The Art of Deception Read Online Free

as she followed directions down the line to the third of the cleaning tables. Even in jeans and a work shirt she would have felt self-conscious in this setting, but dressed in tweed wool pants pleated at the waist and crisp in the crease, and a navy blue Burberry microfiber rain jacket with leather trim, she felt about as comfortable as the silver salmon under the knife.
    Ferrell Walker looked more seventeen than twenty. LaMoia had pulled two driver’s licenses for her: Walker’s and his sister’s, one Mary-Ann Walker, twenty-six. Matthews knew from the data that his eyes were listed as green, his hair brown, his weight 170 and that he wasn’t an organ donor. He wore a black rubber apron smeared with the snotty entrails of his livelihood.The apron attempted to protect a pair of filthy blue jeans and a tattered sweatshirt equally smeared with resident stains. He pulled off mismatched thick rubber gloves, one black, one yellow, stuffing them into a torn pocket on the apron that hung down like a giant tongue. He rinsed his hands in cold water from a rubber hose that ran constantly above his cutting stand. He dried them on a soiled section of torn towel and thankfully did not offer one to shake. Obliged to display her shield, she made sure he saw it.
    Walker’s face was pinched, as if he’d been sat on as a baby. She couldn’t see the green for the dark, deep eye sockets. Behind him, on the high wooden workbench where the water ran pink, a wood-handled fish knife rested, its curving blade like an ill-fashioned smile. Walker’s Adam’s apple bobbed like a buoy as he answered her first question. Had he called the police to report his sister as missing?
    He looked at her almost as if he knew her—men did this to her all the time, but Walker’s variation was pretty convincing, and disquieting.
    “Not like Mary-Ann to miss work,” Walker said. “And when that asshole said he hadn’t seen her either, that didn’t sound right, so I called you guys … you people … whatever.”
    She asked for and received the sister’s pedigree, some of which matched what she’d learned from the driver’s license: twenty-six, blond, 135, five foot six, smoker, worked here at dock five. Last seen—and this was the most troubling to her of all—roughly three days earlier. Those in the know put her in the water over forty-eight hours. This timing made Mary-Ann Walker a likely fit. Matthews had a Polaroid of the woman’s waterlogged, crab-eaten face in her pocket but couldn’t bring herself to deliver it to this kid. Mention of “that asshole” made her think she might have another candidate to ID the body.
    “You’re making reference to a boyfriend?” she asked.
    “Wait, tell me it’s not Mary-Ann,” he said. “Tell me this didn’t happen.”
    “What’s her boyfriend’s name?”
    “Lanny Neal.” He still had hope in his voice. “The description in the paper … tell me I’m wrong about it sounding like Mary-Ann.”
    Matthews looked around for a place to sit, but thought better of it. She didn’t like the smell here, the sound of the dead fish slopping wetly down onto the cutting tables. She didn’t like the sad look in Walker’s tired eyes, or the thought that LaMoia had passed this off to her so that she’d be the one delivering bad news.
    “Anna’s a cleaner, too,” Walker said. “Boss is on me that it’s somehow my fault she hasn’t showed. So basically, I’m picking up her work, putting in a double.” He hesitated. “She wouldn’t leave me hanging like this—not without calling or something. This body … it looks like her?”
    “Unfortunately, the body doesn’t look like much, Mr. Walker. Too long in the water. Now, you asked this Lanny Neal about her, and his reaction was what exactly? And I urge you to recollect what was
said,
not what you
felt
about what was said.” She interrupted herself again. “I take it your sister is living with this individual, or involved in a way that suggests he