Sense of Deception (12 page)

I opened the door and stepped inside. The room was bare except for a large antique dresser and one lone floor lamp. I flipped on the overhead light and surveyed the room.

It was powder blue with the same tan carpet from the hallway. The trim and the closet door were white. The blinds were off-white, and I could barely breathe.

Still, I pushed myself to stand there and feel the energy of the space. I wanted to sense the flow of the crime, even though I knew it'd be almost as bad as witnessing it.

I closed my eyes and tried to brace myself again, but it was like an assault on all my psychic senses. The attack had been brutal, and without mercy. I had a very real impression that Noah had felt an intense amount of pain before he died, and I shuddered in addition to the shivering I was already experiencing.

I opened my eyes and pulled a manila folder out of my purse. Taking a deep breath, I opened the folder and stared at the photo of Noah's room as it had been on that night back in 2004. Stepping to the side, I looked from the photo to the two windows on the far wall. Noah's twin bed had been positioned on that wall,
between the windows like in his mother's room. In the photo, his bedspread and sheets were a tangle, and the angle of the photograph had captured only his bare feet sticking out past the bed on the floor.

The rest of the scene and the images recording it were a bit too horrible to describe, and I found that I'd been unable to look at them more than once, which was why I hadn't brought them along with me from the file I'd left in the car. I'd carried only three of the photos with me into the house: this one, the one showing Skylar's bloody footprints in the hallway, and the one of her bedroom, just to get a feel for how her room had looked at the time.

Taking another deep breath, I moved two steps forward, toward the windows, and looked back and forth from the photo to the windows a few times. Then I stepped all the way to one of the windows and pulled up the blind to reveal the actual panes.

I looked back and forth between the photo and the window a few more times; then I pulled up on the bottom sash. It came up easily. I pushed lightly on the screen and it fell out. Just like that. It simply fell out of the window and into the backyard. “Shit!” I hissed. (I'd worry about the swear jar later.)

“Pssst!” I heard behind me, and I jumped. Sliding the window back down quickly, I turned and adopted a friendly smile. Oscar stood in the doorway, eyeing me curiously. “You okay, Cooper?”

“Uh . . . yeah. I am. Okay.”

“You sure?”

I moved away from the window a little. “Yes. Positive. Would you mind running through a scenario with me, though?”

“Sure,” he said. “What're you thinking?”

I got out the photo of Noah's room and pointed to his bed. “See how the sheets are all rumpled and twisted around? He slept like most kids do, full of movement, but what's weird is that if he
were pulled out of bed by his mother and stabbed, wouldn't we see the sheets tugged to one side?”

Oscar nodded. “I'm with you,” he said.

I then pointed at the pile of sheets at the bottom of the bed. “Instead of being pulled to one side, his sheets are pushed down toward the end of the bed.” I handed him the file and moved to about where the middle of Noah's bed would have been, then got down on the floor and lay down on my back. “Instead of being dragged out of bed, Noah's sheets look like he was awake right before he was attacked, and that he'd gotten out of bed himself.” I then sat up, pulled my knees up, and pushed them down to mime how Noah would've sat up in bed, pulled up his knees, and shoved the covers down toward the end of the bed with his feet. Then I mimed getting up out of bed to stand next to the window.

“Makes sense,” Oscar said, looking from me to the photo.

“Now,” I said, heading back toward Oscar. “I glanced at the ME's report on the way over here, and he indicates that Noah was stabbed from behind, right?”

“Yep,” Oscar said. “I read the file.”

“You be the assailant and I'll be Noah,” I said, turning away from him. I felt Oscar come up behind me and wind his left arm around my shoulders, pulling me into him; then he moved his right fist up high out in front of me before arcing it down toward my chest. He did it fast and his fist bumped gently but firmly against my sternum, and I couldn't suppress a shudder as my intuition practically shrieked when it connected with the real act of murder from ten years earlier.

Oscar let go of me immediately. “Sorry, Cooper, you okay?”

I squared my shoulders and turned around to show him no harm, no foul. “Yeah. Fine. Just the energy in this room is awful.”

Oscar looked pained. He was as seasoned an investigator as they
came, but I knew he abhorred violence against women and children most especially. Sometimes that granite cop exterior cracked a little and I saw the real Oscar, the teddy bear. I put my hand out and rubbed his arm. “Really. I'm okay,” I assured him. He nodded and I got back to the macabre work of going through the events that'd happened in that room. “Now, from what I saw of the other crime-scene photos, it looks like the attack began when Noah was facing the wall and not the window, but at some point the killer turned him a little and that's how blood got on the back wall, right?”

Oscar nodded.

“And there was no interruption in the spatter pattern on those two walls, meaning that the ME's report was probably accurate. Noah was stabbed facing away from his assailant.”

“True,” Oscar agreed.

“So the murderer didn't want to look at him when he killed him.”

“Or it was easier to control him that way. No arms or legs to block the attack.”

“Yeah, that's true,” I said. “And yet, a stabbing is so personal, Oscar. I mean, it's one of the cruelest ways to kill someone. There was rage in that attack. Real rage, and I wonder what fueled it.”

“Maybe Skylar knows,” Oscar suggested.

I shook my head. “I'm not convinced. One of the reasons Dioli thinks she's guilty is that she was covered in her son's blood when she fled to the neighbors.” Stepping around behind Oscar, I reached up and assumed the position of the assailant, making him Noah, and pivoting him toward the wall. “But if she stabbed him like this,” I said, miming the attack, “then how did she get all that blood on her? Isn't it more likely that her version of what happened is the truth?” For emphasis I moved back several steps to the door
as if I were entering it, then walked forward and crouched down as I continued to explain. “She comes in the door, finds him on the floor in the dark, begins to pick him up, he rolls limply forward into her arms, and her clothing gets stained that way.”

Oscar nodded. “I'm with you,” he said.

“And,” I added, “as she realizes something's wrong, she lays him back down on the ground and begins to feel around him, encountering the sharp blade of the knife and cutting her hand. She probably picked up the knife at that point just to see what the heck had sliced her palm, and all the while her mind, which is still trying to catch up from having just been in a deep sleep, is starting to put it together.” Pointing to the corner of the room, I said, “At that point, the assailant, who's still in the room, maybe hiding in that corner, attacks her. . . .” I stood up and pretended to get pushed to the side violently. “They struggle, she somehow manages to get away, and he heads out the window.”

Oscar frowned. “You had me right up to the point where he heads out the window. If there was some other assailant in the room and that's the way he got out, then for sure there'd be a bloody fingerprint on the windowsill. I mean, I can see how he'd avoid getting blood on his clothing, but not on his hands.”

“Not if he was wearing gloves, Oscar, which maybe he took off right before he went out the window. That also would be backed up by the fact that they only found Skylar's prints on the knife. Whoever handled it could've been wearing gloves. And when he made his escape, he could've taken off the gloves, and dove out the window. I mean, look at them,” I said, moving over to stand sideways next to the windows. “They're low enough where he could've just picked up his leg and shimmied out on his butt.” I mimed that for Oscar. “He probably never even had to touch the sill with his bare hands.”

“That's a whole lotta careful planning for this crime,” Oscar observed.

“Exactly,” I said. I totally agreed with him. I felt strongly someone had worked very hard to make it look like Skylar had murdered her son, but who and why were the big questions. “There's just one more thing I need to check out and then I'd like to get a look in Molly's backyard. Do you think she'd let us?”

“Let's hope so. You gotta put her screen back in the window.”

I glared at him as I stepped past him and into the hall. Backtracking my way to Molly's bedroom, I sifted through my folder and pulled out the photo of how Skylar's room had looked the night of the murder.

Holding up the photo, I saw that the image had been captured from the doorway. It showed Skylar's bed, fairly unruffled except that one corner of her bedspread had been thrown back and there was still a small dent in her pillow. Otherwise the room was neat and orderly, nothing out of place.

I squinted at the image to study it more closely. On the nightstand was a framed photograph. The image was fuzzy, but I could make it out because I'd seen the photo within the frame before. It'd been in the back of Skylar's book back at county, the one of Noah and her at his ninth birthday party.

Turning to Oscar, I said, “Let's look at the backyard.”

We went quietly to the living room and Molly sat on the sofa, the quilt laid back over her legs. “Are you finished?” she asked us.

“Almost, ma'am. Would it be all right if we did a simple walkabout around the perimeter of your house, starting in your backyard?”

She cocked her head. “You don't think you'll find any evidence of that boy's murder from ten years ago, do you?”

“No, ma'am,” I confessed. “I'm just trying to get a feel for the house itself. I promise not to disturb a thing.”

“Well, all right, then,” she said, getting up to walk to the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. Undoing the latch, she said, “Please watch out for my mountain laurels. They're young and fragile and I'm still nursing them along.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Oscar and I both said as we stepped back out into the hot summer night.

It was going on eight o'clock but still plenty light out. Oscar and I stepped carefully around Molly's plants, which were set in a row along the house, but about two feet away, so we were able to walk the edge without a lot of trouble. “The grass grows right up to the edge of the house,” I said, more to myself than to Oscar.

He heard me and said, “Didn't Dioli say that they didn't find any footprints along the exterior?”

“He did.” I wondered if Oscar was thinking the same thing I was.

“How would he know that if there was grass here? Footprints wouldn't have been evident.”

Playing devil's advocate, I said, “Maybe the lawn is new.”

Oscar bent down and began poking at the edge of the lawn. “This is Saint Augustine,” he said. “Toughest grass there is. It grows deep roots if given enough time and water. Molly's got an in-ground sprinkler system, looks to be at least a decade old.” Oscar then looked up at the folder in my hand. “You got a photo of the backyard from 'oh-four in there?”

I shook my head. “It's in the car. I only took three of the crime-scene pics with me.”

Oscar stood and rubbed his hands together to shake off the dirt. He then walked with me over to the bedroom window with the screen that I'd knocked to the ground. “So what's the deal with the screen?” he asked me.

I bent to pick it up and studied it. It was dirty as all get-out,
and older. I was betting it was the original. I tucked it into place in the window as easily as I'd knocked it out. “I tapped it and it fell out,” I said to him. “And look at how loose it is.”

Oscar stepped forward and studied the screen. “It's about an eighth of an inch off,” he said. “It'll stay put as long as you don't knock it.”

Oscar then took out a small pocketknife from his cargo shorts and flipped up the blade. He inserted it between the rim of the screen and the window and angled the knife away from the window. The screen came out with barely any effort.

“If this is the original screen,” I said, “then an intruder could've easily popped out the screen, opened the window, and gotten into Noah's room.”

Oscar nodded but said nothing as he replaced the screen, then moved over to the other window and tried to do the same thing with his knife to that screen. It didn't budge. “It would've had to be this window,” he said, coming over to tap the loose screen. And then he leaned forward and studied all the other screens along the back of the house one by one before turning back to me. “They're all the same as far as wear and tear. Frames are all identical colors. I'd bet they were all manufactured and installed at the same time.”

“Like when the house was built?”

Oscar stepped back from the house and studied it and the surrounding yard. “I'll bet you this place was only a year or two old when Miller and her son moved in. It might've even been brand-new.”

“It's younger than I would've guessed,” I said, moving over to him to look at the house too.

“Texas can be hard on a house,” he said. “The heat in the summer can bake the youth right out of it. The real clue is that tree,” he said, pointing across the yard to an oak tree that was just a
smidge past small and headed to medium size. “That guy can't be more than fifteen years old, which means he probably got planted when he was four or five.”

“Why is that important?” I asked, thinking anyone in the past ten years could've planted that young tree.