Ridley Pearson - The art of deception

THE ART OF DECEPTION by RIDLEY PEARSON

RIDLEY PEARSON

Also by RIDLEY PEARSON

The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (writing as Joyce Reardon)

Parallel Lies

Middle of Nowhere*

The First Victim*

The Pied Piper*

Beyond Recognition*

Chain of Evidence

No Witnesses* The Angel Maker*

Hard Fall

Probable Cause

Undercurrents*

Hidden Charges

Blood of the Albatross

Never Look Back

features Lou Boldt / Daphne Matthews

Writing as WENDELL McCALL

Dead Aim

Aim for the Heart

Concerto in Dead Flat

SHORT STORIES

"All Over but the Dying" in Diagnosis: Terminal,

edited by F. Paul Wilson

"Close Shave" in Murder-Love-Set-Match,

edited by Otto Penzler

COLLECTIONS

The Putt at the End of the World, a serial novel

TELEVISION

Investigative Reports: Inside AA (A&E Network, June 2000)

RIDLEY

PEARSON

Copyright (c) 2002 Page One, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information address Hyperion, 77 W. 66th Street, New York, New York 10023-6298.

ISBN: 0-7868-6724-8

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FIRST EDITION

10 987654321

For Bob and Ellen

I wish to acknowledge the following for their help and guidance in the research and editing of The Art of Deception. The mistakes are all mine.

Donna Meade, Rachel Farnsworth, David Laycock, Ray York:

Idaho State Police Forensics Lab. Dr. Alyn Duxbury-University of Washington, Oceanographic

Sciences, retired. Andy Hamilton, United States Attorney's Office, Seattle,

Washington

Detective Marsha Wilson, Seattle Police Department David Thompson, Murder by the Book, Houston, Texas CJ Snow, Book Source St. Louis, Missouri JB Dickey & Tammy Domike, Seattle Mystery Bookshop,

Seattle, Washington

The Underground Tour, Seattle, Washington Heidi Mack, ridleypearson.com website design management Nancy Litzinger, Louise Marsh, office management Mary Peterson, Hailey, Idaho Chris Towle, Towle and Co." St. Louis, Missouri Gary Shelton, Ketchum, Idaho Robbie Freund, Creative Edge, Hailey, Idaho

Thanks, too:

Matthew Snyder, CAA, Beverly Hills, California Albert Zuckerman, Writers House, New York

Editors:

Leigh Haber Ed Stackler Leslie Wells Albert Zuckerman

The Ride of a Lifetime

Mary-Ann Walker

She lay on her side, her head ringing, her hair damp and sticky. She understood that she should feel pain-one didn't fall onto blacktop from a three-story fire escape without experiencing pain-and yet she felt nothing.

She saw the Space Needle in the distance, regretting that she had gone up it only once, at the age of seven. Perhaps that had been the start of her fear of heights. Images from her childhood played before her eyes like a hurried slide show until she heard a car start and the first trickle of sensation sparked up her broken legs; she knew undeniably that this was only the beginning. When the floodgates opened, when nerve impulses reached their mainline capabilities, the pain would prove too great, and she would surrender to it.

For this reason, and a desire to glimpse the glimmering black mirror surface of Lake Union, she pushed herself off the pavement with her shaky right arm, its elbow finally propping her up.

She could feel her father's locked elbows on either side of her, smell his boozed-up breath, although he'd been dead in his grave for two years now. She shrank from the contact of sweaty skin, nauseated by his sour smell and the repetition of his needs, and sought sight again of the body of water that had been a kind of bedtime prayer for her.

She clawed herself high enough to catch a moonlike curve of shoreline, just to the left of a bent Dumpster, pitched toward its missing wheel, that loomed over her and made her think of a coffin.

The two white eyes that winked and quickly narrowed before her were not headlights, as she first had believed, but taillights meant to keep drivers from striking objects in their rear path.

"Stop!" But her faint voice was not to be heard.

Her head led the way to the pavement this time, and she answered the call of the pain.

Below her she saw the waters she had come to think of as her own, flat black like wet marble. Darkness punctuated by pinpricks of light swirled as he carried her away from the humming car to the bridge's railing. She had no strength to fight, no will. Not even her acrophobia could power her to kick and claw for her life. Tears brimmed in her eyes, blurring any image of him, blurring the lights, blurring the boundary between the living and the dead.

In the next few moments she would be both.

When he threw her over, it felt like the act of someone distancing himself from something undesirable, like hearing a rat in the garbage bag on the way out to the cans. But as she dropped, she thought of a ballerina's majestic beauty; she saw herself as elegant and refined; she found a balance, a weightlessness that was surprisingly pleasant. And she wondered why she had feared heights all these years. This was the ride of a lifetime.

Of Mice and Spiders

Daphne Matthews negotiated the aisle between cots occupied by, among others, a spaced-out seventeen-year-old methadone addict, a girl shaking from the DTs, and a street-worn fifteen year-old seriously pregnant. With the continuing spring rains and cool weather, like mice and spiders, the young women migrated inside as conditions required.

The basement space held an incongruous odor: of mildew and medicine, spaghetti and meatballs. Bare bulbs, strung up like lights at a Christmas tree sale, flickered and dimmed over twenty-some teens, two resident RNs, and two volunteers, including

Matthews. This was the Shelter's third home in three years, a cavern like basement space accessed via the Second Presbyterian Church, one of the five oldest structures still standing in Seattle. A thirty-block fire in 1889 had taken all the rest, just as the streets would take these girls if the Shelter ceased to exist.

For the past five months Matthews had doubled her volunteer time at the Shelter, less out of a sense of civic duty than the result of a combination of guilt and grief over the loss of a despondent teenage girl-a regular at the Shelter-who had taken her life. The girl, also pregnant, had jumped to her death from the 1-5 bridge.

Matthews knew the young woman on the cot before her only as Margaret-no surnames were used at the Shelter. She asked if she could join her, and the girl acquiesced, less than enthusiastically.

Matthews sat down beside her onto the wool blanket, leaning her back against the cool brick wall.

Sitting this close, Matthews could see a curving yellow moon of an old bruise that lingered on the girl's left cheekbone, an archipelago of knitted scars curving around that same eye. No doubt Margaret told people they were sports injuries or the result of a fall. She was fifteen going on forty.

"We spoke the other night," Matthews said, reminding the girl. The methamphetamine, booze, and pot wreaked havoc on the short-term memories of these kids. Not that they listened to the counselors anyway. They tolerated such intrusions only to serve the greater purpose of a warm meal, a shower, free feminine products, and a chance to wash their clothes.

"You're the cop. The shrink. I remember."

"Right, but here, I'm a counselor, and that's all. You were going to think about calling your grandparents."