Sense of Deception

  I raised my hand feebly. “Me.”

  She placed two curled fingers to her mouth and bit down as tears welled over the edges of her lower lids and slid down her cheeks. She was one of those women who when they cry, become even more beautiful, and her pain was so raw and so real that I felt my own emotions stir. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.

  “Did he tell you?” she managed in a quavering voice.

  “Tell me what?” I asked.

  She took a shuddering breath. “He met with you, right?” she said. “Before he got shot?”

  I stepped forward again and took her hand. She was trembling so hard that I was worried she wasn’t going to be able to keep standing. “Elaina, is it?” She nodded. “Can we get you some water and have you come out here to sit in one of the chairs so we can talk?”

  “I’ll get it,” the older woman said, disappearing into the house. Candice and I eased Elaina over to the chairs and she sat down, still shaking hard, and the tears kept coming. Candice reached into her purse and offered her a tissue. She took it gratefully.

  We waited for the older woman—who I assumed was her mother—to come out and give her the water, and then she left us alone to talk. I sat on the chair next to Elaina and Candice sat down on the arm of the chair. I motioned for Elaina to sip her water, and she did, wiping her eyes again too. “You okay?” I asked.

  “He told me once that he wasn’t going to live to see his baby grow up,” she said, her voice breaking. “He knew.”

  I nodded and reached out to squeeze her hand. This had to be so hard on her. “We’re sorry that we’ve come at such a bad time,” I said. “But this is important.”

  “They’re gonna put that lady to her death soon, huh?”

  I kept my expression as neutral as possible. She knew about Skylar. “Yes,” I said. “They are. Dennis was going to help us, wasn’t he?”

  She blinked and fresh tears formed in her eyes. “He didn’t tell you?”

  I shook my head. “He tried, Elaina, but he never got the chance.”

  “That guy shot him,” she said, her lip quivering and her tone bitter.

  “Which guy?” I asked.

  “The guy he got the ball from. The guy who killed that boy.”

  Candice put her phone on the arm of the chair right next to her. It was facedown, and I knew she’d hit the Record button again. She then said, “Elaina, can you start from the beginning? We’re coming in here in the middle and we’re having a hard time figuring it all out.”

  Elaina wiped her cheeks with the wet tissue and took a deep breath. “I met Denny a few years ago. He was bad news. Like seriously bad news, and I wanted nothing to do with him. He told me that he fell in love with me the moment he saw me, and he wanted to change, to prove to me that he was worthy of a woman like me. I told him talk is cheap, you know?” Candice and I both nodded. We totally understood.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “my family and I are really involved in our church, so one day, Denny shows up for mass, and I’m all like, ‘Honey, you gotta try a whole hell of a lot harder than that!’ So the next weekend he comes to mass again. And then he goes with our church to help build a house for the homeless. And then he starts volunteering for the church, not, like, here or there, but, like, all the time. He helps to make repairs on the church, and he builds three more houses for the homeless, and he volunteers at the soup kitchen, and he helps out with the literacy program. This goes on for a while, and at the end of all that, he comes to me and he gets down on bended knee. We haven’t even gone out on a date, and he gets down on his knee and he says, ‘Elaina, you may not believe me, but I love you. And I want to marry you. You already know I’m no-good. But you don’t know how bad news I am. So I want to confess to you every single bad thing I’ve ever done, and then I want to confess to you every single good thing I’ve done, and then I want to tell you how many good things I want to do for you, for the church, for your family, and for everyone from this second on. If you’ll just say that you’ll think about going out with me, then I promise you, I will do these things.’”

  Elaina paused to take another sip of water, and Candice reached into her purse again and fished out another fresh tissue for her. After a moment to collect another deep breath, Elaina said, “So I took him up on that. I asked him to tell me all the bad stuff he’d done. It was all the stuff I figured and heard about, except for one thing. And this one thing was that, eleven years ago, Denny was angry at a lady who’d yelled at him in a Home Depot, and he went to her house because he was gonna rob her, but when he got there and started to break in—he said he heard the gate door open. He told me he hustled around the corner of the house to this little spot where the fence formed a nook and he hid. He said he heard someone coming closer to him, and he was sure he’d been seen and it was the cops, but the footsteps stopped and he heard tapping, and then he heard the window slide up and he knew that someone else was breaking into the house. He didn’t want to peek because he was afraid he’d be seen, so he just stood there to wait it out.

  “After a few more minutes, he said he heard something that sounded really creepy to him. He couldn’t explain what it was other than he knew that something really bad was happening in that room. Then it was quiet for a minute, and then he heard a lady call out the name Noah. It was quiet for a few more seconds and then all of a sudden she screamed.

  “Denny pinned himself against the back of the fence, and he said he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to run, but he was afraid he’d get caught trying to go over the fence, so he just stood there until he heard the sound of someone dropping to the grass right around the corner, and then they went running to the opposite side of the yard and out through the gate.

  “Meanwhile, next door the lady was screaming her head off, and he knew the cops were going to be on their way any second. So he got up his nerve, came out from the side of the house, and started to move along the house toward the gate. He said that when he got to the window, though, he stopped. It was dark in the room, but he said he could smell the scent of blood. He looked in through the window and saw the form of a little boy lying on the floor of his room. He knew then that the guy had killed the little kid, and he froze. He didn’t know what to do—he was so freaked-out.

  “Denny said that he could still hear the lady screaming from the house next door, and he realized that he was right in the middle of a murder scene. He was so scared that the cops were going to think he’d killed the little boy that he tried to cover his tracks. He closed the window, put the screen back in, and it was when he was about to leave that he kicked a ball that was lying in the grass right below the window. He said he didn’t know why, but he bent over and picked it up, stuffed it in the backpack he’d brought, and headed to the back fence to climb over it and run for it.

  “When he got home, he turned on the TV and saw the breaking story that a boy in East Austin had just been murdered. Denny said that when he took the ball out of his backpack, it had a bloody fingerprint on it. He’d worn gloves to the lady’s house, and he said he never actually touched the ball without wearing gloves, but he knew that if he took it to the police, they’d pin him for murder just for being there.”

  Dennis’s fears weren’t misplaced. In Texas, if you’re an accessory to a crime like burglary and during the commission of that crime someone is killed, even if you’re the getaway driver out on the street and never set foot inside the house, you’ll still be charged with murder, which in Texas is also a capital offense.

  It’s a widely known fact among criminals. I was certain Elaina was speaking the truth about Dennis’s motivation for holding on to the ball all these years.

  “He also told me that at first, he was happy that the kid’s mom was being charged with the crime. He was still really mad at her for disrespecting him, but as time went on, he knew he’d done a bad thing by covering up the other man’s escape. Denny had only b
een trying to cover up for himself, but in doing that, he’d let the real killer go free. I think that’s why he held on to the ball all these years. It reminded him of the bad thing he’d done. He felt he needed to remember that to keep him from going back to his old ways.”

  “And he never thought about getting the ball to the police anonymously?” I asked her. I mean, if I’d been Gallagher and I’d felt as guilty as he’d claimed to his girlfriend that he was, I would’ve done something about it.

  Elaina looked at me as if she’d had that same argument with Dennis before. Perhaps many times. “Denny’s favorite show was CSI,” she said. “He and I used to watch all of them, CSI, CSI: NY, CSI: Miami. On one of them there was a show about some guy who’d witnessed a murder, picking up the leather glove the killer had dropped with the victim’s blood on it. They did that thing in the show where they made the camera focus on a small drop of sweat dropping from the witness’s forehead onto the glove, so you know that the CSI techs were going to find it, and after the witness sent the glove in to the police anonymously, that’s exactly what the CSI techs did. They also found a strand of nylon thread from the bag the witness had kept it in on the glove, and all of that led to them bringing the witness in and accusing him of murder.

  “At the end of the show, Denny turned to me and told me that he was worried that some of his DNA might be on the ball. He said it was a really hot night, he’d been dressed all in black, and he’d been scared enough to sweat up a storm. He said, ‘What if my DNA is on that ball, Elaina? What if a piece of my backpack got stuck to the blood and they trace it back to me? What if they figure out I was there?’

  “Denny had a record. They had his DNA on file. He was scared that no matter how much he wanted to send the ball to you guys, you’d find a way to pin him for that little boy’s murder.

  “And then you arrested him, and you brought up the murder like you knew he was involved. He called me from jail and said he thought he knew of a way out of the mess he got himself into, but it might cost him some time behind bars. I love him, so I told him, ‘You do what’s right so our son will grow up knowing his dad was a good man, and I’ll be here for you when you get out.’ He told me then that he was going to call you and set up a meeting to talk to you about the baseball. He said you were the only one who seemed to get it, and he said he felt like he could trust you.”

  That hit me like a punch in the gut. Gallagher had trusted me, and he’d been killed for it. “Did Dennis ever tell you anything else about the killer?” I asked next. “Did he ever mention catching a glimpse of him?”

  Elaina shook her head. “No.”

  Candice said, “Elaina, did you put up the money for his bail?”

  She shook her head. “Denny said he didn’t know who put up the money, but I told him it wasn’t us.”

  And then the hair stood up on the back of my neck. “It was the killer,” I said softly.

  Candice’s gaze traveled to me. She gave one nod and got up from the chair, taking her phone with her to walk to the other side of the porch to make a call. Elaina and I waited in silence until she came back. After pocketing her cell, Candice said, “Elaina, I’ve called one of our agents on duty. He’s going to come here tonight and watch over you and your family. We’ll wait with you until he arrives, but I want you to stay inside at all times and not leave your home for the next twenty-four hours, all right?”

  Alarm flashed across Elaina’s features. “You think the guy that shot Denny might come here and try to hurt us?”

  Candice said, “No. I don’t. But I don’t want to take any chances.”

  Elaina nodded and then she began crying again. Looking up at us as if she could plead Dennis’s case, she said, “He made mistakes, you know, but he was trying. He was trying to do the right thing.”

  I reached out and hugged her. “He was,” I told her. “He really was.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  A few hours later Dutch and I walked through the door of our home, both of us beyond exhausted and too upset to talk. AFIS had come back with not one single hit on our bloody fingerprint, which meant that the killer had no prior record, and until we discovered on our own who he was, we had no way to identify him other than the clues already left to us.

  As Dutch headed into the kitchen to fix us both a small snack before bed, I bent down to pick up Tuttle, who’d come out of her bed and was nuzzling my shin. Tuttle is a cuddle bunny, and really, really good at lavishing me with kisses. Eggy, on the other hand, snored away in his bed, with nary a nod of acknowledgment. I took Tuts out on the back porch and let her water the lawn, then settled down with her in one of the patio chairs. It was a nice night, still a bit warm, but dry with just a little breeze. Dutch found me outside and handed me a plate with a sandwich. I took it from him and shared a bit of the roast beef with Tuts.

  “We tried, dollface,” he said, when he saw that I wasn’t so much eating as feeding the pup.

  I laid my head back on the cushion, hugged Tuttle, and looked up at the stars. It was like staring right up into heaven. “We missed something,” I said, my voice hitching a little. I was struggling to hold my emotions in check. It’d been a terrible day.

  “Maybe,” Dutch said. “But we’re probably not gonna find it before the appeals hearing tomorrow.”

  Tuttle began to tug on the end of the sandwich. It was supercute. She was trying to be really subtle about it. I fed her another piece of beef.

  “You feed her the good stuff and she won’t want her dog food,” Dutch said.

  “She’s a good pup,” I told him. “She can have some of the good stuff now and then.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s horseradish on the bread, babe. Probably not good for dogs.”

  I gave her another bit of beef. “She doesn’t seem to mind.”

  Dutch polished off his sandwich and regarded me. “Come to bed, sweetheart.”

  “In a minute,” I told him.

  He got up, lifted the plate holding my sandwich from me so that Tuttle couldn’t gobble it down, and set it on a side table nearby, so that I could reach for it if I wanted it. He then kissed me lightly on the lips and headed back inside.

  I lay curled up with my pup for a long time, going over and over the details of the case, trying to figure out what the heck we’d missed, because the nagging feeling that we had missed something wouldn’t leave me. But what it could be, I had no idea.

  Dutch shook me awake as dawn was making its way across the horizon. “What time is it?” I said, jerking awake and startling Tuttle, who proceeded to cover me with kisses again.

  “It’s six thirty,” he said. “Come to bed, babe.”

  I sat up and set Tuttle on the grass so she could water the lawn again. I felt groggy and out of it, but I forced myself to shake that off. “No,” I said, inhaling a deep breath and getting to my feet. “I need to work on the case.”

  “What’s there to work on?” he asked me. “Until we get some forensics back on the bullet that killed Gallagher to see if it matches anything registered, we’re at a dead end.”

  I leaned into his chest for a moment, gathering my resolve. “I missed something. I don’t know what it is yet. But I missed something.”

  He hugged me, then released me. “Okay,” he said. “Go inside and take a shower. I’ll get the coffee on, make you some breakfast, and text Candice, and then we’ll head into the office and sort it out piece by piece.”

  * * *

  Three hours later, with tears in my eyes, I stood up from the conference table where Dutch, Candice, Brice, and Oscar were all poring over the case, and walked to the corner of the room.

  I looked at my watch. It was nine thirty-five. Cal was most certainly at the courthouse, about to go in front of the appellate court and fight for Skylar’s life. It was a fight I was certain he’d lose.

  “Abs?” I heard Dutch call.

  ?
??I’m fine,” I said sharply. Of course I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to hear him or anyone else tell me that we’d done our best, but these things happen. Nothing could be done. It’d been a long shot anyway.

  Fuck that. (And for that matter, fuck the swear jar.)

  I wanted to save Skylar. I wanted her legacy to reflect what a brave woman she’d been to have overcome her addictions and tried her hardest to create a life for herself and her son, in spite of all the odds and people against her, from her mother, to her ex-husband, to her in-laws, to her former pimp, to . . .

  “Wait a minute,” I whispered as a thought occurred to me. Turning in a circle, I raced back to my chair. “Wait a damn minute!” Two random clues had just come together in my mind and I was so excited I was shaking.

  “What’s up, Sundance?” Candice asked.

  I shuffled through the array of photos from the crime scene. My hands were trembling and that made sorting through them difficult, so I finally just dropped them on the table and pushed the ones I didn’t need out of the way. “Where is it? Where is it?” I asked, frantic to find the one I was looking for.

  “Abs?” Dutch said again.

  I ignored him. Instead I pushed photos aside until I got to the back of the stack and there it was. “Oh . . . my . . . God,” I said.

  Oscar got up and came around to my side of the table to look over my shoulder. “What?” he asked. And I understood that he didn’t see what I saw yet. We’d missed it a dozen times already, but I needed to show him a comparison before it would make sense.

  Without answering him, I dug back through the stack and easily found the other photo I needed. Pushing back from the table again, I walked over to the whiteboard against the back wall and moved the little magnets we used to secure photos and such to the board over the two photos. Turning to the other four in the room, I said, “Notice anything?”

  Everyone squinted at the two photos. The first was an image that captured Noah’s bed, and the second was the view that captured Skylar’s bed. “No,” Candice and Brice said, while Dutch shook his head and Oscar stared at me like he didn’t get it either.