Sense of Deception

by Victoria Laurie

  I pointed to the bedcovers on Noah’s bed. Then to the bedcovers on Skylar’s bed. Still everyone stared as if they had no idea what I could be hinting at. “It was there all along,” I said. “Right under my freaking nose.”

  “Abs,” Dutch said a bit impatiently. “Just tell us.”

  “Do you see how Skylar’s covers have been tossed to the side?” Everyone nodded. “It’s because she heard a noise coming from Noah’s room. She said she woke in a panic because she heard a noise and raced out of bed. That’s what you do when you’ve been jarred awake and have to run out of bed. You throw over the covers.”

  Brice frowned. “Okay, so what’s your point, Cooper?”

  I pointed to Noah’s bed. “His covers haven’t been thrown to the side,” I said. “They’ve been pushed down and shoved to the end of the bed. Noah was a high-energy kid,” I went on, seeing they weren’t following me at all. “I figure he slept like most little boys with lots of rolling over and thrashing limbs. And that’s what his covers show. That he moved around a lot when he was asleep and got tangled up in his legs a little. What they don’t show is someone else’s presence in the room, grabbing him out of bed.”

  “I’m still lost,” Candice said.

  Oscar raised his hand. “Me too.”

  I got down on the ground and lay back to mime it out. “I’m Noah,” I said. Then, I sort of flopped around on the floor a little, kicking my legs a bit. “Now, it’s two thirty in the morning, Noah is asleep, and Dennis Gallagher’s girlfriend told us that at that exact time he was around the corner of the house hiding, and then he heard tapping on the window. Tapping.”

  Candice’s mouth dropped. “He let the killer in,” she said breathlessly. “Noah let the killer in!”

  I nodded and got to my feet. Pointing again to the photo of Noah’s bed, I took them all through it. “Noah hears tapping, and he’s tangled in the covers, so he kicks them free and they end up mostly pooled at the bottom of his bed. He then gets out of bed, opens the window, and lets the killer in. The killer didn’t sneak into the room, grab him out of bed, and murder him. Noah’s bedcovers would’ve been pulled all the way to the side after being tangled in his limbs if that’d been the case.”

  “Okay, so who was it?” Brice asked. “Who did Noah know well enough that he’d let him into his bedroom at two thirty in the morning?”

  I moved over to pick up the baseball from the center of the table. “What do we know about this ball?” I asked. Oscar had had one of our techs do some background on the baseball to make sure that it lined up with what Skylar had told us about it coming from Noah’s bedroom.

  I’d read the report about an hour earlier, as I knew everyone else had. The results were a bit surprising, but I didn’t think of its supreme importance until that moment. Oscar said, “World Series ball from game five, nineteen sixty-nine, signed by Yogi Berra, Nolan Ryan, among others. It’s worth about eighty thousand dollars. Purchased by Grant Miller at auction in nineteen eighty-six for twenty thousand.”

  I smiled. “Grant had that ball for all those years. I’d imagine that he wanted the baseball to go to his grandson because it was one of his most treasured possessions. He and Noah shared a passion for baseball. And so did someone else in the family.”

  Oscar and Candice shared a look. “Chris?” she said.

  I nodded. “Chris.”

  Oscar swiveled his chair and looked like he had something to add. “Cooper, did you know what business Chris is in?”

  “Uh, no,” I said.

  “He buys and sells sports memorabilia.”

  My brow shot up. “For real?”

  “Yeah. When I went to ask him about his mother-in-law, I found him in the office above his shop.”

  “So Chris would’ve not only known the value of the ball, but he would’ve been hard-pressed to leave it behind.”

  “Especially if it’d once belonged to his dad,” Candice said.

  I pointed to her. “And the night that Noah was murdered, Skylar told me that Chris had called, she’d given the phone to Noah, and then she’d headed to the shower, so she hadn’t heard what they’d been talking about.”

  “According to court testimony,” Candice said, “Noah had insinuated that he had something important to tell him but didn’t feel comfortable telling him anywhere his mom could overhear, and Chris had taken that to mean later that Skylar had fallen back off the wagon.”

  “But why would a kid be worried about his mom overhearing him if she’s in the shower?” I said. “I mean, you can’t hear anything in the shower.”

  Candice went back to typing rapidly on her computer.

  “So what was it that they talked about?” Dutch asked.

  “I think I know. I think that what Noah said to his dad was that he wanted to go on living with his mom. I think Chris Miller was trying to talk his son into changing his mind, and coming back to live with him, and Noah let him know that he wanted to stay put. And since Skylar and Chris were due back in court at the end of the month to meet with the judge, who was going to take Noah’s wishes into consideration when they met to either continue the custody ruling or change it, I’m guessing Chris knew that night that he’d lost custody for good.”

  “Chris Miller has a hunting license!” Candice said suddenly. We all looked at her. “And,” she added, “look what photos I found on his Facebook page.” She swiveled the computer around so we could see. On the screen were several photos of Chris proudly holding a hunting rifle, standing next to a wild boar he’d obviously killed.

  Oscar grabbed her computer and enlarged the image. “That’s a Remington,” he said knowingly. “Thirty caliber.”

  “Same caliber we pulled out of Gallagher,” Brice said.

  “Any military background?” Dutch asked, and I knew he was wondering whether Chris would be ruled out based on the fact that there was no print match from the baseball.

  “No,” Candice said. “No military record that I’ve found yet, but he is an excellent marksman, as these pictures show.” She leaned forward across the table where Oscar still had her computer to click her keyboard again, and a photo of Chris holding his rifle and a blue ribbon at some sort of marksman tournament popped up.

  I felt the back of my scalp tingle. It was all falling into place.

  “Okay,” Dutch said, adopting his best devil’s advocate face. “So, Chris crawls into his son’s bedroom, murders him, and slips back out the way he came, taking the ball with him when he went. But what about the knife, Abs? How did he make it to the kitchen and back without leaving any footprints?”

  I smiled the smile of someone so relieved to finally have the missing puzzle piece in hand. “Easy,” I said. “He’d taken it a few weeks before.”

  Everyone looked around at one another. Oscar said, “Huh?”

  I fished through the murder file again to a page that inventoried the contents of the kitchen drawer where Skylar had kept her kitchen knives. “Skylar told me that the murder weapon was part of a larger high-end knife set she’d gotten as a wedding present. I looked up the knives, and they’re crazy expensive, made by a Japanese manufacturer named Shun. According to Skylar, when they split up the marital assets, she got the knives in the divorce settlement. So, not only did Chris know what knife set to buy to swap out for the one in the drawer; he also had an opportunity to do that when he came to Noah’s birthday party. My guess is that he switched the knives when he passed through the kitchen when no one was looking, because Noah’s party was on the back porch.”

  “To what end?” Candice asked. “Why swap out a knife when he could’ve just brought his own to the scene?”

  “Remember the smudged fingerprints of Skylar’s found on the handle that weren’t bloody?” I said. “I think that Chris wanted to make it really clear that the knife belonged to Skylar. I think that he wanted to frame her for Noah’s murder all alo
ng. I think that he had some sort of elaborate plan to kill Noah using the knife, then murder Skylar, stage her murder to look like suicide, and have everyone think she killed Noah in a rage before taking her own life.”

  “But wouldn’t everyone assume that a killer had broken in, killed them both, and just used a knife from the kitchen?” Brice asked.

  Before answering him, I went back to the table and fished around for another photo. Bringing it back to the board, I tacked it up so that everyone could see it. “See this?” I said, pointing to the house phone, lying on the floor near the closet. “That phone was found in the exact same spot where Skylar claimed that the intruder had jumped out to attack her. Now, that’s important because when Dioli talked to us a few days ago, he said that when he delivered the death notification to Chris, Noah’s dad had shown him his cell phone, which he claimed had rung in the middle of the night but he’d been too tired to answer it, and only when Dioli showed up did he realize the importance of the call.

  “That’s why Dioli didn’t look to Chris as a possible suspect. Chris’s cell was his alibi. Also, in the murder file itself, Dioli confirms that phone records indicate that a call was made from Skylar’s landline to Chris’s phone at the exact time of the murder.

  “Now, the really interesting thing that I also didn’t connect was that, in the file, Dioli notes that he wanted to present the call at trial to show that Noah had made one last desperate attempt to get help, but, he notes, the DA kicked the call log out because the medical examiner’s report showed that Noah wouldn’t have been capable of doing anything like dialing the house phone or even hitting redial. He was either rendered unconscious or dead within moments of being stabbed. Dioli didn’t investigate the anomaly further because he really likes to ignore things that don’t make his case add up. I myself discounted Chris for a lot of reasons, but when I read that the phone call from Skylar’s house had been sent to Chris’s cell, I’d just assumed he’d been home too. I hadn’t even considered that Chris had wanted it to look like that all along.

  “Anyway, the way I see it is that, after stabbing his son, Chris’s gloved hands literally have blood on them. Maybe the blood has soaked through, so he takes off his gloves momentarily so as not to get blood on Skylar’s phone, and he’s not worried about leaving a print on it, because he’s the ex, and he was just there for Noah’s birthday, so his prints would be in the house, or maybe he planned to wipe the phone down after, anyway; the point is that he’s the one who dials his cell, and while he’s waiting for the call to go through, he’s walking toward the closet area, and maybe that’s when he also picks up the baseball. He’s probably worked it all out to establish his alibi this way. I mean, it’s believable, right?” Several heads in the room nodded. I continued. “Right—so, he’s in the middle of making that call when Skylar walks into the room, interrupting him, but doesn’t even see Chris because she’s too focused on Noah, who’s on the floor.

  “As he watches his ex-wife bend down to their son, Chris must’ve realized that he’s left the knife next to Noah, and he’s wondering what to do, and then he just decides to attack and kill her, but she gets away. In a panic he dives out the window and runs off, hoping that the call to his cell at his house is enough to establish that he wasn’t there. On his way out of the window, however, he drops the baseball, which Dennis then picks up, and he inadvertently helps Chris out by closing the window and putting the screen back in place.”

  “That’s a pretty elaborate plan, Edgar,” Dutch said.

  “Do you have a better theory?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said, with a slight smile. “But what I also don’t have is a motive.”

  “I know,” I admitted. “Being angry at Noah for picking his mom over him is a little thin.”

  “I have a question,” Brice said.

  “Shoot,” I told him.

  “If Chris switched out the knife, and Skylar swears she used the murder weapon to chop up the salad that night, wouldn’t there be an extra knife at the scene?”

  I went back to the table and rummaged through the CSI inventory of everything that was in the house that night, including the kitchen’s contents. Running my finger down the page, I let out a breath of relief when it landed on the one I was looking for. “There was,” I said, and held the list out to Brice. “See? ‘One utility knife, wood handle, Chinese symbol. Six and a half inches.’ This is the duplicate knife to the one used to murder Noah, which is on this list, here.” I picked up a separate list, which inventoried the contents of Noah’s room, where the murder weapon was found.

  “Utility knife—wood handle, Japanese symbol on blade. Six and a half inches,” Candice said. “Sweet Jesus, you’d think they would’ve noticed a duplicate knife!”

  “Obviously someone mistook the symbol on the knife from the drawer for Chinese, and the person who inventoried Noah’s bedroom knew it to be Japanese, but still, I agree, they overlooked quite a few things on this case to make their theory that Skylar did it stick,” I said.

  “We still need a motive,” Dutch said. “Or, something usable to bring Chris in for questioning.”

  Brice glanced at the wall above my head where the clock was. “It’s ten to ten,” he said.

  My stomach muscles clenched. I pulled out my cell and called Cal. It rolled to voice mail. I left him an urgent message to call me back before he went into court. Once I’d hung up, everyone in the room looked grim. “We’re so close,” I told them. “We can’t give up now.”

  “Abs,” Dutch said softly. “There isn’t enough to give Cal before the appeal.”

  “I know,” I told him. “And he’ll lose. But we’ll still have a shot at the Board of Pardons.”

  “They’ve never granted clemency,” Candice reminded me, her expression pained as if it hurt her to say that.

  “True,” I said. “But there’s always a first time, and no way am I giving up now.” Turning to Brice, I said, “Have you had any luck rushing the labs on the blood from the baseball?”

  “I put in another call about an hour ago,” he said. “He said no way can he get us DNA matches until tomorrow, but he will probably be able to narrow the spectrum of possibility down to around ninety-seven percent by ten a.m. In other words, he’ll be matching certain isotopes, blood type, and other science-sounding stuff to give us at least a ninety-seven percent likelihood that the blood on the ball is Noah’s.”

  “I like those odds,” I said. “And if we can at least nail Miller for shooting Gallagher, we can also grill him about his son’s murder.”

  Oscar said, “In order to get a warrant for the hunting rifle, Cooper, we’ll need to show the judge that we have probable cause, and it needs to be more than what we have on hand, because Miller has money and connections.”

  I reached again for the baseball. “I have just the plan,” I told him. “I’m calling it: two birds, one baseball.”

  * * *

  Two hours later I got a quick call from Cal. The appellate court had upheld Skylar’s conviction and impending execution. He had an appointment to meet with the Board of Pardons at four, but Skylar was already scheduled to be put to death at midnight.

  I had to work hard to slow the rapid uptick in my heart rate upon hearing that, because I couldn’t afford to appear anything but confident as I strode down the walk and into that familiar Starbucks.

  Chris Miller was sitting in the far corner, watching the door. The Starbucks was empty of anyone who actually worked there. Candice was behind the counter in a green apron, doing her best to appear like an earnest barista, intent on scrubbing down the counter and espresso machine. Brice sat at a table by the window, pretending to talk on his phone, and Dutch sat at another nearby table, wearing a baseball cap, a long-sleeved button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, khaki shorts, and sandals. He was seemingly absorbed in the sports page.

  I moved over to sit at the table with Chr
is. He considered me with a steely glare. “Elaina?”

  I nodded. “You killed my boyfriend,” I said softly, managing also to get my voice to quiver and tears to form in my eyes.

  “That’s a hell of an accusation,” he told me. He wore a confident smile. The kind a snake adopts right before it springs for a mouse.

  “But it’s true,” I told him. “Dennis told me all about you. And I know you were the one to pay his bail.”

  “You have proof?” he asked me, as if he couldn’t believe some lowlife would dare confront him.

  I nodded and lifted my purse, taking out the baseball covered in red gore and blue scribbling across the center. “You left this when you killed your little boy,” I told him. “Denny gave it to me because he knew you were going to try to kill him.”

  Chris’s eyes widened at the sight of the ball in my hand, but then his confidence returned. “Right,” he snapped. “You’re delusional.”

  “Denny didn’t know who you were at first,” I told him. “But then he saw you on TV at Skylar Miller’s trial, and he told me that you were the guy he saw coming out of the window that night. He knew you were the one that killed your little boy.” I was of course lying through my teeth, but Chris Miller didn’t know that.

  “My ex-wife killed my son,” he said angrily. “A crime for which she’ll pay with her own life sometime around midnight.”

  I studied him. “Not if I go to the FBI and tell them everything Dennis told me, and give them this ball. That’s going to lead to some questions, Mr. Miller. And maybe even a press release.”

  Miller glared hard at me. “What do you want?”

  “This ball is for sale,” I said. “One million dollars.”

  Chris laughed and shook his head. “You have a son of your own, don’t you, Elaina?”

  I was careful to appear shocked and scared by his statement. “You leave my son out of this,” I hissed.