Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

She feared the CAP sergeant might resolve the situation with a baseball bat, and no one needed that.

“It’s open this time of night, right?” he asked.

She answered with a don’t-ask-me-to-do-this look.

“The Sarge wants him in for questioning. I want answers how he got your cell number. Call whoever it is you gotta call down there, and let’s get the flock out of here. It smells funky in here, you know that?”

“Boy, you really know how to flatter a girl.”

“Yeah,” he fired back at her. “That’s what they say.”

It came together for Matthews slowly, like learning the steps to a dance. Not something she could jump into, this idea of Walker in the Shelter. Like so many times before in other investigations, she found the early information too much to process as a whole, a stew stirred up that had to settle before being tasted, its in-gredients properly understood. For LaMoia, it wasn’t stew but spaghetti, and he was throwing it at the wall as he always did, waiting to see what stuck. For him, she was part of the mix-he’d thrown her up there, too, by including her in his theory.

LaMoia didn’t develop theories so much as test them. He didn’t put his work on paper, he put it in the field, and that pretty much explained to her why she found herself strapped into the passenger seat of his Jetta shortly before midnight. Another of LaMoia’s wild hairs, and she along for the ride, as much for the company as anything else.

“You feeling better?” he asked. LaMoia drove fearlessly-his approach to so much of life. She envied him that, while at the same time hated being his passenger.

“I resent you dragging me along, John.”

God, he loved women.

She fought against the silence that followed. She said, “Your mind goes to strange places when you feel yourself under attack.”

“You’re safe with me,” he said in the most serious voice she’d ever heard him use. “Always, and forever. No one will ever get to you with me around, Matthews.”

She didn’t want to cry in front of him. She glanced out her side window only to have her focus shift and the mirror image of her glassy eyes superimpose itself. LaMoia gallant? Who would have thought?

She said, “Making statements like that can get you in trouble.”

“I’m always in trouble,” he said.

He won a private smile from her.

“From here on out you’ll stay at my loft. End of discussion.”

She laughed into the car. “That’ll be the day.”

“No, that’ll be tonight. That’ll be until we clear this thing.”

She searched his profile for any indication he was kidding.

The car drifted through yet another greasy turn, and she made no attempt to steady herself. Instead, she settled into the seat, wondering how and why everything suddenly felt a whole lot better.

“Pack a bag.” He reached across and took up her left hand-an impossibly caring gesture for John LaMoia. She did not recoil, did not tease him. For an instant they met eyes. He squeezed her hand gently, ran his thumb down her palm. She felt it to her toes. “I know you think I’m crazy. That’s all right, Matthews. You, and everyone else.” He flew through traffic, colored lights reflected in the black shine of the wet street. “This too shall pass.”

They started with LaMoia entering the Shelter alone, just as he assumed Walker would have done. Matthews entered a moment behind him, waved hello to the attendant, checked the guest book, and then walked past a screen to roam the aisles between the cots.

With the midnight curfew a half hour off, a fairly steady stream of desolate young women trickled in as LaMoia stood before a gunmetal gray steel desk listening to a woman who had more chins than a shar-pei as she explained the Shelter’s women-only policy to him. The arriving girls read a page of rules and disclaimers before signing in. As the hefty woman in charge oversaw this procedure, a neglected LaMoia looked quickly for where Walker might have picked up Matthews’s cell phone number, his eyes combing several bulletin boards, paperwork on top of the desk, and a handful of flyers offered to arrivals. To his discouragement, the only phone number he could find on any of the literature was the Shelter’s toll-free hotline.

“Matthews,” he called out loudly, finding himself on the verge of being thrown out, cop or not.

Matthews found herself entering the dormitory and reliving the day she’d sat down with Margaret trying to convince the girl to contact her family-she recalled the conversation nearly word for word, her own frustration at Margaret’s impertinence. She remembered taking the Sharpie from her purse and using the indelible ink to make a point about her determination to help.

She remembered so well inking her cell phone number down the girl’s forearm. This recollection hit her like a slap in the face. She spun on her heels and ran, coming around the privacy screen and meeting back up with LaMoia. She stopped abruptly, unable to get a word out.

He tested, “You okay?” and stepped closer. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Mention of this raised the head of the attendant. He had spoken a Shelter watchword without knowing it. Expectancy hung in the air like static before a storm as this woman and LaMoia awaited her response. The smell of hot chocolate permeated, as did the distant nasal whine of a girl’s earphones as she listened to rap music on a portable CD player.

“Other way around,” Matthews said hoarsely, her voice belying her stoic exterior. “I think the ghost saw me.”

“For once, Matthews, you lost me, not the other way around.”

“Her forearm,” Matthews said. “I wrote my cell number on her forearm with a Sharpie.” She hollered out the general alarm, “Man on the floor!” As LaMoia was led around the privacy screen, he saw several dozen teens-most all wearing surgical scrubs as pajamas. They sat on the edges of their cots aiming their hollow faces in open curiosity. Some girls came down a hall with wet hair. The announcement of a man had cleared the showers.

“Walk me through this,” LaMoia said quietly, aware of their audience. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“There are two possibilities,” Matthews said. “Either Walker met up with Margaret sometime later and she told him what that number on her arm was-”

“I have serious reservations about that.”

She nodded her agreement, surprising him. “Second possibility: He overheard my conversation with Margaret and saw me write my cell number on her arm … in real time … right as I did it. Right here.”

LaMoia mulled this over, his brown eyes shifting and lighting on various focal points: her face, the wall, her face again.

He asked, “That’s the best you’ve got?”

“John, you know when you know something, and you really know it, no matter how much you can talk yourself out of it?

You’ve been there, right? We’ve all been there before. This is one of those times. I’m right about this. One hundred percent.”

He glanced around the room, saw the girls watching them like some kind of freak show.

“And there’s something else,” Matthews said, her voice returning to that warm, dark, husky complaint she’d fallen into only moments earlier. Her tone suggested conspiracy, so he leaned even closer to her, to where her breath ran warm on his neck. “For months, the girls have been complaining about this place being haunted.” She caught his condescending expression.

“No, no. Hear me out! Not creaky-noises-kind-of-haunted, but being watched-the feeling they were being watched. Especially in … the … showers.” Was it her imagination, she wondered, or had the whole room gone quiet? LaMoia looked in the general direction of the showers. For her, the hallway suddenly seemed to stretch much longer. “John?” she asked.