasn’t a guy, Abby. It was a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl.”

  “Ah,” I said. “So, let me just ask you straight out. Do you have any idea who would want to murder your son?”

  “No. No one. Noah was the sweetest boy you’d ever meet. He was kind. He loved animals. He was polite. He’d strike up a conversation with anyone, and he’d help anyone too. He was a loving, caring, sweet, sweet boy.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “But now let me ask you a tougher question. Do you know anybody who might’ve wanted to hurt you by killing your son?”

  Skylar sighed. “That’s something I’ve had to ask myself a thousand times since that night,” she said. “I mean, until I quit drinking, I was a total mess, and I probably did make some enemies, but I just can’t picture anyone I know hating me enough to murder Noah. I’d been clean and sober for almost four years by that time. Who would hold a grudge that long before acting? If they’d wanted to hurt me, they could’ve done it at any given time when I was struggling to get it together, living in some dicey neighborhoods. I was an easy mark until I started working the program. It doesn’t make sense that someone would pass up so many opportunities to hurt me if that was their goal.”

  I jotted a few more notes before I went to my next question. “Skylar, my associate and I met with a man you used to date. Wayne Babson. Remember him?”

  Her brow furrowed. “Wayne? He’s still in town? How’d you find him?”

  I looked her steady in the eyes. “Through Rico DeLaria.”

  Her breath caught. “Oh,” she said, and a flush tinged her cheeks. “So you heard about that, huh?”

  “Yes. And I’m not judging, Skylar, please believe me. But Rico’s a pretty dangerous guy. He attacked my partner with a knife yesterday, as a matter of fact.”

  Skylar’s eyes widened. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s ducky. He’s in the hospital because he brought a knife to a kung fu fight.”

  Skylar pursed her lips and there was the barest hint of mirth there. “Sounds like your associate can take care of herself.”

  “She can. And sometimes she also takes care of me.” I glanced up for a moment and saw Candice leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed over her chest, and an amused smile on her lips. “Anyway, we met briefly with Wayne, and he says that shortly before the verdict came in against you, he was approached by a man serving time for breaking and entering. This man went by the name of Slip, and he may have known you.”

  Skylar’s brow dipped again. “I’ve never heard of a guy named Slip.”

  My radar said she
wasn’t lying. “He suggested to Wayne that he felt you had disrespected him in front of your son and that he might’ve gotten even by teaching you a lesson. Can you think of any stranger you might have somehow offended while your son was with you right around the time he was murdered? Maybe it was another driver you cut off. Or maybe it was a rude shopper at the grocery store. Anyone come to mind?”

  In an instant Skylar’s face became deathly pale and she laid her hands flat on the desk as if her equilibrium was compromised. “Oh, my God,” she said. “The guy at Home Depot!”

  “What guy at Home Depot?”

  Skylar was breathing hard and she’d started to sweat a little. It looked like she was having a panic attack. “Oh, my God!” she whispered. “Oh, my God!”

  Candice came fully into the room and around the desk to peer at the computer screen. “Skylar?” she said in a loud firm voice. “I’m Candice Fusco, Abby’s associate. Listen to me. I’m going to start counting from one to four over and over, and you need to breathe in time to my counting. Can you do that?”

  Skylar’s eyes were wide and panicked. She was gripping the table, and barely seemed to hear Candice. My BFF began counting, somewhat rapidly at first until she was sure she was keeping up with Skylar’s inhalations; then Candice slowed the pace bit by bit until it was at a calm, even rhythm. “Better?” Candice asked.

  Skylar nodded. “Yes . . . thank . . . you.”

  “Feel up to telling us about this guy at Home Depot?”

  Skylar looked sick. She was pale and there was an almost greenish pallor to her face. “Noah and I had gone to Home Depot one morning to get some paint supplies,” she said. “While I was talking to my friend at the store who was hooking us up with free paint, Noah wandered off. I was panicked when I realized he wasn’t next to me, and ran up and down the aisles looking for him. I finally found him in the tool section talking to some guy, and the guy had his hand on Noah’s shoulder, leading him along the aisle. I was so scared about having lost sight of Noah and then seeing this total stranger with his hand on my son. . . .”