Sense of Deception (21 page)

When we finally piled back into Candice's car, I felt a measure of satisfaction and tense excitement. “Man! If we could get that tape, Candice? That would be a game changer!”

“Don't get your hopes up yet, Sundance,” she warned.

“Why not?”

“Because we don't have the tape yet and because we'll have to sift through hours and hours of video to find the two minutes we're looking for. Plus, once we find that section, who's to say there'll be anything usable on it? Surveillance footage captured by cameras from ten years ago isn't like it is today. It's grainy and fuzzy and barely passes for acceptable by current standards. And even if it's crystal clear, it's not like we have a name to match it. Or, for that matter, any way to convince the appellate court that what's on the tape is motive for murder.”

I crossed my arms and frowned at Candice. “If I was a parade, you would be rain.”

She smirked. “I'm just saying that it's too early to get your hopes up. We need a name more than anything else, and the longer we spend trying to find it, the closer we get to our deadline.”

“Still, it backs up the theory that there was an encounter that could've motivated someone to take revenge on Skylar,” I said.

“True. But what I don't like is that this guy waited two, possibly three weeks to get even with her. I mean, by then he should've cooled down, right?”

“Not really,” I said. “Maybe it took a little while to fester. Maybe it took him some time to come up with a plan.”

“I'll give you that,” Candice said, “but I'm not sure that the appellate court would see it that way. They might view the encounter, wonder the same thing I did, and decide that a crime so heinous would be driven by passion, not cool calculation. Noah wasn't just murdered—he was butchered, and that's not the action of a guy who sits back and waits for an opportunity. Plus, I have to question one thing that keeps really bothering me.”

“The knife,” I said, knowing that's what she was going to say. It was bothering me too.

“Yep. How the hell did this guy break into the house without waking anybody, or leaving signs of forced entry behind, walk into the kitchen, get the knife from the drawer, head
back out
of the house to the backyard and the window leading to Noah's room, open the window, crawl in without Noah waking up to scream his head off, then, after Skylar fled the room, calmly slip back out the window, close it without leaving a single smudge,
and
put the screen back in? It makes
no
damn sense.”

I sighed. She was absolutely right. Much as I tried to make sense of this guy's motive and method, I couldn't. “Only one way to find out how it actually went down,” I said.

Candice started the car and began to back out of the space. “What's that?”

“We talk to Slip and get him to tell us,” I said.

Candice let out a little laugh. “Love your enthusiasm, Sundance.”

“It's how I get through the day,” I said.

We headed back to the office, making a detour for a smoothie before we got back to work and checked in with Oscar and brought him up to speed on our progress. He had nothing new to report, unfortunately.

As Candice talked to Oscar on speakerphone, I kept thinking about poor Noah and his life cut so short. I remembered the words Skylar had used to describe her son. That he was outgoing, personable, and kind to humans and animals. He certainly hadn't deserved his fate, and I felt so much sorrow that such a bright light had been so brutally snuffed out.

“You okay?” Candice asked me, and I realized I'd been staring off into space and that she'd hung up with Oscar.

“Yeah. Just thinking about Noah. Seemed like a great little kid, you know?”

“He did,” she agreed.

I poked at my super-healthy smoothie with my straw (Candice's idea) and said, “It makes me curious, actually, about whether he mentioned this guy Slip to anyone else.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I said, sorting through the thought as I spoke. My intuition was buzzing with something, and I needed to talk to work it through. “I can see why he wouldn't have mentioned Slip to his mom after the encounter at Home Depot. I mean, he probably didn't want to upset her again, but what if he'd mentioned it to someone else, like a teacher?”

“It was the summer, remember?” Candice said. “School was out for the year.”

“Oh,” I said, “that's right.”
Buzz, buzz, buzz,
my intuition chimed. Something was there, so I pushed a little more at the line of thought. “But maybe,” I said next, “he brought it up with someone else. Like, isn't that the kind of thing you confess to your grandma?” As I said that, I felt a light tingling in my abdomen. I was on to something.

“Maybe,” Candice agreed, squinting at me. “You look like you want to go ask her about it.”

“I do.”

“Intuition buzzing?”

I grinned. “It's like you
know
me.”

Candice got up from her chair. “No time like the present,” she said. “Give me ten minutes to find Skylar's mom's name and address and we'll roll.”

I drove while Candice navigated, or, more accurately, I drove and reacted to Candice's infrequent pointing while she spoke on the phone to various clients and made a second attempt to reach our IT contact at Home Depot headquarters.

Eventually, we pulled onto Westlake Drive, which is a section of town where the houses are ginormous and the property tax bracket is likely in the mid–five figures. I started to feel a little self-conscious driving my fairly new hybrid SUV when every other car that passed me cost more than the entire sum of my college education. At last we pulled up to a grand gray masonry estate (there was no other word for it) and peered down the long drive.

“Skylar's mom lives
here
?”

Candice read the address on the side of one of the pylons at the edge of the drive and said, “The estate belongs to an A. Hudson
and, judging by the address I pulled up for Faith Wagner, I think she lives in the guesthouse.”

“Where's the guesthouse?”

Candice pointed down the drive to a small pond. On the edge of the pond was a cottage constructed of the same gray masonry as the main house.

“Do you think we can just head up the driveway and park?” I whispered.

“Unless you want to walk from here,” Candice said, motioning impatiently with her hand for me to turn into the drive.

“But what if they come out?” I said, still hesitating. Big money intimidates me. And I admit this even though my own sister could probably afford a place like this. Maybe two or three places like this.

“Just freaking drive,” Candice said impatiently.

I gripped the wheel and turned onto the estate, creeping down the driveway like I did it every day and being careful not to look toward the main house. I parked next to a gold-colored Volvo and we got out. I kept my keys out just in case a SWAT team of security burst out of the house to chase us off the property, but no one appeared from the main house and I let Candice lead us down the slight hill to the guesthouse.

On the way Candice looped the lanyard holding her FBI ID around her neck and I did the same.

As we stopped on the front step, we heard music from inside. Piano music. Bad piano music. Candice knocked and the music stopped. A moment later the door was opened and a woman in her mid to late sixties, bearing a strong resemblance to Skylar, minus the curly blond hair, stood there peering at us over bright red reading glasses. She was smartly dressed in a steel blue silk blouse and a camel skirt with matching flat-heeled shoes. “Yes?”

Candice tilted the badge hanging from her neck toward the woman and said, “Mrs. Wagner?”

She blinked a few times as she looked from Candice to the badge, then over to me, and down at my badge. “Yes?” she said. “What's this about?”

I couldn't help noticing that Skylar's mother had broken out in a sheen of sweat, and I wondered, what was up with
that
?

Candice introduced us and said, “We'd like to ask you a few questions about your grandson, if we could?”

Mrs. Wagner's lips pressed down in a hard line. “I don't have a grandson,” she said, anger erupting in her eyes. Again, I wondered at her reaction.

“I'm so sorry,” Candice said, trying to appease her. “I didn't mean to upset you. It's just that we've been investigating Noah Miller's murder, and we've turned up some compelling evidence that we're following up on.”

Mrs. Wagner's hands balled into fists. “My
daughter
murdered my grandson, Ms. Fusco. A crime for which she is going to pay the ultimate penalty. I see no reason why you would want to dredge up the most horrible incident of my life now, when it's already too late to alter the outcome.”

“Mrs. Wagner,” I said gently, trying to get a feel for her energy, “I know you're alarmed by our sudden arrival on your front step, but we've been investigating the murder of your grandson, operating under the premise that your daughter committed the crime, only to discover that there are several inconsistencies in the evidence presented at court that blow giant holes through that theory. All we want is the truth, ma'am. And we believe you could hold vital information.” When Skylar's mother continued to stare angrily at me, I added, “Ma'am. What if Skylar
didn't
do it? Wouldn't that be worth discovering before it's too late?”

She let out a breath and shook her head. “My daughter is a master manipulator, Ms. Cooper. You've obviously talked to her, and she's convinced you that she's innocent.”

“No,” Candice was quick to say. “We examined the evidence, ma'am, and
that
alone was enough to convince us.”

“What evidence?” she demanded.

I found it really unsettling that a mother could be so cold and callous toward her own daughter. Then again, my own mother was cut from much the same cloth as this woman. “We think there really was an intruder that night,” Candice said patiently. “And we have multiple witnesses that suggest he might've been out to hurt your daughter
and
her son. We're currently waiting on video surveillance, in fact, to confirm that he threatened her.”

Candice was fibbing a lot here, but I didn't care. We had to get past the ice wall this woman was putting up if we were going to find out if Noah had spoken to her about Slip.

For her part, Mrs. Wagner seemed to mull that all over. Finally she said, “I don't know how I can help. I certainly never witnessed my daughter or my grandson being threatened.”

“We know,” I said. “But maybe Noah talked to you about a particular incident that took place at a Home Depot about two weeks before he was murdered?”

Mrs. Wagner's eyes widened slightly in a flash of recognition, but she seemed to catch herself, and then her features smoothed out, as if she were suddenly the most calm and reasonable person you'd ever want to meet. “I don't recall any such conversation,” she said.

My radar detector went off like a tornado warning siren. “I see,” I said, narrowing my own eyes. I wanted her to read my disbelief. She started sweating again. “So he never told you about the guy in the hardware store? The welder who knew all about tools?”

“No,” she said, a bit too quickly.

I glanced at Candice and shook my head, again not even trying to hide my disbelief. “Mrs. Wagner,” Candice tried. “You
do
know that your daughter will quite likely be put to death next week, right? And that will happen because she's been unjustly convicted of the crime of murdering her own son.”

“It's in the court's hands,” she said, turning up her palms as if there weren't anything to be done about it.

“All right, then,” Candice said.

My best friend turned to leave, but anger got the better of me and I stepped threateningly close to Skylar's mother. “I don't know what you're hiding, Faith Wagner, but I sure as hell intend to find out. And when I clear your daughter of the charges, I'm going to make sure that she knows her own mother was willing to let her die rather than offer us one simple kernel of truth.”

I then looked her up and down to show her she wasn't all that, and turned to go, marching right past a gaping Candice on the way.

“Well, that went well,” Candice said as we got in the car. Mrs. Wagner was still glaring hard at us and I was tempted to flip her the bird, but held myself in check. Barely. And only because she wasn't worth the quarter.

Her attitude was just a bit too close to home for me, so I settled for squealing backward out of the space to turn the car and screeching the tires on the tidy concrete as we zipped out of the drive.

“Why do you think she won't cooperate?” Candice asked after a bit of protracted silence (during which I fumed and mentally doubled the amount in my swear jar).

“There are two reasons why people usually withhold information,” I said angrily. “The first is because they think it'll get them in trouble. The second is because they have something to gain by keeping whatever it is a secret.”

“Which one do you think it is with Wagner?”

I shrugged. “Possibly both. She was awfully nervous when we started flashing our badges. That tells me she's broken the law. Her energy reads as a cold, calculating narcissist, so it wouldn't surprise me that she's working some angle that puts her just this side of what's legal. Also, the way her features smoothed out—I mean, did you
see
that? It was practiced. Once she regained her composure, she fell into the act of portraying herself as some sort of exemplary citizen. And the joke is that any idiot can see right through her!”

“You're getting a little worked up, Sundance,” Candice said, eyeing the road nervously. “Maybe I should drive?”