Sense of Deception

  No, what bothered me was what breaking the rules would do to Oscar’s conscience. He was a decent, hardworking, honest agent, and I worried that this one incident could be a slippery slope.

  Now was probably not the time to talk about it, however, and I settled for hopping in the front seat as Oscar slid in next to me and we headed out.

  For most of the forty minutes back to downtown, Dennis yelled, swore, and threw a pretty good hissy fit, demanding to know what he’d done wrong. Where we were taking him. Who we were. Why we were kidnapping him. He lectured us on his civil rights. On the Constitution. On being innocent until proven guilty. He threatened to sue us. To have our badges taken away. To have us thrown in jail. He said he knew people. Important people. People who knew people.

  For all of the ride back, Oscar said not one single word. I took his lead and kept my trap shut too, but it was disconcerting to have a guy handcuffed in the backseat making such threats when I knew we were the ones currently skirting a fine line with the law.

  At last we’d parked in the underground garage of the bureau’s downtown office and Oscar yanked Dennis out of the car and pushed him along up the stairs to the office.

  As we came through the door, it was interesting. Every person in the large open room stopped talking and looked up. The place got eerily quiet except for Dennis, who started yelling up a really great storm, making his performance in the car look like a modest dress rehearsal.

  Dutch came forward out of his office and edged over next to me. “Hey, Edgar,” he said quietly. “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, you know . . .”

  “The usual?”

  “Yeah. Just another Friday.”

  “Good, good,” he said. Then he motioned with his chin toward Oscar and the prisoner. “What’s the story?”

  “He’s the guy who killed Noah Miller,” I said. And then my conscience got the better of me and I carefully added, “And when we confronted him at his work, Oscar believes he threatened us with a pocketknife he carried in his back pocket, which is clearly a direct violation of his parole.”

  Dutch eyed me with narrowed eyes before turning that same look on Oscar. I couldn’t tell if there was disapproval there or acceptance. “I see,” he said, his tone giving no further clue as to how he felt about what I’d pretty much revealed.

  “It’s our only chance to question him about Noah,” I said quickly, before he could demand that Oscar cut Dennis loose.

  Dutch waved an arm toward the pair just down the aisle from us. “Then by all means.”

  I blew out a breath and hurried after Oscar, who was turning right toward the only interrogation room we had. (Ours was mostly a cold-case bureau.)

  By the time I caught up to them, Oscar had Dennis shoved into a chair. He then made eye contact with me, nodded toward one of the other chairs on the opposite side of the table, and took a seat right across from Dennis.

  I slid in next to Oscar and waited for him to begin. Oscar started by clicking on the microphone in the center of the table, took out a small card from his shirt pocket, and began to read Dennis his Miranda rights. Dennis glared hard at him. “What the hell, man?” he said when Oscar was done. “I didn’t do nothin’!”

  “Oh, but you did, Slip. Didn’t you?”

  Dennis had gotten himself good and worked up with all that yelling in the car, being handcuffed and hauled off to the bureau offices, and for all of the time since I’d met him, his face had been flushed and sweaty.

  The second Oscar called him “Slip,” Dennis’s face drained of color, and I swear most of the sweat all but evaporated from his skin.

  “Naw, man,” he said. “Naw. That ain’t me, okay?”

  “No?” Oscar asked him as he stared him down. “We heard that’s what you liked to call yourself, bro. Slip. You slip in and out of homes before anyone knows you’re there, right, Slip?”

  “Stop callin’ me that,” Dennis said.

  “Why, Slip? You afraid that name might be associated with something you don’t want to be known for?”

  “Dude, I mean it,” Dennis said. “Stop callin’ me that.”

  Oscar shrugged, like maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. Dennis squirmed in his chair. Some of the color had returned to his cheeks, and I seriously thought he was going to start freaking out again. Especially if Oscar called him Slip one more time.

  My radar had been all over Dennis since we’d sat down. I expected to see certain things in his energy, but it was more what I didn’t see that puzzled me. So I reached out and put a hand on Oscar’s arm, and said, “Dennis, you know we’ve got you for a parole violation, right?”

  “Aw, man! I use that knife for work! And you know it!”

  “Oh, I’m not talking about the knife, honey,” I said. “I’m talking about the fact that you haven’t obtained certification from TxDOT for a welder’s license, and you’ve never applied for one. Which means you forged one. Which means you’re guilty of fraud. A direct violation of your parole, and a probable misdemeanor at best.”

  Dennis swallowed audibly. “I needed a job, man!” he shouted. “And they won’t let you get a license if you’ve got a record!”

  “Ah,” I said. “Yeah, that is a conundrum.”

  “A con what?”

  “Problem. But see, that’s not even the biggest issue we have with you. The biggest issue we have is that we’ve recently come across some really interesting surveillance video of you stalking a woman and her young son.”

  Again the flush vanished from Dennis’s face. He stared at me with big wide eyes.

  “You were driving your uncle’s truck that day. You went to Home Depot. You met a young man named Noah. You put your arm around him—something that even eleven years ago was completely inappropriate—and when his mother confronted you and told you to stay away from her son, you made your way out of the store, waited for her to leave the parking lot, and followed her home.” The next ten seconds were totally silent. You could’ve heard a pin drop. Dennis seemed to be barely breathing, except that his lower lip began to tremble a little. “Didn’t you?” I asked softly. He pressed his lips together to still the trembling and refused to answer. “You did, Dennis. You sure did. How long did you stalk the mother? How many nights did you drive by and check out the neighborhood so that you could slip in from the open field behind the sub, creep into her backyard, head over to her son’s window, and—”

  “Lawyer,” Dennis said, cutting me off. “Now.”

  I opened my mouth to ask him if he’d want to reconsider bringing a lawyer into the mix, or if he might like to cooperate, but I didn’t even get a sound out before he leaned forward toward the microphone and said, “This is Dennis Gallagher. I’m being held by the FBI. My civil rights are being . . . uh . . . inpinged upon, and I want my fucking lawyer—right now.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  We came out of the interrogation room after moving a phone onto the table so Dennis could make his stupid call. Oscar didn’t seem rattled, but I was. Big-time. A lawyer would never let Dennis talk. Our last chance for Skylar seemed to be going up in smoke. “I shouldn’t have pushed him,” I said. “I should’ve eased into that whole thing more gently, or maybe I just should’ve let you take the lead and talk. God, I blew it!”

  “Hey,” Oscar said, putting a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Cooper, you handled that great. Really. I mean, did you see his lip quivering? I thought he was gonna start bawling like a little baby.”

  “What good does it do us if he clams up, Oscar? We had one chance at this, and I totally blew it.”

  Dutch appeared in the small hallway off the interrogation room and said, “How’d it go?”

  Oscar thumbed toward the door. “He’s calling his lawyer.”

  My husband grunted. “Did he give up anything useful before he lawyered up?”

  I shook my head, but Oscar
nodded. “The second we talked about a connection to Noah Miller, he almost broke. There’s something there,” he said. “And it looks like guilt has been eating away at him for the last ten years.”

  “His lawyer’s never gonna let him admit to anything,” I said.

  Dutch walked forward. “What else do we have him on?”

  Oscar looked Dutch in the eye when he said, “We’ve got him on attempted assault of a federal officer, and forgery, which isn’t federal, but it’ll still count against him.”

  Dutch rubbed his chin. “Well, that’s something,” he said. “The attempted assault on a Fed is the thing that could put him away for life. It’d be a third strike for him, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Oscar confirmed. “He’s facing twenty to life, mandatory.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to enforce that,” Dutch said.

  Oscar was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Yes, sir.”

  I stared at the floor and Dutch shifted subtly on his feet to move a little closer to me. “I’ll call Matt. Get him down here to talk him into leaning on Dennis’s attorney. We can hold him on the assault charge and hope he wants to cut a deal. I don’t know if Matt is gonna want to make a deal for information involving a state case that’s already been adjudicated, but we just handed him a major win on the Corzo case, so he might be willing to do us this favor.”

  “Thanks, honey,” I said to Dutch.

  He reached out and took my hand. “We’ll figure this out, Edgar,” he said. “Don’t lose hope.”

  Matt showed up before Dennis’s lawyer, about the same time Candice did, and Dutch, Oscar, Candice, myself, and Matt all gathered in the conference room to discuss the case.

  About midway through, Brice also joined us, and other than a nod to his wife, he didn’t interrupt as he took his chair and sat quietly while I finished telling Matt about Skylar and Noah Miller.

  It took a bit of time to go through it all, but I made my argument by laying out all that Oscar, Candice, and I had discovered in just a week of investigating the case, displaying the photos from the crime scene, and the photos Oscar and I had taken, and Candice had even brought along her laptop showing the video of Dennis following Skylar from the Home Depot parking lot.

  I ended by telling Matt that when we’d confronted Doug Gallagher—Dennis’s uncle—he’d confessed that Dennis had mentioned to him that he’d “never hurt that kid.”

  “What else could that be but a confession?” I asked rhetorically.

  Everyone in the room wore somber expressions, and Matt appeared to be intrigued but also a bit reserved. “So, let me get this straight,” he said. “You want me to press Gallagher’s attorney into making a deal on the federal charge if he’ll confess to murdering the little kid?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “We just want him to tell us if he followed Skylar from the Home Depot parking lot. There’s no way he’ll confess to murdering Noah. I’m sure of that. But if we can get him talking and go on the record about that day, then we can present him as an alternate suspect that the APD refused to investigate. And we can have Wayne Babson give us his witness statement about Gallagher’s confession to him at county, and that he’d gone and told Dioli about Gallagher, and that Dioli refused to even look into it.”

  “Still,” Matt said. “You’re asking me to push for information on a case where we have absolutely no jurisdiction. A case that has already been adjudicated, and where the defendant was found guilty at trial and at all of her appeals thus far. You really want me to play with that kind of fire?”

  “Yes,” Candice, Oscar, and I all said at once.

  “Yes,” Dutch said after a moment. I looked at him and hoped he could read the gratitude in my eyes.

  “Yes,” said Brice after another pause. That caught me by surprise. I hadn’t expected Brice to block our efforts, but I certainly hadn’t expected him to help sway Matt to work with us.

  Matt seemed surprised too. “Really, Brice?” he asked. “You want your neck on the line here too?”

  “The woman’s innocent, Matt,” Brice said. “I’ve reviewed the case and the new evidence these three have uncovered. I’m convinced.”

  My heart rate ticked up and I was filled with a sense of pride to be working for a man like Brice Harrison, who was as principled and decent a man as my husband.

  Matt shook his head. “You realize that if we push this, APD and the Travis County prosecutor’s office are bound to get royally pissed off.”

  Brice turned his palms up. “Que sera, sera.”

  Matt stared hard at Brice. “You need to really think on this, my friend,” he said. “You guys are a fairly small division. Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio have triple the guys you have and APD knows that you’re fairly small-time. APD also outnumbers you by at least a hundred to one. If you get a case that you need APD’s assist on, they could make life hard for you.”

  Brice leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “Matt,” he said firmly. “If the woman wasn’t down to her last appeal before being put to death, I might not push this, but she didn’t do it. And the guy who murdered her little kid and somehow managed to frame her is currently sitting in our interrogation room just waiting for the clock to run out. No way am I gonna let that happen without a fight. No way.”

  I was so moved by Brice’s declaration to stand by us that I wanted to get up out of my seat and go hug him. But that would’ve been totally inappropriate. Not to mention unprofessional. Yep. Really not the time, nor the place.

  “Aww, to hell with it,” I said, getting up from my chair to walk over and briefly hug my boss. He sat there very stiffly for a minute before he gave three pats to my back and said, “Okay, okay, Cooper. Now go sit down.”

  I wiped a tear, cleared my throat, and headed back to my chair. Candice reached out and took my hand, giving it a big squeeze. “Ya big softy,” she whispered with a wink.

  And you know what? I think my little emotional display did something to convince Matt, because when I again looked up hopefully to him, he nodded at me. “I guess I owe you one for finally giving us Corzo,” he said. “You really pulled that case out of the crapper, Cooper. So, fine. I’ll go to bat for you on this, but if we walk in there on the federal assault charge and you even flinch, Gallagher’s attorney is gonna smell blood in the water, and all leverage you have to motivate Dennis to confess his sins is gonna go down the toilet.”

  “Yes, sir,” Oscar said without batting an eye.

  I settled for really vigorous nodding.

  Matt stood up then. “Okay. Let’s play ball.”

  Dennis’s attorney arrived close to five o’clock. He’d kept us all waiting for several hours and the second he walked in, I swear my skin crawled.

  He looked like one of those slick TV attorneys who make their reputation and fortune chasing ambulances. His tan looked fake. His teeth were definitely fake. And I had my suspicions about the mound of hair at the top of his head too. He introduced himself as Jeffrey Bachman. “Not Jeff,” he said to us, as if we might dare be tempted by the abbreviated moniker. “Jeffrey.”

  He could’ve skipped driving that point home. I’m pretty sure the only name we’d use to address him going forward was also two syllables of the “douche” and “bag” variety.

  “Now, where is my client?” he demanded.

  Oscar showed him to the interrogation room, where we’d made sure to make Dennis quite comfortable with a few bags of chips from the vending machine, a candy bar, and an extra-large slush from Sonic. We’d also made sure to deny him bathroom privileges for the past two hours, ever since it became obvious that his attorney was taking his sweet-ass time.

  I had a feeling that Dennis and Jeffrey weren’t gonna spend their time together making idle chitchat.

  Sure enough, ten minutes later the door opened again and Mr. Douche Bag announced that his client had to us
e the men’s room.

  “Sorry,” Oscar said, thumbing over his shoulder to the restrooms just down the hall. “They’re working on the plumbing. Bathrooms are out of order.”

  Jeff’s eyes narrowed. He was on to us. “Then I must insist that he be allowed to use the building’s restroom.”

  Oscar made a face. “Yeah, sorry about that too, sir. Maintenance has the water turned off in the whole building. You can check if you want. There’s a public restroom out the main door and down the hall on the left.”

  We’d put up an OUT OF ORDER sign and turned off the water leading to that toilet mere minutes before good ol’ Jeff had arrived.

  Bachman glared at Oscar before turning his steely eyes to me. And that might have been because I was having to work really hard to hide a smile. Clearing my throat, I said, “You know, the sooner we can all sit down to chat, the sooner we’d be inclined to walk your client down to the local gas station, if he’s really that bad off.”

  Jeff checked his watch. “Fine,” he said. “Where’s your guy?”

  “Matt Hayes,” I said, referring to our assigned federal prosecutor. “He should be here any second. . . .” I made a point of looking at my watch. “I mean, he was here earlier when we were all waiting for you, but then he had to leave. Hopefully traffic won’t be too tied up and he can get back here soon.”

  There was a noise from inside the interrogation room, and if I had to guess, I’d say that Dennis’s bladder might be ready to explode.

  Jeff squared his shoulders and said, “While we wait for Hayes, why don’t you take my client to that gas station?”