Sense of Deception Read online

  “Can you call their Realtor back and let them know that you have a backup offer should their deal fall through?”

  There was a pause, then, “I can. Absolutely. But maybe I should warn you that, according to the seller’s agent, the other couple have excellent credit and they’re going through a terrific lender.”

  “Oscar’s offer would be a cash deal, Bonnie.”

  I heard her suck in a little breath. In real estate there’s nothing better than a cash deal. Quick, painless, no appraisal, no mortgage insurance, no lender contingencies to deal with, just money for keys. “He didn’t tell me that,” she said.

  I slid a glance sideways to Oscar. Newbies. “Yeah, this will be his first purchase. You know how it goes. Anyway, I’m going to hand my phone to him and you two can discuss offer price. I have a very strong feeling the deal the sellers have on the table is gonna fall through. Maybe it won’t appraise. Maybe their lender will find some other flaw, but this is going to be Oscar’s house.”

  She practically squeaked with excitement and I handed the phone over to Oscar; then I got up to give him some privacy. He’d of course heard my entire conversation, so he knew my thoughts, and while he worked out a deal, I headed in search of my husband. “Hey,” I said, looking into the study.

  Dutch sat at the desk, squinting at the screen, with his fingers poking the keyboard like someone who nudges a bug to see if it’s dead. He blinked and rubbed his eyes as I came into the room. “Hey, yourself. How was the day?”

  “Long. Yours?”

  “About the same. Oscar still here?”

  “He is.”

  “He’s been waiting for you since three.”

  “Sorry, honey.” I knew Dutch liked to have the house to himself sometimes.

  “It’s fine,” Dutch assured me, but I could tell it kinda wasn’t. “He brought you those two files,” he added, motioning with his chin to the right side of the desk. One was a lot thicker than the other.

  I sighed. “Skylar Miller and the case Dioli wants me to dig into.”

  Dutch’s mouth set in a frown. “I thought you were going to give your impressions to him at the meeting?”

  “He took too long telling us about Noah Miller’s murder, and I had a full list of clients to get to.”

  Dutch’s frown deepened. “You’re working a lot, dollface. Think you might be taking on too much?”

  “Yep.”

  His frown split into a grin. “Well, as long as you’re pacing yourself.”

  I sighed. “When it rains, it pours.”

  “What’s Dioli’s case?”

  “A former UT student here on a student visa from Vietnam, found in Zilker Park a week after she went missing.”

  Dutch nodded. “Yeah, I heard about that one on the news a while back. Tough case from what I heard.”

  “All the cold ones are tough, honey.”

  “Did Dioli give you the rundown on Skylar Miller?”

  “He did, and from what he told me, I’ve got a straight uphill battle.”

  “Without a lot of time,” Dutch reminded me.

  I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. “Yes. Without much time, which means I need to work through being tired and soldier on. You gonna be okay for dinner on your own?” I asked, getting up.

  “You’re leaving?” Dutch asked.

  “Yeah. There’re a few things I need to check out. Something about the crime scene is really bothering me, and I feel like I want to go there and feel it out.”

  “You’re not going alone, are you?”

  I moved around the desk to kiss him on the cheek. “No, honey. I’ll take Oscar.”

  He squeezed my arm. “Okay,” he said. “Call me if you’re gonna be out past ten.”

  I promised I would and headed away to find Oscar and recruit him for some gumshoeing.

  Forty minutes later we were each nibbling on some fast food and staring at a tiny house in an adorable secluded community just off Highway 183 on Austin’s east side. “Nice neighborhood,” I said with a bit of surprise.

  “Yeah, given the area, this is a pretty cool little sub,” Oscar said, craning his neck to look at the surrounding houses. “You think there’re any for sale in this hood?”

  I cut him a look. “Will you stop? I told you, you’re getting that other house. Have a little faith, would ya?”

  “Sorry, Cooper, but when the Realtor says the sellers have already accepted another offer, I’m sort of inclined to move on.”

  “Trust,” I said, a bit distracted by the small house at the end of the cul-de-sac. “I wonder if anybody’s home.”

  “Only one way to find out,” Oscar said. Getting out of the car, he approached the house and I hustled out to follow behind him. After knocking, we waited and were rewarded with the sound of an elderly woman who asked, “Who is it?” through the door.

  Oscar identified himself as an agent with the FBI and when she opened the door, he flashed her his badge and said immediately, “I’m very sorry to disturb you, ma’am, and I don’t want you to be alarmed. My associate and I aren’t here on official business, and if you want us to leave, we will immediately. However, we’re here investigating a cold case from a decade ago, and we were hoping that we might look around your property, simply to get a feel for what might have occurred here in two thousand and four.”

  The woman blinked her eyes rapidly, as if she couldn’t quite keep up with Oscar’s speech. She was a cute old lady. I’d put her roughly in her seventies with short curly white hair; big, round, pink-framed glasses; and a mouth that fell perpetually open. “What happened here a decade ago?” she asked him.

  I spoke up. “A young boy died, ma’am. We’re simply trying to get a feel for how it might’ve happened.”

  The old woman put a hand to her chest and said, “Oh, my. How old was he?”

  “Nine, ma’am,” I answered.

  She paled and turned slightly sideways to peer back into her home. Then she turned back to me and said, “He died in the back bedroom, didn’t he?”

  Wow. The old lady had just shocked me and, judging by the look on Oscar’s face, she’d shocked him too. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “How did you know?”

  She shuddered. “I’ve lived here two years,” she said. “I love the house, but that back bedroom creeps me out. I won’t go in there unless I have to, and I always keep the door closed. Ever since I moved in I’ve felt something awful happened in there, but I never knew it was the death of a little boy.”

  “I’m sorry if we’ve upset you by telling you that,” I said, and I truly was. I wondered if she was a renter instead of the owner. Realtors in Texas were required to inform their clients of any deaths that occurred on the property, but landlords were excluded from needing to provide such info.

  “It’s fine,” she said with a wave of her hand. Then she looked at us a bit expectantly. “What did you two want to do, just look around?”

  “We would be very much obliged,” I told her, crossing my fingers that she’d say yes.

  “Well, I wasn’t expecting company, but I suppose it’ll be all right.” She stepped back to allow us inside and, upon stepping over the threshold, I immediately felt the presence of the violence that had taken place in the house—even from a decade ago.

  Some acts are so monstrously despicable that the atmosphere soaks them up like a dry sponge, and it stays like that for a very long time. The more horrible the act, the more the atmosphere is stained with the imprint. I felt it like a heavy weight on my chest and it was a bit difficult to breathe, but when I glanced at Oscar, he seemed to be totally unaware of any change. I figured the old lady who’d let us in fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of sensitivities. She was able to live in the house as long as she didn’t venture down the hall to the back bedroom. I’d be lucky to make it an hour in the place without needing to lea
ve.

  While I did my best to buffer myself against the energetic assault, the woman introduced herself as Molly Cummins. “I’m sorry for the mess,” she said, her cheeks glowing pink as we followed her forward into the living room.

  I looked around and thought she had no reason to be embarrassed. The place was neat as a pin except for a quilt on the sofa that was slightly askew—as if Molly had been cuddled under it before our knock on her door had disturbed her. The TV was on and blaring rather loudly, but I could still pick out the hum of an air-conditioning unit outside whirring to keep the house cool. I shivered both for the cool temp in the house and the atmosphere. “Can I offer you some iced tea?” she asked politely.

  “None for me, thank you,” I said right away. I didn’t want to take advantage of the sweet woman’s hospitality.

  “I’d love a glass,” Oscar said, and followed her into the kitchen. I was about to frown at him when he turned to wink at me over his shoulder and motion for me to go down the hall and check out the back bedroom. I suddenly realized that he was allowing me some undisturbed time to scope out the house psychically.

  “Thank you,” I mouthed to him, and headed down a hallway on my immediate left, which obviously led to the bedrooms. On the way, I passed a bathroom, also on the left, and adjacent to the bathroom was a narrow door, which I opened and discovered led to a broom closet. Across from the bathroom on the right-hand side of the hallway was the open door to a bedroom. I paused for a moment and peered into the room, which was obviously Molly’s master bedroom. It was maybe twelve by twelve, fairly small, especially for a home I guessed to be less than twenty years old. Pulling out my phone, I took several photos of the room, making a note of where Molly had her bed positioned against the far wall between two windows; then I turned back to the hallway and snapped another photo of the distance between the master bedroom and the guest room at the end of the hall. Looking down, I saw that the carpet seemed fairly new—it was a light shade of tan and not well-worn or stained. I stared at it, imagining Skylar running down the hallway in her bare and bloody feet, and I turned to look back behind me. The hallway was maybe fifteen feet if that. If she was running, she’d take, what? Five actual steps?

  It bothered me greatly that Dioli and his partner hadn’t come across other footprints in the hallway and I wondered how late in the day the hallway had actually been vacuumed the night Noah was murdered. Had Skylar vacuumed right before going to bed? That seemed an odd thing to do, even for a neat freak, but maybe not. When I thought about it, I’d vacuumed a rug or two after nine p.m.

  From the kitchen I could hear Molly and Oscar chatting away. Molly was telling him that she sold her home after she retired, and didn’t know if she wanted to stay in Austin, so she decided to rent the house for a year, which had now turned into two.

  There was a part of me that wished I could abandon my next task and go hang out with them in the kitchen, but I knew that I couldn’t. We’d come this far, and Molly had been incredibly kind to allow us to enter and snoop around her home as it was. Most people wouldn’t have allowed us past the welcome mat.

  With a sigh I turned back and proceeded down the hallway, pausing at the closed door of the back bedroom. Another shudder went through me. I swear I could feel a sense of malice as a leftover by-product of the night Noah was killed.

  I opened the door and stepped inside. The room was bare except for a large antique dresser and one lone floor lamp. I flipped on the overhead light and surveyed the room.

  It was powder blue with the same tan carpet from the hallway. The trim and the closet door were white. The blinds were off-white, and I could barely breathe.

  Still, I pushed myself to stand there and feel the energy of the space. I wanted to sense the flow of the crime, even though I knew it’d be almost as bad as witnessing it.

  I closed my eyes and tried to brace myself again, but it was like an assault on all my psychic senses. The attack had been brutal, and without mercy. I had a very real impression that Noah had felt an intense amount of pain before he died, and I shuddered in addition to the shivering I was already experiencing.

  I opened my eyes and pulled a manila folder out of my purse. Taking a deep breath, I opened the folder and stared at the photo of Noah’s room as it had been on that night back in 2004. Stepping to the side, I looked from the photo to the two windows on the far wall. Noah’s twin bed had been positioned on that wall, between the windows like in his mother’s room. In the photo, his bedspread and sheets were a tangle, and the angle of the photograph had captured only his bare feet sticking out past the bed on the floor.

  The rest of the scene and the images recording it were a bit too horrible to describe, and I found that I’d been unable to look at them more than once, which was why I hadn’t brought them along with me from the file I’d left in the car. I’d carried only three of the photos with me into the house: this one, the one showing Skylar’s bloody footprints in the hallway, and the one of her bedroom, just to get a feel for how her room had looked at the time.

  Taking another deep breath, I moved two steps forward, toward the windows, and looked back and forth from the photo to the windows a few times. Then I stepped all the way to one of the windows and pulled up the blind to reveal the actual panes.

  I looked back and forth between the photo and the window a few more times; then I pulled up on the bottom sash. It came up easily. I pushed lightly on the screen and it fell out. Just like that. It simply fell out of the window and into the backyard. “Shit!” I hissed. (I’d worry about the swear jar later.)

  “Pssst!” I heard behind me, and I jumped. Sliding the window back down quickly, I turned and adopted a friendly smile. Oscar stood in the doorway, eyeing me curiously. “You okay, Cooper?”

  “Uh . . . yeah. I am. Okay.”

  “You sure?”

  I moved away from the window a little. “Yes. Positive. Would you mind running through a scenario with me, though?”

  “Sure,” he said. “What’re you thinking?”

  I got out the photo of Noah’s room and pointed to his bed. “See how the sheets are all rumpled and twisted around? He slept like most kids do, full of movement, but what’s weird is that if he were pulled out of bed by his mother and stabbed, wouldn’t we see the sheets tugged to one side?”

  Oscar nodded. “I’m with you,” he said.

  I then pointed at the pile of sheets at the bottom of the bed. “Instead of being pulled to one side, his sheets are pushed down toward the end of the bed.” I handed him the file and moved to about where the middle of Noah’s bed would have been, then got down on the floor and lay down on my back. “Instead of being dragged out of bed, Noah’s sheets look like he was awake right before he was attacked, and that he’d gotten out of bed himself.” I then sat up, pulled my knees up, and pushed them down to mime how Noah would’ve sat up in bed, pulled up his knees, and shoved the covers down toward the end of the bed with his feet. Then I mimed getting up out of bed to stand next to the window.

  “Makes sense,” Oscar said, looking from me to the photo.

  “Now,” I said, heading back toward Oscar. “I glanced at the ME’s report on the way over here, and he indicates that Noah was stabbed from behind, right?”

  “Yep,” Oscar said. “I read the file.”

  “You be the assailant and I’ll be Noah,” I said, turning away from him. I felt Oscar come up behind me and wind his left arm around my shoulders, pulling me into him; then he moved his right fist up high out in front of me before arcing it down toward my chest. He did it fast and his fist bumped gently but firmly against my sternum, and I couldn’t suppress a shudder as my intuition practically shrieked when it connected with the real act of murder from ten years earlier.

  Oscar let go of me immediately. “Sorry, Cooper, you okay?”

  I squared my shoulders and turned around to show him no harm, no foul. “Yeah. Fine.
Just the energy in this room is awful.”

  Oscar looked pained. He was as seasoned an investigator as they came, but I knew he abhorred violence against women and children most especially. Sometimes that granite cop exterior cracked a little and I saw the real Oscar, the teddy bear. I put my hand out and rubbed his arm. “Really. I’m okay,” I assured him. He nodded and I got back to the macabre work of going through the events that’d happened in that room. “Now, from what I saw of the other crime-scene photos, it looks like the attack began when Noah was facing the wall and not the window, but at some point the killer turned him a little and that’s how blood got on the back wall, right?”

  Oscar nodded.

  “And there was no interruption in the spatter pattern on those two walls, meaning that the ME’s report was probably accurate. Noah was stabbed facing away from his assailant.”

  “True,” Oscar agreed.

  “So the murderer didn’t want to look at him when he killed him.”

  “Or it was easier to control him that way. No arms or legs to block the attack.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” I said. “And yet, a stabbing is so personal, Oscar. I mean, it’s one of the cruelest ways to kill someone. There was rage in that attack. Real rage, and I wonder what fueled it.”

  “Maybe Skylar knows,” Oscar suggested.

  I shook my head. “I’m not convinced. One of the reasons Dioli thinks she’s guilty is that she was covered in her son’s blood when she fled to the neighbors.” Stepping around behind Oscar, I reached up and assumed the position of the assailant, making him Noah, and pivoting him toward the wall. “But if she stabbed him like this,” I said, miming the attack, “then how did she get all that blood on her? Isn’t it more likely that her version of what happened is the truth?” For emphasis I moved back several steps to the door as if I were entering it, then walked forward and crouched down as I continued to explain. “She comes in the door, finds him on the floor in the dark, begins to pick him up, he rolls limply forward into her arms, and her clothing gets stained that way.”