Oscar nodded. “I’m with you,” he said.
“And,” I added, “as she realizes something’s wrong, she lays him back down on the ground and begins to feel around him, encountering the sharp blade of the knife and cutting her hand. She probably picked up the knife at that point just to see what the heck had sliced her palm, and all the while her mind, which is still trying to catch up from having just been in a deep sleep, is starting to put it together.” Pointing to the corner of the room, I said, “At that point, the assailant, who’s still in the room, maybe hiding in that corner, attacks her. . . .” I stood up and pretended to get pushed to the side violently. “They struggle, she somehow manages to get away, and he heads out the window.”
Oscar frowned. “You had me right up to the point where he heads out the window. If there was some other assailant in the room and that’s the way he got out, then for sure there’d be a bloody fingerprint on the windowsill. I mean, I can see how he’d avoid getting blood on his clothing, but not on his hands.”
“Not if he was wearing gloves, Oscar, which maybe he took off right before he went out the window. That also would be backed up by the fact that they only found Skylar’s prints on the knife. Whoever handled it could’ve been wearing gloves. And when he made his escape, he could’ve taken off the gloves, and dove out the window. I mean, look at them,” I said, moving over to stand sideways next to the windows. “They’re low enough where he could’ve just picked up his leg and shimmied out on his butt.” I mimed that for Oscar. “He probably never even had to touch the sill with his bare hands.”
“That’s a whole lotta careful planning for this crime,” Oscar observed.
“Exactly,” I said. I totally agreed with him. I felt strongly someone had worked very hard to make it look like Skylar had murdered her son, but who and why were the big questions. “There’s just one more thing I need to check out and then I’d like to get a look in Molly’s backyard. Do you think she’d let us?”
“Let’s hope so. You gotta put her screen back in the window.”
I glared at him as I stepped past him and into the hall. Backtracking my way to Molly’s bedroom, I sifted through my folder and pulled out the photo of how Skylar’s room had looked the night of the murder.
Holding up the photo, I saw that the image had been captured from the doorway. It showed Skylar’s bed, fairly unruffled except that one corner of her bedspread had been thrown back and there was still a small dent in her pillow. Otherwise the room was neat and orderly, nothing out of place.
I squinted at the image to study it more closely. On the nightstand was a framed photograph. The image was fuzzy, but I could make it out because I’d seen the photo within the frame before. It’d been in the back of Skylar’s book back at county, the one of Noah and her at his ninth birthday party.
Turning to Oscar, I said, “Let’s look at the backyard.”
We went quietly to the living room and Molly sat on the sofa, the quilt laid back over her legs. “Are you finished?” she asked us.
“Almost, ma’am. Would it be all right if we did a simple walkabout around the perimeter of your house, starting in your backyard?”
She cocked her head. “You don’t think you’ll find any evidence of that boy’s murder from ten years ago, do you?”
“No, ma’am,” I confessed. “I’m just trying to get a feel for the house itself. I promise not to disturb a thing.”
“Well, all right, then,” she said, getting up to walk to the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. Undoing the latch, she said, “Please watch out for my mountain laurels. They’re young and fragile and I’m still nursing them along.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Oscar and I both said as we stepped back out into the hot summer night.
It was going on eight o’clock but still plenty light out. Oscar and I stepped carefully around Molly’s plants, which were set in a row along the house, but about two feet away, so we were able to walk the edge without a lot of trouble. “The grass grows right up to the edge of the house,” I said, more to myself than to Oscar.
He heard me and said, “Didn’t Dioli say that they didn’t find any footprints along the exterior?”
“He did.” I wondered if Oscar was thinking the same thing I was.
“How would he know that if there was grass here? Footprints wouldn’t have been evident.”
Playing devil’s advocate, I said, “Maybe the lawn is new.”
Oscar bent down and began poking at the edge of the lawn. “This is Saint Augustine,” he said. “Toughest grass there is. It grows deep roots if given enough time and water. Molly’s got an in-ground sprinkler system, looks to be at least a decade old.” Oscar then looked up at the folder in my hand. “You got a photo of the backyard from ’oh-four in there?”
I shook my head. “It’s in the car. I only took three of the crime-scene pics with me.”
Oscar stood and rubbed his hands together to shake off the dirt. He then walked with me over to the bedroom window with the screen that I’d knocked to the ground. “So what’s the deal with the screen?” he asked me.
I bent to pick it up and studied it. It was dirty as all get-out, and older. I was betting it was the original. I tucked it into place in the window as easily as I’d knocked it out. “I tapped it and it fell out,” I said to him. “And look at how loose it is.”
Oscar stepped forward and studied the screen. “It’s about an eighth of an inch off,” he said. “It’ll stay put as long as you don’t knock it.”
Oscar then took out a small pocketknife from his cargo shorts and flipped up the blade. He inserted it between the rim of the screen and the window and angled the knife away from the window. The screen came out with barely any effort.
“If this is the original screen,” I said, “then an intruder could’ve easily popped out the screen, opened the window, and gotten into Noah’s room.”
Oscar nodded but said nothing as he replaced the screen, then moved over to the other window and tried to do the same thing with his knife to that screen. It didn’t budge. “It would’ve had to be this window,” he said, coming over to tap the loose screen. And then he leaned forward and studied all the other screens along the back of the house one by one before turning back to me. “They’re all the same as far as wear and tear. Frames are all identical colors. I’d bet they were all manufactured and installed at the same time.”
“Like when the house was built?”
Oscar stepped back from the house and studied it and the surrounding yard. “I’ll bet you this place was only a year or two old when Miller and her son moved in. It might’ve even been brand-new.”
“It’s younger than I would’ve guessed,” I said, moving over to him to look at the house too.
“Texas can be hard on a house,” he said. “The heat in the summer can bake the youth right out of it. The real clue is that tree,” he said, pointing across the yard to an oak tree that was just a smidge past small and headed to medium size. “That guy can’t be more than fifteen years old, which means he probably got planted when he was four or five.”
“Why is that important?” I asked, thinking anyone in the past ten years could’ve planted that young tree.
“All the trees in the hood are about that size,” he said. “I’ll bet the builder gave everybody two trees for their landscaping package and you could have them in the front or the back, or one in the front and one in the back.”
My gaze traveled over the fenced-in yard to the neighbor’s yard, where a similar-sized tree stood. And then down a few more houses to another tree, also about the same size. As far down as I could look, in fact, I couldn’t find a much bigger tree, and then I remembered pulling up to the house and the smallish-sized oak tree in the front yard.
I jotted a note to myself on the cover of the manila folder. “Skylar bought this house right before she moved Noah in. I can
ask her if she bought it brand-new.”
I then opened the folder so I could show Oscar what I’d noticed from the photo of Skylar’s bedroom. “Oscar,” I said. “Look at this and tell me what you see.”
He edged close to me and peered over my shoulder. After studying the image for a few seconds, he said, “Awful tidy room for a woman who’s fallen off the wagon.”
I pointed to him, pleased that he’d picked up on it so quickly. “Bingo. I mean, look at her room. Everything is neat and orderly. Alcoholics aren’t neat. They’re slobs.” I knew this from personal experience, actually. “So if she’d fallen off the wagon, wouldn’t there be signs of her alcoholism in the house? I mean, the fact that the hallway was vacuumed and the house was neat as a pin, especially her room, should’ve been a sign that she was still abstaining.”
“There was also no sign of alcohol on her breath when Dioli interviewed her,” Oscar said.
I looked sharply at him. “How do you know that?”
“I asked him after you left. His theory for her motive seemed pretty lame, so I asked him if he’d seen any empty bottles in the kitchen or if he’d smelled any booze on her, and he said no, that she’d been careful and had planned ahead of time to make it look like she was still running sober.”
“Right,” I said, rolling my eyes. Focusing back on the photo, I said, “Look at the bed. Notice anything?”
Oscar squinted. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “What am I missing?”
I pointed to the bedcovers. “See how the whole bedspread is perfectly smooth and flat, except for this section where Skylar obviously slept—the covers here have been folded over.”
Oscar continued to study the photo. “Cooper, I’m still not seeing anything weird. She had a neat room and she had a neat bed. What’s throwing you off about it?”
“Well, it tells me two things: The first is that Skylar is a deep sleeper. At least she was on the night her son was murdered. I mean, you can see that she did actually lay her head down on the pillow long enough that it left an impression, and the same thing with the sheets, right? She was in bed and sleeping when Noah was attacked, so if she’s in a deep enough sleep not to have kicked the covers around, I’m thinking she was in a deep enough sleep to not have heard the beginning of Noah’s attack.
“Then there’s the covers themselves, especially this section that’s been thrown back over to reveal the sheets. If you’re fast asleep and you hear a noise loud enough to startle you awake, and you think maybe your son’s in trouble, you’re going to throw back the covers hastily. Like, whip them off you to get out of bed, right?”
Oscar’s brow rose and he began to nod. “Yeah, Cooper, you’re right. They do look thrown over.”
“Exactly. The other thing that’s bothering me is this,” I said, pulling out the photo of the hallway with its one set of bloody footprints, and a lighter set of prints walking the edge of the hallway toward the back bedroom, and then away from it on the other side of the hallway. “I see a total of three sets of footprints here, and I’m wondering why I don’t see four.”
Oscar’s brow dipped low again. “Assuming it was an intruder who killed Noah,” Oscar said, “he could’ve gone out the window and covered his tracks by closing the window and popping the screen back on.”
“I’m not talking about the killer’s exit,” I said. “I’m talking about the knife. The CSI report says that knife came from her kitchen, right?”
“Yeah, it did. So?”
“So, if we’re to believe Dioli’s version of how it went down, Noah calls his dad, tells him he has a big secret. Skylar overhears this, assumes he’s about to rat her out, and she waits until two thirty in the morning to go into Noah’s room and murder him. So when did she grab the knife?”
“Before she vacuumed,” Oscar said.
I shook my head. “I’m not buying it. According to Dioli, Skylar starts drinking again; then she overhears Noah on the phone to his dad; then she cleans the place all nice and tidy-like, making sure to grab the knife before she vacuums the hallway, and stows the murder weapon somewhere in her room. Then she waits in bed under the covers without moving more than an inch until two thirty in the morning, when she stages it to look as if she was startled out of bed, rushes into Noah’s room with the knife, kills him in a fit of rage that she’s somehow managed to keep perfectly contained for the previous five and a half hours, and flees the scene, covered in her son’s blood, tracking the only footprints down the hallway away from the scene. What about any of that makes any kind of sense?”
Oscar glanced at the window with the loose screen. “Yeah, but, Cooper, the knife only had her prints on it, old prints and ones made during the murder. I mean, if she didn’t grab the knife from her kitchen before she vacuumed the hallway, who did?”
“Someone who knew where to look for a weapon in her kitchen. I mean, we have no idea when the knife was taken, only that it was by someone who was familiar enough with Skylar and her belongings to know where to locate it. And this same someone also knew that screen could be pried loose. And he also knew which bedroom her son slept in.”
Oscar stared at the house for a long moment, and I could practically see the wheels in his head turning. “But why?” he said at last. “Why kill the kid, Abby? I mean, you gotta be a special kind of monster to do that to a nine-year-old boy.”
“I agree,” I said, feeling a well of anger curl up around my insides. “And that’s why, no matter what happens to Skylar, we’re not gonna stop until we hunt his ass down and make him pay.”
Chapter Eight
Oscar dropped me back at the house a little after nine. I found Dutch spoon-deep into a bowl of ice cream in front of the TV. After dropping a five note into the swear jar (it’d been a long day and I might’ve taken some liberties), I sat down next to him and leaned my head on his shoulder. “Hey, beautiful,” he said to me, kissing my forehead. His lips were pleasantly cool from the ice cream. “Tough night?”
“You could say that.”
“What happened?”
“Oscar and I went to the crime scene and met this sweet old lady who lives there now. She let us look around the place and in doing that, we became convinced that Skylar didn’t murder her son.”
“Really?” Dutch asked, his deep baritone going up an octave. “Oscar’s convinced?”
I smirked. “Heaven forbid you should be surprised that I was convinced too.”
“I thought you were already convinced.”
“No. I was just ninety-nine percent sure. Now I’m one hundred percent sure.”
“What put it over the line?”
I sat up and pulled the folder back out of my purse. I went over the contents in detail with him, telling him what we’d found at the scene and comparing it with the photos taken. “Even though we have no physical evidence of an intruder, I’m still convinced that there was one.”
“You’re right,” he said once I’d finished. “We don’t always find physical evidence tying an intruder to a crime scene. Think about the hard time we’re having finding anything on Corzo.”
I nodded. Yeah, it was more the rule than the exception to not find a killer’s physical evidence at a crime scene these days. Too many psychopaths were big fans of the CSI shows.
“The knife is the tough part,” Dutch said. “Everything else you’re describing would fit an intruder except for the fact that the murder weapon came from the home, and there were no signs of forced entry and no signs that the intruder used the hallway to access the knife from the kitchen.”
“But what if it was taken in advance of the crime?” I said to him. “What if someone who knew Skylar took the knife without her knowledge and brought it back to the scene when he decided to commit the murder?”
Dutch scratched the back of his head absently. “That’s one elaborate plan there, Edgar. I mean, stabbing someone is a highly person
al crime. And to stab a little kid, you gotta be one hell of an evil son of a bitch.”
“You gotta be the worst kind of evil son of a bitch,” I agreed, feeling a white-hot anger burn inside me. “And one that I’m gonna hunt down and hold accountable.”
Dutch turned his head to consider me for a moment. “Be careful on this one, dollface. If this guy really did kill a little kid and framed the mother for it, he’d think nothing of doing you in.”
I smiled confidently. “I’ve got Oscar and Candice on this one, cowboy. Let this asshole try to get past that posse.”
Dutch hugged me and kissed my cheek. “And yet, I’m still worried.”
“Shocker,” I said.
“In my defense, I’ll point out that, on several prior occasions, you’ve managed to get into trouble even while in the company of Candice and Oscar.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “And on a few other occasions I’ve also managed to get into trouble with you as my chaperone.”
Dutch made a face. “Noted,” he said. Then he appeared thoughtful. “You know what I wonder?”
“What a great girl like me is doing with a worrywart like you?”
That won me a smile. “That, and if it’s truer that you find trouble or trouble finds you?”
I hugged him. “It’s not me. I never go looking for trouble.”
Dutch pointed to my legs. “Hey, liar, liar, I think your pants are on fire.”
* * *
The next morning I was up crazy early. I had a lot on my mind and hadn’t slept well, so around four a.m. I got up, crept out of bed and into the kitchen, where I huddled over the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the grisly pictures of Noah Miller’s crime scene.
Something about the photos in the file was bugging me, but I really couldn’t put my finger on it, until I got to a group of photos taken of the back wall, where Noah’s bed was.
There was a series of photos showing the blood spatter, and I tried not to think too much about the actual pattern dotting the walls, until I looked at one photo in particular. It was my Eureka! moment.