Sense of Deception Read online

  “There are two reasons why people usually withhold information,” I said angrily. “The first is because they think it’ll get them in trouble. The second is because they have something to gain by keeping whatever it is a secret.”

  “Which one do you think it is with Wagner?”

  I shrugged. “Possibly both. She was awfully nervous when we started flashing our badges. That tells me she’s broken the law. Her energy reads as a cold, calculating narcissist, so it wouldn’t surprise me that she’s working some angle that puts her just this side of what’s legal. Also, the way her features smoothed out—I mean, did you see that? It was practiced. Once she regained her composure, she fell into the act of portraying herself as some sort of exemplary citizen. And the joke is that any idiot can see right through her!”

  “You’re getting a little worked up, Sundance,” Candice said, eyeing the road nervously. “Maybe I should drive?”

  I ignored her. “What really sticks in my craw is that she got up there on that witness stand and testified against Skylar. She had to have known that her testimony could’ve swayed the outcome! I mean, the prosecution was asking for the death penalty! But what Wagner doesn’t get, what she is truly too dense to understand, is that juries can see right through shit like that. They probably looked at Skylar and thought, yeah, this woman murdered her son, but no wonder she’s a little off. I mean, have you seen the mother?”

  “Sundance?”

  “What?” I snapped. I was so angry, and in the back of my mind I knew I wasn’t just mad at Faith Wagner, which made me even more mad.

  “You’re drifting in and out of the lane and if you get any closer to the car in front of you, I will have to crawl into the backseat just to get some legroom.”

  I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly while easing off the gas pedal. “Sorry.”

  “Totally okay,” Candice assured me, like she fully understood exactly where all that pent-up anger came from. And I knew for a fact she did.

  After a while of more quiet (which I spent breathing deeply and obeying every rule of the road), I said, “Where to?”

  Before answering, Candice rummaged around in her purse, pulled up her notes, flipped through the pages, and finally rattled off an address. “Head back toward Lamar,” she instructed. “I’ll let you know how far down it is.”

  “What’s the address?” I asked.

  “Central office for the Department of Social Services. We have an appointment to meet with Diane Pickett.”

  My memory keyed in on the last name from one of the articles I’d read covering Skylar’s trial. “Skylar’s social worker?” I guessed.

  “Yep. She’s still working in that capacity.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I would’ve thought that Skylar’s verdict would’ve been political suicide for Pickett.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t pretty,” Candice said. When a social worker was involved in the case of a dead kid, he or she always got some of the blame. “Still, she’s still there, and she’s willing to meet with us.”

  “When did you contact her?”

  “I sent her an e-mail this morning. She just replied back.”

  “That’s some nice timing,” I mused.

  “We’ve had a bit of that on our side this whole case—have you noticed?”

  I smiled sideways. “It’s like someone up there doesn’t want Skylar to die for the wrongful conviction of her son’s murder.”

  “Yep,” Candice agreed.

  We got to Pickett’s office about fifteen minutes later and walked up two flights of stairs (the elevator was out) to come through the doors into a sea of misery. The place was filled with people, almost exclusively women and children. Not one smile among them. Beyond the front waiting area was a vast room of short cubicles, all of them rather similar: occupied by women, each sitting in front of a computer at a desk with enough paper and files stacked on top to threaten its stability. Next to each casually dressed social worker was another woman outfitted modestly and, almost as a rule, at least two to three children gathered around her. Kids outnumbered the adults in here three to one.

  Candice and I sort of stiffened as we came through the door in our spiffy professional wear with designer purses and full stomachs. All eyes turned to us. Judgments likely followed.

  Candice stepped forward to a small reception area, where most newcomers were prompted to take a number from a red ticket dispenser by the door. Candice leaned forward, displayed her badge, and whispered something to the woman behind the desk, who then nodded, picked up her phone, dialed, and motioned for Candice to head back to the waiting area.

  We didn’t sit down, even though there were a few empty chairs. I think we were too ashamed. There’s nothing like staring poverty and hardship in the face to make you think about how good you have it, and how little you’ve been appreciating it. The watch Dutch had given me just the other day felt heavy on my wrist, and I covered it with my palm self-consciously.

  We stood like that, not speaking, for about a half hour before a woman in her mid to late fifties, with gray shoulder-length hair, round features, and a pleasant smile, came out from the area behind the counter and headed straight for us. “Candice?” she asked me. I pointed to my left, and the woman I assumed was Diane Pickett swiveled slightly to greet my partner.

  “Thank you for seeing us, Diane,” Candice said, extending her hand.

  Diane took it and offered us a warm smile. After I was introduced, Diane said, “Would you mind if we talked on the go? I only get a half hour for lunch and it’ll be better if I don’t cut into my time on the clock.”

  “Of course,” Candice said quickly. No way did either of us want to take Diane’s time away from the people who really needed her.

  We went out the door and down the stairs, and as we only had a half hour to talk, Candice got right to it. “As I said in my e-mail, we’re working on Skylar Miller’s appeal, and we’d like to get your take on a few things, if we could.”

  “That poor girl,” Diane said. “I’ve been watching the news, waiting for any word on the appeal. Does she have a chance?”

  “There’s always a chance,” Candice said.

  “I still have nightmares about it,” Diane said. “In this line of work you always wonder if you could’ve done something to prevent harm to a child, but I’ve gone over and over and over every single one of my interactions with Noah and Skylar, and there was never a hint of anything but love and affection between them. She was a good mother. She was. Hell, she was a good person.”

  “We think so too,” I said.

  Diane beamed at me. Her loyalty to Skylar was apparent. “How can I help?” she asked as we came out into the bright sunshine and heat of the day.

  “We’re curious about a few things,” Candice said. “First, I know you had regular meetings with Noah and Skylar, correct?”

  “Once a month plus the odd surprise visit to the home,” she told me. “It was part of the terms of Skylar’s custody agreement and her parole.”

  “Did you by any chance talk to Noah in the two weeks prior to his murder?” I asked, hoping that maybe Noah had mentioned something about Slip to her.

  “No,” she said sadly. “Skylar and Noah were scheduled to see me the week after. She’d been doing so good with him too.”

  “Can you talk a little about your history with her?” I asked. I felt intuitively that Diane had information for us that we’d need, somehow.

  “Sure,” she said, pointing down the street to the sign of a deli. “We’re heading there, by the way.” We adjusted our pace slightly to a less hurried walk and Diane told us about Skylar. “She was assigned to me right out of jail,” she said. “The first thing she said to me at our introductory meeting was that she wanted to get her son back. I told her she’d never get him back. I mean, I wanted to be honest with her. Her ex-husband came from money; s
he’d spent the last fourteen months in jail. . . . I told her she’d be lucky to get supervised visitation, and she didn’t even blink. She said that if all she ever got was supervised visitation, then she’d take it as the chance to show Noah just how much he meant to her.”

  “Pretty awesome attitude,” Candice said.

  Diane nodded. “That was Skylar. She did everything I and the court asked her. She went through the twelve steps, got her medal, took it slow with Noah, got to know him and let him know her, and they bonded. Most of the women I work with truly love their children, but Skylar and Noah were especially close. They seemed to understand each other in a way that was so beautiful to watch. She was so patient with him, so fascinated by how his mind worked, what he came up with, how he looked at life.”

  “What was Chris like?” I asked.

  “Chris Miller?” Diane said. She seemed to think about her answer before giving it. “He lived for that boy too. He just couldn’t stand Skylar. I think he was worried that she’d end up back on the bottle, and he didn’t want to see his son heartbroken. He fought really hard against her gaining any kind of physical custody, and in the end, it backfired on him.

  “When they went to court to revisit custody, he and his dad came in with their high-powered attorney and they basically stunk up the court with their derision for all that Skylar had done to get her life back, and the judge didn’t like it.”

  “The judge granted Skylar custody out of spite?” I asked.

  Diane laughed. “No. But she had a choice of shared physical custody or solely granting it to Skylar, and after hearing from Noah, well, she made the right choice.”

  “Noah didn’t get on with his dad?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, he loved his dad. He just really didn’t like his grandmother. Skylar’s mom was babysitting Noah while Chris was at work, and Chris worked long hours.”

  “We just came from Faith Wagner’s house,” Candice told her. “She’s a real piece of work.”

  “Oh, then you caught her on a good day?” Diane chuckled as we arrived at the deli and got in line. “Faith never gave anybody the warm fuzzies.”

  We stepped forward to the counter and ordered our sandwiches, were given a number, and took a seat at a table to wait for our lunch.

  “How did Chris take the judge’s decision?” I asked while we sipped on our drinks.

  “He seemed upset but not as upset as his father. Grant Miller threw a fit in the courtroom, yelled at the judge, and nearly got his butt tossed in jail for contempt. He couldn’t believe the decision, and you could tell he wasn’t a guy who liked to lose. He even yelled at Chris like it was his fault. That guy was a piece of work too.”

  “Wait,” I said, making room for the delivery of our sandwiches. “We heard that Grant and his wife were pleased by Skylar’s turnaround and even offered to have Skylar put on a trust he’d set up for his grandson.”

  “Oh, that,” Diane said. “That came almost a year after she got custody. I think it was Skylar. She didn’t let Grant’s outburst in court get to her, and she told me that she’d been in contact with the Millers through e-mail in the days after the custody hearing, promising them that anytime they wanted to visit with Noah, they could. She didn’t want anything to change about Noah’s life except to provide him with the constant love he deserved from a repentant mother.

  “The tactic worked. The Millers calmed down, saw their grandson whenever they wanted, and actually grew to respect Skylar’s efforts to make something of herself. When she got accepted into UT’s undergrad physical therapy program, which is no easy program to get into, mind you, they actually sent her a laptop.”

  “She was headed to UT?” I asked. That was new information.

  “She was,” Diane said sadly. “She’d wanted to specialize in pediatric therapy—helping kids recover from injury or genetic limitations was what she dreamed about doing. She never got there, obviously. Anyway, along with the laptop, Skylar told me they’d also sent her the paperwork on the trust as their way of letting her know that they were supporting her as their grandson’s mother and primary caregiver. What they didn’t understand was that she didn’t want anything to do with their money. They’d used it to try to control her in the past, and she didn’t want that type of relationship with them, so she ignored it. I think the fact that she never signed it was the sole reason it wasn’t used against her in court, not that it mattered. In my opinion, the jury found her guilty the moment they heard she was once an addict.”

  I finished my sandwich and sighed. It was all so sad. How were we going to overcome all that’d been taken away from Skylar? “Can I ask you something personal, Diane?” I said.

  “Depends on what it is,” she replied, but she smiled in a way that told me she was teasing.

  “How did you avoid the political fallout from Skylar’s conviction?”

  All the humor in her smile drained away. “It was bad,” she said. “For a lot of years it was bad. My job was somewhat protected by the union, but that didn’t stop my boss from doing everything she could to get me to select out, as they say. I was assigned the worst cases in the worst areas, but I hung in there because of Skylar. I knew she hadn’t murdered Noah. And because I’d helped her get her life back in the days up until it was ripped away from her, I also knew I’d made a difference to her and to Noah, and if in those days she hadn’t quit, I didn’t think I could either. Still, I’ve often found it so odd that, because of my relationship to Skylar Miller, I’ve been both lifted up and pulled under, but I’ll never let myself drown. Like Dory, I’m just going to keep swimming.”

  * * *

  We let Diane get back to work and headed back to the office. Candice wanted to check in with the guy at Home Depot’s headquarters and she also commented that she wanted to check into Faith Wagner’s income tax records.

  When I asked her why, she replied, “It’s like you said: She’s either hiding something or has something to gain, and I think you’re right that it could be both.”

  I pulled up to the curb to let Candice out at our office, and before she got out, I told her that I had something of my own to check out. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “It’s not anything to do with Skylar,” I assured her. “It’s for the case I got from Dioli. I still can’t believe that idiot had Cheng arrested. I want to swing by the dry cleaner’s before they close and check the place out with my radar.”

  “You want company for that?” Candice asked me.

  “Nah. I’m not gonna ask any questions. I’m just gonna go there, take some clothes in, posing as a customer, and feel out the ether.”

  “You have clothes to take to the dry cleaner?”

  I threw a thumb toward the backseat. “Dutch’s shirts. I was supposed to take them in for him two weeks ago, but I’ve been forgetting. Poor guy keeps looking for his favorite blue shirt and I keep lying and telling him I don’t know where it is.”

  Candice twisted to look into the backseat and said, “Being married to you is a real picnic, ain’t it, Sundance?”

  I offered her my most winning smile. “The good times just keep on rollin’.”

  Chapter Twelve

  After dropping Candice off, I headed north and west to the address of the dry cleaner’s I’d lifted from the file on Tuyen Pham. I wasn’t at all sure what I’d find, but my intuition was sending me there, either because I’d pick up a valuable clue or because Dutch was about to finally figure out that I’d been driving around with his dirty shirts in the back of my car for two weeks. My crew—the spirit guides tasked with looking out for me—were all about keeping my marriage intact.

  The dry cleaning business itself was a pleasant enough looking place: a stand-alone building with parking in the rear and a cute dark green facade with a window box full of flowers and a little bench outside. The presentation gave it a homey look.

  Most dry-cleaning plac
es I’d been to were far more utilitarian, and I was just a teensy bit thrown by the fact that the outer appearance of this one was so charming. I think I might’ve been expecting something more sinister.

  Still, I shrugged it off, got out all of Dutch’s shirts (dropped one or two on the ground while I was at it), and headed down the long drive toward the front door. As I rounded the corner to go inside, I came to an abrupt halt. Heading in just in front of me was none other than Don Corzo, carrying a toolbox and wearing a blue work shirt.

  He smiled pleasantly at me as he pushed open the door, and I gasped as I recognized him. “Holy shit!” I squeaked. (No way does swearing at the sight of a serial killer cost me a quarter.)

  Corzo suddenly paused midway through the door.

  I gripped Dutch’s laundry.

  Corzo dipped his head back out to give me another look.

  I put two and two, and two, and two, together, which in my crazy math world added up to four dead girls.

  Corzo’s eyes narrowed.

  I stood there frozen, still adding, dividing, and multiplying, all synapses firing at once as questions with obvious answers bulleted through my mind. Hadn’t I read in Wendy McLain’s file that she’d once lived above a dry cleaner’s? And hadn’t one of the photos of Donna Andrews’s murder scene been in the parking lot of a strip mall with a dry cleaner’s in the background? Didn’t the air-conditioning units at most dry cleaning places run continuously because of the heat produced by the dryers? They’d break down a lot, wouldn’t they?

  Corzo began to ease back out of the doorway.

  My head pivoted as if turned by an unseen force to look across the street. The restaurant where Misty Hartnet had worked as a waitress was in plain sight three blocks down.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Corzo take a slow step in my direction.

  Turning my attention back, I looked at the storefront I stood in front of. Tuyen Pham had worked here. Tuyen Pham had been strangled and left in a park, just like the other three girls, only her body had been hidden, because, knowing we were onto him, her killer had changed up his pattern.