Lie Catchers_A Pagan & Randall Inquisition

by Paul Bishop

  “It can’t possibly be connected,” I said. “Can it?”

  “Kids go missing every day,” Pagan said. “But two six year-olds gone from their beds on the same day in the early morning hours…I don’t know.”

  “It’s certainly unusual, but they’re miles apart,” Dodd said.

  Pagan looked at Castano. “What do you want to do?”

  Castano thought for a moment. He turned and spoke to Nelson and Hawkins who had also joined our group. “Dodd and I will head over to West Valley and see what the hell is going on there. Can you run the scene here?” he asked Nelson. “Have taps been set on the phones in case there’s a ransom demand?”

  “Covered,” Nelson said. She looked at her partner. “You’ll coordinate the outside search.”

  Hawkins nodded. “I’ll liaison with the search and rescue teams to check the surrounding trails and canyons. I’ll also get something organized to interview whoever is squatting at the house next door.”

  “Search that place from top to bottom,” Castano said. “These are exigent circumstances, so don’t wait for a warrant.”

  Hawkins nodded. He understood the urgency. We all did. The longer this went on, the more the odds of finding Unicorn alive dropped.

  “Can you also pull the prior reports and log entries regarding the problems with the house next door?” Pagan asked Hawkins.

  “I’ll get Lancaster on it back at the office, but it’s going to be a ton of material to sift through. The problems up here have been going on for a while.”

  “We don’t even know if anything about this situation is related to those problems,” Nelson said.

  “Agreed,” said Pagan. “But we can’t ignore the possibility.”

  “You staying here or coming with us?” Castano asked Pagan.

  Pagan looked at me. I knew what he expected. I turned to Castano.

  “Do you mind if we tag along with you?” I asked.

  He grunted, then gave me a genuine grin. “You’ve been learning from your new partner,” he said. “You’re coming whether I want you to or not, right? You didn’t want to appear like you were trampling on my dainty feelings.”

  I smiled back at him. “Did it work?”

  “Yeah,” he said, with an amused snort. “It kind of did.”

  Chapter 14

  “If you tell the truth, you don’t have

  to remember anything.”

  - Mark Twain

  We were back in the Escalade, traveling north on the Hollywood Freeway. The late morning work traffic was more stop than go as we headed toward West Valley Division and the location of the second missing child.

  “We’re not going to find Unicorn alive, are we?” I asked. I was looking straight ahead, but my peripheral caught Pagan turn his head toward me and then back ahead.

  “Possibly not,” he said. “But we both know the alternative may be even worse.”

  I’d been thinking hard. Trying to feel my way emotionally through what we had heard and seen. “The situation is off,” I said.

  “Take me through your process.”

  ‘Stranger abductions occur,” I said. “But we know they are rare in the grand scheme. Most missings are voluntary unless the victim is under eight. Then the abduction is usually parental or family related. Something like this is almost always an inside job – like you figured shortly after we got there.”

  Pagan was nodding his head, changing lanes to gain a little advantage as we moved up the Sepulveda Pass. “When Smack Daddy stormed off, the chance he was involved in the disappearance skyrocketed,” he said.

  “BPEs,” I said, echoing what Pagan had told me. “Behavior, personality, environment.”

  “Exactly. What is predictable human behavior in a situation where your six year-old daughter has gone missing?”

  “Normal people don’t head off to work like nothing happened – despite how you justified Smack Daddy’s actions to Castano.”

  Pagan grunted. “I had to cool Castano out. I also needed Smack Daddy out of the picture in order to break Judith Davis down.”

  “Now, there’s somebody who displayed normal behavior. She’s shattered.”

  “No purple ribbons attached to her words?”

  “You know there weren’t,” I said. “On one level, she’s still playing what she thinks is her expected role. But underneath her subconscious posing, there’s real torment.”

  “What about Smack himself?”

  “I saw what you saw. He was consciously acting a part, but nothing he said was a specific lie just bluster – so no purple.” It was an odd feeling to talk openly about my ability. I’d hidden it for so long, it gave me an emotional fission to say it out loud.

  “How about Unicorn’s room?” Pagan asked.

  “Nothing. No sign of a struggle. No sign of forced entry.”

  “So, the most likely scenario is Smack Daddy comes home late, after Judith has taken whatever it is she takes to make her sleep…”

  It was my turn to nod. “Smack Daddy takes Unicorn from her bed and…what?”

  “Either hands her off to somebody or worse.”

  “He doesn’t have a lot of time for worse.”

  “Which is why her body will turn up quickly if she’s dead.”

  “You don’t think she woke up and wandered off?”

  “Do you?”

  “No.” I sighed. “I don’t like the alternatives.”

  “Me either, but it’s those alternatives we deal with most often. Evil is unspectacular and unfortunately all too human”

  “So, you’re an optimist?”

  “A realist,” Pagan said.

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “Sarcastic? Wasn’t he a thirteenth century explorer? Went over the Alps with Marco Polo? Attacked the Steppes with Genghis Khan?”

  “You’re impossible.”

  Pagan grinned. “So I’m often told.”

  We had crested the Sepulveda Pass on the freeway and were dropping down into the San Fernando Valley. As Pagan took the Ventura Boulevard off ramp, I spotted a Starbucks.

  “Caffeine,” I said, and Pagan pulled across the street and into the drive-thru.

  After we ordered – with Pagan insisting on adding prepackaged salads to go with the coffee – Pagan took the coffee and food from the barista at the window and handed it all over to me. I took some cash out of my pocket and tried to give it to Pagan, but he shook me off. He pulled forward into a parking spot, leaving the Escalade’s engine running with the air conditioner pumping.

  “Let’s eat this here,” he said. “Give Castano a few minutes to get things organized at the scene of the other missing child.”

  He got out of the Escalade, opened the back, and returned with a tin foil wrapped package. It was filled with cold sliced chicken.

  When he saw my questioning look, Pagan explained. “Mrs. Parker keeps the small cooler back there refilled with high protein food. Too many cops survive on burgers, fries, and other fast foods. Plus, I’ve got to fatten you up for Tanaka.”

  I shook my head. “So you keep saying. I’m beginning to feel like a Thanksgiving turkey.” Still, I took my share of the proffered chicken and didn’t argue. Instead, I said, “Tell me about Steve – Judith’s mysterious visitor.”

  “Steve Stuben,” Pagan said. He peeled the plastic covering off both salads. Using a fork, he pushed the carrots and sprouts off of his and onto mine. He thrust the plastic container toward me and I dumped the cold chicken on the top.

  “The dynamics of the situation made it clear Smack Daddy and Judith weren’t the loving married couple,” Pagan said.

  I took a forkful of salad, realizing I was surprisingly hungry. It had been a long time since I’d experienced an appetite. I didn’t dwell on the reasons for the change, I started eating before the urge went away. “So you assumed a boyfriend on the side – Steve Stuben?” I asked, chewing.

  Pagan talked through his own mouthful of lettuce and cold chicken. “I can guarantee Sm
ack Daddy isn’t faithful to the marriage bed. And with Smack Daddy always making Judith feel like she wasn’t good enough…”

  “All that plastic surgery,” I said.

  “Exactly. So, it was no great leap to figure out she had a lover.”

  “How did you know he’d been there last night?”

  “I didn’t know. I played the odds.”

  “You think Steve is a suspect?”

  “Second tier maybe,” Pagan said. “Can’t rule him out. But I don’t see a motivation since there is no ransom demand.”

  “What about the Susan Smith case?” I asked, referring to the 1994 notorious South Carolina faux-kidnapping case. Smith told police she had been carjacked at a rural crossroads by a black man who drove away with her two young sons still in the car. Over a nine-day period, Smith made dramatic pleas on national television for their rescue and return. Eventually, however, after an intensive investigation, she confessed to letting her car roll into a nearby lake, drowning both boys. She claimed she did it in order to engage in a relationship with a rich local man who did not want children.

  “You’ve watched videos of the press conferences where she was crying her eyes out and asking for her children to be returned. Even without your gift, you must have known she was lying.”

  “Sure. So did all the detectives standing behind her during the press conference.”

  “But, leaving your gift out of it, how did you know?”

  There was Pagan’s favorite question again. I thought about it, picturing the press conference.

  Pagan pressed. “What was the one thing missing when Susan Smith was crying? Something Judith Davis had in abundance.”

  I’m my mind I saw Smith standing behind the blooming garden of press microphones, tears streaming down her face, pleading for the return of her children.

  “Snot,” I said, finally figuring out why I had instinctively known she was lying beyond the waves of purple streamers attached to her words. “There was no snot, no mucus, to go with the tears. Judith Davis was overwhelmed with mucus. You couldn’t understand what she was saying half the time.”

  “Exactly,” Pagan said, as if I was a prized pupil. “When people force out crocodile tears, they only engage the tear ducts in the corners of their eye-sockets. Real tears also engage the tear ducts in the nasal passages, rehydrating dried mucus and producing snot.”

  “You’re saying Judith Davis was telling the truth based on her production of snot?”

  “I bet you could give me some crocodile tears right now if you tried real hard, but I bet you can’t manufacture me any snot.”

  I held up a spear of chicken on my plastic fork. “It’s like I’m eating lunch with a six year-old. The next thing you’re going to tell me is you can tell when somebody is lying because they fart.”

  “Absolutely!”

  “What!”

  “Uncontrolled flatulence is one of many responses to anxiety brought on by lying.”

  “So, if somebody doesn’t produce snot and they fart, they’re lying.”

  “You can’t rely on any one thing alone, but those two things are the start of a cluster – and clusters of anxiety driven behavior indicate deception. When you see them, you know you are making progress in an interrogation – specifically if the behaviors weren’t present when you established a subject’s truth face.”

  “Truth face?”

  “Their baseline behavior when they are responding to non-accusatory, low anxiety questions.”

  I sipped at my coffee and ate some more salad. LAPD considers its training to be the best in the country, if not the world, but I’d never once heard interrogation techniques broken down in this fashion.

  “Once you got Judith to tell you about Steve,” I said, “cracking her open over her appearance and her relationship with Smack Daddy was easy.”

  “He’s been threatening to divorce her for months, but only served her with actual papers last week,” Pagan said.

  “I take it this is not going to be an amicable situation?”

  “Not a chance. Smack Daddy has all the lawyers and all the money.”

  “Does he want Unicorn?”

  “No. Nor does he want to pay support for her. It might be different if she was a pretty child and he could keep her around like a trophy.”

  “Ain’t love grand,” I said.

  “When it comes to romantic love, when somebody says, I love you – those three little words we all long to hear – it’s almost always a lie. They may love their perception of you, but they don’t love you. When they discover you don’t actually fit their version of truth, they see the falseness of their claim. Living a lie is continuing to say you love someone when the detritus of two truths colliding settles.”

  “And I thought I was a cynic,” I said.

  “You have any life experience which disproves my statement?”

  I shrugged. Pagan was hitting a little too close to home, so I changed the subject. “What’s your immediate feeling about this second case being connected?”

  Pagan took my empty salad bowl and placed it along with our other trash in a plastic bag he produced from the vehicle’s door pocket. He then dumped the bag in an outside trash can. The guy was a regular boy scout when it came to being prepared.

  “Unlikely, but I’m reserving judgment,” he said putting the Escalade into reverse and backing out of the parking sport. “As we said, two six year-olds going missing in one night, very unusual. We’ll figure it out.”

  As Pagan pulled out of the parking lot, I was struck by his last statement – we’ll figure it out.

  First hunger pangs and now suddenly a sense of fully being part of something. If Pagan was manipulating me, he was very, very good at it, because I didn’t even mind.

  Chapter 15

  “A little inaccuracy sometimes saves

  tons of explanation.”

  - Saki: The Square Egg

  As we turned onto the surface streets, Pagan’s phone rang through the Escalade’s hands-free system. Pagan pressed the connect button on the steering wheel. “Hello, Arlo.”

  “Hi. I got your text. I don’t know how quick you wanted this stuff, but I’ve got some preliminary info on Smack Daddy Davis.” Arlo’s voice sounded even younger over the speaker phone system.

  “Great,” Pagan said. There was genuine warmth of approval in his voice. “You’re on speaker phone. Randall is with me.”

  “Hello, Detective Randall,” Arlo said.

  “Hey, Arlo,” I said. “It’s okay to call me Jane. I sent you the text from Pagan’s phone.”

  “No wonder I didn’t need a decoder ring to figure out the spelling,” Arlo said.

  I laughed. It was the first time I’d heard anyone poke fun at Pagan. I hadn’t thought the emo-looking Arlo had it in him.

  “What have you got for us, Arlo?” Pagan said, a feigned growl in his voice.

  “It’s not much, yet. You know he’s filed for divorce?”

  “Yes. I have no doubt you got copies of the filing. Anything interesting?”

  “He doesn’t want custody of their child, but he doesn’t want to pay support for her either.”

  “No surprises there,” Pagan said. “Especially if he’s still having financial troubles, he wants to get out of the marriage free and clear.”

  “Then how about this?” Arlo sounded like he had a secret. “I talked to Davenport over at TMZ. They’ve been following the divorce ruckus and found out Smack Daddy paid for a paternity test.”

  “He wanted to prove Unicorn wasn’t his? What a prick,” I said.

  “It gets better,” Arlo says. “Turns out Unicorn wasn’t related to the male DNA sample Smack Daddy provided for himself.”

  “So Smack Daddy isn’t the daddy? He’s off the hook?” Pagan said.

  “Not exactly,” Arlo said.

  “Spill it,” Pagan was getting short.

  “Turns out the male sample Smack Daddy provided wasn’t his,” Arlo said.

 
“How did they know?” I asked before Pagan could jump in.

  “The sample Smack Daddy provided for himself was from a Caucasian male not a black male.”

  Pagan and I looked at each other and then burst out laughing.

  “The guy is not a freaking rocket scientist is he?” I said.

  “Bad guys rarely are,” Pagan said, then became serious. “That’s one of the reasons why we’re going to nail him if he did anything to his little girl.”

  Arlo jumped back in. “Smack Daddy tried to pay off the lab to keep his screw-up quiet, but one of the technicians saw a fast way to make some bucks and called Davenport at TMZ. Apparently, they’ve done business before.”

  “How come they haven’t run with the story?” Pagan asked.

  “Davenport says they’re holding it back pending a full smear job. Smack Daddy has a bunch of skeletons in his closet about to come out and haunt him.”

  “Such as?”

  “Mostly money stuff, dope, old gang connections from back in the day. He’s made a lot of bad decisions.”

  “Have those bad decisions affected Smack Records?”

  “I’ve got some preliminary stuff, but it looks like they were in big trouble up to a year ago when Smack Daddy signed a hip-hop star called Changeling, who went viral on the web.”

  “Never heard of him,” Pagan said.

  “Like I’m surprised,” Arlo retorted. “Music didn’t stop with jazz.”

  “I’m aware of Changeling, but didn’t know he was a Smack Records artist,” I said.

  “He’s not huge in the mainstream yet, but Smack Daddy was able to financially leverage Changeling’s earning potential to keep Smack Records afloat,” Arlo said. “I don’t know yet if that leverage money is going to Changeling, directly into Smack Daddy’s pocket, or simply digging the business out of debt.”

  Pagan made a face like something smelled wrong. “No way Smack Daddy is going to be worried about paying off debts. He’ll be too busy hiding assets from Judith. What about this Changeling character?”

  “Surprisingly, there is not much on him outside his YouTube videos. He doesn’t seem to be making the scene at the clubs or running around town with an entourage. Smack Daddy appears to be keeping him under wraps, building anticipation for an upcoming CD release. Smack Records has produced an EP of tracks – remakes actually of the viral YouTube songs. They’ve been getting a lot of streaming play, which promises good things for a full CD.”