Chris began to draw little lazy circles on the table with his finger. Speaking very softly, he said, “I know where you live, bitch. Don’t think I can’t take care of you too.”
Crap. That wasn’t the confession I’d wanted, but I still had a card to play. “You killed my boyfriend,” I repeated. “You owe me something for that.”
Chris sighed heavily, then reached into his back pocket. I stiffened, but he withdrew his wallet and pulled out a hundred. Tossing it on the table in front of me, he said, “Your boyfriend did me a favor, you know, closing the window and putting back that screen. Made it look like no one but Sky had ever been there. It worked out better than even I’d planned, and for that, you can keep the change.”
I shuddered for effect, set the ball on the table without meeting his eyes, and picked up the hundred. Taking a moment to gather my purse, I stood up and waited for him to pick up the ball. The second he did, I couldn’t help but smile a little. “That autograph sort of says it all, don’t you think?”
Lifting my gaze, I watched as Chris’s brow lowered in confusion, and then he inspected the ball. Written across the brand-new baseball we’d purchased an hour before, and covered in smeared blood from Oscar’s pricked finger, was the word Murderer.
Chris lifted his eyes back to me and realization dawned in his eyes. He then glanced at Candice behind the counter. She was staring at him with contempt. His eyes darted next to his left and saw that Dutch had set aside his paper and was also glaring at him. Swiveling his head to the right, he took in Brice, who’d stood up with a set of handcuffs in hand.
Chris dropped the ball on the table. It bounced once and I caught it, my hand now wrapped in a plastic bag, which I then folded over the ball and dropped back into my purse. “Game over, douche bag,” I told him, peeling back the collar of my shirt to reveal the wire taped to my chest.
Quicker than I could’ve expected it, Chris lunged at me. He grabbed me by the throat and pulled me hard to him as he also kicked the table toward Dutch, who’d begun to spring to my aid. And then I felt the muzzle of a gun at my temple.
“Back off!” he yelled to everyone in the room. It was unnecessary. Nobody dared advance on him with me in his clutches.
It took me a few moments to recover myself, but then I was able to look around the room and assess the situation. Brice, Dutch, and Candice all had their guns drawn and aimed at Miller. He had me by the neck, and he was backed into a corner. I was still holding my purse.
Advantage team Abby.
As Miller shouted for everybody else to drop their weapons, I eased my hand into the big purse and wrapped my fingers around a small canister, placing my thumb just over the trigger. Calmly I said to all of them, “Guys, it’s okay. Drop your guns and do what he says.”
I looked meaningfully at each of my protectors in turn, but Dutch was very reluctant to let his weapon go. Miller gripped me tighter and shouted at him, and I managed to mouth, Please to my husband, who finally did crouch to drop his weapon.
“You!” Miller shouted to Candice. “Get out here!” Candice came out from around the counter, her hands in the air. “On the floor!” Miller yelled next. “All of you get your asses on the floor, your hands behind your back!”
Brice was the first to comply. Candice followed, but Dutch resisted. My stubborn husband. I wanted to yell at him too, but before I had time to beg him to obey, Miller withdrew the gun from my temple and pointed it at Dutch. The warning in my head went off a millisecond before Miller pulled the trigger, and I managed, somehow, to get my elbow up in time to knock the gun’s deadly aim away from its target. The gun went off, the bullet went wide, and I spun around to spray Miller in the face with a good dose of Mace. He went down to the floor, writhing and covering his eyes with his left arm. I went under his arm and continued to spray his face, even as I dropped to my knees to land on the outstretched hand holding the gun. “You. Son. Of. A. BITCH!” I yelled, and he wriggled and tried to hit me with his free hand. I took the blow on the shoulder and just kept squirting him.
And I would’ve continued to empty the canister, except that Dutch hooked me under both arms as Brice came up on my left to remove the gun from Miller’s hand and slap a cuff on him.
Dutch lifted me away, allowing Candice and Brice to twist Miller onto his back and secure his hands.
The whole thing was over in about ten seconds, but I kept shaking for much of the rest of the afternoon.
At two o’clock I was pacing the hallway outside the interrogation room, staring at my watch every five seconds and muttering under my breath. At last I heard voices coming from the other side of the hallway and I straightened up when I saw Oscar come around the corner leading Dioli. “Detective,” I said, holding out my hand to him.
He shook it even though his face registered a mixture of irritation and annoyance with perhaps a dash of suspicion. “Abby,” he said. “I’m here. What’s this urgent case involving Skylar Miller you needed me to look at?”
I took a breath. This was going to be tricky, but I couldn’t accomplish what I needed to without Dioli’s cooperation. Pointing over my shoulder to the door behind me, I said, “It’s in here, but, Detective, I’d like for you to make me a promise before we enter the room.”
His eyes narrowed. “What kind of promise?”
“I’d like for you to let me do all the talking. And no matter how much you’re tempted to say something, or perhaps even to walk out of the room, I’m going to ask you to stay put until I’m finished.”
Dioli’s brow folded low over his eyes. He didn’t like my conditions, mostly, I suspected, because he couldn’t figure out what my angle was. Still, I knew he’d heard that Skylar’s last appeal had been denied, and I thought he was feeling pretty confident that I wasn’t going to derail her execution. By the end of our meeting, I truly hoped he’d want nothing more than to help me save her life.
After studying me for a bit, as if waiting to see if I’d say more, Dioli said, “Is this gonna take long?”
“No, sir.”
“Fine. Let’s get this over with, then.”
I nodded to Oscar, who spun on his heel and headed toward the observation room while I turned to the door and opened it. Dioli followed me inside.
At the table sat Chris Miller, his face a mass of puffy redness, his eyes still leaking tears. Eyes that held not an ounce of regret or remorse. Which would still work in my favor. I hoped.
Next to Chris sat his attorney, dressed in a suit that likely cost more than all the outfits in my closet. Combined.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dioli pause in the doorway as he took note of Chris, but he didn’t say a word and came to the table to sit in the seat next to me. Once he was settled, Miller’s attorney, a guy named Mel something, said to me, “I’ve advised my client not to say a word.”
I smiled tightly. “Of course you have. And thank goodness he’s paying you all that money to advise him to stay silent, something he had every intention of doing anyway.”
Mel pursed his lips at me. I ignored him and focused on Miller. “Here’s the thing, Chris: I don’t need you to say a word. I’ve got all I need without your input. You’re here almost inconsequentially, actually. The person I really need to hear what I’ve got to say is currently seated on my left, and by the end of this conversation where you say absolutely nothing, I hope to convince him what a very bad person you are.”
Without looking at Dioli, I bent down and pulled up my big purse. It was a technique I’d seen Kyra Sedgwick do repeatedly on old episodes of The Closer, and I’d always liked the effect of it. “So, first off, I gotta say thank you for providing the fingerprint.” I pulled out the baseball I’d brought to Starbucks from out of my purse and slapped it on the table. It made a nice loud thunk. “The print you provided from your left index finger, Chris, ended up being a perfect match to this one. . . .” Reaching back into my purse,
I pulled out the actual baseball I’d gotten from Gallagher. The one he’d picked up in Skylar’s backyard, smeared with Noah’s blood. Next to me I could feel Dioli’s gaze tracking my every move. “You may recognize this baseball,” I said, smacking it down on the table as well. “It came from your son’s room.” Then I slapped down a crime-scene photo taken in Noah’s room with a view of his dresser and the blood-spattered wall behind it. “And we know this ball came from Noah’s room because—see that?” I pointed to the small round void on the wall behind the stand where the blood hadn’t spattered. “That is a void about the size of a baseball. And if you look at the ball this way,” I said, turning the baseball around to get the right angle, “you can see that the spatter hit the ball exactly in the pattern it left on the wall.”
Chris refused to look at the ball, or the picture, so I continued, pointing to the small stand on the dresser where the baseball had once been so proudly displayed. “That’s where the ball your father gave to Noah was sitting the night you crept into your son’s room with the knife you’d stolen from your ex-wife’s kitchen a few weeks before, swapping it for a duplicate, which is the knife she remembered using to cut up the veggies for the salad she made that night.”
Next to me Dioli picked up the baseball and swiveled the photo of the crime scene around so that he could take a closer look at it.
While he did that, I slapped another photo of the murder weapon on the table and then set the second inventory list—the one from the kitchen—down next to it. “And see that, Chris?” I said, pointing to the inventory list. “There’s a duplicate knife still in the drawer, and inventoried by CSI.”
Chris glared hard at me as Dioli set aside the baseball and reached for both the photo and the inventory list, pulling them close to inspect them.
“And this,” I said, reaching back into my purse to pull out another piece of paper, “is the report from our lab indicating that the blood on the baseball—the one smudged by your fingerprint—is that of your son. But you know what else is interesting, Chris? Our lab tech found another drop of blood on the ball. It’s the blood of a close male relative, likely a father. You didn’t realize you cut yourself when you attacked him, did you? It was probably a very small cut, because the drop of your blood isn’t any bigger than a dot, really, but it’s yours. We’re still waiting another few hours for all the DNA analysis to come back, but it’s looking pretty good that you’ll be definitively identified as having handled the ball at the time that Noah was murdered. But I think what’s most telling of all, Chris, is that, after Skylar’s trial was over, what I found at the very back of Detective Dioli’s murder file was a copy of a list of items that you claimed you wanted out of evidence. Oh, you asked mostly for keepsake stuff, like photos and your son’s ball cap, and his mitt, but what you didn’t ask for, Chris, was this ball. You knew he had it; he showed it to you at his birthday party. And, being the owner and operator of a sports memorabilia company, you had to know the ball’s value, and yet, you didn’t ask for it from the contents of Noah’s room, which CSI had collected from Skylar’s house, because you knew it was missing.”
Chris’s dark glare turned murderous. I didn’t care. I kept going. “And this,” I said, reaching into my purse to pull out one more slip of paper before slapping down the hastily gathered witness statement, “is from your ex-mother-in-law. She’s recanting her court testimony. Once we showed her that we could pull her bank records, revealing regular monthly deposits—monthly deposits we’d be eager to share with the IRS, mind you—she was more than willing to roll on you. She says you came to her and offered her a deal. In exchange for the testimony against her own daughter, you would set her up rent free and supply her with enough money on a monthly basis to live in the style to which she’d been accustomed when she was living with you and taking care of Noah. What a boon for her,” I said snidely. “She didn’t have to play babysitter anymore; she just had to sell out her own daughter.”
Chris was breathing hard enough through his nose to let me know he really, really, really wanted to end me. I looked him in the eye to let him know he’d never get the chance. “We’re still going to prosecute her for perjury,” I told him smugly, crossing my arms and leaning back in the chair. “And if a copy of her bank statements happens to become part of the public record, which anonymously gets sent to the IRS, then I guess we’ll just shrug our shoulders and tell her, ‘Gee golly, that’s too bad.’”
Next to me, Dioli studied the witness statement. I reached back into my purse and slid a copy of Faith’s bank statements over to him along with a copy of the Austin American Statesman article Candice had stumbled upon that announced that Skylar Miller was listed as a person of interest in her son’s murder. The dates on both the statement and the article were the same. I wondered if Chris had gotten the idea to include his mother-in-law in the framing of his wife on the day the article came out, or if he’d thought about it even earlier.
And then I dug back into my purse for the coup de grâce. We’d been so lucky to have a judge willing to sign the warrant that I was still thanking my lucky stars. Sliding two bound sets of papers with the word “VOID” in big red letters across their covers to Chris, I said, “Know what these are?”
Chris’s eyes darted to the papers and he visibly paled. My smile widened. We had him dead to rights. “I thought you might recognize a copy of your parents’ old will. Interesting reading that one. Even if it was written in two thousand three. Seems you weren’t their favorite son at the time, Chris.
“See, I had my first inkling that you might not have gotten on well with your parents when Skylar’s neighbors said that Noah’s grandparents showed up to his birthday party early, then left, and a while later you stopped by. Your dad was going through chemo at the time, and I thought it was a little odd that a man who was seemingly such a good father didn’t want to hang out with his own father at his son’s birthday party. Now, that could’ve been a coincidence, but we have it on good authority that there was a major rift between you and your daddy-o, Chris. Over some treasured possessions of your dad’s.
“It seems that in two thousand two, you started your sports memorabilia company. It didn’t do so well at first, did it, Chris? In fact, it wasn’t doing well at all. And this despite the fact that some of the items we were able to track, in just the hour or so that we’ve been working on this, came back as belonging to your dad. In fact, they were listed in his original will from nineteen eighty.” I tapped the first set of bound papers for emphasis.
“Your dad was a big collector, wasn’t he?” I asked him. Chris didn’t reply, nor did I expect him to. He simply kept glaring at me. I picked up the baseball he’d taken from Noah’s room. “This puppy cost him a fortune in fact. I’m guessing, Chris, that your dad found out about all the little backroom deals you were making to sell off a few of his sports memorabilia. And as you’d always been a bit of a pain in his ass—dropping out of college after two years, getting a girl pregnant at twenty, and then struggling to do something with your life—I’m thinking that Grant Miller had just about had enough of your ass when he found out that you were selling off his stuff. So, he drafted this puppy.”
I put my palm on the second set of bound papers. “In this will, your parents leave you completely out of the picture, Chris. They leave everything to their beloved grandson, Noah. And they even made a bit of a provision for Skylar. Probably a nod to how well they thought she’d been doing.
“And that left you with nada. No inventory for your already struggling business, and no money to live on. You were cut off. From them. And from their money. Your only hope would be to try to worm your way back into their good graces with their precious grandson, but Noah wasn’t exactly cooperating with you, now, was he? And your father even blamed you for losing the custody battle with Skylar, didn’t he? In the end, he was even taking her side, and, Chris, all of that led you to start thinking about getting even.
 
; “The coup de grâce, however, came with this.” Reaching back into my bag, I pulled out a folded set of legal papers and set them on the table. “This trust with the small provision paragraph near the end, which stated that if Noah died before his twenty-first birthday, the money in his trust would be split equally between his parents. And what’s really interesting is the very last sentence of that particular paragraph, Chris, which states that if only one parent remains alive, then the whole kit and caboodle falls to the surviving parent.
“On the twenty-first of March, two thousand and five, Chris Miller, you received one million tax-free dollars from this trust. Money that, at the time, you desperately needed. It funded both you and your failing business nicely. The other million, of course, remains in limbo until tomorrow, after Skylar Miller is put to death, when half then falls to you. Of course, you don’t need that million now. After Noah’s death, your dad was so heartbroken that he made amends with you, and together you even had someone to fight against. Skylar. He died thinking that she murdered his grandson, and he left his entire estate to the actual murderer. How’s that for irony?”
From the time I’d produced the wills, I could feel Dioli’s gaze riveted to me. Good.
“Now,” I said, spreading my hands at all the clutter on the table, “maybe you and your attorney, Chris, are thinking that all this is purely circumstantial. But the other thing we discovered from the original crime-scene report was that your fingerprints were on the windowsill of Noah’s bedroom. They’d been eliminated because of course you would’ve been in Noah’s room, right? Nothing unusual about his dad hanging out in Noah’s room, but the question of when those prints were left on that windowsill is gonna become a big question at your trial. And given all this other stuff, methinks any jury would likely decide those prints were left on a specific night in July of two thousand four. A night a nine-year-old beautiful boy was murdered in the most unspeakable fashion by the man he loved most in the world. For money. And for the fact that both he and his grandfather picked his mother over you.”