Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

There were “spy stores” in town that sold fiber-optic cameras that fit into smoke detectors, electric switch plates, bathroom fans, and heating ducts.

She started out methodically, but within minutes found herself frantically pulling books from shelves, yanking artwork off the walls, and uprooting potted plants. Had she looked behind herself she would have seen a path littered in destruction and might have stopped herself. But it wasn’t until she’d come full circle that she saw her downstairs in ruins-books scattered, plants and lamps tipped over, the walls bare and crawling with unfamiliar shadows from lamps on their sides.

Hurricane Daphne.

Actions did in fact speak louder than words. She saw her rampage as a sustained scream, a cry for help of epic proportions.

Her mobile phone chirped from somewhere on the kitchen counter. She searched for it contemptuously, as if it, too, might be watching her.

“Matthews.”

“Daphne? It’s Ferrell.”

Her breath caught. He’d called again. With impeccable timing. And on her cell phone, a number he simply could not possess.

“You let me down, Daphne.”

She felt as if he’d poured ice water down her back. “I asked you not to contact me.” Could he sense her terror? Did she dare hang up on him?

“You said it was a process, a system. That it worked. I don’t see it working, Daphne, and I don’t see you doing anything to fix it.”

“It’s a process that takes time, Mr. Walker. Believe me, we’re doing everything-”

“Don’t hand me that crap! If you were doing everything you could, he’d be locked up, not free to do what he wants.”

“You and I talking about it is not going to help. I’m going to hang up now.”

“I brought you her sweatshirt!”

“Get this straight: The more you try to help, the more you hurt our chances of putting away your sister’s killer. Tampered evidence is inadmissible.”

“Since when can’t an informant supply evidence?”

“Since the informant held a knife to the suspect’s neck. Since the informant is related to the victim. Since the informant has repeatedly been asked to stay out of it. Since the informant is not an informant in the first place! Police informants are re-cruited and managed, and records are kept of their activities.

You are not a police informant, Mr. Walker. You are not helping things.”

“Okay, okay. Cards on the table?” Walker asked.

“Mr. Walker, you are not listening.”

“I can help you, Daphne.”

“Mr.-”

“The two missing women.”

The sudden silence in the room and over the phone was replaced by a pounding in her ears as a slide show of recent events flashed through her consciousness. Hebringer and Randolf had stolen away Boldt and his CAP team for months. She had personally worked up profiles, interviewed family members, and torn open the lives of these two women to where secrets no longer existed-sex toys, family turmoil, medications, and past lives included. As a resident of the city, Ferrell Walker certainly knew of the department’s dedication to the investigations-so was this tease of his an act of desperation or a legitimate offer?

If the latter, did she dare refuse him?

“I’m listening,” she said, her heart continuing to race as adrenaline coursed through her. She reached for the wine bottle and upended it.

“I’ll help you find those women if you’ll get Lanny Neal behind bars for good.”

“We’ve been looking for those two women for a long time, Mr. Walker. What makes you think-?”

“Because I know things you don’t.”

“And how am I to believe that?”

“Let’s just say I’ve had a vision. The two of them strung up like marlins. Maybe you’ve been looking in the wrong place.”

She didn’t consider herself easily rattled-“strung up like marlins”-and yet this homeless, bereaved street person had her shrinking and shaking as she took yet another swig of wine in an attempt to settle herself. “A dream, or something more concrete?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Childish. Toying with her.

“Yes, I would, Mr. Walker.”

“You’re scared because I know more than you,” he said. “I can understand that. But there’s no reason to be. We’re friends, the two of us. I wouldn’t hurt you. You wouldn’t hurt me. I can help you; you can help me. Tell me you’ll help me.”

The psychologist pushed aside the frightened woman in what she considered a moment of personal triumph. “The arrest and conviction of Lanny Neal isn’t about you, Mr. Walker. It’s about us doing our jobs. As for your contributing to our ongoing investigation into the disappearances-”

“Then do your job,” he complained.

“We are. We’re doing just that.”

“By letting him go? By buying a bottle of red wine and taking the night off?”

Oh God: He’d followed her, watched her. He knew her cell number. She fought to hold herself together, to place the psychologist ahead of the victim.

“How’d you get this phone number?” She blurted it out without thinking, her internal wiring a mess from the unwanted cocktail of wine and adrenaline. She realized that the phone would reveal to her the caller-ID information once she disconnected.

She had to know where he was calling from, and she had to hang up on him to get the information. But with Walker dangling information about Hebringer and Randolf, she knew she couldn’t hang up. Not yet.

“Why cover the windows like that? It spoils the view.”

Her entire body twitched as her nerves seized. She never let these guys win, yet the temptation was to hang up. She could stare across any interrogation table faking self-confidence and leveling intimidating looks that made even the most heartless think twice about going up against her. So why couldn’t she face Ferrell Walker over the airwaves?

She disconnected the call.

Her fingers fumbled through the phone’s menu choices in search of caller-ID. PAY PHONE #945

She lunged for her home phone and dialed 911 as her mobile began chirping again. The caller-ID blinked on the screen: PAY PHONE #945 Walker, calling back.

“Emergency operator,” a controlled voice answered.

Matthews introduced herself, recited her shield number, and requested the street address for pay phone number 945.

She was placed on hold as her mobile continued to ring. Then the mobile went silent as the voice mail engaged. Two transfers later, she reached a supervisor. Nearly five minutes after that, minutes consumed by the supervisor establishing her legitimacy, she was finally supplied the address of pay phone 945. An address just two blocks south of her.

Hanging up the phone, she sensed the walls of the room closing in on her-physically moving-and though she’d heard such anxiety attacks described in sessions from the other side of the couch, only now did she experience the terror associated with the physical environment shrinking. Suddenly the houseboat was but a cage from which to be plucked. Walker was two blocks away and watching her.

Already on the run, she snatched up car keys, purse, and cell phone, giving little thought to stepping outside the safety of her home. Clomping down the dock in a pair of rubber Wellingtons, her robe slipping open to expose her flannel pajamas, Matthews fished her handgun from her purse and chambered a round.

She lumbered past a well-dressed couple, neighbors returning from dinner. They made way for her, the woman calling out and offering help.

A blur of white terry cloth, Matthews clomped her way up a set of wooden steps that led from the dock to street level beneath an overhang of limbs, maple trees and a sycamore reaching down with their long bony fingers, an area where even she had to duck and maneuver in order to avoid having an eye poked out. Her head averted, she ran smack into a person. The unexpected contact took her breath away-part solid physical contact, part shock. In such close quarters, amid the jumble of lacelike mottled light from a streetlamp, she saw only the brown uniform at first, the resulting wave of terror filling her head like a rush of blood from standing up too quickly. She’d struck a man’s chest. A tall man. She looked up into the eyes of Nathan Prair.