Sense of Deception Read online

  “Anyway, they went into the back bedroom, found Noah on the floor, checked for a pulse, found none, and called me. I was on duty that night with my partner, Jay Perkins. He retired three years later, and then a heart attack took him on the fifth hole of a golf course. . . .” Dioli stopped speaking and he seemed to need a moment to find his voice again. He must’ve really loved his old partner, because I swear his eyes were a bit shiny right then.

  After clearing his voice, he said, “Jay was the best damn detective I ever worked with. Taught me a lot, that guy. Anyway, the two of us got dispatched to the scene and were given the scoop from the unis. They were keeping clear of the house until we had a chance to process and take pictures, and they were keeping a close eye on the mom, who I first saw sitting on the curb, rocking like a crazy person back and forth while one of the neighbors, Mrs. Mulgrew, sat with her.

  “Jay went inside to check that the scene was secure while I went over to interview Skylar. Now, at first Skylar seemed pretty out of it. I tried to get her attention, but she was feigning shock pretty good. She was somewhat unresponsive and shaking all over. I finally got it out of her that she’d woken up to a noise, but she couldn’t remember what the noise was. She said she’d gotten out of bed and gone to check on her son, and found him on the floor next to the bed, facedown. She said she thought he might’ve fallen out of bed and she was trying to lift him back into it when she realized that he was wet. She says she thought he might’ve wet the bed, but then she felt something sharp on her hand, and it cut her. She felt around some more and said that she then realized that Noah was bleeding, and he’d been stabbed with a knife, and then all of the sudden she’s hit by something from behind and gets shoved to the floor. She tells me she struggles with someone in the room, manages to get away, and goes running out of the house to the neighbors’.”

  So far the story Dioli told didn’t seem that implausible, other than the fact that someone had murdered a young boy in cold blood. With as much violence and hate as I’ve seen and experienced in my life, I’ve never understood how anyone could mentally get to a point where they could hurt or murder a child. It’s beyond my ability to fully comprehend. And yet, the news was full of reports of predators more than willing to do just that. Even the idea of a parent killing his or her child wasn’t nearly as shocking as it’d been a decade ago. To my mind, it was still somewhat unfathomable. Causing harm to someone else’s child was a despicable thing. Causing it to your own made you a particular kind of monster, and as much as I heard Dioli’s derisive tone whenever he mentioned Skylar’s name, I just couldn’t see her as that brand of monster.

  “After taking Skylar’s statement,” Dioli went on, “I spoke briefly with the neighbors, who corroborated her account from the time she came over to bang on their door and scream for help. From that point forward they said that she was so hysterical they couldn’t make sense of anything she was saying, but they saw her nightgown was bloody and Noah wasn’t with her, so they called nine-one-one right away.”

  “Did you ask them what they thought of Miller’s behavior?” Oscar asked.

  “Yeah, but later. They’ve always supported Skylar. They believed her story.”

  “At what point did you begin to suspect her story wasn’t true, Ray?” I asked.

  “Pretty early on,” he said. “Jay met me outside after I got through interviewing the Mulgrews and he told me there were some things I needed to see. He took me into the house and showed me the hallway leading to the bedrooms. There was a single set of bloody footprints leading away from Noah’s room, and we suspected those were Skylar’s because they were small and slender—like a female’s—and you could also tell they were made by bare feet.”

  “Why was that suspicious?” I asked. “If Skylar told you that she went into her son’s room to check on him, wouldn’t it be the case that she would’ve likely tracked some of the blood from his room into the hallway?”

  “It would. But that’s not why it was suspicious. What was suspicious was that the hall had been recently vacuumed. We could see the prints of the uni who went into the house in response to the burglary in progress. When you get that kind of a call and you’re in the process of clearing the house, you hug the wall, and we could see his footsteps doing exactly that.” The memory of Candice and me inching our way along the wall in my own home when we didn’t know it was Oscar in my bathroom flashed through my mind.

  “The footsteps of the uni went down the hall to the far right,” Dioli continued, “and came back on the far left. But other than his footprints and Skylar’s, there were no other tracks in that house.”

  “Could the assailant have gone out the window?”

  “Nope. Shut tight, free of blood, and the screen was in place. All the windows in the house were like that, pristine and showing no sign of forced entry. What’s more, Jay took me around the outside of the house and we couldn’t find a single footprint, scuff mark, or broken blade of grass. And neither could the crime-tech guys.”

  “I’m assuming there was no other sign of forced entry,” I said, recalling one of the articles I’d read had highlighted that detail.

  “None,” Dioli said. “The front door was left open from when Skylar went out, but she’d unlocked that herself. Hell, she told me she’d done that on her way out the door, because I’d asked her if her front door had been locked.

  “What’s more, there wasn’t a single hair, fingerprint, DNA fragment, or scrap of other physical evidence left by this supposed intruder. We could account for every single speck of physical evidence in Noah’s bedroom as belonging to him or his mom. If there was an intruder in that room, he wore a hazmat suit.”

  I frowned. Something felt a little off to me about that statement, but I didn’t think I wanted to question the detective. Instead, I’d pay close attention to the file notes on the physical evidence collected.

  “Did she ever confess?” I asked.

  Dioli shook his head. “Nope. We grilled her all the rest of that night and through the middle of the afternoon the next day, but she stuck to the story. Fourteen hours we went at her, and she finally asked for a lawyer. Once we couldn’t talk to her anymore, we started interviewing everyone in her life.” Dioli paused to shake his head, like he was remembering something tragic. “I tell you, that poor kid Noah was put through the wringer before she finally went nuts and killed him.”

  I leaned forward. “Tell me.”

  “Well, Skylar married pretty young. She and her ex were high school sweethearts, and Skylar got pregnant at nineteen and the kids got married. Anyway, Noah comes along and Skylar’s still kind of a kid herself. She’s upset that all her friends are out having fun and she’s got a baby at home, so she starts dumping the kid on her mom and heading out to party.

  “Pretty soon she’s a full-blown alcoholic and she spends three months in a rehab center and comes home to be the good little wife. She was back in rehab six months later. Then a year after that.”

  That surprised me. “Rehab is pretty expensive,” I said. “How’d two twenty-something kids with a baby afford multiple stays?”

  “Chris Miller—her ex—he comes from big money. His folks told me they always suspected Skylar got herself pregnant to trap Chris, and, in the beginning, they wondered privately if Noah was even his.”

  “Was he?” I asked, not knowing if they’d do a DNA match postmortem if that was a question.

  “He was Chris’s son,” Dioli confessed. “The parents had done their own DNA test right after Noah was born without ever telling Skylar, and we also did one just to cover our bases. Noah was Chris’s kid. Anyway, Chris and Skylar get along about as well as you’d expect. They both cheated on each other, and Skylar was given to disappearing for days or weeks on end. She’d just leave Noah with her mother and trot out the door and they wouldn’t see her for a while. Then she’d show up drunk off her ass.

  “Chris finally thre
w in the towel when he found her passed out on the couch, leaving Noah unsupervised, and a day later she got arrested for her third DWI.”

  “You’d think he would’ve thrown in the towel long before then,” I said. I couldn’t imagine being in that kind of toxic relationship, especially when I had a young son to think about.

  “Chris had opened up his own business and he was working long hours, so he put dealing with her on the back burner until it became apparent that she couldn’t be left alone with Noah. He convinced his mother-in-law to move in and provide child care after Skylar got arrested. Mrs. Wagner—Skylar’s mother—had had enough of Skylar’s shit too. She helped Chris get full custody.”

  “Wow,” I said. Across from me Oscar grimaced. “Skylar must not have been happy.”

  “Nope. We think that might have been some of the motivation for murdering Noah.”

  “How would that be motivation?” I asked.

  “If you interview Chris, you’ll understand. That guy lived for his son. We had to do the notification the day after the murder, and I’ve never seen a man so gutted. He said that his phone had rung in the middle of the night, but he’d been too tired to answer it, and when we came by, he ran to get his phone and showed us that Noah had called him in the middle of the night. There was no message, but it fit with the time of the murder.”

  “He called his dad?” I asked. That detail had been left out of the articles I’d read.

  “He did,” Dioli said. “We think he woke up, saw his mom was about to attack him, grabbed the phone, and hit redial. The call was only two seconds in length, so she must’ve hung it up before the call could connect and Noah could cry out for help.

  “Noah had a phone in his room?” I asked next. Not only was it a bit unusual for a nine-year-old to have a phone in his room, but the phone call itself felt important to my radar.

  “Noah had talked to his dad right before bed,” Dioli said. “He probably never put it back before falling asleep.”

  “Anyway, it was one of the most gut-wrenching notifications I’ve ever done. You had to see it, I guess. Chris blamed himself for not answering the call, and for losing custody of Noah in the first place. At the time, I had a son only a little older than Noah, so it hit me pretty hard too.”

  “No wonder you worked so hard on the case,” I said. It made sense then why Dioli had been so determined to nail someone for Noah’s murder.

  “Yeah. The case was too close to home,” he admitted. “Anyway, we think Skylar fell off the wagon soon after Noah moved back in with her, and we also think that Noah caught her in the act. Chris said that he got the first call from Noah the night of the murder at around nine p.m., and he recalled that his son told him he needed to talk to him in private. He said he tried to get Noah to tell him what was so important, but he says that Noah wouldn’t talk about it with his mom in the house. At the time, Chris just thought Skylar was being a little strict with Noah or something. Later, he figured that Skylar might’ve been listening in on the call, and she knew that Noah was planning to tell Chris about the drinking. Skylar was getting a pretty good child-support check every month, and she knew she’d lose custody if she was caught drinking again, which was also a violation of her parole. Knowing her free ride was over, she killed Noah to get her revenge against Chris.”

  “Against Chris for what?” I asked. “Divorcing her?”

  Dioli shook his head. “No. For getting her thrown in jail in the first place. Chris was the one who called the cops on Skylar the day she was pulled over for her third DWI.”

  “Wow. That’s some tough love,” Oscar said.

  Dioli snorted. “No love, just tough,” he said.

  I shifted in my chair. Not only did the motive Dioli offered as Skylar’s reason for killing Noah seem seriously flawed, if not out-and-out ridiculous, the picture Dioli was painting of Skylar just didn’t jibe with the woman I’d met in jail. I mean, the Skylar I’d seen had been beaten down by a terribly tragic life. She hadn’t seemed defiant, or rebellious, or even feisty. She’d seemed exactly the opposite, in fact, someone who’d been pummeled by life, and there wasn’t much left in her except for the tiny acts of kindness she could manage to scrounge out of her current existence to remind herself of her own humanity.

  And yet, the more Dioli spoke of her past, the more I knew that if I’d known Skylar fifteen years ago, I’d likely look at her with a whole lot less sympathy, and that made me wonder if Dioli’s version of who Skylar was wasn’t somehow skewed and profoundly biased.

  Based on the facts Dioli had presented, it was easy to see how he could’ve been so convinced that Skylar was guilty.

  He continued to tell us about the case, and a bit about the trial, until I glanced at my watch and said, “Ray, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but I have clients in twenty minutes and I’ve got to get to the office. Can I come back later today to pick up the file and the one you’d like me to look at for you?”

  Dioli pulled his head back in surprise. “Oh, you gotta go?”

  I nodded. “Sorry. I have clients today.”

  “Uh, okay. Yeah. But I’m only gonna stay here long enough to copy the files.”

  “I can wait,” Oscar said pleasantly. I smiled gratefully at him.

  “I guess that could work,” Dioli said. “The file I’m giving you is a murder I worked on eight months ago. Girl found in Zilker Park. We eventually identified her as a recent UT graduate. She’d been here on a scholarship from Vietnam. Kept to herself and lived alone. Her parents didn’t even know she’d been missing.”

  I winced. Another dead girl. Sometimes I hated my consulting job. “I promise to look at it later on today, Ray. I’ll call you tomorrow if I can give you any info.”

  “Great,” he said. “And if you give me any leads, I’ve got a few other cases I could use your thoughts on.”

  Although the detective’s acceptance of my particular talent was refreshing, I wondered if he realized I didn’t work for free. Still, I decided to hold my tongue until after I got my hands on Noah’s murder file.

  “Let’s make sure I can give you something on this first one,” I said, standing up to thrust my hand forward to shake Dioli’s and thus control my exit. “It was truly a pleasure, Ray. Thank you again for taking time out of your weekend to talk to us.”

  “Sure,” Ray said. I could tell he was a little thrown by my sudden departure.

  “Until we meet again,” I said, pumping his hand one last time before winking at Oscar and hurrying away.

  As I exited the building, all that Dioli had told us about Skylar settled firmly on my shoulders like the weight of a thousand pounds. There didn’t seem to be any doubt in the detective’s mind that Skylar had been lying through her teeth about the intruder. He was certain she was guilty.

  Getting in my car, I mentally began to gather a list of things I’d need to get to the truth. “First things first,” I muttered as I looked behind me to pull out of the slot. “Skylar Miller, you and I are gonna have another little chat.”

  Chapter Seven

  I read for five clients nearly back-to-back and by the time I was done, I felt numb with fatigue.

  Most people don’t realize how much effort it takes to give a reading. For the record, it’s a buttload. I know it looks like we psychic types are just chatting away happily, merely having a conversation with our clients, but really we’re expending lots of our own energy assessing your energy, filtering out distractions, searching for solutions, trying to home in on the most accurate interpretation of what we’re sensing. It’s work. A lot of work.

  Anyway, after closing up shop, I headed home and found Oscar once again in my living room. “Hey, Cooper,” he said, looking about as peppy as I felt.

  “Oscar,” I said, plopping down on the couch next to him right before Eggy and Tuttle assaulted me with kisses and wriggling bodies. “Where’s my hubby?”

/>   Oscar motioned toward the study. “In there working on his private security gig.”

  Dutch and his best friend, Milo, ran a personal security business, which Milo managed on the people end and Dutch managed on the numbers end. “Ugh. He’ll be working on spreadsheets all weekend,” I said. One weekend a month my husband devoted all of his time to making sure D&M Security made a tidy profit. It always did, but mostly because Dutch ran a tight ship and knew his way around the tax code better than most accountants.

  Setting Tuttle in my lap while Eggy curled himself up next to me, I glanced again at Oscar and said, “You look like you had a day. What happened?”

  “Someone else bought the house,” he said.

  I shook my head. “What? How can that be?”

  “Dunno, Cooper. I met your Realtor, she took me through the house, I really liked it, like a lot, and I told her I wanted it. She made a call and the other Realtor said the sellers had just accepted another offer.”

  Tired as I was, I sent out my radar to assess the situation. “Hang on,” I said, digging out my phone and calling Bonnie. She answered right away. “Abby! So great to hear from you. Oh, that Oscar Rodriguez is such a cutie! Thank you so much for referring him to me. I’m not going to stop until I find him the perfect house. I mean, I know he must be disappointed to lose out on the one today, but I told him there were plenty of other listings, and I’m working on a whole batch right now.”

  Bonnie had said all of that in a single breath. It was exhausting just to listen to, but I liked Bonnie because she had such wonderfully high energy and she worked extremely hard for her clients. “Yeah, about that, Bonnie. What’s the deal on the house from today?”

  “Oh, you know how it is. Terrific listing in a great area for the right price, they go fast, Abby, especially when they’re within a decent commute to downtown. I guess a couple from the listing agency went through it last night and they made their offer this morning right after we got to the house.”