The Art of Deception

by Ridley Pearson

  Matthews told the suspect, “What we were just discussing is of relevance here.”

  His face reflected a mixture of annoyance, anger, and uncertainty. “If there’s blood in that car, I’ve got no idea how it got there. None.”

  Matthews informed LaMoia that they’d just been exploring various possibilities for any such evidence. She dropped the hammer with, “. . . since we know that Mr. Neal has the only key to the vehicle.”

  “It’s not the only key,” he spoke up. His eyes pleaded for understanding. “You asked if Mary-Ann had a key. She didn’t. But it wasn’t the only key. I’ve got one of those spare key things inside under the driver-side rear wheel.”

  This news hit her like a bomb, and she could see it had with LaMoia as well, though he hid it cleverly from Neal, disguising it as a yawn that he covered with his hand. He wanted Neal thinking he was bored. Anything but.

  “A second key,” LaMoia said.

  “Rear wheel, up on the axle. One of those magnetic boxes.”

  Matthews asked, “And you would expect that key to be in place at the moment?”

  “Last time I used that was a good two months ago. It’s gotta be there.”

  “Locked yourself out?” LaMoia asked.

  “Over on Forty-fifth. We’d gone to that Thai place . . . Vietnamese . . . whatever it is. Mary-Ann’s birthday.”

  “I’m going to check it out,” LaMoia informed Matthews. “You okay here?”

  “Fine,” Matthews said.

  “I hit a bird last week,” Neal volunteered. “Right side of the car, right?” he called out after a retreating LaMoia.

  LaMoia stopped. “With your permission, Mr. Neal, I’m going to check for that key.” He waited for a response.

  Neal looked back and forth between the two, clearly weighing cooperation versus objection. He looked as if he might ask a question of Matthews, but she made no effort to encourage this. If LaMoia was operating on a bluff, the wrong answer now could sway Neal to start protecting himself—the last thing she and LaMoia wanted.

  Neal said, “What the hell?” LaMoia opened the door but did not leave. He turned to Neal and nodded faintly, sending the man a signal. “You have my permission,” Neal conceded.

  If a randomly placed key existed somewhere on the car, any decent first-year defense attorney could shred their attempts to lay blame on Neal for any damaging evidence collected. Confusing Matthews further was Neal’s willingness to cooperate with the search. His earlier conviction and brief prison time, when combined with what was obviously an above-average intelligence, should have prevented him from making any such agreements. Guilty or not, she thought.

  “I hit a bird,” he repeated for her benefit.

  “Sure you did,” she said, trying her best to sound utterly unconvinced.

  “No key, Mr. Neal,” LaMoia announced when he returned less than five minutes later. “I checked the same location behind all four tires.”

  “Yeah?” His bravado seem to crumble. Matthews had seen this dozens of times before: that point when the lies collapse under the weight of truth. “Then it fell off somewhere. . . . Or maybe . . . I never put it back after the last time.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m telling you . . .” But he couldn’t think how to complete the thought.

  LaMoia was just getting warmed up. “Crawling around under the car just now, you want to know what I found?” He asked this to Matthews, as if Neal weren’t in the room.

  “What’s that?” she answered.

  “Some hair. A nice little smudge of blonde hair and blood. Bottom of the rear bumper, and more on the bottom of the gas tank. Rear of the vehicle,” he said, for Neal’s sake. “You ever hit a blonde bird, you scumbag? Backing up? Maybe you’d like to start doing some talking, on account SID is going to collect all that physical evidence—including, I want to bet, some blue cotton fibers from the sweatshirt that you, yourself, put Mary-Ann in that night—and you’re going to lose any chance you had to put us, or the court, on your side of this. You understand how that works, don’t you? You’re no stranger to the process.”

  “An argument,” Matthews said, seizing on LaMoia’s discovery of this evidence. She felt energized, gripped by adrenaline. “Maybe she shoved you. Hit you. Swore at you. All that affects the way the lawyers look at a domestic.”

  “But if that evidence piles up ahead of time,” LaMoia said, “then what the hell do we need you for? How the hell you going to get anyone to listen if we’ve already got you in the bag?”

  “We’re listening right now, Mr. Neal,” Matthews said. But Neal looked as paralyzed by LaMoia’s announcement as she felt. Every time they had a leg up on this guy, he threw her into doubt with an unexpected reaction. She cautioned herself to work the Boldt method—listen to the victim, follow the evidence, discount witnesses, and ignore the suspect completely until all the facts were in. She tended to react emotionally to suspects, at least on a surface level, and to trust that reaction. It was this opposite approach of theirs that made their combination such an effective team. With LaMoia, things were a little different. He tended to cut to the chase, go for the heart and then leave it to her to show the suspect the error of his ways. She added, “We won’t be around forever, Lanny. This thing will be out of our hands soon,” she said, wondering if they could be so lucky, “and into the hands of the attorneys. At that time, your chance of gaining any points for cooperation pretty much disappear.”

  “I don’t know anything about any blood being under that car.”

  “That’s the wrong answer,” LaMoia said. His cell phone rang. “And you know what that is?” he asked the suspect, viewing caller-ID. “That would be my court order coming through to search this dump.” He silenced the ringing of the phone with the push of a button and held the device to his ear. “LaMoia,” he announced into the phone. “Talk to me, darlin’. Tell me what I want to hear.”

  16 Voice Male

  A blinking message light was no great surprise to Matthews as she returned to her office that evening. In what had become an automatic gesture, she dialed in to retrieve her voice mail, which announced that she had six messages. She cringed as she intuitively anticipated that at least one of these could be from Deputy Sheriff Nathan Prair. He’d attached himself to her once before, and now, with their renewed acquaintance, with the description of the brown uniform in the parking garage, she felt nearly certain she would need to deal with him again.

  The first message on the system was an earlier one from LaMoia asking for her company when he went to interview a possible peeper victim, Tina Oblitz. He explained Oblitz’s prior attempts to “cancel the order,” as LaMoia put it, and how he hoped he might gain insight into Hebringer’s and Randolf’s “vanishing act.”

  She felt closer to John—his teasing bordered on flirting. His earlier struggle with the OxyContin had revealed a more human LaMoia. Some people were helped by such challenges, and LaMoia had the makings. She scribbled down his initials—this was how she took note of all such phone messages—a reminder to return his call.

  The second message caught her by surprise, and because of her premonition, she mistakenly assigned the voice initially to Prair, though her brain quickly straightened her out. “Lieutenant Matthews?” It was Ferrell Walker. “I wondered if my gift helped you out? I don’t have a phone, so... listen... I’ll call you back.”

  Her image was not of Walker at the ME’s half out of his mind with grief, nor was it the boyish man delivering his sister’s soiled sweatshirt as a gift; it was, instead, an image of Walker in his bloodied apron standing in the falling rain, his eyes bloodshot with fatigue but looking up and down her body, his wet, matted hair. One black rubber glove, one yellow—she remembered so many details of that interview.

  “Pass,” she said aloud, deleting the message.

  At the start of the third message, the first vestiges of concern warmed her, spreading through her like a shot of alcohol. “Me again.” She was mad at herself for being d
istracted by Prair, only to be blindsided by the much more obvious, emotionally unstable Ferrell Walker. Trouble came in threes—she’d heard detectives talk of this for years, though dismissed such superstitions—and yet, it seemed she’d been served up a pair. Walker said, “I forgot to mention that I love what you’re wearing— especially the orange blouse.” It was peach, not orange, she thought as she looked down past the phone and took in her clothing. “Listen . . . we could have a beer, or coffee, or something. Talk about the case. Do you even drink coffee? So much to learn about you.”

  How had he managed to see the color of her blouse? she wondered. She’d worn her gray rain jacket all day because of the persistent drizzle. She’d taken it off only when inside. The thoughts connected like a magnet picking up filings. She glanced over at her office window. The blinds were twisted open. Not possible! She pressed the keypad to save Walker’s message, then crossed the room, peered curiously out her seventh-floor window, and twisted the blinds shut. It wasn’t as if she wore her rain jacket zipped to her neck—he could have seen her anywhere away from the office. But to do so, he would have to have been watching her, and watching her closely.

  The fourth message played automatically from the speakerphone as she stood across the room. Walker’s voice yet again: “Me again. Sorry. But we could take a walk or something. It doesn’t have to be a drink. Later.”

  She took a deep breath to clear her thoughts. She’d worked with dozens upon dozens of disturbed men, some across an interrogation table, some in a corrections facility: sex offenders, drug addicts—homicidal, suicidal—social misfits. Ferrell Walker was still grieving, no doubt, and had clearly transferred some of his feelings for his unavailable sister onto her. Such transference was more typically directed at people considered close to the individual, not a virtual stranger, but there were no rules to such things, no commandments to follow.

  Walker’s final message ran goose bumps up her arms then down her spine and into a nauseated stomach. “I hope I’m not scaring you with these messages. I know women—especially attractive women—must be scared in this city right now. I’m not going to hurt you or something. I want to help you get Lanny Neal is all. The sooner, the better, as far as I’m concerned.” The unspoken message there was that in fact he might be planning to hurt her if Neal was not brought in.

  She sat down heavily into her chair, her hands steepled before her lips. One more thing to deal with. She struggled to evaluate him as she might a patient. With the death of his sister he had preexisting emotional conditions that allowed the possibility of a fantasy stage where Matthews was seen as his solution to all ills and injustices. She’d made a mess of it by not laying down strict guidelines at his first offer to help her. Worse yet, such a fine line existed between love and hate that she now faced a very difficult job of distancing herself without repercussions.

  The sixth message was from Boldt—just the sound of his voice came as a great relief. Something about Mama Lu, an autopsy, and a possible connection to Hebringer and Randolf, though she didn’t focus on it clearly, Walker’s bloody apron still foremost in her mind. Without the mounting evidence against Neal, without Walker’s initial call-in and his attempt to assist in Neal’s prosecution by turning over that evidence, she might have believed Walker capable of having killed his only sister himself. She couldn’t rule it out entirely, even so.

  “End of messages,” the voice mail announced. A pleasant, automated voice that had no idea of the worry those messages instilled in her. She stabbed the speakerphone button and disconnected, Walker’s messages and his unflinching tone echoing in her head. First things first: She would start a file, detailing the passing of the sweatshirt, making notes about the silhouette in the parking garage, transcribing the various phone messages. If he continued to harass her, the existence of that file would help her make a case. She would not allow him to rattle her. She’d seen much worse than Ferrell Walker, although in her patients the conflict, the violence, the obsession or fixation was always directed at others, not her. Always someone else’s problem. She was the facilitator, not the target. The cop. Not the victim.

  She packed up and headed home, but found herself checking her rearview mirror a little more often, glancing around while stopped at red lights, and triple-checking the car’s automatic door lock. Walker had put the bug in her, and it wasn’t going away.

  Her houseboat on Lake Union had been bought well before the city’s techno renaissance, when the floating one-and-a-half-story homes—actual houses on pilings and accessed by a wooden dock down the middle—had been a latent-hippie community, nonconformists who wanted a home in the city but not the cost of the land beneath. The houses had been dirt cheap back then, an awkward phrase given their setting. Now those same homes went for high six figures, and Matthews had long since realized she was living in her 401(k); at the very least, she had quadrupled her investment.

  Her houseboat, last on the left of dock 7c, was constructed of gray shiplap. Thirty-gallon terra-cotta flower tubs sat to either side of the hemp rope railing that surrounded her deck. No green thumb, she’d tried annuals in the tubs for a while but kept killing them off. They currently housed a variety of Korean boxwood that required no attention.

  She walked briskly down the dock, her Cole Haan flats clapping like gunshots, her heart rate elevated as she wondered if she’d been followed. Her houseboat’s front door was African mahogany and bore a carving of a dove she could do without. She entered, locked the door, and threw its deadbolt. Removing and hanging up the rain jacket reminded her of the color of her blouse and reintroduced a wave of brief panic at the thought that Walker not only had managed to see her with her jacket off but was brazen enough to mention it.

  The downstairs was finished cedar, the furnishings spare—a foldout couch, a wood-burning stove, a hand-carved cherry rocker. An eight-by-eight post in the center of the small living room supported the roof. The galley kitchen was separated from the living area by a small island countertop that hosted three stools, a walk-around phone, a cutting board, and a suspended wooden rack that was home to wineglasses. The killer home stereo had taken her three years to acquire. She fired up Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing and cranked the volume. If anything eventually sank this place it would be the high count of books and professional journals that overflowed the bookshelves and rose to towering stacks on the floor. A narrow, padded window seat offered her favorite reading nest. Snuggled in there, a fire going, a throw pulled across her legs, she had consumed many hours of pure bliss—at least those hours that weren’t tied down. They’d been increasingly few in the last several months. Something drove her to not just fill her schedule but pack it full of work, volunteering at the Shelter, running, and the gym—it didn’t matter as long as she filled 6 A.M. to exhaustion without time to think. For thinking was the real enemy: thinking about herself, the lack of romance in her life, the isolation, the poverty of public service, the missed opportunities.

  After a dinner of broiled chicken breast and a green salad with rice vinegar, she changed into flannel PJs, built a fire, and tucked herself into the window seat, a glass of Archery Summit Pinot in hand. She felt a bit guilty about not stopping by the Shelter to inquire about Margaret, but Walker’s phone messages had unsettled her, and the comfort of home proved just what the doctor ordered, she being the doctor. Chapter by chapter, she lost herself to Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer—a book she found unexpectedly titillating—a rare and much-needed escape from psychology reviews. She caught herself dozing off. Luxury came cheaply these days.

  At 11:32—she noticed the firm, bright green display of the kitchen’s digital clock—she heard what her mind registered as an unfamiliar sound. The houseboat had a life of its own, never perfectly at rest, battered by water and weather, always shifting, settling, creaking, and groaning. These pops and grunts, the wooden cries and long, eerie sighs helped to form a personality uniquely its own. Matthews knew that personality well. These same sounds lulled her to sleep
. They woke her up. On some occasions they frightened her, as they did on this night.

  She suddenly felt more awake. Her brain sorted through the database of familiarity with what she now heard, filtering out the noises that accompanied any night on Lake Union: the seaplanes landing and taking off, motor craft, highway traffic, distant ferry horns, sirens, and the noises of her neighbors going about everyday life. She lay there, ears ringing slightly, as she “stretched” to hear beyond the walls. She couldn’t be sure what she heard, or whether or not it was just a bad case of nerves. Those phone messages had rattled her. So had her experience at the parking garage. More than she had thought. She promised herself that she wouldn’t let this get the better of her, yet she glanced across the room to her purse, which hung by its strap from one of the three ladder-back stools—her handgun, cell phone, the small can of pepper spray, and a mini Maglite. Barbara Kingsolver drew her eyes back to the novel as she told herself that noise carried well and did funny things across water. No reason to get all worked up.

  But she’d momentarily lost the chance at sleep. Another few minutes passed behind the efforts of the delicious pages, the melodious singing, and the sumptuous wine. Going on midnight. Feeling tired again at a chapter break, she inserted the bookmark, spun her legs off the window seat, and mechanically folded the throw. She hand-washed the wineglass in the kitchen sink, its glass squeaking, and placed it carefully down into the drying rack. She watched a seaplane land—the last of the night—as it taxied across the lake’s black water. As the groan of the propellers faded, she heard yet another unfamiliar creak from the bones of her houseboat.

  This time she grabbed her gun and moved to the front door, intent on escorting Walker off the dock. Never mind that the residential phone numbers and addresses of police officers went unpublished, never mind that she’d carefully watched her car’s rearview mirrors and had assured herself she hadn’t been followed; she remained convinced it was Ferrell Walker creeping around out there, and it was beginning to get to her.