Sense of Deception

by Victoria Laurie

  There was another pause; then Candice said, “You’re the best, Gary. I really appreciate it.”

  Once she hung up, I said, “That throaty voice you use when you ask for information really turns the boys on, doesn’t it?”

  She chuckled. “Whatever gets me the info, Sundance.”

  “Heartbreaker,” I mocked.

  “It should take about ten minutes,” she replied, ignoring me.

  “I’m assuming we’re trying to see if Skylar was followed out of the parking lot?”

  “We are,” she said, taking a seat. “And while we wait, let’s check in with Oscar.”

  I took a seat. I’d been so focused on the footage, I’d forgotten all about him. Candice called him on her cell and had the phone on speaker when he answered. “Fuscoooo!” he said, clearly in a good mood. “I was just about to call you.”

  Candice and I traded smirks. Sure he was. “Abby’s here,” she told him. “What’ve you got?”

  “Chris Miller wouldn’t say much, other than he hopes that Skylar feels the sting of that needle and that she burns in hell.”

  “Nice guy,” I sneered. “Is he taken?”

  Oscar ignored me. “He totally blames her for Noah’s murder. According to him, Noah would’ve grown up, gone to college, and lived a great life if only his mom hadn’t won custody. He also blames the system, which he says was set up to award custody unfairly to the mother. Even if—and these are his words—‘she’s a crack-pipe-smoking whore.’”

  “Did he mean Skylar?” I asked. “Did she do crack?”

  “I think it was more a general statement,” Oscar told me. “He was pretty worked up.”

  “Okay, so he’s still convinced she did it,” Candice said.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Did you ask him about Faith?” Candice said next. “Is he supporting her?”

  “He clammed right up when I brought that up.”

  “Interesting,” Candice and I said together.

  Oscar laughed. “My guess, he’s supporting her, but he’s being careful about it because, like you said, Candice, if we found out there was some sort of an agreement between them, it could be used to help Skylar’s appeal.”

  I looked at Candice. “You gotta dig and find the money trail,” I told her, feeling a sense of urgency about it.

  “Did he say anything else?” I asked, hoping that maybe Oscar had asked him if Chris remembered talking to Noah about the man in Home Depot. I doubted that Chris would tell us if he had, but maybe he’d slip up and say something offhand that would help us.

  “Nope. The second I asked him if he was supporting his ex-mother-in-law, he told me to get out of his office and go talk to his attorney.”

  “Well, that’s telling,” Candice said. And then she filled him in on the videotape.

  “Wow,” he said, and then he started to say something else, but he cut off midword and instead said, “That’s Bonnie. Can I catch up with you guys later?”

  “Sure!” I told him. “And congratulations on the new house!” I knew it was preemptive, but I wanted to be the first to say it. My radar said Bonnie had good news.

  Candice’s e-mail pinged at that moment and she pulled her laptop forward and clicked to download the footage. Then she clicked on the screen again and swiveled her computer so I could see.

  We watched in silence for a few minutes until all of a sudden we saw Skylar appear from the exit and walk over to a nearby station wagon, still holding on to Noah, who appeared to be crying. She spent a few moments soothing him next to the car, and in those moments another figure appeared. “There!” I said, pointing to the lower right-hand corner.

  “Yep,” Candice agreed.

  We watched the guy who called himself Slip move over to a beat-up pickup a row away and climb in. He sat there, not moving, the whole time Skylar was consoling Noah, putting him into his booster, and buckling him in. She then got into the driver’s side and a moment later had pulled out of the space to turn the car to the right and drive up the aisle. A half beat later, Slip had also backed out of his space, turned his car to the right, and drove up his aisle, where he waited for Skylar to pass him; then he turned right and drove after her.

  “It was him,” I said. “It really was!”

  Candice didn’t say anything. Instead she rewound the tape, and used her fingers on the keypad to enlarge the image. “Holy Lady Luck!” she said when the image had finished pixelating.

  “I can see letters!” I yelled, excited by what was on the screen.

  “Is that a P or an R?” she asked me.

  I squinted. “R,” I said. “R, W, three . . . or is that a five?”

  “Three, I think,” Candice said.

  I squinted and pushed my face closer to the screen. “I think that’s a six and maybe a one?”

  “And the last letter is F.”

  “Or E,” I said.

  Candice wrote down several of the letter-and-number combos that the plate might contain, and then she said, “What do you think for make and model of the truck?”

  “It’s a little small,” I said. “I don’t think it’s an F-one-fifty.”

  “No way is it an F-one-fifty,” she agreed. “Maybe a Chevrolet? They made some smaller-model trucks in the early two thousands.”

  “Yeah, but that thing looks pretty beat-up. My guess is that it’s from the nineties.”

  Candice jotted herself a note. “I’ll do some digging. Now how about the color?”

  The footage from the parking area surveillance camera had been in black-and-white. The truck appeared to be of a dark color, but whether it was dark blue, dark green, black, or charcoal, I had no idea. “My guess is that it’s navy blue,” I said. “I mean, that’s a pretty popular color among truck owners.”

  Candice nodded and wrote that down. I saw that she added black, gray, and brown to the mix, just for good measure. “How long do you think it’ll take us to find this truck?”

  Candice sat back and pulled her laptop toward her on the desk. “Don’t know. But the sooner you let me get cracking on searching for it, the sooner we’ll find it.”

  I saluted her and headed back to my own office, where I promptly called Oscar, who was just about at our office. “So, are you a new homeowner?”

  He chuckled. “I am, Cooper.”

  “Told ya!”

  “I close a week after the inspection, assuming the property doesn’t have anything big wrong with it.”

  “It’s fine,” I assured him.

  “I need to go furniture shopping!” he said suddenly.

  “Tonight,” I promised him. I figured we could do some major damage to his credit cards sometime after five. And, along the way, I was also going to make him swing by a department store so that he could stop looking like a bum on his days off. “First, I need you to come and take a look at the feed we got off the parking lot surveillance video from Home Depot. Slip gets into a truck and looks to be following Skylar and Noah out of the lot. We can see most of the plate, but the make and model of the truck are what’s throwing us.”

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” he assured me. “I have to head to the bank, and then to Bonnie’s office to drop off the check for my earnest money.”

  I felt anxious. “Get here as soon as you can,” I told him.

  “You okay?” he said, obviously detecting the impatient tone in my voice.

  “I feel like we’re running out of time, Oscar.”

  “Don’t worry, Cooper,” he said confidently. “Between Candice and me, we’ll track this guy down in time.”

  I heard his words and waited to feel the lightness in my midsection, which was a surefire way of knowing that what he said would come true. But there was no lightness. Just a subtle flatness that worried me for the rest of the day.

  Chapter Thirteen

 
It took us two more days to find Slip. Two long, frustrating, irritating, annoying days to finally, finally get the right license number on the right make, right model truck in the right color for the right year.

  Oscar came up a total bust on the welding-license angle, even going back several years and trying to match a criminal record for B and E to a welder registered with TxDOT. The search was a complete waste of time.

  “He must’ve worked off the grid,” Oscar concluded.

  “Who would’ve hired him?”

  “Probably cheap builders who were taking advantage of the big construction boom from two thousand two to two thousand seven,” Oscar said. “Or he could’ve faked a certificate.”

  “If he was breaking and entering, he probably wouldn’t have thought twice about creating a fake license,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  All our hopes rested on Candice, who worked hard on finding a match to the grainy image of the license plate from the surveillance footage at Home Depot. For the record, finding something like that isn’t like it is on TV, where you just press a button and the computer whirs through a million bits of information per second and then blammo! You’ve got your bad guy!

  The way that particular technique works is that you have to enter all the parts you think you got right, and the computer spits out a series of possible matches. In our case that was a few thousand trucks, and we kept trying to narrow our search by eliminating possible matches. In other words, we’d painstakingly select a combination of what the most likely matches might be, like, for example, a black 1992 Mazda pickup with a plate that began RW3, and plug that into the computer to see if it would narrow the choices down to something less than a hundred, but it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

  After three days of endless effort to get everything to match, we finally found the truck, which was a 1995 GMC Sierra in navy blue with the license tag BW5 36L, and in 2004 it’d been registered to one Doug Gallagher.

  We all wanted to celebrate, except that when we pulled up Doug Gallagher’s driver’s license, it showed an old man with greasy silver hair and at least four chins. “Dammit!” I swore, leaning over Candice’s shoulder to look closely at the license.

  No one called me out for swearing, because both Oscar and Candice had used the f-bomb. F trumps D every time.

  I rubbed my tired eyes and looked again at the spreadsheet we’d been keeping to narrow each successive search. “Where did we go wrong?”

  “We didn’t,” Candice said, her shoulders slumped. We were all exhausted. It was going on ten o’clock and we’d been at it—off and on—since that morning.

  “So how come that’s not the guy from Home Depot?” I snapped. Did I mention I get grouchy when I don’t eat, sleep, or rest after a full day of clients and searching through databases until my head hurts?

  Candice wisely ignored my snippy attitude. “I can think of a few reasons,” she said. “Either the truck was stolen, borrowed, or sold without the title ever being transferred, or this guy could be a relative.”

  I let out a bitter sigh. “He doesn’t look anything like the description of our suspect.”

  Oscar reached for a piece of paper and a pen and he wrote down Gallagher’s information. “I’ll swing by this guy’s place in the morning,” he said. “Feel him out for info. In the meantime, you two should go home and get some rest. You both look exhausted.”

  It was Candice’s turn to sigh. “Yeah, okay,” she said, closing the lid to her laptop. “Come on, Sundance. I’ll walk you down to your car.”

  I stared at both of them in disbelief. I mean, I was crazy tired, but it was freaking Thursday. Thursday! Skylar’s final appeal was the following Tuesday and the Hail Mary of passes we’d thrown trying to save her had just gone wildly out-of-bounds. (Impressed by my football metaphor, ain’tcha?)

  “There’s got to be something more we can do!” I protested. And then, quite unexpectedly, my eyes began to well up and a tear slid down my cheek.

  “Abby,” Candice said gently, reaching out to take hold of my hand. “Honey, we’re doing the best we can. You know we are. But like I told you when we first started this case, you get too attached to the outcome, and, honey, you can’t do this with Skylar. The odds are too long here.”

  More tears leaked down my cheeks. “Candice, we can’t just let her die!”

  “We’re not letting anybody die,” she said, rubbing my arm, while Oscar handed me a tissue. “We’re all gonna fight to the bitter end, honey. If we go down, it won’t be because we didn’t give it our all. But there’s only so much we can do in a given day. So let’s get you home, put you to bed, and fight again tomorrow, okay?”

  I bit my lip and tried to stop the floodgates. The image of Doug Gallagher came up in my mind and I couldn’t help but feel that we’d wasted nearly three whole days chasing a ghost.

  “Maybe this guy will know something,” Oscar coaxed. “Maybe he’ll point us in the right direction.”

  I took an unsteady breath and wiped at my cheeks with the tissue. “I’m going with you tomorrow, Oscar.”

  He studied me. “You sure?”

  “I am.”

  “Okay, Cooper. I’ll pick you up here at nine a.m.”

  “And I’ll do a few more searches,” Candice added. “I mean, maybe there’s another make and model truck that we haven’t thought of yet that could fit that description.”

  I sighed heavily again. “No,” I told her. “Don’t bother. My gut says it’s the right truck.” What my gut didn’t tell me was why it was registered to the wrong guy.

  “Well, okay, then!” Candice said, her voice a bit too enthused. “See? Progress. We haven’t hit a dead end yet, Sundance. And this ain’t over.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I muttered, getting up from the chair and moving toward the door with my two companions. “Tomorrow, then.”

  As I came through my front door, I found Dutch on the couch, watching baseball. “Hey, beautiful,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said without an ounce of enthusiasm. Scooping up Tuttle, who’d roused herself from the doggy bed to jump about at my feet, I moved over to the couch and plopped down. Tuttle took that opportunity to cover me in kisses, and then Eggy had to get into the act, and before I knew it, the pups were in some kind of kissing competition and I was laughing.

  Sometimes there’s nothing better for a bad day than a pair of sweet pups to remind you that you’re loved. When I finally got them to settle back down in the doggy beds, I looked up and found Dutch standing over me, holding a bowl. “Eat,” he said.

  I took the bowl. He’d made his famous spaghetti carbonara. It smelled and tasted like heaven. I ate a few bites and Dutch sat beside me, quietly watching the game. “I’m worried about you,” he finally said.

  I snorted. “That’s nothing new.”

  “True. But I think you’re pushing yourself too much on this case, Edgar.”

  I ate another two bites before answering him. “I can’t look away from this one, Dutch. Skylar Miller is innocent. She is. And if someone doesn’t do something, she’s gonna die next Tuesday.”

  “Cal could win the appeal.”

  “Pigs could also fly.” Nothing in the ether had changed about the direction of the appeal. It still felt like Skylar was going to lose, which meant we wouldn’t have enough evidence to provide the appellate court with the reasonable conclusion that she might actually be innocent. That’s what kept driving me. “It’s like I’ve told you,” I said to Dutch. “The future isn’t set. It’s fluid, but there are some things, some distinct points, within the context of the future that have a certainty to them. Some events simply feel inevitable to me. Most don’t, thank God, which means we can alter the future to our advantage when we need to, but there are some things that simply feel like they’re headed to a specific destined conclusion, and the only way to alter them is to find t
he one thing, the one variable, that might alter things.”

  “The appellate court’s decision is going to be nay, eh?” Dutch asked.

  “Yes. Skylar and Cal are going to lose.”

  “So why try so hard?” Dutch said. “I mean, Edgar, if it’s inevitable, why are you trying so hard to change it? Why are you killing yourself when you can’t win?”

  “Because I don’t know that I can’t win, babe.”

  “I’m confused.”

  I thought about how to explain it. “It’s like I’m chasing after this speeding train, and this speeding train is headed to a certain destination, and I know I want to beat the train so I can throw a switch and alter the course of the track, but I haven’t found the shortcut yet that’s going to let me beat the train.”

  “So you think you can alter the outcome of the appellate court’s decision?”

  “No, I don’t know if I can, but knowing that I might not be able to doesn’t mean that I won’t find a way if I keep at it. If I keep trying. If we can just find this guy from Home Depot and arrest his ass and bring him in—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Dutch said, twisting on the couch to face me. “Edgar, how are you going to arrest this guy if you find him?”

  I blinked. “What do you mean, how am I going to arrest him? I’ll have Oscar slap the cuffs on him and bring him in.”

  “On what charge?”

  I looked at him like he was stupid. “Murder.”

  “Whose?” he said, ignoring the level look I was giving him.

  “Noah Mill—” My voice cut off because it suddenly dawned on me that we wouldn’t be arresting anybody for Noah’s murder, because as far as law enforcement was concerned, that case was solved, closed, and the murderer was about to hang for the crime. “Aw, son of a . . .”