The Art of Deception

by Ridley Pearson

  “A soufflé would be a problem. Black coffee, I think I can handle.”

  LaMoia asked to use the head, revealing a perceptive understanding that this was a houseboat. She pointed around the corner of the galley, asking aloud if he hadn’t been here before. He answered obliquely, as if maybe he didn’t remember.

  As LaMoia urinated, his eye wandered into her medicine cabinet, left slightly ajar. An orange-brown prescription bottle presented itself. A white cap that was childproof, but not LaMoia-proof. He zipped himself up, flushed, and used the resulting noise of washing his hands to cover his reaching in there and spinning that bottle around. The script was a year old.

  His eyes danced nervously to the door, ensuring the lock was in place. Amitriptyline. Ten or more in there. He liberated two of them and slipped them into the coin pocket of his jeans. Safekeeping. A voice in him cried out, What the hell are you doing? But the answer came instantly. Insurance. Relax. It doesn’t mean I’m going to take them. He shut the medicine cabinet door to the exact position he’d found it—ever the good detective. He looked himself in the mirror, astonished that the reflection came back absolutely normal. As he unlocked the door and joined back up with her, guilt spiked through his system like a series of tiny fevers.

  “How ’bout I get you out of here and buy you breakfast at my favorite diner?” he asked.

  “How ’bout you get me a drop gun?”

  “Peepers are nonviolent. You’ve said so yourself when we’ve dealt with them in the past. Walker’s got this notion he’s part of the investigation. Grief does that, right?”

  “Suddenly you’re the psychologist?”

  “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You’re never wrong, John.” Sarcasm from Matthews would normally drive him from a room. When she got really pissed off she let her intelligence loose, uncaged like some zoo animal just waiting for the chance, and he knew better than to try to stand up to it. But this time he found himself unwilling to let her drive him out, for that would be a double win.

  “Him having your cell phone number,” LaMoia said. “That’s what our focus ought to be. That’s gonna be what connects the dots here, Matthews, because that is the one thing impossible to explain. We solve that, we’ll know where to find him.”

  “We’ll find him at the canal,” she said, “cleaning fish. Tomorrow morning.”

  “No we won’t. He’s blown off work. You know that. My guess is he’s in the wind. He knows he went too far with his offer to help with the two disappearances. He’s gotta be hooked up to that somehow if he’s making that kind of offer. Mentioning it to you was a mistake.”

  “He is not hooked up to the disappearances,” she protested. “He’s a grief-stricken, sad excuse of a human being who’s lost and emotionally fragile and is trying to bait me into including him with information he doesn’t possess just so he can be a part of something. Right now, he’s a part of nothing. His sister’s murder is all he has left.”

  “So explain him having your cell phone number.”

  “He got it off the phone while in the car—it’s all I can think of.”

  “For me, it adds up differently.”

  “Surprise,” she said, again resorting to sarcasm.

  Only then did LaMoia notice a massive tangle of wires and a tape recorder by the home phone.

  “You know Danielson in tech services?” she asked.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “If I’m to get a restraining order against him, I need at least one of my refusals on tape. Welcome to the woman’s side of the new-and-improved stalking law. Same old, same old, you ask me.” She made herself tea and poured hot water through a funnel loaded with too much coffee. He didn’t tell her. She said calmly, “I need a weapon, and in case I have to use it, I don’t want it traceable.”

  LaMoia churned inside to hear this. “You’re making me worried,” he said.

  “I’m making you coffee,” she corrected.

  He sampled her effort. It tasted bitter and burned. He told her otherwise. Tea drinkers. What did they know? “Are you going to ask?” he said.

  “About your version of the cell phone number?”

  “What else?”

  “Okay, I’m asking.”

  “He’s been inside the Shelter,” LaMoia said confidently. “Your name, your address, your cell phone, they’re tacked up on a bulletin board somewhere. Am I right? It talks like a street person, it walks like a street person . . . Who’s to question his being down there?”

  “Nice theory, but it’s women only, John.”

  “Guys must wander down into there now and then, whether it’s looking for some girl or thinking it’s coed.”

  “Sure they do, you’re right.”

  “So, one of them was Walker. Maybe on purpose, even. Very intentionally when you weren’t there. And he lifted your—”

  She interrupted, stuck back on the earlier part of his suggestion. “It would explain his watching the Shelter.” She was thinking about the figure in the parking garage. What if those street kids had merely told her what they thought she’d wanted to hear? What if it had been Walker up there looking down on her? More to the point, why did she feel so uncertain about sharing that Nathan Prair had been lurking at the end of her dock? She answered that question immediately, knowing that she hadn’t been completely innocent with Prair, had not remained 100 percent objective with him during counseling. Not that she’d ever done anything that could be remotely construed as a come-on, not even close, but something about him had made her tack a few more minutes onto a session, had given him the benefit of the doubt when evaluating an answer. Later, she had wondered if she’d allowed herself to be charmed—an egregious error, an unforgivable sin, for any psychologist. She knew Prair’s presence on her dock had to be mentioned, but not now. Not LaMoia. She feared the CAP sergeant might resolve the situation with a baseball bat, and no one needed that.

  “It’s open this time of night, right?” he asked.

  She answered with a don’t-ask-me-to-do-this look.

  “The Sarge wants him in for questioning. I want answers how he got your cell number. Call whoever it is you gotta call down there, and let’s get the flock out of here. It smells funky in here, you know that?”

  “Boy, you really know how to flatter a girl.”

  “Yeah,” he fired back at her. “That’s what they say.”

  It came together for Matthews slowly, like learning the steps to a dance. Not something she could jump into, this idea of Walker in the Shelter. Like so many times before in other investigations, she found the early information too much to process as a whole, a stew stirred up that had to settle before being tasted, its ingredients properly understood. For LaMoia, it wasn’t stew but spaghetti, and he was throwing it at the wall as he always did, waiting to see what stuck. For him, she was part of the mix— he’d thrown her up there, too, by including her in his theory. LaMoia didn’t develop theories so much as test them. He didn’t put his work on paper, he put it in the field, and that pretty much explained to her why she found herself strapped into the passenger seat of his Jetta shortly before midnight. Another of LaMoia’s wild hairs, and she along for the ride, as much for the company as anything else.

  “You feeling better?” he asked. LaMoia drove fearlessly— his approach to so much of life. She envied him that, while at the same time hated being his passenger.

  “I resent you dragging me along, John.”

  God, he loved women.

  She fought against the silence that followed. She said, “Your mind goes to strange places when you feel yourself under attack.”

  “You’re safe with me,” he said in the most serious voice she’d ever heard him use. “Always, and forever. No one will ever get to you with me around, Matthews.”

  She didn’t want to cry in front of him. She glanced out her side window only to have her focus shift and the mirror image of her glassy eyes superimpose itself. LaMoia gallant? Who would have thought?

&
nbsp; She said, “Making statements like that can get you in trouble.”

  “I’m always in trouble,” he said.

  He won a private smile from her.

  “From here on out you’ll stay at my loft. End of discussion.”

  She laughed into the car. “That’ll be the day.”

  “No, that’ll be tonight. That’ll be until we clear this thing.”

  She searched his profile for any indication he was kidding. The car drifted through yet another greasy turn, and she made no attempt to steady herself. Instead, she settled into the seat, wondering how and why everything suddenly felt a whole lot better.

  “Pack a bag.” He reached across and took up her left hand— an impossibly caring gesture for John LaMoia. She did not recoil, did not tease him. For an instant they met eyes. He squeezed her hand gently, ran his thumb down her palm. She felt it to her toes. “I know you think I’m crazy. That’s all right, Matthews. You, and everyone else.” He flew through traffic, colored lights reflected in the black shine of the wet street. “This too shall pass.”

  30 Snuffing the Flame

  They started with LaMoia entering the Shelter alone, just as he assumed Walker would have done. Matthews entered a moment behind him, waved hello to the attendant, checked the guest book, and then walked past a screen to roam the aisles between the cots.

  With the midnight curfew a half hour off, a fairly steady stream of desolate young women trickled in as LaMoia stood before a gunmetal gray steel desk listening to a woman who had more chins than a shar-pei as she explained the Shelter’s women-only policy to him. The arriving girls read a page of rules and disclaimers before signing in. As the hefty woman in charge oversaw this procedure, a neglected LaMoia looked quickly for where Walker might have picked up Matthews’s cell phone number, his eyes combing several bulletin boards, paperwork on top of the desk, and a handful of flyers offered to arrivals. To his discouragement, the only phone number he could find on any of the literature was the Shelter’s toll-free hotline.

  “Matthews,” he called out loudly, finding himself on the verge of being thrown out, cop or not.

  Matthews found herself entering the dormitory and reliving the day she’d sat down with Margaret trying to convince the girl to contact her family—she recalled the conversation nearly word for word, her own frustration at Margaret’s impertinence. She remembered taking the Sharpie from her purse and using the indelible ink to make a point about her determination to help. She remembered so well inking her cell phone number down the girl’s forearm. This recollection hit her like a slap in the face. She spun on her heels and ran, coming around the privacy screen and meeting back up with LaMoia. She stopped abruptly, unable to get a word out.

  He tested, “You okay?” and stepped closer. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Mention of this raised the head of the attendant. He had spoken a Shelter watchword without knowing it. Expectancy hung in the air like static before a storm as this woman and LaMoia awaited her response. The smell of hot chocolate permeated, as did the distant nasal whine of a girl’s earphones as she listened to rap music on a portable CD player.

  “Other way around,” Matthews said hoarsely, her voice belying her stoic exterior. “I think the ghost saw me.”

  “For once, Matthews, you lost me, not the other way around.”

  “Her forearm,” Matthews said. “I wrote my cell number on her forearm with a Sharpie.” She hollered out the general alarm, “Man on the floor!” As LaMoia was led around the privacy screen, he saw several dozen teens—most all wearing surgical scrubs as pajamas. They sat on the edges of their cots aiming their hollow faces in open curiosity. Some girls came down a hall with wet hair. The announcement of a man had cleared the showers.

  “Walk me through this,” LaMoia said quietly, aware of their audience. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “There are two possibilities,” Matthews said. “Either Walker met up with Margaret sometime later and she told him what that number on her arm was—”

  “I have serious reservations about that.”

  She nodded her agreement, surprising him. “Second possibility: He overheard my conversation with Margaret and saw me write my cell number on her arm . . . in real time . . . right as I did it. Right here.”

  LaMoia mulled this over, his brown eyes shifting and lighting on various focal points: her face, the wall, her face again. He asked, “That’s the best you’ve got?”

  “John, you know when you know something, and you really know it, no matter how much you can talk yourself out of it? You’ve been there, right? We’ve all been there before. This is one of those times. I’m right about this. One hundred percent.”

  He glanced around the room, saw the girls watching them like some kind of freak show.

  “And there’s something else,” Matthews said, her voice returning to that warm, dark, husky complaint she’d fallen into only moments earlier. Her tone suggested conspiracy, so he leaned even closer to her, to where her breath ran warm on his neck. “For months, the girls have been complaining about this place being haunted.” She caught his condescending expression. “No, no. Hear me out! Not creaky-noises-kind-of-haunted, but being watched—the feeling they were being watched. Especially in . . . the . . . showers.” Was it her imagination, she wondered, or had the whole room gone quiet? LaMoia looked in the general direction of the showers. For her, the hallway suddenly seemed to stretch much longer. “John?” she asked.

  “You trust this?” he questioned.

  “Completely and absolutely.”

  He whispered back at her, “Then we’ll start in the showers so the girls can’t see what we’re doing.”

  “Agreed,” Matthews said.

  “And Matthews, just for the record: If we strike out, you never talked me into doing this. If I get tagged as a ghostbuster, I’ll never live it down.”

  “I was told this room was probably a salting room at one point,” Matthews said, explaining the large drain in the shower room’s brick floor at which LaMoia was staring intently.

  “Or a stable or carriage house,” LaMoia suggested. “You put a drain in a basement, Matthews, especially one close to water, as we are here, and you’re going to have water in your basement. Fact of life.”

  “Meaning?”

  “If the Sarge wasn’t all hot and heavy about these EMTs mentioning the Underground, then maybe I wouldn’t go there. But a drain in a basement? I don’t think so. I think this thing was at ground level at some point.”

  She looked around, studying the shower room’s old stone walls. Gray mortar, added sloppily in the not-too-distant past, lay frozen where it seeped from the seams. “You’re saying it isn’t dirt on the other side of these walls?”

  “I’m saying the Sarge is trying to make a connection between a possible underground section of the old city and Hebringer and Randolf. He’s the one who put a bug in my ear. Now you raise the possibility of a peeper down here, and I gotta go with that, with you, because you’ve got this thing—you know what I mean?—and I’ve gotta take this wherever I can take it, as stupid as it may seem.”

  “I’m not saying it’s stupid, John.”

  “I am, Matthews. It is stupid. But to overlook it? That’s even stupider.”

  “There’s no such word.”

  “Yeah? Well, at the end of this there may be,” he said. “Stay tuned.”

  The cast-iron drain, twelve inches across, was positioned directly in the center of the large room. Some white PVC plastic pipe had been suspended from the stone ceiling as temporary plumbing to supply the shower water. The space smelled of young women, shampoo, and soap, nothing like a men’s locker room, and this made LaMoia uneasy. In all his vast experience with women, he had never entered a girls’ locker room.

  “Turn out the lights,” he instructed.

  Matthews obeyed without comment, without interrupting his train of thought, ushering the room into total darkness—the only sounds the stea
dy, rhythmic splash of water dripping from the showerheads. That, and LaMoia’s shallow breathing.

  “How ’bout a flashlight?” she whispered expectantly, even a little anxiously.

  Instead, LaMoia struck a match, shadows jumping and bending across the crumbling brick walls. The room was set into motion as he moved carefully along the far wall, the match held close to the bricks and mortar. The flame burned brightly at first, then shrank, the shadows fading, and LaMoia tossed it to the floor. He lit another. The dripping water mimicked a heart beating. LaMoia worked the flame high to low, left to right, his own pagan ritual. The fire flickered, danced, and then blew out, enveloping them in darkness once again.

  “Bingo,” LaMoia said softly.

  With another lit match, he tested the same spot again—a slice of mortar about shoulder height. Again, long shadows raked the walls as the small flame first flickered and then was extinguished.

  Matthews asked, “Why keep putting the match out? What’s the point?”

  “It’s not me,” LaMoia answered. “It’s wind.” He held another match between them so they could see each other, but the effect was disorienting. Now the shadows waved and commingled on the floor. “There’s a hole poked through the mortar here,” he said, pointing, “and here. Peepholes, Matthews. Not ghosts. Not goblins. Dirty old men, I’m guessing. And maybe one much younger. One with a thing for a very pretty cop.”

  She crossed her arms against the chill. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “We’d better call SID.”

  “Let’s wait on that. It may be nothing,” LaMoia suggested, much to her obvious consternation. He stepped forward and whispered into her ear, “He may be watching.”

  Twenty minutes later LaMoia had marked with chalk another four such rents in the mortar, all with unobstructed views of the shower stalls where the young women had bathed themselves. He made one last test alongside the brick wall that faced the cot where Matthews and Margaret had spoken. The match’s flame blew out.