Sense of Deception

by Victoria Laurie

  He looked down at the ground. “I didn’t,” he said. “I mean, I think I was kind of in shock. I just couldn’t believe it, you know? I went to Noah’s funeral, and they’d arrested Sky by then. I visited her in jail right after and told her how beautiful the ceremony was and how many people came. She was sorta destroyed by the whole thing. Catatonic even. I don’t even know if she remembers me visiting her.”

  My lips pressed together. The injustice that’d been done to this poor woman filled me with a deep and seething anger. “That was nice of you to visit her,” I told him.

  “I was the only one who did,” he said bitterly. “Not even her mom showed up to support her. And her ex . . . man. I never told Sky this, but at the funeral the guy was in a rage. He cursed her in front of the entire congregation. Swore he’d get even with her for murdering his son, and I guess he did, because the judge gave Sky the death penalty. I have a friend in the program—I guess you know that’s how we met, right?”

  Candice and I both nodded. “She told us,” I said. “But she didn’t want to. She wanted to keep you anonymous.”

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “I would’ve wanted her to send you guys to me. Anyway, I have another friend in the program who’s high up in the court system, and he said there was a rumor that the presiding judge had been unduly influenced by the Millers’ money.”

  I scowled. “We heard that too.”

  Allen was thoughtful for a moment before he said, “Do you think you can save her?”

  I wanted to say yes. Man, did I want to say yes. But my intuition was still laying even odds on whether we’d be able to save Skylar from the needle. “We’re going to do everything we can,” I promised.

  Allen sighed. “I should go visit her,” he said. “I haven’t seen her in eight years. Since they moved her to Mountain View.”

  “She’s back at county,” I told him. “You can sign up for a video visit through their Web site. They don’t allow in-person visits anymore, but if you don’t have Wi-Fi, you can go to the jail and they’ll set you up in a room with a monitor.”

  Allen’s eyes widened. “Technology,” he said. “Stealing a little piece of your soul one megabyte at a time.”

  “True that,” I told him. The new video system was very efficient, and probably terrific for those people who couldn’t make the drive to county, but also ridiculously impersonal. Sometimes, inmates and their families needed that extra dose of physical reassurance that a window of Plexiglas could provide and a computer monitor just couldn’t.

  Candice suddenly seemed to get an idea. “Speaking of video systems, Allen, do you think there’s any way there might be a recording of the incident involving Skylar and this guy you threw out of the store from back then?”

  Allen’s brow lifted. “You know,” he said, “there might be. The store is packed with security cameras because the company gets a lot of accident claims and people walk out of here all the time with stuff they don’t pay for. I know that the feed is sent to headquarters in Atlanta, and they hold it for ten years or so until the statute of limitations runs out. You might get lucky and get a copy, but you’d be right under the wire, ’cause it’s been almost exactly a decade.”

  “Do you remember the approximate date?” Candice asked, her voice excited.

  Allen rubbed the stubble on his chin with his hand. “Well, let’s see. It was about two weeks before Noah was murdered, which would’ve made it mid-June, and I think it was a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday shift, because back then they had me on that rotation, and I know we weren’t busy that day, so it couldn’t have been a Saturday—and it probably wasn’t a Thursday either, ’cause the closer we get to the weekend, the busier we get, plus inventory comes in on Thursday and I don’t remember being busy with that.”

  Candice had her phone out and was scrolling through it. “Could it have been the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth of June two thousand four?”

  Allen nodded. “Or the week before. I’m pretty sure it was two weeks before Noah was murdered, but I’m not positive.”

  Candice pocketed her phone. “Thanks, Allen. We’ll check it out. You’ve been a really big help.”

  We left Allen and headed back inside the Depot. Candice then approached the customer service desk and inquired about a contact to their headquarters, flashing her badge and letting the girl behind the desk know this was a matter of some urgency.

  Ten minutes later the manager had helped us navigate the complicated world of HD headquarters, and we had the name of the director of IT, who could assist us with obtaining a copy of the video, and confirmation that HD held on to store surveillance footage for exactly ten years. The director was out when we called, but Candice left him an urgent message, along with her credentials as a consultant to the FBI and a private investigator in Austin. I thought it very clever that she kept dropping the whole “consultant with the Federal Bureau of Investigation . . .” line. It opened doors, and at the moment I wasn’t too worried about getting into trouble using the street cred.

  When we finally piled back into Candice’s car, I felt a measure of satisfaction and tense excitement. “Man! If we could get that tape, Candice? That would be a game changer!”

  “Don’t get your hopes up yet, Sundance,” she warned.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we don’t have the tape yet and because we’ll have to sift through hours and hours of video to find the two minutes we’re looking for. Plus, once we find that section, who’s to say there’ll be anything usable on it? Surveillance footage captured by cameras from ten years ago isn’t like it is today. It’s grainy and fuzzy and barely passes for acceptable by current standards. And even if it’s crystal clear, it’s not like we have a name to match it. Or, for that matter, any way to convince the appellate court that what’s on the tape is motive for murder.”

  I crossed my arms and frowned at Candice. “If I was a parade, you would be rain.”

  She smirked. “I’m just saying that it’s too early to get your hopes up. We need a name more than anything else, and the longer we spend trying to find it, the closer we get to our deadline.”

  “Still, it backs up the theory that there was an encounter that could’ve motivated someone to take revenge on Skylar,” I said.

  “True. But what I don’t like is that this guy waited two, possibly three weeks to get even with her. I mean, by then he should’ve cooled down, right?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Maybe it took a little while to fester. Maybe it took him some time to come up with a plan.”

  “I’ll give you that,” Candice said, “but I’m not sure that the appellate court would see it that way. They might view the encounter, wonder the same thing I did, and decide that a crime so heinous would be driven by passion, not cool calculation. Noah wasn’t just murdered—he was butchered, and that’s not the action of a guy who sits back and waits for an opportunity. Plus, I have to question one thing that keeps really bothering me.”

  “The knife,” I said, knowing that’s what she was going to say. It was bothering me too.

  “Yep. How the hell did this guy break into the house without waking anybody, or leaving signs of forced entry behind, walk into the kitchen, get the knife from the drawer, head back out of the house to the backyard and the window leading to Noah’s room, open the window, crawl in without Noah waking up to scream his head off, then, after Skylar fled the room, calmly slip back out the window, close it without leaving a single smudge, and put the screen back in? It makes no damn sense.”

  I sighed. She was absolutely right. Much as I tried to make sense of this guy’s motive and method, I couldn’t. “Only one way to find out how it actually went down,” I said.

  Candice started the car and began to back out of the space. “What’s that?”

  “We talk to Slip and get him to tell us,” I said.

  Candice let out a
little laugh. “Love your enthusiasm, Sundance.”

  “It’s how I get through the day,” I said.

  We headed back to the office, making a detour for a smoothie before we got back to work and checked in with Oscar and brought him up to speed on our progress. He had nothing new to report, unfortunately.

  As Candice talked to Oscar on speakerphone, I kept thinking about poor Noah and his life cut so short. I remembered the words Skylar had used to describe her son. That he was outgoing, personable, and kind to humans and animals. He certainly hadn’t deserved his fate, and I felt so much sorrow that such a bright light had been so brutally snuffed out.

  “You okay?” Candice asked me, and I realized I’d been staring off into space and that she’d hung up with Oscar.

  “Yeah. Just thinking about Noah. Seemed like a great little kid, you know?”

  “He did,” she agreed.

  I poked at my super-healthy smoothie with my straw (Candice’s idea) and said, “It makes me curious, actually, about whether he mentioned this guy Slip to anyone else.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” I said, sorting through the thought as I spoke. My intuition was buzzing with something, and I needed to talk to work it through. “I can see why he wouldn’t have mentioned Slip to his mom after the encounter at Home Depot. I mean, he probably didn’t want to upset her again, but what if he’d mentioned it to someone else, like a teacher?”

  “It was the summer, remember?” Candice said. “School was out for the year.”

  “Oh,” I said, “that’s right.” Buzz, buzz, buzz, my intuition chimed. Something was there, so I pushed a little more at the line of thought. “But maybe,” I said next, “he brought it up with someone else. Like, isn’t that the kind of thing you confess to your grandma?” As I said that, I felt a light tingling in my abdomen. I was on to something.

  “Maybe,” Candice agreed, squinting at me. “You look like you want to go ask her about it.”

  “I do.”

  “Intuition buzzing?”

  I grinned. “It’s like you know me.”

  Candice got up from her chair. “No time like the present,” she said. “Give me ten minutes to find Skylar’s mom’s name and address and we’ll roll.”

  I drove while Candice navigated, or, more accurately, I drove and reacted to Candice’s infrequent pointing while she spoke on the phone to various clients and made a second attempt to reach our IT contact at Home Depot headquarters.

  Eventually, we pulled onto Westlake Drive, which is a section of town where the houses are ginormous and the property tax bracket is likely in the mid–five figures. I started to feel a little self-conscious driving my fairly new hybrid SUV when every other car that passed me cost more than the entire sum of my college education. At last we pulled up to a grand gray masonry estate (there was no other word for it) and peered down the long drive.

  “Skylar’s mom lives here?”

  Candice read the address on the side of one of the pylons at the edge of the drive and said, “The estate belongs to an A. Hudson and, judging by the address I pulled up for Faith Wagner, I think she lives in the guesthouse.”

  “Where’s the guesthouse?”

  Candice pointed down the drive to a small pond. On the edge of the pond was a cottage constructed of the same gray masonry as the main house.

  “Do you think we can just head up the driveway and park?” I whispered.

  “Unless you want to walk from here,” Candice said, motioning impatiently with her hand for me to turn into the drive.

  “But what if they come out?” I said, still hesitating. Big money intimidates me. And I admit this even though my own sister could probably afford a place like this. Maybe two or three places like this.

  “Just freaking drive,” Candice said impatiently.

  I gripped the wheel and turned onto the estate, creeping down the driveway like I did it every day and being careful not to look toward the main house. I parked next to a gold-colored Volvo and we got out. I kept my keys out just in case a SWAT team of security burst out of the house to chase us off the property, but no one appeared from the main house and I let Candice lead us down the slight hill to the guesthouse.

  On the way Candice looped the lanyard holding her FBI ID around her neck and I did the same.

  As we stopped on the front step, we heard music from inside. Piano music. Bad piano music. Candice knocked and the music stopped. A moment later the door was opened and a woman in her mid to late sixties, bearing a strong resemblance to Skylar, minus the curly blond hair, stood there peering at us over bright red reading glasses. She was smartly dressed in a steel blue silk blouse and a camel skirt with matching flat-heeled shoes. “Yes?”

  Candice tilted the badge hanging from her neck toward the woman and said, “Mrs. Wagner?”

  She blinked a few times as she looked from Candice to the badge, then over to me, and down at my badge. “Yes?” she said. “What’s this about?”

  I couldn’t help noticing that Skylar’s mother had broken out in a sheen of sweat, and I wondered, what was up with that?

  Candice introduced us and said, “We’d like to ask you a few questions about your grandson, if we could?”

  Mrs. Wagner’s lips pressed down in a hard line. “I don’t have a grandson,” she said, anger erupting in her eyes. Again, I wondered at her reaction.

  “I’m so sorry,” Candice said, trying to appease her. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that we’ve been investigating Noah Miller’s murder, and we’ve turned up some compelling evidence that we’re following up on.”

  Mrs. Wagner’s hands balled into fists. “My daughter murdered my grandson, Ms. Fusco. A crime for which she is going to pay the ultimate penalty. I see no reason why you would want to dredge up the most horrible incident of my life now, when it’s already too late to alter the outcome.”

  “Mrs. Wagner,” I said gently, trying to get a feel for her energy, “I know you’re alarmed by our sudden arrival on your front step, but we’ve been investigating the murder of your grandson, operating under the premise that your daughter committed the crime, only to discover that there are several inconsistencies in the evidence presented at court that blow giant holes through that theory. All we want is the truth, ma’am. And we believe you could hold vital information.” When Skylar’s mother continued to stare angrily at me, I added, “Ma’am. What if Skylar didn’t do it? Wouldn’t that be worth discovering before it’s too late?”

  She let out a breath and shook her head. “My daughter is a master manipulator, Ms. Cooper. You’ve obviously talked to her, and she’s convinced you that she’s innocent.”

  “No,” Candice was quick to say. “We examined the evidence, ma’am, and that alone was enough to convince us.”

  “What evidence?” she demanded.

  I found it really unsettling that a mother could be so cold and callous toward her own daughter. Then again, my own mother was cut from much the same cloth as this woman. “We think there really was an intruder that night,” Candice said patiently. “And we have multiple witnesses that suggest he might’ve been out to hurt your daughter and her son. We’re currently waiting on video surveillance, in fact, to confirm that he threatened her.”

  Candice was fibbing a lot here, but I didn’t care. We had to get past the ice wall this woman was putting up if we were going to find out if Noah had spoken to her about Slip.

  For her part, Mrs. Wagner seemed to mull that all over. Finally she said, “I don’t know how I can help. I certainly never witnessed my daughter or my grandson being threatened.”

  “We know,” I said. “But maybe Noah talked to you about a particular incident that took place at a Home Depot about two weeks before he was murdered?”

  Mrs. Wagner’s eyes widened slightly in a flash of recognition, but she seemed to catch herself, and
then her features smoothed out, as if she were suddenly the most calm and reasonable person you’d ever want to meet. “I don’t recall any such conversation,” she said.

  My radar detector went off like a tornado warning siren. “I see,” I said, narrowing my own eyes. I wanted her to read my disbelief. She started sweating again. “So he never told you about the guy in the hardware store? The welder who knew all about tools?”

  “No,” she said, a bit too quickly.

  I glanced at Candice and shook my head, again not even trying to hide my disbelief. “Mrs. Wagner,” Candice tried. “You do know that your daughter will quite likely be put to death next week, right? And that will happen because she’s been unjustly convicted of the crime of murdering her own son.”

  “It’s in the court’s hands,” she said, turning up her palms as if there weren’t anything to be done about it.

  “All right, then,” Candice said.

  My best friend turned to leave, but anger got the better of me and I stepped threateningly close to Skylar’s mother. “I don’t know what you’re hiding, Faith Wagner, but I sure as hell intend to find out. And when I clear your daughter of the charges, I’m going to make sure that she knows her own mother was willing to let her die rather than offer us one simple kernel of truth.”

  I then looked her up and down to show her she wasn’t all that, and turned to go, marching right past a gaping Candice on the way.

  “Well, that went well,” Candice said as we got in the car. Mrs. Wagner was still glaring hard at us and I was tempted to flip her the bird, but held myself in check. Barely. And only because she wasn’t worth the quarter.

  Her attitude was just a bit too close to home for me, so I settled for squealing backward out of the space to turn the car and screeching the tires on the tidy concrete as we zipped out of the drive.

  “Why do you think she won’t cooperate?” Candice asked after a bit of protracted silence (during which I fumed and mentally doubled the amount in my swear jar).