Sense of Deception (15 page)

Dioli raised his beer and took a lazy sip. “Ask away,” he said.

From my purse I got out the photo of the window with the void on the curtain. “Can I ask you how you guys were able to explain this void?” I asked, pointing specifically to the white area around the curtain.

Dioli arched a skeptical eyebrow. “Sure. We determined it was
caused by Skylar Miller as she was stabbing her son. She blocked the curtain from the spray.”

I nodded, as I'd sort of expected Dioli to say something like that. “See, I was thinking the same thing, but then I saw this photo,” I said, digging again in my purse and pulling out the next photo of the wall with the blood-spatter pattern that otherwise would've been on the curtain. “See how the spatter is intact from the middle of the window all the way to the far left? There's no break in it. Which tells me that Skylar couldn't have been standing there when she stabbed Noah. The void was only present on the curtain.”

Dioli shrugged, and turned his gaze away from me to the TV above the bar. It was obvious that he knew about the spatter pattern and hadn't been able to convince himself of the explanation he'd just offered me. “The curtain could've been up on the bed,” he said. “Out of the way of the spatter at the time of the stabbing.”

I considered the photo again, and the distance from the curtain to the bed. “See, now, that'd make sense, except for the fact that in this picture . . .” I dug into my purse again and riffled through the photos I'd been over a dozen times. Finding the one I needed, I pulled it out and laid it on the bar. “. . . it shows the bedspread had some blood spatter on it too. And there's no void where the curtain would've fallen, and no spatter on the curtain.”

Dioli turned to me again and his brow furrowed while his eyes glinted with suspicion. “Why are you so interested in the curtain?” he asked.

“Because I can't explain it,” I told him. “And I don't like it when I can't explain things like this. I need to offer the readers of my book a good explanation, Detective. Something reasonable that will firmly lay the blame at Skylar Miller's feet. This is a loose end, and I'm seeing some problems with it.”

“You can leave that part out of the book,” Dioli offered. “No harm, no foul.”

I wanted to push back at him, but decided that it might arouse his suspicions and he'd shut down on me, so instead I simply nodded and put the photos away. “Good advice,” I said. “Now, can I ask you if you ever considered anyone else besides Skylar for the murder?”

Instead of answering me, Dioli propped one elbow up on the bar and cupped the side of his head with his index finger and his thumb. “Why?”

“Because the readers are going to expect that I've looked at and dismissed other suspects in the case in favor of Skylar.”

Dioli gave me that lopsided shrug again. “We did look into other people,” he said. “Miller kept questionable company, so we looked.”

Next to me I saw Candice lay her phone facedown on the bar. I had a feeling she'd hit the Record button. “Who specifically did you look at, Ray?”

“A couple of Miller's exes, and her pimp.”

I blinked. “Her what?”

“Her pimp,” he said, clearly enjoying the fact that he got to share that fact with me. “Before her trial for the DWI charge, she was let out on bond, which Chris put up for her, maybe because he felt a little guilty that he'd called the unis on her for driving drunk. So, he'd gotten her out of jail, but he'd had it with her drinking and wouldn't let her live in the house. She found
work
on the streets and spent four months in the company of a guy known for running girls.”

I felt a pang of sadness in the center of my chest. I wondered how desperately addicted you'd have to be to resort to that, and silently whispered my thanks to the powers that be that I'd never
been hit with the addictions that'd possessed so many members of my family, including my father, an uncle, two aunts, and a few cousins. “So,” I said, trying to get over my shock at Skylar's checkered past. “About this pimp . . .”

“Guy by the name of Rico DeLaria,” Ray said. “Nice guy, if you like slime buckets.”

I scribbled down the name. “I'm assuming you interviewed him?”

“Yeah. Once we caught up to him. He's pretty slippery. He didn't have much of an alibi, but there didn't seem to be a motive. At least not one as good as the one we had on Skylar.”

“You mean the whole being cut off from child-support payments,” I said.

“Yeah,” Dioli said. “I mean, along with jail, she'd spent time on the street. I doubted she wanted to go back to that life.”

Candice leaned in. “But wouldn't killing her son bring about that end anyway? Killing off Noah meant no more child support, which, according to the argument made by the prosecution, was her only reason for keeping Noah around in the first place.”

Dioli adopted a sly smile. “You guys don't know about the trust, do you?”

“Trust? What trust?” I asked.

Dioli polished off his beer and motioned to the bartender for another before he explained. “Chris Miller's parents were loaded,” he began. “When Noah was born, they set up a two-million-dollar trust in his name. The trust went through a few changes over the years, and the one that was the most interesting was set in place not long before Noah was murdered, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The trust itself had some very specific rules attached to it. The first rule was that it could only be accessed by his legal custodial guardian when Noah turned sixteen.”

“Legal custodial guardian?” I asked. “It actually said ‘custodial'?”

Dioli nodded. “Not long into the investigation, we learned about the trust. Grant Miller, Noah's grandfather, was dying of bone cancer, and his wife, Lynette, was in the first stages of Alzheimer's. I got to meet with Grant only the one time, and I asked him about the trust, and he said that they'd never have chosen Skylar for a daughter-in-law, but he said that he'd been impressed with how she'd turned her life around, so he and his wife amended the trust to reflect that should she continue to provide a good and loving environment for Noah in the coming years, then she could also be trusted with his money.

“Grant explained to me that she wouldn't just be able to write herself a blank check—the trust would have the oversight of a bank officer and an attorney, and Skylar would be required to submit to random drug and alcohol testing from the time that Noah was sixteen all the way until he was twenty-one, so in order to access the money, she had to be clean and sober.”

“I still don't see how that's a motive if she couldn't have access to the trust until Noah turned sixteen,” I said. “He'd have to have been alive for her to get any money, right?”

Dioli's eyes sparkled. “Nope,” he said. “The trust had a provision that—and I memorized it, so I can quote it—‘if Noah dies before he reaches the age of twenty-one, and it is deemed that his death is in no way caused by any negligence, purposeful neglect, or act on the part of his legal custodial guardian, then all monetary funds available within the trust shall revert back to his heirs,' and at the end of all this other legal mumbo jumbo it lists Skylar Miller, specifically, as one of Noah's heirs.”

“Wouldn't it also have named Chris?” Candice asked, mirroring my thoughts.

“Yeah, and it did,” Dioli said. “But he didn't need the money. He inherited everything after his parents died. Two million bucks was chump change compared to what I heard his folks were worth.”

“Who else did the trust name as heirs?” I asked, hoping for a creepy cousin or long-lost uncle.

“Just Skylar, Chris, Grant, and Lynette.”

“So,” I said, trying to figure out Dioli's argument, “what you're saying is that Skylar murdered Noah and claimed it was an intruder so that she could get ahold of the money?”

“Yes.”

“Why wasn't that argument presented at trial?” Candice asked.

“Grant Miller had passed away by the time the trial rolled around two years later, and Lynette's mental state was questionable at best by then. The DA didn't want to make things too complicated, and they didn't want Skylar's attorney dragging Lynette Miller into court as a rebuttal witness. There was also the minor issue that they'd sent Skylar a copy of the trust's provisions along with a notice she needed to sign saying that she agreed to the terms, including the drug and alcohol testing, and she never returned the signed agreement, so there was no way to prove that she'd actually read the trust. But come on, she read it. So in the end we stuck with the motive that she'd fallen off the wagon, and killed Noah because she was worried he'd rat on her and she'd have her child support cut off and get sent back to prison for the violation of her parole.”

I scowled. The prosecution's argument sounded even flimsier the second time I heard it from Dioli. “It still seems a little far-fetched, Ray.”

“Hey, when it comes to money and an addict, Abby, it's been my experience that they'll try anything to get their hands on it. Especially when they're looking at a million bucks.”

Another pang of sadness went through me. As a recovering alcoholic, Skylar had never had a chance with this judgmental detective. “Was there anybody else you looked at for Noah's murder?” I asked, wanting to move off the subject of motive and back onto other possible suspects.

“Yeah,” Dioli said, adopting a bored expression. “We looked at a guy named Connor Lapkus for about a minute. Skylar and he dated right after rehab. Turns out she owed him some money but not enough to kill a little kid over, only a couple of grand. Anyway, he alibied out. He owns a machine shop off Lamar, and four of his homies say he was with them the night of the murder.”

“Could they be lying?”

“Sure,” Dioli said. “But it's still a better alibi than Skylar's. You get placed at a crime scene covered in the victim's blood and leaving a trail of bloody footprints down a hallway, with your prints on the murder weapon, and any other digging we do is simply to arm the prosecution should your lame-ass defense attorney try to interject reasonable doubt.”

I nodded like I totally agreed with Dioli, even though a big part of me wanted to punch him in the nose. “So, just Rico DeLaria and Connor Lapkus,” I said. “Nobody else in Skylar's life could've had a checkered past?”

“The only other guy we did a background check on was her neighbor down the street. A guy by the name of John Thomas, who's a registered sex offender. Turns out he liked little boys about Noah's age, and he spent a dime up in Dallas before moving in with his mother in Miller's neighborhood. He didn't have much of an alibi either: claims he was playing video games all night. He was introduced as a possible suspect by the defense at the trial, but he's a guy who, since he's been out, has met every single probationary protocol, and there were no witnesses that ever saw him
and Noah within a hundred feet of each other. Plus, nothing in his past indicated any use of violence. The defense tried to bring him forward as a possible suspect, but the jury dismissed him outright. After we presented all of our evidence, there was no room for them to doubt our story. Skylar did it. It was a slam dunk, really.”

Getting up from the barstool, I left a twenty on the bar and said, “Thank you, Ray. I appreciate the time.”

Candice got up too, and as we were turning to leave, Dioli called after me, “I'll have that list of names for you on Monday.”

I waved a hand over my shoulder and didn't look back. I was kind of sure that if I did, I'd give in to the urge to go back up to Dioli, and punch him in the nose.

W
e drove away from the bar and toward the city in silence. Mostly because I was fuming. It wasn't as much that I thought Dioli was a bad guy as I thought he was a narrow-minded, pigheaded, chauvinistic son of a bitch who'd run roughshod over a woman reeling from the murder of her young son. He'd seen those bloody footprints in the hallway, and he'd made up his mind then and there. That was the one thing he couldn't get over. Those damn bloody footprints and no sign of forced entry in the house. He'd ruled out an intruder within a few hours of being at the crime scene.

It galled me that such a seasoned detective could be so closed-minded, or so cold about sending a woman to the needle, given the very shaky holes in his circumstantial case. He'd flat out ignored huge inconsistencies in his theory, and done only a cursory job of investigating other suspects.

“Goddamn him,” I muttered. (My purse was full of quarters. I could splurge.)

“Yep,” Candice agreed. She seemed just as angry. “Still, we have some people to look into.”

“But hardly any time to look into them,” I groused.

Candice was quiet for a moment and then she said, “Well, we've been under the gun before, and we've always managed to work with what we have. So we can spend time getting good and mad, or we can get going on finding out who really murdered Noah.”

I took a deep breath and blew it out nice and slow. “Who do we start with?”

“I like Rico,” she said. “Mostly 'cause I know where he hangs out.”

“You do?”

“Yep. For a pretty sizable fee, he slipped me some info on one of my missing persons cases. Teenage runaway. Rico's info led me right to her.”

“I gotta admit that I'm surprised you know a guy like him.”

Candice's expression was wry. “Sometimes, Sundance, when you walk the mean streets, you gotta get your shoes a little dirty.” Taking an exit for Highway 360, we traveled south all the way past the west side of the city and continued on to Lamar Boulevard. Candice followed Lamar southbound, finally taking a turn into a pretty shoddy-looking apartment complex.

I scowled. “Why do scuzzballs always live in the worst places?”

“Makes them feel at home,” Candice said, taking her gun out of the glove box to remove the clip and replace it with another full one, also from the glove box. Sliding back the barrel to arm the gun, she tucked it into the back of her jeans, pulled her shirt out of her pants to cover it, and motioned for us to get out.

We crossed the parking lot and I followed Candice up an outside staircase to the second floor. She paused in front of one door, then seemed to reconsider and moved down to one next to that. Knocking, she and I waited on the landing, me staring uncomfortably around, and Candice looking like she was about to visit
with an old friend. The door opened a crack and a guy with black hair and lots of stubble peered blearily out. “Yeah?”

“Rico!” Candice said, like they were best buds. “How you doin', guy?”

“Who the fuck're you?”

Ah. Rico was what we in the trade liked to call a “romantic.” Candice didn't answer; instead she stood there appearing incredulous with her arms outstretched like she couldn't wait to hug DeLaria.

He considered her from head to toe before he finally edged the door all the way open. “Lady, I don't know you,” he said, crossing his arms and leaning against the doorframe.

Candice tapped her head. “Oh, right!” she said. Then she added a laugh and turned slightly to me to say, “Maybe this'll refresh your memory.” And then, quick as a flash, Candice rounded back to face forward and punched DeLaria right in the nose, much like I'd wanted to do to Dioli.

Rico's head snapped back and his knees buckled, causing him to stagger back into the apartment. Candice shook her hand a little and followed him inside. Shocked down to my socks, I stood there mutely for a second before I shrugged and headed in too.

“What the hell?!” DeLaria shouted, holding both hands over his nose as a little blood dribbled down between his fingers. “You fucking bitch!”

Candice offered him a crocodile smile and kicked him in the nads. DeLaria emitted a squeak high-pitched enough to put little girls to shame and sank to the ground, doubling over and rolling onto his side, one hand holding his nose, the other covering his nethers.

Candice stepped forward to push her heel at his shoulder and lay him flat on his back. There wasn't even a hint of mercy in her
eyes. “Candice,” I whispered, afraid she'd already pushed this too far.

She ignored me. Reaching down, she hauled DeLaria up by the collar and got into his face. “I found the girl you ruined, you son of a bitch,” she said. “She was seventeen when you two met—her on the street, scared, hungry, cold, and naive, and you a wolf in sheep's clothing. You wasted no time recruiting her into your little ring, and when she started to fall apart, you fed her drugs until she wasn't even a shadow of her former self, you gutless, heartless piece of shit. Oh, yeah, for a price you tipped me off about where I could find her, but only because she wasn't any good to you anymore.” Candice then shook DeLaria hard and his head bobbled on his neck and blood came out of his nose more earnestly.

I'll admit that I was sickened by the scene. Putting a hand on Candice's shoulder, I tried to interject a little reason into the situation. “Candice,” I said. “Please.”

But she refused to let go of Rico. With strength that belied her thin frame, she hauled him halfway off the floor by his shirt and spat, “She's tried to kill herself three times since I got her home, Rico.
Three times!
”

Rico's trembling hands came up to grip Candice's arms. He was starting to recover from the blows she'd dealt him, and he was maybe a good dose of adrenaline away from becoming a real problem.

Well, maybe a problem for anyone who wasn't my BFF. With a snarl she let go of him and he fell back to the floor with a thud. Before he could get up again, Candice drew her gun out from the back of her waistband and pointed it right at his head. “Something you should know, DeLaria. Stacey's dad has a few bucks. The last time he called to tell me that they'd just barely gotten his little girl to the hospital in time to save her life, he asked me how much it'd
cost him to put you down. I named my price, and he didn't even flinch.”

I was sweating buckets as Candice talked, and not just from the heat snaking its way into the apartment. What bothered me was that my lie detector hadn't gone off as Candice spoke about the girl's father offering her money to kill DeLaria. Nor when she told him she'd named the price. I knew Candice better than anyone else in the world, even her husband, which meant that I knew exactly what she was capable of. Hence I was shaking in my boots.

Candice lowered the gun a little closer to DeLaria's face. “So here's how this is gonna play out, Rico,” she said softly. “I'm going to ask you a series of questions, and you're gonna answer them honestly. If you fail to answer them honestly, my friend over there—who's a human lie detector—is gonna let me know that you're a big fat fibber, and I'm going leave this apartment a
much
wealthier woman.”

I wasn't the only one shaking now. DeLaria was visibly trembling and his face took on a shade of white so severe, if he stopped moving, he could've been mistaken for a corpse. I wanted to say something to defuse the tension in the room, but Candice seemed to be right on the edge, and I was afraid anything I said or did would tip her over. The best that I could hope for was that DeLaria cooperated fully, but then, even if he didn't, I had no intention of ever admitting to Candice that he was lying.

Still, when DeLaria's desperate gaze traveled to me, I crossed my arms and cocked my head slightly, just to let him know that he'd better play along all nice-like. “Whad do you wanna knowd?” Rico asked, his speech hampered by the severe swelling to his nose.

“Skylar Miller,” she said. “Remember her?”

DeLaria's eyes darted to me and I cocked an eyebrow. He looked back at Candice and nodded his head subtly.

“Good, Rico,” Candice said, the gun in her hand never wavering from her deadly aim at his head. “Did you murder her son?”

Rico blinked and he even pulled his chin back in surprise. “Wah? Naw! Naw! I swear! I dinnit!”

Candice glared hard at Rico. “Sundance?”

“He's not lying,” I said, so relieved that he'd been honest, because I was fairly certain that if Rico had lied about that, Candice would've seen through him and I didn't know if she'd be able to hold back from pulling the trigger. Hell, I would've been tempted to put him down if I knew he'd killed Noah in the manner the young boy was murdered.

“Do you know who did?” she asked Rico next.

He shook his head. “Naw! Naw, I swear!”

Candice stood there without saying anything further, and into the silence I said, “Again, he's telling the truth.”

Candice then said, “Rico, you just admitted that you don't think Skylar murdered her kid. What do you know that the cops don't?”

Rico gulped. “I don't. I mean, not for sure,” he said. “But my girls, they're in the know, you know?”

“Start talking,” Candice said, the gun moving a fraction closer to Rico's fast-swelling nose.

“One a my girls said the judge on the case was on the take. Someone wanted her to hang, man.”

“Who?” Candice demanded.

“I don't know, man!” Rico insisted, shaking in fear; it was pretty obvious he was telling the truth about that.

Candice inhaled deeply, absorbing what he'd said. She knew, like I did, that the judge had imposed the death sentence above
the jury's recommendation that Skylar serve life in prison without parole.

In other words, the jury had been convinced by the evidence that Skylar had murdered her son, but something about the case had bothered them enough not to go for the death penalty. Maybe there was something about the prosecution's case that didn't quite add up. Or maybe the jury had enough members on it that simply couldn't believe a mother would murder her beautiful boy in that manner. And I understood that. It was too abhorrent to even imagine.

Still, even knowing about a possible bribe didn't get us closer to identifying the real killer. But then something in Rico's energy got my attention and I said, “What aren't you telling us, Rico?”

His posture stiffened and his eyes darted once again to me. I glared hard at him, now even more convinced that he was hiding something. Candice leaned forward menacingly with the gun and his hand came off his privates to splay in front of his face. “Wait! Wait, wait, wait!”

“Better start talking,” I advised him. “Candice looks like she's getting tired holding back that trigger finger.”

“It was just something I heard!”

I made a “get on with it” motion with my hand. “Which was?”

Rico took a steadying breath. “One o' my homies who got popped around the same time that Sky's sentence was handed down, he overheard another inmate say that Sky got what was comin' to her. Said she'd disrespected him or somethin', and she was payin' for it. He said the guy said it like he'd had a hand in it or somethin'.”

A chill went through me. “What was he in for, do you know?”

Rico began to shake his head, but then he seemed to remember
something and said, “B and E. Pretty sure that's what Wayne said it was.”

Another chill went through me. “What was his name?” I asked.

Rico shook his head. “Don't know.” Candice growled impatiently and Rico added, “I swear! I don't know his name. He was just some guy in the holding cell with one of my bros.”

“Where do we find this bro, yo?” Candice asked in a tone that wasn't at all friendly.

“He works at Rounders on Sixth.”

“He working today?” Candice pressed.

“Uh, yeah, I think so,” Rico said with more than a little enthusiasm. He wanted us to go, and bad.

“What's he look like?” I asked. We'd want to pick him out prior to asking for him.

Rico put his hand a little above his head. “He's an inch or two taller than me. Brown hair. Goatee. Looks a little like Ethan Hawke.”

Candice shifted her gaze ever so slightly to me. “Sundance?”

“He's telling the truth.”

Candice stepped back two paces and eased off pointing the gun at DeLaria's face. “Okay. We'll hit up Rounders. In the meantime, guess what you're gonna do, Rico?”

He audibly gulped. “What?” he asked meekly.

“You're gonna get out of the recruiting business and take up another profession. Something that doesn't involve ruining young runaways.”

Rico blinked at her. He was obviously still scared, but seemed reluctant to give up the life of being a scuzzball. Candice pointed the gun back at his face and took the two steps forward again. He held up both hands in surrender and yelled, “Okay! Okay! Don't kill me, man! I'll give up pimping!”

But Candice wavered. She seemed to study him for a very long time before she said, “I don't believe you, Rico.” And then she pulled the trigger.

The gun made a loud pop and I jumped and Rico screamed. It took me a sec to realize that she hadn't actually shot him, but I worried about where the bullet had gone. If there was anyone in the downstairs apartment, she could've killed them. Candice put the gun back into the waistband of her jeans and coolly said, “That's your final warning, you son of a bitch. If I
ever
catch you running girls in this town again, I'm going to cash in that offer from Stacey's father. You
get
me?”

Rico was curled into a ball, quivering, sweating, and actually crying. “I won't, I won't, I won't, I won't!” he said, weeping in earnest now. It was terrible to witness, but I had little sympathy for him. He'd brought it upon himself.