The Art of Deception Read online

  PRAISE FOR PARALLEL LIES:

  “Pearson (No Witnesses, etc.) has written another terrific thriller . . .”

  —Library Journal

  “. . . Pearson remains near the top of the genre.”

  —Booklist

  “. . . a killer combination of Patricia Cornwell and John D. MacDonald with a soupçon of Thomas Harris.”

  —Stephen King

  “. . . grabs, he twists, he tightens the screws until you’re drained by a superior read.”

  —Clive Cussler

  “Pearson works this man-on-the-run episode like a pro . . . you’ll be rewarded with a bravura display of acceleration.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  PRAISE FOR MIDDLE OF NOWHERE:

  “Excitement quotient: high; technology details: intriguing.”

  —USA Today

  “Master plotter, reliable thrills from a pro.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Fast-paced read from beginning to end. Pearson is able to effortlessly intertwine several detailed plot lines while still keeping his story firmly robed in reality.”

  —New York Post

  “Pearson uses clear, forthright prose that perfectly exposes the psychological doubts and fears of his characters and keeps the plot racing from scene to scene. Craftily, Pearson weaves his web.”

  —Providence Sunday Journal

  PRAISE FOR THE FIRST VICTIM:

  “Razor-sharp plotting and timing.”

  —Seattle Times

  “There is no one writing police novels with the precise touch of Pearson. His stories are thoroughly researched, heartbreaking and full of escalating suspense.”

  —Rocky Mountain News (Denver)

  PRAISE FOR THE PIED PIPER:

  “Pearson proves once again that he can put together a big-scale, big-time police manhunt better than anybody else in the business.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A master of the genre. We all should thank Ridley Pearson for the gift of good characters and great plots.”

  — Washington Times

  “Pearson is a first-rate winner, and The Pied Piper won’t disappoint his growing number of fans.”

  —Knight Ridder New Service

  PRAISE FOR BEYOND RECOGNITION:

  “Pearson’s dazzling forensics will hook his usual fans. But it’s the richness of incident and the control of pace that’ll keep them dangling as he switches gears each time you think the story’s got to be winding down in this exhilarating entertainment.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Pearson has all the sharps and flats he needs to keep his roller-coaster rhythm rising and falling, speeding and slowing, yet somehow always building, winding us tighter.”

  —Booklist

  “Pearson has the details of a murder investigation down cold.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  PRAISE FOR CHAIN OF EVIDENCE:

  “This is an impeccable, high-speed thriller.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “Pearson handles the complex plot with grace and speed, packing a potent blend of action and procedural information into his work. A must-read for thriller fans.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “The gadget man is back with a bag of new toys. You don’t have to be a techno-nerd to get wired on this scary stuff.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Pearson weaves psychology and suspense into this tale of high-tech clues and complex motives.”

  —Playboy

  “Ridley Pearson is an unequivocal success. I’m hooked again.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  PRAISE FOR NO WITNESS:

  “Tough and intelligent.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “Up-to-the-nanosecond techno-thriller.”

  —New York Times

  “Infused with astonishingly effective overtones.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Good old-fashioned storytelling.”

  — Washington Post Book World

  “A serious, well-researched, complex thriller.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  PRAISE FOR THE ANGEL MAKER:

  “Exceptionally gripping and full of amazing forensic lore: a topflight offering from an author who has clearly found his groove.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A chilling thriller.”

  —Dell Publishing

  PRAISE FOR HARD FALL:

  “Pearson excels at novels that grip the imagination. Hard Fall is an adventure with all engines churning.”

  —People magazine

  “Mesmerizing urgency.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Nifty cat-and-mouse caper. Crisply written tale.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  PRAISE FOR UNDERCURRENTS:

  “Neatly constructed plot. Hair-raising denouement. Remarkable insight and understanding of the motivations of the criminal mind.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Undercurrents is a roller-coaster ride in the dark.”

  —Book of the Month

  PRAISE FOR PROBABLE CAUSE:

  “Filled with clues, both planted and missed, fancy forensic footwork, and intriguing snares. A whole lot of suspense. A satisfying, gripping police procedural.”

  —Booklist

  “A sleek, cleverly plotted part-psychological thriller, part-courtroom drama.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  PRAISE FOR NEVER LOOK BACK:

  “A masterly debut. Powerful yet poignant suspense story.”

  —Booklist

  “A breakneck-action first novel.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  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)

  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, BookSource, 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

  1 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.

  2 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 cavernlike 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 I-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.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about it. You were.”

  “After five days you have to leave the Shelter for at least one night.”

  “Believe me, I know the rules.”

  “I don’t like to think of you up there in the weather.”

  “That’s your problem. I live up there.” Defiant. An attitude. But behind the eyes, fear.

  Matthews rarely lost her temper, though she could pretend to when needed. She debated her next move in what to her was a chess game that could make or break lives. “You can call for free. It doesn’t have to be collect.”

  “I wouldn’t mind getting out of here so much,” the girl conceded.

  Matthews saw an opening and seized it. To hell with the regulations. She pulled a Sharpie—an indelible marker—from her purse, grabbed hold of Margaret’s forearm, and wrote out her cell phone number in letters the size of the top row of an eye test. Clothes came and went with these girls. Notes in pockets came and went. Forearms were a little more permanent.

  “Day or night,” Matthews said. “No questions asked. No police. You call me and it’s woman to woman, friend to friend.”

  Margaret eyed her forearm, angry. “A tattoo would have lasted longer.”

  “Day or night,” Matthews repeated and pulled herself off the cot with reluctance.

  “Can I ask you something?” the girl asked.

  Matthews nodded.

  “You think this place is haunted?”

  Matthews bit back a smile. “Old, yes. Creepy, maybe. But not haunted.”

  “Haven’t you felt it?”

  It wasn’t the first time Matthews had heard this. “Maybe a little,” she confessed.

  “Like somebody watching.”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she said, aware she was sounding like a schoolmarm. “The imagination is powerful. We don’t want to mislabel it.”

  “But you’ve felt it, too,” Margaret said.

  Matthews nodded, stretching the truth. It took a long time to establish anything close to trust with one of these kids.

  “I heard this place used to be a storeroom or something. Pirates, or smugglers, or something. Like a hundred years ago.”

  “I’ve heard it called lots of things: a slaughterhouse, a jail, a house of ill repute.” She delivered this comically, and won the first signs of light in that face. “Smugglers? Why not?” Matthews hesitated, unsure if she should leave it here—the first tendrils of rapport connecting them—or drive home her p
oint once more. “If you do call your grandmother, we have funding for transportation. No one’s kicking you out, you understand. But I want you safe, Margaret. The baby, safe.”

  The girl glanced around the room, uncomfortable. “Yeah,” she said. “We’ll see.”

  As Matthews reached the surface and her car, her police radio crackled, and the dispatcher announced a 342—a harbor water emergency—a body had been spotted. The location was the Aurora Bridge. Matthews ran four red lights on the way there.

  3 The LaMoia

  John LaMoia awoke from a two-hour afternoon nap (he was on night tour for all of March) wondering where his next OxyContin would come from. Then he remembered he’d quit.

  The California King contained his feet despite the fact that he liked to sleep with his arm under the pillow and out toward the headboard. At an inch over six feet, he’d been hanging ten off the ends of mattresses for his entire adult life, so he thought of the California King as a “spoiler,” a luxury item that, once used, makes you wonder how you ever lived without it.

  LaMoia could get around the bedroom blindfolded, as he’d built it himself, hammer and nail, two-by-four and Sheetrock, as the first element of Phase One of his refurbishing the cannery warehouse loft, a stone’s throw from Elliott Bay. He was currently in Phase Three—the last of a series of storage closets by the guest bedroom.

  At nearly four thousand square feet, the loft gave him plenty of space to play with.

  It remained a quirky space with a bachelor’s sense of independence, a cop’s sense of budget, and a man’s sense of decor. There was no long line forming at the door to shoot it for a magazine spread. But for the view alone it was worth the price of admission.

  He rolled over and petted his dog, his nagging dry throat reminding him of his former addiction. He wondered if it would ever fully go away.

  The treatment that had begun following a broken jaw suffered in the line of duty had matured from medical necessity to medicinal abuse, an addiction of legendary proportions. LaMoia still couldn’t understand how he had allowed it to happen; and even now, three months into rehab, he found himself still in the unforgiving grasp of need.