Sense of Deception (25 page)

“I'll be there in an hour,” he assured me. “I have to head to the bank, and then to Bonnie's office to drop off the check for my earnest money.”

I felt anxious. “Get here as soon as you can,” I told him.

“You okay?” he said, obviously detecting the impatient tone in my voice.

“I feel like we're running out of time, Oscar.”

“Don't worry, Cooper,” he said confidently. “Between Candice and me, we'll track this guy down in time.”

I heard his words and waited to feel the lightness in my midsection, which was a surefire way of knowing that what he said would come true. But there was no lightness. Just a subtle flatness that worried me for the rest of the day.

I
t took us two more days to find Slip. Two long, frustrating, irritating, annoying days to finally,
finally
get the right license number on the right make, right model truck in the right color for the right year.

Oscar came up a total bust on the welding-license angle, even going back several years and trying to match a criminal record for B and E to a welder registered with TxDOT. The search was a complete waste of time.

“He must've worked off the grid,” Oscar concluded.

“Who would've hired him?”

“Probably cheap builders who were taking advantage of the big construction boom from two thousand two to two thousand seven,” Oscar said. “Or he could've faked a certificate.”

“If he was breaking and entering, he probably wouldn't have thought twice about creating a fake license,” I said.

“Nope.”

All our hopes rested on Candice, who worked hard on finding a match to the grainy image of the license plate from the surveillance footage at Home Depot. For the record, finding something
like that isn't like it is on TV, where you just press a button and the computer whirs through a million bits of information per second and then blammo! You've got your bad guy!

The way that particular technique works is that you have to enter all the parts you think you got right, and the computer spits out a series of possible matches. In our case that was a few thousand trucks, and we kept trying to narrow our search by eliminating possible matches. In other words, we'd painstakingly select a combination of what the most likely matches might be, like, for example, a black 1992 Mazda pickup with a plate that began RW3, and plug that into the computer to see if it would narrow the choices down to something less than a hundred, but it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

After three days of endless effort to get everything to match, we finally found the truck, which was a 1995 GMC Sierra in navy blue with the license tag BW5 36L, and in 2004 it'd been registered to one Doug Gallagher.

We all wanted to celebrate, except that when we pulled up Doug Gallagher's driver's license, it showed an old man with greasy silver hair and at least four chins. “Dammit!” I swore, leaning over Candice's shoulder to look closely at the license.

No one called me out for swearing, because both Oscar and Candice had used the f-bomb. F trumps D every time.

I rubbed my tired eyes and looked again at the spreadsheet we'd been keeping to narrow each successive search. “Where did we go wrong?”

“We didn't,” Candice said, her shoulders slumped. We were all exhausted. It was going on ten o'clock and we'd been at it—off and on—since that morning.

“So how come that's not the guy from Home Depot?” I snapped. Did I mention I get grouchy when I don't eat, sleep, or
rest after a full day of clients and searching through databases until my head hurts?

Candice wisely ignored my snippy attitude. “I can think of a few reasons,” she said. “Either the truck was stolen, borrowed, or sold without the title ever being transferred, or this guy could be a relative.”

I let out a bitter sigh. “He doesn't look anything like the description of our suspect.”

Oscar reached for a piece of paper and a pen and he wrote down Gallagher's information. “I'll swing by this guy's place in the morning,” he said. “Feel him out for info. In the meantime, you two should go home and get some rest. You both look exhausted.”

It was Candice's turn to sigh. “Yeah, okay,” she said, closing the lid to her laptop. “Come on, Sundance. I'll walk you down to your car.”

I stared at both of them in disbelief. I mean, I was crazy tired, but it was freaking Thursday. Thursday! Skylar's final appeal was the following Tuesday and the Hail Mary of passes we'd thrown trying to save her had just gone wildly out-of-bounds. (Impressed by my football metaphor, ain'tcha?)

“There's got to be something more we can do!” I protested. And then, quite unexpectedly, my eyes began to well up and a tear slid down my cheek.

“Abby,” Candice said gently, reaching out to take hold of my hand. “Honey, we're doing the best we can. You know we are. But like I told you when we first started this case, you get too attached to the outcome, and, honey, you can't do this with Skylar. The odds are too long here.”

More tears leaked down my cheeks. “Candice, we can't just let her die!”

“We're not letting anybody die,” she said, rubbing my arm, while Oscar handed me a tissue. “We're all gonna fight to the bitter end, honey. If we go down, it won't be because we didn't give it our all. But there's only so much we can do in a given day. So let's get you home, put you to bed, and fight again tomorrow, okay?”

I bit my lip and tried to stop the floodgates. The image of Doug Gallagher came up in my mind and I couldn't help but feel that we'd wasted nearly three whole days chasing a ghost.

“Maybe this guy will know something,” Oscar coaxed. “Maybe he'll point us in the right direction.”

I took an unsteady breath and wiped at my cheeks with the tissue. “I'm going with you tomorrow, Oscar.”

He studied me. “You sure?”

“I am.”

“Okay, Cooper. I'll pick you up here at nine a.m.”

“And I'll do a few more searches,” Candice added. “I mean, maybe there's another make and model truck that we haven't thought of yet that could fit that description.”

I sighed heavily again. “No,” I told her. “Don't bother. My gut says it's the right truck.” What my gut didn't tell me was why it was registered to the wrong guy.

“Well, okay, then!” Candice said, her voice a bit too enthused. “See? Progress. We haven't hit a dead end yet, Sundance. And this ain't over.”

“Yeah, okay,” I muttered, getting up from the chair and moving toward the door with my two companions. “Tomorrow, then.”

As I came through my front door, I found Dutch on the couch, watching baseball. “Hey, beautiful,” he said.

“Hey,” I said without an ounce of enthusiasm. Scooping up Tuttle, who'd roused herself from the doggy bed to jump about at my feet, I moved over to the couch and plopped down. Tuttle took
that opportunity to cover me in kisses, and then Eggy had to get into the act, and before I knew it, the pups were in some kind of kissing competition and I was laughing.

Sometimes there's nothing better for a bad day than a pair of sweet pups to remind you that you're loved. When I finally got them to settle back down in the doggy beds, I looked up and found Dutch standing over me, holding a bowl. “Eat,” he said.

I took the bowl. He'd made his famous spaghetti carbonara. It smelled and tasted like heaven. I ate a few bites and Dutch sat beside me, quietly watching the game. “I'm worried about you,” he finally said.

I snorted. “That's nothing new.”

“True. But I think you're pushing yourself too much on this case, Edgar.”

I ate another two bites before answering him. “I can't look away from this one, Dutch. Skylar Miller is innocent. She is. And if someone doesn't do something, she's gonna die next Tuesday.”

“Cal could win the appeal.”

“Pigs could also fly.” Nothing in the ether had changed about the direction of the appeal. It still felt like Skylar was going to lose, which meant we wouldn't have enough evidence to provide the appellate court with the reasonable conclusion that she might actually be innocent. That's what kept driving me. “It's like I've told you,” I said to Dutch. “The future isn't set. It's fluid, but there are some things, some distinct points, within the context of the future that have a certainty to them. Some events simply feel inevitable to me. Most don't, thank God, which means we can alter the future to our advantage when we need to, but there are some things that simply feel like they're headed to a specific destined conclusion, and the only way to alter them is to find the one thing, the one variable, that might alter things.”

“The appellate court's decision is going to be nay, eh?” Dutch asked.

“Yes. Skylar and Cal are going to lose.”

“So why try so hard?” Dutch said. “I mean, Edgar, if it's inevitable, why are you trying so hard to change it? Why are you killing yourself when you can't win?”

“Because I don't know that I can't win, babe.”

“I'm confused.”

I thought about how to explain it. “It's like I'm chasing after this speeding train, and this speeding train is headed to a certain destination, and I know I want to beat the train so I can throw a switch and alter the course of the track, but I haven't found the shortcut yet that's going to let me beat the train.”

“So you think you can alter the outcome of the appellate court's decision?”

“No, I don't know if I can, but knowing that I might not be able to doesn't mean that I won't find a way if I keep at it. If I keep trying. If we can just find this guy from Home Depot and arrest his ass and bring him in—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Dutch said, twisting on the couch to face me. “Edgar, how are you going to arrest this guy if you find him?”

I blinked. “What do you mean, how am I going to arrest him? I'll have Oscar slap the cuffs on him and bring him in.”

“On what charge?”

I looked at him like he was stupid. “Murder.”

“Whose?” he said, ignoring the level look I was giving him.

“Noah Mill—” My voice cut off because it suddenly dawned on me that we wouldn't be arresting anybody for Noah's murder, because as far as law enforcement was concerned, that case was solved, closed, and the murderer was about to hang for the crime. “Aw, son of a . . .”

The rest of that sentence cost me a buck fifty, but I didn't really care because if we couldn't bring this Slip guy in for questioning, then he didn't have to talk to us. We had no jurisdiction, no cause, and no case. I set down the bowl of pasta and leaned forward to put my face in my hands. I thought the worst thing that could happen was that we wouldn't be able to find Slip before the appellate hearing. But it wasn't. The worst thing that could happen was that we would find Slip and he'd refuse to say boo to us, and we'd have to let him go without so much as a “We know you did it.”

“What're we gonna do?” I moaned.

Dutch put a hand on my back. “Listen,” he said. “This guy from the Home Depot store has a criminal record, right?”

“We think so, yeah.”

“Then I'm pretty sure that if you're diligent, you can find some kind of parole violation. Assuming he's on parole.”

I felt a tingle of lightness in my abdomen and my head snapped up. Grabbing Dutch by the face, I pulled him forward and kissed him passionately. “You are the best husband
ever
!”

He grinned. “Just remember that the next time you get mad at me.”

I stroked his cheek. “If I forget, I'm pretty sure you'll remind me.”

“What are good husbands for?”

*   *   *

T
he next morning I was at the office promptly at eight forty-five and Oscar showed up a few minutes late. My radar pinged the moment he walked through my office door wearing his new duds. I felt good news surrounded him. “Look at you,” I said, giving him an appreciative up-down.

Oscar puffed his chest out a little. “This is where I remind you that you're a married woman, Cooper.”

My smile widened. And then I noticed something on his new shirt. Leaning forward, I saw that it was hair. Dog hair. “Dude,” I said, swiping my hand across his shirt to help clean it off. “What's with all the hair?”

Oscar offered me a big ol' cheesy grin. “I went by the new house last night, just to look at it before heading home. The sellers don't live there anymore—they've already moved—so it's not as creepy as you might think. Anyway, I parked at the curb and was sort of just taking in my new place when this woman walks by carrying this white, matted mutt. We got to talking and she said that she was house-sitting for a couple two doors down, and the dog she tells me was a stray from the neighborhood that she's been setting out food for and trying to coax it to trust her so that she could rescue him. She said he finally let her get close enough to grab him, and that she was thinking about taking him to a rescue shelter in the morning.

“Anyway, she starts to ask me if I like dogs, like she might want me to take him, and swear to God, Cooper, what you said to me about getting a dog pops into my head, so before you know it, the little guy's in my car and I'm taking him home, giving him a bath and a big cut of my steak dinner. He cleans up really good, see?” he said, showing me a picture of an adorable little white and tan pup with big brown eyes and perky little terrier ears.

I started to laugh. “Oh, Oscar,” I said. “He's adorable!”

“Yeah. He's really sweet. I named him Amigo.”

“I love it. But you should take him to a vet as soon as you can. Get him checked for heartworm and see if he has a chip.”

“I dropped him off about ten minutes ago,” Oscar said. “That's why I'm late. They're gonna call me after the vet sees him. I hope he doesn't belong to anybody. I really want to keep him.”

And then my radar pinged again. “Did you get her number?” I asked.

Oscar actually blushed. “Whose?”

“The house sitter.”

“Uh . . . ,” Oscar said. “Not yet. She's there for another week, she told me. She was really cute, though. Think I should ask her out?”

I rolled my eyes. “I
know
you should ask her out.” Grabbing my purse, I motioned for us to go.

As we were headed out, Oscar said, “You know, Cooper, I've been around you for a couple of years, and your radar is always really cool to watch in action, but when you point that thing at me, I gotta tell you, it freaks me out how you can just lay out my life like that.”