Sense of Deception

Book 13: Psychic Eye Mystery

by Victoria Laurie

Genres: Mystery; Cozy Mystery; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

In New York Times bestselling author Victoria Laurie’s thirteenth Psychic Eye Mystery, Abby Cooper senses a convicted killer is innocent, but she’ll need hard evidence to save the woman before it’s too late… 

A ticked-off judge has tossed Abby in the slammer for contempt of court, and during her brief but unpleasant stay she learns the story of a condemned woman who is confronting a far more serious sentence. Skyler Miller has been found guilty of murder and faces the death penalty. Everyone believes she’s guilty, including her own family and her ex-husband—everyone, that is, except Abby, whose finely honed intuition tells her this woman doesn’t belong behind bars.
 
With the help of her husband Dutch and her friend Candice, Abby launches into her own investigation to clear Skyler and find the real killer. But after a final appeal is denied and Skyler’s attorney scrambles for a stay of execution, time is running short—and the list of suspects keeps growing. There’s no margin for error as the life of an innocent woman hangs in the balance. . . .

Release date: July 7, 2015

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 304

Sample

THE PSYCHIC EYE MYSTERY SERIES

OBSIDIAN

For Lilly, who was the whole of my heart

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

There was chaos in the courtroom as I was dragged kicking and screaming from it by two beefy bailiffs. After I landed a pretty good kick to someone’s kneecap, the number of bailiffs “escorting” me out of the courthouse increased by two. It would’ve been humiliating if I’d paused long enough in my struggles to consider it. Mostly I yelled my head off and wrenched my limbs back and forth until one of the big and beefies put a can of Mace right next to my nose and threatened to let loose. I piped down quickly after that and settled for glaring hard at my captors before being handed off to a couple of deputies. The deputies made quick work of handcuffing me and placing me into a van for a short road trip to a large loading dock, where I was unloaded and moved inside a big ugly building. After that I was put through the process of getting my butt thrown in jail.

On the plus side, there wasn’t a strip search (thank the baby Jesus!), but I did have a panicky moment during which I seriously regretted my decision to go commando that morning. Some days it just pays to wear underwear.

Still, I had to give up my dress slacks and blouse for an orange jumpsuit, and I don’t care what anyone says: Orange is so not the new black.

After demanding my right to make one phone call for the eleventh time, I was handcuffed and led down a dark, narrow, claustrophobia-inducing hallway to a bank of phones attached to a wall. The husky woman in uniform who’d led me there growled, “You have ten minutes,” before moving a little way down the hall to eye her watch and then glower at me.

Charming.

After squinting meanly at her retreating form, I turned to the phones and called my hubby. “Rivers,” he said when he picked up the line.

“Hi, honey, it’s me.”

“Edgar,” he said with honeyed tones, using his favorite nickname for me. I love the sound of my husband’s voice. So rich and seductive. It soothes me like a morning cup of coffee, heavy on the cream and sugar. “How was court?”

“Oh, you know. Not quite what I was expecting.”

“Was it tough on the stand?”

“A bit.”

“Yeah, this defense counsel of Corzo’s . . . he’s a slick bastard. Did you get beat up a little?”

I swallowed hard. “Um, yes, actually. You could say that it went exactly like that.”

“Aw, dollface,” Dutch said. “Don’t let ’em get you down. You did great on this case. Gaston even pulled me aside yesterday to say how happy he is with the work we did to nail Corzo. And, between us, I think he’s especially proud of you.”

I winced. Dutch’s boss’s boss was Bill Gaston. Regional director for the Central Texas FBI office. Former CIA. Totally great guy, until you got on his bad side. Once on said bad side, you might as well pack a bag and leave town. Quickly. “Speaking of Gaston,” I said, trying to keep the waver out of my voice, “could you maybe get him to come down to the county jail for me?”

There was a lengthy pause; then (after adopting a slight Cuban accent) my hubby said, “Edgar? What did you do?”

I took a deep breath. “I sorta outed the judge to a packed courtroom and then he attacked me and then I was thrown in jail for contempt of court.”

Another (longer) pause. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“I’m kidding.”

“Really?”

“No.”

There was a muffled sound, which I suspected was my husband trying to quiet a laugh. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

I opened my mouth to give him the 411, but at that moment the guard tapped her watch and gave me a stern(er) look. “Actually, honey, maybe you should just call Matt Hayes. He can give you the play-by-play. But please also call Gaston. I have a feeling we’re going to need his clout to get me out of here.”

I thought I heard my hubby stifle another laugh with a cough. After clearing his throat, he said, “I’ll call Gaston and Matt. We’ll have you home for dinner, sweethot.”

Dutch had slipped into his best Bogie impression for that last bit, and it actually made me feel a little better, even though he thought my getting tossed in the clink was high-larious.

After hanging up with Dutch, I shuffled down the hallway to the waiting guard, and she led me by the arm back down the corridor, to a window with a redheaded, freckle-faced inmate standing ready behind a counter in a little enclosed room with lots of neatly packed supplies behind her. I was pushed up to the window and a pillow, sheets, a thin blanket, and some toiletries were shoved into my chest. “We’re out of toothpaste,” she said, as if I’d already noticed and had copped an attitude.

“Okay,” I replied.

“Are you on your period?” she asked.

I felt heat in my cheeks. I’m a bit modest when it comes to discussing bodily functions. “Not presently.”

“Good. We’re out of tampons, too.”

“Got any aspirin?”

“Yeah. You got a headache?” she said, reaching behind her for a small packet of one-dose Tylenol.

“Yep.”

“Here, but that’s all you get,” she said firmly before jotting down the added item on a clipboard in front of her.

“Thank you very much.”

She rolled her eyes and turned away. I wondered if we’d end up braiding each other’s hair later.

Stern Eyes then led me to a set of doors, which required us to get buzzed through. Once we were through the doors, the conversations and shouts and jeers on either side of the hallway from the inmates currently jailed there echoed and bounced off the concrete walls like a mad game of Pong.

I tried not to tremble as Stern Eyes pulled me along, but I might have let out a whimper or two.

I’d been in jail before. Trust me on this: It’s not a place you ever want to be. It’s loud, it’s jarring, and it smells like a mix of Pine-Sol, BO, and perhaps a soupçon of desperation.

Plus, it’s dangerous. I mean, it’s literally wall-to-wall criminals. Think about that the next time you want to jaywalk. (Or out a federal judge to a packed courtroom . . . ahem.)

Stern Eyes walked me down the length of the open section of the jail, and I ignored the catcalls and whistles from cells to my right and left. I suspected that new prisoners got paraded in front of the other inmates like this on a regular basis. It was meant to scare the newbies—and make them easy for the guards to handle initially—and I can tell you for a fact that it’s effective.

About midway down the length of the open section, Stern Eyes tugged my arm and directed me to the right. “You’re here,” she said, coming to a stop in front of a closed cell door with only one inmate inside. Using the radio mic at her shoulder, she ordered the cell door to be opened, and after a rather obnoxious buzzing sound, it slid to the right. She didn’t even wait for it to get all the way open—she merely gave my back a hard shove and I stumbled forward, barely able to stop myself before my head hit the top bunk on the right side. “You have a new roommate,” Stern Eyes said. It took me a minute to realize she wasn’t talking to me.

I turned cautiously to look across the cell at the other inmate and did a double take. She wasn’t at all what I was expecting.

Tall and willowy, she had very long, very curly blond hair, big blue eyes, and the kind of heart-shaped face that would break a man’s heart. (Or a woman’s, depending on which team you’re playing for.)

She considered me without a hint of expression, and I wondered how I measured up in her mind. I tried to square my shoulders to show her that I was cool, yo. All she did was blink.

The guard then turned to me, and with a thumb over her shoulder to the inmate across the cell, she said, “That’s Miller. Play nice with her or we’ll send you to solitary. You missed lunch, so dinner’s at six. When the doors open, move out into the corridor and stand to the left of the opening to wait to be counted by one of the COs. Then move single file to the cafeteria. It’ll be your only chance to eat for the rest of the day, so make it count. Lights out at nine p.m. Sharp.”

With that, she motioned for me to raise my arms, and after dumping my assigned goodies on the metal frame of the top bunk, I held my hands out so she could undo my cuffs.

After pocketing the keys, Stern Eyes got up in my face and glared hard at me, as if she alone could scare me straight (good luck with that), and then she simply turned on her heel and walked out.

A moment later the door buzzed and slid mechanically closed.

I looked meaningfully at my new bunkmate and said, “Well, she’s not getting a holiday card from me this year.”

The corner of Roomie’s mouth quirked, but there was no real humor in her eyes. Instead, I noticed for the first time a rather profound sadness there. Like all the mirth had been sucked right out of her, and what remained was something hollow. Broken. “So you’re one of those, huh?” she asked me.

I stiffened. “One of whats?”

“One of those people who makes a joke out of everything as a coping mechanism.”

I laughed and waved my hand. “No. I definitely have a serious side.”

“What’d you do to get in here?” she asked.

“Used my charm and quick wit when I should’ve used diplomacy.”

That quirk came back to her mouth. “Well, whoever you pissed off, they must’ve been high up the food chain. I’m on death row and I’m not supposed to have roommates.”

I stiffened again. “Death row? I’m on death row?”

“Relax,” she told me. “I’m down here from Mountain View, for my appeal. Normally they’d put me in solitary, but that’s full up from the last fight in the cafeteria, so they moved some people around and I got the luxe digs here.”

I gulped. The urge to ask her what she’d done was heavy on my tongue, but I wasn’t sure that was (a) polite or (b) a question that could get me shivved in my sleep, so I simply nodded and said, “Well, I shouldn’t be here long. My husband’s gonna get me out, hopefully before dinner.”

Her brow rose skeptically, but then she went back to a rather blank expression. “So, what do you do when you’re not expelling lots of charm and quick wit?”

I struggled with her question for a moment; no way was I gonna reveal that I worked with the Feds, especially not in here. But I also wondered if it was a bad idea to let her know that I was a psychic. I mean, maybe I was bunking with the only serial psychic killer in all of Texas. “I’m an accountant.”

She squinted at me. I had a feeling she could smell the smoke from my liar, liar, pants on fire. “Ah,” she said. And then she sat back on her bunk and picked up a paperback. In jail only ten minutes and I’d already failed my first test.

“Actually,” I said, taking a seat on the lower bunk, “I’m not an accountant.”

“Quelle surprise,” she said flatly. She didn’t even look up from the book.

“Okay, I deserved that. The truth is, I’m a professional psychic.”

Her gaze slid over to me, as if she were waiting for my orange jumpsuit to actually explode in a ball of flames. I made sure to hold her gaze. “For real?”

“For real.”

“You make a living at that?”

“Yep.”

“So . . . what? You just look into a crystal ball or something?”

I grinned. “No. Crystal balls, head scarves, and lots of bangles are for amateurs. My technique is to focus on a person’s energy—their electromagnetic output, if you will. We carry bits of our future in the energy we expel, and someone like me can focus on that energy and tell a person about what’s likely to happen in the future.”

I waited for her to ask me what I was picking up about her, but she surprised me with her next question. “Can you look back at something?”

I cocked my head. “Back? You mean, can I look back in time?”

She sat up and put her feet on the ground, resting her elbows on her knees after setting the paperback aside. “Yeah. If I told you about something like a break-in, could you see who did it?”

“That’s actually a more complicated question than you’d think,” I told her. “If you’re asking me if I could see how a crime unfolded, and give a description of the offender, yeah. I could do that.”

Tears welled in her eyes and I couldn’t imagine what I’d just said to upset her. “Have you ever worked on a crime before?”

I thought about lying again, but her sudden display of emotion and those sad eyes got the best of me. “Yes.”

“How many?”

“Several dozen.”

“You work with the police?” she asked, a hint of suspicion in her eyes.

I was quick to shake my head. “My business partner is a private investigator. We work quite a few cases together.” And that was not a lie, albeit not exactly the whole truth either.

My roommate took a deep breath and looked away from me to stare out the bars of the cell. It was a long moment before she was able to compose herself. Putting a hand on her chest, she said, “My name is Miller. Skylar Miller.”

I got up and extended my hand. “I’m Abby. Abby Cooper. Rivers. Cooper. Cooper-Rivers.”

She took my hand and that small quirk at the corner of her mouth returned. “You sure?”

“I still can’t decide if I want to take my husband’s last name or not.”

“How long you two been married?”

I returned to my side of the cell. “It’ll be a year in November.”

She nodded. “Keep your own name,” she said. “Don’t give up your identity.”

“Word,” I said, and put my fist out for a bump, but she didn’t raise her hand or acknowledge the banter. My hand dropped limply back to my lap. “You okay?” I asked her after an awkward moment. She still looked so sad, and she hadn’t asked me about this break-in she’d mentioned earlier. I’ll admit that she’d more than piqued my interest.

“Yeah,” she lied. Then she reached under her pillow and pulled out a Twix. Opening the wrapper, she shook out one bar and offered it to me.

As someone who never turns down free chocolate, I was quick to get up and retrieve it. “Thank you.”

“Can I ask you something?” she said, looking thoughtfully down at the remaining candy bar.

“Sure.”

“How much would you charge me if I wanted to ask you about something that happened a while ago?”

“That break-in you mentioned?”

Her gaze lifted to mine again. Her expression was still so sad, but for the first time since meeting her, I swore I saw the smallest glimmer of hope. “Yeah.”

I took a good bite of the Twix and held what remained up. “You’re in luck today. I’m running a special. All glimpses into the past are priced at one Twix bar.”

“I’m serious,” she said.

“So am I.”

She nodded, but she didn’t rush to ask me her next question, and I thought maybe a demo of what I could do was in order. “You’ve been in jail for . . . ten years, right?”

She squinted at me and nodded slightly.

I assessed her for a bit before continuing. “This is your last appeal.”

Again she nodded.

“You don’t think it’ll go well.”

“No.”

“You’re right. Your lawyer is shit.”

“He came cheap.”

“When’s the appeal?”

Skylar sighed. “It was supposed to be today, but it got postponed to the nineteenth.”

I nodded. That wasn’t even two weeks away, and in Texas, when your last appeal doesn’t go well, you’ll have an IV filled with lethal toxins in your arm by midnight.

As I sat there, I took in all of Skylar’s energy, which was extremely complex. She carried a whole lotta baggage and it was tough to riffle through it all. “You’ve had a pretty tough life,” I told her. “But a lot of it you brought on yourself.”

She squinted skeptically before waving a hand to indicate the cell we were in.

I ignored that and kept going. “You struggled with addiction. It got the best of you for a lot of years, but then I feel like you worked really hard and overcame it.”

Her expression softened. I’d just struck a chord.

“You’re divorced,” I said next. “And your ex is still really angry at you.”

She gave me one short nod.

I closed my eyes to better concentrate, feeling my way along her energy, looking for bits of information that I could talk about. “You lost someone,” I said. I didn’t know why I hadn’t touched on it sooner. It was the loudest thing in her energy. “Someone very close to you was murdered.” And then I gave a small gasp and opened my eyes. “Your son?”

Her eyes had misted again, but she didn’t look away from me. Instead she asked, “Can you see who murdered him? Can you tell who it was?”

My brow furrowed and I stood up. The energy from my roommate had shifted dramatically; it was as if the floodgates had been opened and there were now waves of guilt rolling off Skylar—an ocean of regret filled the space between us and it was so intense that I had to withdraw my intuitive feelers. “Skylar,” I said, because I needed to get her to close those floodgates. “What are you in here for? Why are you on death row?”

“Cooper!” someone yelled at the door to our cell, and I jumped a whole foot. Stern Eyes was back, handcuffs dangling off her index finger. “Step forward with your arms in front of you and put them through here.” Stern Eyes was indicating a small square open section of the bars next to the lock, where she wanted me to stick my hands.

“What? Why?”

“Someone’s here to see you,” she said. “Someone with big brass balls and a whole lotta pull, so hurry it up.”

Gaston. It had to be him. I gulped. God, I hoped Dutch was with him. Especially after what I’d pulled in court. I shuffled over to the door and put my wrists through the small window so she could slap the cuffs on me.

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that Skylar was staring at us, and I tried to offer her an apologetic look. “Let me go meet with this guy and when I get back, we’ll talk,” I said.

“What if you don’t come back?” she asked, and that small glimmer of hope that I’d seen in her eyes vanished.

“I will,” I promised.

“All right, Cooper, step back and I’ll have them open the door,” Stern Eyes said.

“I will,” I repeated to Skylar as I moved two steps back and waited for the buzz.

It came, and as the door began to slide open, Skylar said, “That question you asked me about why I’m here?”

I nodded.

“You know why, don’t you?”

I nodded again—reluctantly, though. She was here for her son’s murder, and those waves of guilt still sloshed around the cell. I didn’t quite know what to think about that.

Skylar studied my face for a moment before she turned her gaze to the wall. As the door clanged to a stop, I turned, still feeling the sticky residue from the Twix bar heavy on my fingers.

Chapter Two

I was partially right about who’d come to visit me at the county jailhouse. In a small room with a table and two chairs, Gaston was waiting for me, along with two other men: my husband and U.S. assistant prosecutor Matt Hayes.

Matt looked bad, like maybe he himself had gone a few rounds with Judge Schilling, the man I’d outed to a packed courtroom a few hours earlier, who’d then leaped across his bench and grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking what little sense I had left right out of me. To make matters worse, I’d been found in contempt and thrown in jail.

Seeing Matt, however, I started to feel really bad about what I’d done, but we’d been about to lose the case anyway, and my (infamous) temper had gotten the best of me. When I’d been up on the stand, Judge Schilling had flat out called me a charlatan, a faker, a fraud. Where I come from, them’s fightin’ words, and I’d unleashed the kraken, pinging Judge Schilling with all his secrets, including his biggest—the affair he was having with his cute male clerk. Judge Schilling was a happily married pillar of Christian values in the community. At least, he had been that before I’d gotten through with him.

I hadn’t really wondered what’d happened in the aftermath, but here in the little room I could clearly see more stuff had gone down, because Matt was as furious and worked up as I’d ever seen him, his tie askew, his shirt wrinkled, and I bet he’d been pacing a small section of the room right before I came in. Meanwhile my husband was leaning against the right wall, one arm crossed over his beautifully broad chest while he rested the other elbow on it so he could hover his index finger over his mouth.

I narrowed my eyes at him because I knew that stance. He was doing his best to appear serious while trying to tamp down a chuckle.

Hayes expended no such effort. Visibly seething, the second I came fully into the room, he let go. “What the hell were you thinking, Abby?!”

“Can I at least get my cuffs off before you start in on me, Matt?” I asked more calmly than I felt. I then turned slightly so the guard could undo the cuffs, but she simply offered me a mocking grin and started to leave. At that moment Gaston cleared his throat and with a one-finger wave toward me, he said, “Hey, CO. Her cuffs. Now.”

Stern Eyes turned slowly toward Gaston, as if she couldn’t believe he’d just given her a direct order. He casually opened his blazer to expose his badge and said, “Warden Hoffman is an old friend. I was godfather to his son, Quinn. If you’d like to have me call him and order you directly, I can do that.”

Stern Eyes paled and her face slacked into a decidedly less stern expression. I had to work to hide a smirk. She stepped forward and undid my cuffs, then left us alone, closing the door behind her.

For a minute nobody spoke. I think we were all waiting for Gaston to say something else, but he merely eyed me coolly, so Matt took it upon himself to get back to yelling at me. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

I pulled the seat out from the table and sat down across from Gaston. “It looks like I blew your case to kingdom come.” I don’t think Matt was prepared for that answer, because all he did was bob his head up and down with his mouth hanging open like, “Yeah you did!”

Swiveling in my seat, I turned to Dutch and said, “How bad is it?”

He lowered his hand, all hidden mirth vanishing. “Schilling called a mistrial.”

“He did?” I said. “That’s awesome!”

“How is that awesome?!” Matt shouted.

“He was going to rule against us,” I said calmly.

Matt glared at me. “You don’t know that!”

I tapped my temple. “Yep. Yep I do.”

Gaston said, “Abigail, I haven’t heard the full story yet. Tell me what happened in court. And please, start at the beginning.”

For the next thirty minutes I told Gaston all about what’d gone on in court. The whole thing had been so ridiculous, so slanted against me, as if I were the one on trial and not Don Corzo, a serial killer who’d murdered at least three women in two states that we knew of.

I’d been brought on to the case late in the game. The trail had long since gone cold after the March night two years earlier when Misty Hartnet’s body had been found in a small park. She’d been raped and strangled, but forensics had been unable to pull DNA off her from the rape, for reasons that were a bit too graphic to get into.

Anyway, we knew that her murder was linked to two other murdered girls by the way she’d been posed holding a white carnation over her heart.

I’d looked through the other girls’ files first and hadn’t gotten a lot from their cases, but when I opened Misty’s case, I felt strongly that something at the crime scene had been overlooked. And yet, in the file was a stack of photographs that documented the scene in infinite detail.

Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something about or at the crime scene had gone unnoticed, so I, along with Dutch and two other investigators, headed out to the park to check it out.

That’s when I’d had the strong sensation that we were looking in the wrong spot, and I’d then spied a gazebo next to a running path about four hundred yards away. I’d been drawn to it and I’d called the boys with me as I went to check it out.

As we poked around the area near the gazebo, Oscar Rodriguez—one of the other FBI investigators—discovered, after digging through some leaves, three items perfectly preserved, as if they’d just been waiting for us to find them. A license, a bank card, and a charm with Misty Hartnet’s DNA on it, which also perfectly matched the one her sister had given her for Christmas. The license and the bank card belonged to one Don Corzo, an air-conditioning repair guy who’d worked in Oklahoma—where one of the other girls, Wendy McLain, had been murdered—and in Texarkana, where Donna Andrews had been murdered. We knew we’d hit pay dirt with the circumstantial evidence, especially when the DNA results came back confirming the charm’s owner.

The problem was, somewhere along the line when we’d all been preparing for trial, the defense got wind that I’d been the one to alert the FBI to the second crime scene, and he’d come up with the rather convenient argument that I was a big fat faker. He submitted a motion to suppress all evidence collected at the second crime scene under the premise that I’d actually stolen Corzo’s wallet, planted it at the scene, and pointed the FBI boys right to it.

To prove that I was a fraud, he called in a former client of mine, Stephanie Snitch. (Swear to God, that’s her real name.) Stephie wasn’t a fan of mine. Of course, she wasn’t a fan of anyone, except perhaps herself.

On the stand, Stephie had lied her ass off. (I’ll gladly pay that quarter to the swear jar.) At the end of her testimony she’d even gotten in a little jab: “You don’t have to be psychic to know Abby Cooper isn’t psychic.”

The defense attorney, Jack Reiner, had laughed.

Corzo had laughed.

The courtroom had chuckled.

Even Judge Schilling had grinned.

Me and Matt? Not so much. It was a cheap shot, and I wondered how long it’d taken Stephanie Stoopid to come up with it. (Okay, so that’s just me being petty, but seriously? How many eye-roll-worthy bad psychic jokes can a person bear in her life?)

Anyway, we had a whole ton of clients willing to testify that I was, in fact, the real deal. And I even had a recording of the actual reading I’d done for Little Miss Snitch to show how accurately I’d predicted what would happen to her in the following months. The problem was, I’d never gotten written or verbal consent on the tape to record the session. That the session was going to be recorded wasn’t in my disclaimer form. And I’d only said to Stephanie at the start of our time together that I’d record it and e-mail her a copy. She’d said, “Okay,” and then I’d hit play.

All of that