Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

I need to know about that.”

“It’s not that … it’s just that I was mistaken.”

“Okay, so I’m wrong. I still got to talk to you, Ms. Oblitz, about that original complaint. A woman’s gone through something awful-two others have gone missing-and I think you may be able to help me with this. I think you know what she’s going through.”

A long pause. He could hear her breathing. “Not now. Not over the phone.”

LaMoia experienced a great sense of victory. He closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and combed his free hand through his hair. “Okay. Thank you. So when? Where?” He added, “You’re in … the Bay Area. It’s going to have to be by phone, I’m afraid.”

“I’m traveling up there on business, Monday. I’m in the W.”

“Name a time,” he said.

She asked him to wait a minute. “I have an opening at four.

Four to five. Will that suit you?”

“Four o’clock. Fine.”

“Whatever you do, don’t announce yourself at the desk, would you not, Sergeant? Just call up to the room, please.”

“Done.” He hung up the phone with a smile. He owned Ms.

Tina Oblitz. She just didn’t know it yet.

“Bernie Lofgrin typed the blood on that sweatshirt your boyfriend delivered,” LaMoia explained to Matthews. “It matches Mary-Ann Walker’s. They’re running DNA now. Meanwhile we’re here for a little chat.”

“SID?” she asked. “We’re going to search his apartment, right?”

“If he lets us in, we get a plain-sight search,” LaMoia answered. “But for anything more than that, we’ll need a court order, and for that Mahoney wants a print or prints developed on the sweatshirt, some hairs other than Mary-Ann’s, a second blood type, semen … something to bring Neal into the picture with physical evidence.”

“And the lab?”

“Is working on it.” He added, “Call me reckless-I don’t feel like waiting another twenty-four hours on this.”

“And I’m along because?” she asked.

“Because I like you, Matthews. Why else?”

She felt herself blush and tried to cover it by saying, “Gee, John, you’ve got me all feverish.”

“That’s the idea,” he said. “We’ll cool off with a drink later.”

“Don’t count on it,” she said, though it didn’t sound so bad.

LaMoia? she asked herself. Who was she kidding?

“Because you see things the rest of us don’t,” he said, answering her original question. “And because someone has to keep an eye on him while I inspect his car.” He allowed this to sink in. “She was sitting up facing a car when she was hit, not standing, not running away. Dixie can prove that. If not the sweatshirt, maybe Neal’s car. The point being something is going to win SID a ticket into Neal’s apartment, and I’ll take it however we can get it.”

He gave her one of his high-voltage smiles as he used a credit card to trick open the lock on the apartment house’s street-side door.

The dark stairwell smelled sour, of spilled beer and wine, tobacco and other things in various states of organic decompo-sition that she didn’t want to think about-street sex and in-travenous drug use, and always that tinge of the sea. These combined with an odor that she took to be poisoned mice or water rats entombed in the walls in various stages of silent decay.

“Should we have maybe called for backup?” she asked in a forced whisper.

“We’re fine,” LaMoia said, climbing the stairs two at a time and reaching inside his jacket for his handgun as he got to the landing.

It didn’t feel all that “fine” to her, and she nearly said so.

“You didn’t have to come,” he said.

“Then why’d you ask me along? What the hell, John: These aren’t even my hours.”

“Because I knew if I didn’t you’d be all moody about being left out.” This irritated her-not the comment, but the fact that he had her dead to rights. “I asked you because I knew you had nothing better to do tonight, and I thought you might enjoy seeing me take this guy down.”

“Seeing you take him down,” she restated. “So I’m what, your audience?”

“It’s not like that and you know it.”

“What is it like, John?” she whispered. They stood outside the apartment number listed on LaMoia’s slip of paper. She was angry now. Angrier still that she allowed it to show.

He met eyes with her and whispered back, “I like your company, Matthews. You’re smart, you’re clever, and like I said, you see things in shit-balls like Neal that the rest of us miss. A case like this … maybe we find evidence, maybe we don’t. And if we don’t, the evidence may boil down to this guy’s behavior.

His reactions. Am I right? And who better than you to sit up on that witness stand and charm the shorts off a jury to where they buy a collection of circumstantial evidence that pins him as capable of anything, including lying.”

LaMoia reached up and rapped his knuckles on the door. He indicated for her to step back, and he readied the weapon before him.

She understood then that the pistol was nothing more than posturing on LaMoia’s part-he wanted to scare Neal with this entrance, to establish a degree of distrust that would set the tone for the interview to come. She admired him for this gut instinct of his; sometimes she wondered who, of the two of them, understood human behavior better.

“Who is it?” Neal asked through the door.

“Sergeant LaMoia and Lieutenant Matthews, Mr. Neal.”

The man opened the apartment door with none of the reluctance or hesitation that Matthews might have expected of the guilty, and she took note of this. Such cocksure confidence could be its own telltale, its own undoing for a rare breed of suspect.

The door opened into a room dominated by a large worn couch covered in an unpleasant green cotton that looked more like a bedspread, a wooden chair facing it, and a coffee table with badly scratched veneer that clearly doubled as a footrest.

A shabby, aluminum card table that belonged in an Airstream trailer held two empty beer bottles and a pair of disposable picnic containers of salt and pepper. The table was situated in front of a large double-hung window. Its jamb and sill pockmarked by a dozen coats of poorly applied paint, it looked out onto a black metal fire escape and beyond, an unexpectedly impressive view of Lake Union. Finding the one-man kitchen neat and clean surprised her. She would have expected Neal incapable of house-keeping. A plain-sight search of the small bedroom revealed the television he’d mentioned previously as well as a second window access out onto the fire escape, also part of his earlier statement. At least in his description of the place, his earlier statement held up.

The artwork, if it could be called that, amounted to travel posters of beach resorts showing scantily clad bronzed women enjoying bright sunshine while surrounded by palm trees and umbrellas.

He caught her staring. “I was an Internet travel agent until the meltdown happened. Put most of us out of business.”

“And now?” LaMoia asked. “I don’t think we established your employment, Mr. Neal.”

“A little of this, a little of that. Between jobs right now.”

“Between women, too,” LaMoia muttered.

“Mary-Ann was helping with the rent?” Matthews said.

Neal shrugged. “A little. You’ll hear it from the maggot anyway, if you haven’t already.”

“The brother,” LaMoia clarified.

“He’s a parasite, and don’t look at me like I’m the pot calling the kettle black because it’s my apartment in the first place, my car, my things. I’m between jobs is all, and Mary-Ann helped out. So what?”