“How did you meet Herron?”
“You’re assuming I did. But, no, never met him in my life. I swear.”
The last sentence was a deception flag, though his body language wasn’t giving off signals that suggested he was lying.
“But you told the prisoner in Capitola that you wanted him to go to the well and find the hammer and wallet.”
“No, that’s what he told the warden.” Pell offered another amused smile. “Why don’t you talk to him about it? You’ve got sharp eyes, Officer Dance. I’ve seen them looking me over, deciding if I’m being straight with you. I’ll bet you could tell in a flash that that boy was lying.”
She gave no reaction, but reflected that it was very rare for a suspect to realize he was being analyzed kinesically.
“But then how did he know about the evidence in the well?”
“Oh, I’ve got that figured out. Somebody stole a hammer of mine, killed Herron with it and planted it to blame me. They wore gloves. Those rubber ones everybody wears on CSI.”
Still relaxed. The body language wasn’t any different from his baseline. He was showing only emblems—common gestures that tended to substitute for words, like shrugs and finger pointing. There were no adaptors, which signal tension, or affect displays—signs that he was experiencing emotion.
“But if he wanted to do that,” Dance pointed out, “wouldn’t the killer just call the police then and tell them where the hammer was? Why wait more than ten years?”
“Being smart, I’d guess. Better to bide his time. Then spring the trap.”
“But why would the real killer call the prisoner in Capitola? Why not just call the police directly?”
A hesitation. Then a laugh. His blue eyes shone with excitement, which seemed genuine. “Because they’re involved too. The police. Sure . . . The cops realize the Herron case hasn’t been solved and they want to blame somebody. Why not me? They’ve already got me in jail. I’ll bet the cops planted the hammer themselves.”
“Let’s work with this a little. There’re two different things you’re saying. First, somebody stole your hammer before Herron was killed, murdered him with it and now, all this time later, dimes you out. But your second version is that the police got your hammer after Herron was killed by someone else altogether and planted it in the well to blame you. Those’re contradictory. It’s either one or the other. Which do you think?”
“Hm.” Pell thought for a few seconds. “Okay, I’ll go with number two. The police. It’s a setup. I’m sure that’s what happened.”
She looked him in the eyes, green on blue. Nodding agreeably. “Let’s consider that. First, where would the police have gotten the hammer?”
He thought. “When they arrested me for that Carmel thing.”
“The Croyton murders in ninety-nine?”
“Right. All the evidence they took from my house in Seaside.”
Dance’s brows furrowed. “I doubt that. Evidence is accounted for too closely. No, I’d go for a more credible scenario: that the hammer was stolen recently. Where else could somebody find a hammer of yours? Do you have any property in the state?”
“No.”
“Any relatives or friends who could’ve had some tools of yours?”
“Not really.”
Which wasn’t an answer to a yes-or-no question; it was even slipperier than “I don’t recall.” Dance noticed too that Pell had put his hands, tipped with long, clean nails, on the table at the word “relatives.” This was a deviation from baseline behavior. It didn’t mean lying, but he was feeling stress. The questions were upsetting him.
“Daniel, do you have any relations living in California?”
He hesitated, must have assessed that she was the sort to check out every comment—which she was—and said, “The only one left’s my aunt. Down in Bakersfield.”
“Is her name Pell?”
Another pause. “Yep . . . That’s good thinking, Officer Dance. I’ll bet the deputies who dropped the ball on the Herron case stole that hammer from her house and planted it. They’re the ones behind this whole thing. Why don’t you talk to them?”
“All right. Now let’s think about the wallet. Where could that’ve come from? . . . Here’s a thought. What if it’s not Robert Herron’s wallet at all? What if this rogue cop we’re talking about just bought a wallet, had R.H. stamped in the leather, then hid that and the hammer in the well? It could’ve been last month. Or even last week. What do you think about that, Daniel?”
Pell lowered his head—she couldn’t see his eyes—and said nothing.
It was unfolding just as she’d planned.
Dance had forced him to pick the more credible of two explanations for his innocence—and proceeded to prove it wasn’t credible at all. No sane jury would believe that the police had fabricated evidence and stolen tools from a house hundreds of miles away from the crime scene. Pell was now realizing the mistake he’d made. The trap was about to close on him.
Checkmate . . .
Her heart thumped a bit and she was thinking that the next words out of his mouth might be about a plea bargain.
She was wrong.
His eyes snapped open and bored into hers with pure malevolence. He lunged forward as far as he could. Only the chains hooked to the metal chair, grounded with bolts to the tile floor, stopped him from sinking his teeth into her.
She jerked back, gasping.
“You goddamn bitch! Oh, I get it now. Sure, you’re part of it too! Yeah, yeah, blame Daniel. It’s always my fault! I’m the easy target. And you come in here sounding like a friend, asking me a few questions. Jesus, you’re just like the rest of them!”
Her heart was pounding furiously now, and she was afraid. But she noted quickly that the restraints were secure and he couldn’t reach her. She turned to the mirror, behind which the officer manning the video camera was surely rising to his feet right now to help her. But she shook her head his way. It was important to see where this was going.
Then suddenly Pell’s fury was replaced with a cold calm. He sat back, caught his breath and looked her over again. “You’re in your thirties, Officer Dance. You’re somewhat pretty. You seem straight to me, so I guarantee there’s a man in your life. Or has been.” A third glance at the pearl ring.
“If you don’t like my theory, Daniel, let’s come up with another one. About what really happened to Robert Herron.”
As if she hadn’t even spoken. “And you’ve got children, right? Sure, you do. I can see that. Tell me all about them. Tell me about the little ones. Close in age, and not too old, I’ll bet.”
This unnerved her and she thought instantly of Maggie and Wes. But she struggled not to react. He doesn’t know I have children, of course. He can’t. But he acts as if he’s certain. Was there something about my behavior he noted? Something that suggested to him that I’m a mother?
They’re studying you as hard as you’re studying them. . . .
“Listen to me, Daniel,” she said smoothly, “an outburst isn’t going to help anything.”
“I’ve got friends on the outside, you know. They owe me. They’d love to come visit you. Or hang with your husband and children. Yeah, it’s a tough life being a cop. The little ones spend a lot of time alone, don’t they? They’d probably love some friends to play with.”
Dance returned his gaze, never flinching. She asked, “Could you tell me about your relationship with that prisoner in Capitola?”
“Yes, I could. But I won’t.” His emotionless words mocked her, suggesting that, for a professional interrogator, she’d phrased her question carelessly. In a soft voice he added, “I think it’s time to go back to my cell.”
Chapter 2
Alonzo “Sandy” Sandoval, the Monterey County prosecutor, was a handsome, round man with a thick head of black hair and an ample mustache. He sat in his office, two flights above the lockup, behind a desk littered with files. “Hi, Kathryn. So, our boy . . . Did he beat his breast and cry, ‘Mea culpa�
��?”
“Not exactly.” Dance sat down, peered into the coffee cup she’d left on the desk forty-five minutes ago. Nondairy creamer scummed the surface. “I rate it as, oh, one of the least successful interrogations of all time.”
“You look shook, boss,” said a short, wiry young man, with freckles and curly red hair, wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a plaid sports coat. TJ’s outfit was unconventional for an investigative agent with the CBI—the most conservative law-enforcement agency in the Great Bear State—but so was pretty much everything else about him. Around thirty and single, TJ Scanlon lived in the hills of Carmel Valley, his house a ramshackle place that could have been a diorama in a counterculture museum depicting California life in the 1960s. TJ tended to work solo much of the time, surveillance and undercover, rather than pairing up with another CBI agent, which was the bureau’s standard procedure. But Dance’s regular partner was in Mexico on an extradition and TJ had jumped at the chance to help out and see the Son of Manson.
“Not shook. Just curious.” She explained how the interview had been going fine when, suddenly, Pell turned on her. Under TJ’s skeptical gaze, she conceded, “Okay, I’m a little shook. I’ve been threatened before. But his were the worst kinds of threats.”
“Worst?” asked Juan Millar, a tall, dark-complexioned young detective with the Investigations Division of the MCSO—the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, which was headquartered not far from the courthouse.
“Calm threats,” Dance said.
TJ filled in, “Cheerful threats. You know you’re in trouble when they stop screaming and start whispering.”
The little ones spend a lot of time alone. . . .
“What happened?” Sandoval asked, seemingly more concerned about the state of his case than threats against Dance.
“When he denied knowing Herron, there was no stress reaction at all. It was only when I had him talking about police conspiracy that he started to exhibit aversion and negation. Some extremity movement too, deviating from his baseline.”
Kathryn Dance was often called a human lie detector, but that wasn’t accurate; in reality she, like all successful kinesic analysts and interrogators, was a stress detector. This was the key to deception; once she spotted stress, she’d probe the topic that gave rise to it and dig until the subject broke.
Kinesics experts identify several different types of stress individuals experience. The stress that arises primarily when someone isn’t telling the whole truth is called “deception stress.” But people also experience general stress, which occurs when they are merely uneasy or nervous, and has nothing to do with lying. It’s what someone feels when, say, he’s late for work, has to give a speech in public or is afraid of physical harm. Dance had found that different kinesic behaviors signal the two kinds of stress.
She explained this and added, “My sense was that he’d lost control of the interview and couldn’t get it back. So he went ballistic.”
“Even though what you were saying supported his defense?” Lanky Juan Millar absently scratched his left hand. In the fleshy Y between the index finger and thumb was a scar, the remnant of a removed gang tat.
“Exactly.”
Then Dance’s mind made one of its curious jumps. A to B to X. She couldn’t explain how they happened. But she always paid attention. “Where was Robert Herron murdered?” She walked to a map of Monterey County on Sandoval’s wall.
“Here.” The prosecutor touched an area in the yellow trapezoid.
“And the well where they found the hammer and wallet?”
“About here, make it.”
It was a quarter mile from the crime scene, in a residential area.
Dance was staring at the map.
She felt TJ’s eyes on her. “What’s wrong, boss?”
“You have a picture of the well?” she asked.
Sandoval dug in the file. “Juan’s forensic people shot a lot of pics.”
“Crime scene boys love their toys,” Millar said, the rhyme sounding odd from the mouth of such a Boy Scout. He gave a shy smile. “I heard that somewhere.”
The prosecutor produced a stack of color photographs, riffled through them until he found the ones he sought.
Gazing at them, Dance asked TJ, “We ran a case there six, eight months ago, remember?”
“The arson, sure. In that new housing development.”
Tapping the map, the spot where the well was located, Dance continued, “The development is still under construction. And that”—she nodded at a photograph—“is a hard-rock well.”
Everybody in the area knew that water was at such a premium in this part of California that hard-rock wells, with their low output and unreliable supply, were never used for agricultural irrigation, only for private homes.
“Shit.” Sandoval closed his eyes briefly. “Ten years ago, when Herron was killed, that was all farmland. The well wouldn’t’ve been there then.”
“It wasn’t there one year ago,” Dance muttered. “That’s why Pell was so stressed. I was getting close to the truth—somebody did get the hammer from his aunt’s in Bakersfield and had a fake wallet made up, then planted them there recently. Only it wasn’t to frame him.”
“Oh, no,” TJ whispered.
“What?” Millar asked, looking from one agent to the other.
“Pell set the whole thing up himself,” she said.
“Why?” Sandoval asked.
“Because he couldn’t escape from Capitola.” That facility, like Pelican Bay in the north of the state, was a high-tech superprison. “But he could from here.”
Kathryn Dance lunged for the phone.
Chapter 3
In a special holding cell—segregated from the other prisoners—Daniel Pell studied his cage and the corridor beyond, leading to the courthouse.
To all appearances he was calm but his heart was in turmoil. The woman cop interviewing him had spooked him badly, with her calm green eyes behind those black-framed glasses, her unwavering voice. He hadn’t expected somebody to get inside his mind so deeply or so fast. It was like she could read his thoughts.
Kathryn Dance . .
Pell turned back to Baxter, the guard, outside the cage. He was a decent hack, not like Pell’s escort from Capitola, who was a burly man, black and hard as ebony, now sitting silently at the far door, watching everything.
“What I was saying,” Pell now continued his conversation with Baxter. “Jesus helped me. I was up to three packs a day. And He took time outta His busy schedule to help me. I quit pretty much cold.”
“Could use some of that help,” the hack confided.
“I’ll tell you,” Pell confided, “smoking was harder to say good-bye to than the booze.”
“Tried the patch, thing you put on your arm. Wasn’t so good. Maybe I’ll pray for help tomorrow. The wife and I pray every morning.”
Pell wasn’t surprised. He’d seen his lapel pin. It was in the shape of a fish. “Good for you.”
“I lost my car keys last week and we prayed for an hour. Jesus told me where they were. Now, Daniel, here’s a thought: You’ll be down here on trial days. You want, we could pray together.”
“ ’Preciate that.”
Baxter’s phone rang.
An instant later an alarm brayed, painful to the ears. “The hell’s going on?”
The Capitola escort leapt to his feet.
Just as a huge ball of fire filled the parking lot. The window in the back of the cell was barred but open, and a wad of flame shot through it. Black, greasy smoke streamed into the room. Pell dropped to the floor. He curled up into a ball. “My dear Lord.”
Baxter was frozen, staring at the boiling flames, engulfing the entire lot behind the courthouse. He grabbed the phone but the line must’ve been dead. He lifted his walkie-talkie and reported the fire. Daniel Pell lowered his head and began to mutter the Lord’s Prayer.
“Yo, Pell!”
The con opened his eyes.
The massive Capitola escor
t stood nearby, holding a Taser. He tossed leg shackles to Pell. “Put ’em on. We’re going down that corridor, out the front door and into the van. You’re—” More flames streamed into the cell. The three men cringed. Another car’s gas tank had exploded. “You’re going to stay right beside me. You understand?”
“Yeah, sure. Let’s go! Please!” He ratcheted on the shackles good and tight.
Sweating, his voice cracking, Baxter said, “Whatta you think it is? Terrorists?”
The Capitola escort ignored the panicked hack, eyes on Pell. “If you don’t do ’xactly what I say you’ll get fifty thousand volts up your ass.” He pointed the Taser toward the prisoner. “And if it ain’t convenient to carry you I will leave you to burn to death. Understand?”
“Yessir. Let’s go. Please. I don’t want you or Mr. Baxter getting hurt ’causa me. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Open it,” the escort barked to Baxter, who hit a button. With a buzz, the door eased outward. The three men started down the corridor, through another security door and then along a dim corridor, filling with smoke. The alarm was braying.
But, wait, Pell thought. It was a second alarm—the first had sounded before the explosions outside. Had someone figured out what he was going to do?
Kathryn Dance . . .
Just as they passed a fire door Pell glanced back. Thick smoke was filling the corridor around them. He cried to Baxter, “No, it’s too late. The whole building’s going to go! Let’s get out of here.”
“He’s right.” Baxter reached toward the alarm bar of the exit.
The Capitola escort, perfectly calm, said firmly, “No. Out the front door to the prison van.”
“You’re crazy!” Pell snapped. “For the love of God. We’ll die.” He shoved the fire door open.
The men were hit with a blast of fierce heat, smoke and sparks. Outside a wall of fire consumed cars and shrubbery and trash cans. Pell dropped to his knees, covering his face. He screamed, “My eyes . . . It hurts!”
“Pell, goddamn it—” The escort stepped forward, lifting the Taser.
Kathryn Dance Ebook Boxed Set : Roadside Crosses, Sleeping Doll, Cold Moon (9781451674217) Page 44