Sense of Deception (10 page)

“I have clients starting at ten thirty, which is why I insisted we take separate cars. I barely have time to meet with Dioli.”

He frowned but nodded, and I followed him inside the building, which was air-conditioned to a comfortable degree rather than the frigid temps Dutch and his crew kept the bureau offices.

Making our way upstairs to the second floor, we inquired about Detective Dioli with the duty officer and we were on our way to sit in the chairs in the small lobby when we heard someone call, “Hey” behind us.

My first impression of Dioli was that he resembled a lot of the cops on APD's force, who all seemed to have come from the same genetic stock—thick in the shoulders and neck, a bit of a belly, face
of a bulldog, and completely bald. I offered him a perfunctory smile and hoped he wasn't also thick in the head.

He waved us over to walk with him and we followed obediently past several empty cubicles to the back of a room lit with harsh fluorescents. We stopped behind him at a smallish round table with three chairs.

I noticed that Dioli had dressed casually in jeans and a black T, and I thought he might be off duty but getting in a little extra paperwork time over the weekend.

In the center of the table were two thick stacks of folders. Before we sat down, the detective turned to face us with outstretched hand. “Ray Dioli,” he said. “It's nice to finally meet you, Miss Cooper. I've heard a lot about you.”

I took his hand and shook it. “It's ‘Mrs.' now, and please call me Abby, Ray. It's nice to meet you too.” Dioli then shook Oscar's hand and we all sat down.

Leaning forward to rest his elbows on the table, Dioli said, “Agent Rodriguez said you're interested in the Skylar Miller appeal?”

“Yes,” I said without any elaboration.

Dioli looked me square in the eye, as if attempting to read me the way he knew I could read him. “You think she'll win the appeal?”

“No.”

Dioli nodded. “Good,” he said with no small measure of bitterness.

I worked hard to keep my expression neutral. “You're convinced she did it?”

He held my gaze again. “Without a shadow of a doubt. She did it. She butchered that little boy.”

I took in both his conviction and his statement before I asked
my next question. “Can you tell me about the case?” I knew I could bargain for the file, but I thought that since Dioli had been the lead detective, he'd be the best person to give me the highlights of how he came to make the case against Skylar.

Dioli tapped his index finger on the table and chewed on the inside of his cheek, as if considering my request. “Yeah, I can tell you all about it, but I'd like something in return.”

“Of course,” I said easily. “I'm always happy to assist the APD.”

Ray chuckled. “Yeah, so I hear.” Even though his comment held no malice, I knew by it that he must've heard about the times I'd butted heads with those in APD. “I had your partner down here a couple of months ago.”

“She says you gave her a rough time.” I probably shouldn't have baited him, but where Candice was concerned, my inner protective tiger came out.

Dioli shrugged as if it was no big deal. “Her husband's a Fed,” he said.

“As is mine.”

“Yeah, but you weren't filmed shooting a guy in a parking garage. I worked that scene. It was ugly. Anyway, I had to push her and see if there were any holes in her story. I wouldn't be a good cop if I didn't.”

I took a deep breath and was aware that Oscar was sitting quietly in his chair, his gaze roving back and forth between us. “I guess that's fair,” I told Dioli. “She doesn't seem to harbor any hard feelings at least.”

He chuckled again, like he thought me a nice little white liar. “So! About our bargain. I tell you about Skylar Miller, and in exchange I'd like your thoughts on a case that we're having a hell of a tough time cracking and, due to the lack of any solid leads, is about to get put on ice.”

“I agree to your terms except with one added request.”

“Which is?”

“I'd like a copy of Noah's murder file.”

Dioli narrowed his eyes at me . . . suspicious. “Why?”

“I'm writing a book,” I said easily. Wow, that lie had just totally rolled right off my tongue. Maybe I'd need another jar for those.

“You're writing a book?” the detective asked me, as if my answer didn't quite make sense to him.

“Yes.”

“You're a psychic—why would you want to write a book about a murder you didn't help solve?”

“Color me adventurous.”

Dioli chuckled again. I hoped it was a good thing that he found me amusing at least. “You working for Miller?” he asked me, suddenly losing all sense of humor and narrowing those eyes again.

“No.” Holding up a pinkie, I added, “Pinkie swear.”

Dioli glanced at Oscar as if to get his take, but Oscar merely offered him a mildly polite blank stare. Finally Dioli sat back and said, “Okay, but if I'm gonna make you a copy of the file, then I want your word that you're not working for Skylar Miller or any of these liberal groups trying to get death row inmates out of the needle.”

“You have it, Detective. I assure you, my interest in Miller's case is personal. I'm advancing my own agenda here. That's it.”

At last, he nodded and said, “Okay. I'll make you a copy of the file.”

“Awesome, and I'll give you my impressions on this case of yours.”

Dioli stuck out his hand again. “Deal.” We shook on it and then he started telling me about the murder of Noah Miller, and bless Oscar, he subtly set his phone down to record Dioli in a way
that only I saw. “It was a big case that took up two years of my life, so I remember it like the back of my hand,” he began. “The call came into dispatch at two thirty-eight a.m. At first it was reported as a burglary in progress. Unis were dispatched to the scene, and as they went through clearing the house, they saw bloody footprints leading out from the back bedroom. The house had only two bedrooms, both off the hallway leading from the living room.

“Anyway, they went into the back bedroom, found Noah on the floor, checked for a pulse, found none, and called me. I was on duty that night with my partner, Jay Perkins. He retired three years later, and then a heart attack took him on the fifth hole of a golf course. . . .” Dioli stopped speaking and he seemed to need a moment to find his voice again. He must've really loved his old partner, because I swear his eyes were a bit shiny right then.

After clearing his voice, he said, “Jay was the best damn detective I ever worked with. Taught me a lot, that guy. Anyway, the two of us got dispatched to the scene and were given the scoop from the unis. They were keeping clear of the house until we had a chance to process and take pictures, and they were keeping a close eye on the mom, who I first saw sitting on the curb, rocking like a crazy person back and forth while one of the neighbors, Mrs. Mulgrew, sat with her.

“Jay went inside to check that the scene was secure while I went over to interview Skylar. Now, at first Skylar seemed pretty out of it. I tried to get her attention, but she was feigning shock pretty good. She was somewhat unresponsive and shaking all over. I finally got it out of her that she'd woken up to a noise, but she couldn't remember what the noise was. She said she'd gotten out of bed and gone to check on her son, and found him on the floor next to the bed, facedown. She said she thought he might've fallen
out of bed and she was trying to lift him back into it when she realized that he was wet. She says she thought he might've wet the bed, but then she felt something sharp on her hand, and it cut her. She felt around some more and said that she then realized that Noah was bleeding, and he'd been stabbed with a knife, and then all of the sudden she's hit by something from behind and gets shoved to the floor. She tells me she struggles with someone in the room, manages to get away, and goes running out of the house to the neighbors'.”

So far the story Dioli told didn't seem that implausible, other than the fact that someone had murdered a young boy in cold blood. With as much violence and hate as I've seen and experienced in my life, I've never understood how anyone could mentally get to a point where they could hurt or murder a child. It's beyond my ability to fully comprehend. And yet, the news was full of reports of predators more than willing to do just that. Even the idea of a parent killing his or her child wasn't nearly as shocking as it'd been a decade ago. To my mind, it was still somewhat unfathomable. Causing harm to someone else's child was a despicable thing. Causing it to your own made you a particular kind of monster, and as much as I heard Dioli's derisive tone whenever he mentioned Skylar's name, I just couldn't see her as that brand of monster.

“After taking Skylar's statement,” Dioli went on, “I spoke briefly with the neighbors, who corroborated her account from the time she came over to bang on their door and scream for help. From that point forward they said that she was so hysterical they couldn't make sense of anything she was saying, but they saw her nightgown was bloody and Noah wasn't with her, so they called nine-one-one right away.”

“Did you ask them what they thought of Miller's behavior?” Oscar asked.

“Yeah, but later. They've always supported Skylar. They believed her story.”

“At what point did you begin to suspect her story wasn't true, Ray?” I asked.

“Pretty early on,” he said. “Jay met me outside after I got through interviewing the Mulgrews and he told me there were some things I needed to see. He took me into the house and showed me the hallway leading to the bedrooms. There was a single set of bloody footprints leading away from Noah's room, and we suspected those were Skylar's because they were small and slender—like a female's—and you could also tell they were made by bare feet.”

“Why was that suspicious?” I asked. “If Skylar told you that she went into her son's room to check on him, wouldn't it be the case that she would've likely tracked some of the blood from his room into the hallway?”

“It would. But that's not why it was suspicious. What was suspicious was that the hall had been recently vacuumed. We could see the prints of the uni who went into the house in response to the burglary in progress. When you get that kind of a call and you're in the process of clearing the house, you hug the wall, and we could see his footsteps doing exactly that.” The memory of Candice and me inching our way along the wall in my own home when we didn't know it was Oscar in my bathroom flashed through my mind.

“The footsteps of the uni went down the hall to the far right,” Dioli continued, “and came back on the far left. But other than his footprints and Skylar's, there were no other tracks in that house.”

“Could the assailant have gone out the window?”

“Nope. Shut tight, free of blood, and the screen was in place.
All the windows in the house were like that, pristine and showing no sign of forced entry. What's more, Jay took me around the outside of the house and we couldn't find a single footprint, scuff mark, or broken blade of grass. And neither could the crime-tech guys.”

“I'm assuming there was no other sign of forced entry,” I said, recalling one of the articles I'd read had highlighted that detail.

“None,” Dioli said. “The front door was left open from when Skylar went out, but she'd unlocked that herself. Hell, she told me she'd done that on her way out the door, because I'd asked her if her front door had been locked.

“What's more, there wasn't a single hair, fingerprint, DNA fragment, or scrap of other physical evidence left by this supposed intruder. We could account for every single speck of physical evidence in Noah's bedroom as belonging to him or his mom. If there was an intruder in that room, he wore a hazmat suit.”

I frowned. Something felt a little off to me about that statement, but I didn't think I wanted to question the detective. Instead, I'd pay close attention to the file notes on the physical evidence collected.

“Did she ever confess?” I asked.

Dioli shook his head. “Nope. We grilled her all the rest of that night and through the middle of the afternoon the next day, but she stuck to the story. Fourteen hours we went at her, and she finally asked for a lawyer. Once we couldn't talk to her anymore, we started interviewing everyone in her life.” Dioli paused to shake his head, like he was remembering something tragic. “I tell you, that poor kid Noah was put through the wringer before she finally went nuts and killed him.”

I leaned forward. “Tell me.”

“Well, Skylar married pretty young. She and her ex were high
school sweethearts, and Skylar got pregnant at nineteen and the kids got married. Anyway, Noah comes along and Skylar's still kind of a kid herself. She's upset that all her friends are out having fun and she's got a baby at home, so she starts dumping the kid on her mom and heading out to party.

“Pretty soon she's a full-blown alcoholic and she spends three months in a rehab center and comes home to be the good little wife. She was back in rehab six months later. Then a year after that.”

That surprised me. “Rehab is pretty expensive,” I said. “How'd two twenty-something kids with a baby afford multiple stays?”

“Chris Miller—her ex—he comes from big money. His folks told me they always suspected Skylar got herself pregnant to trap Chris, and, in the beginning, they wondered privately if Noah was even his.”

“Was he?” I asked, not knowing if they'd do a DNA match postmortem if that was a question.

“He was Chris's son,” Dioli confessed. “The parents had done their own DNA test right after Noah was born without ever telling Skylar, and we also did one just to cover our bases. Noah was Chris's kid. Anyway, Chris and Skylar get along about as well as you'd expect. They both cheated on each other, and Skylar was given to disappearing for days or weeks on end. She'd just leave Noah with her mother and trot out the door and they wouldn't see her for a while. Then she'd show up drunk off her ass.