The crew in the conference room thanked her. Dance sipped the excellent coffee. Wished Maryellen had brought some of the cookies sitting on her desk. She envied the woman’s ability to be both a domestic powerhouse and the best assistant Dance had ever had.
The agent noticed that Maryellen wasn’t leaving after delivering the caffeine.
“Didn’t know if I should bother you. But Brian called.”
“He did?”
“He said you might not have gotten his message on Friday.”
“You gave it to me.”
“I know I did. I didn’t tell him I did. And I didn’t tell him I didn’t. So.”
Feeling O’Neil’s eyes on her, Dance said, “Okay, thanks.”
“You want his number?”
“I have it.”
“Okay.” Her assistant continued to stand resolutely in front of her boss, nodding slowly.
Well, this is a rather spiny moment.
Dance didn’t want to talk about Brian Gunderson.
The trill of the conference-room phone saved her.
She answered, listened for a moment and said, “Have somebody bring him to my office right away.”
Chapter 11
The large man, in a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation uniform, sat in front of her desk, a workaday slab of government-issue furniture on which lay random pens, some awards, a lamp and photos: of the two children, of Dance with a handsome silver-haired man, of her mother and father, and of two dogs, each paired with one of the youngsters. A dozen files also rested on the cheap laminate. They were facedown.
“This is terrible,” said Tony Waters, a senior guard from Capitola Correctional Facility. “I can’t tell you.”
Dance detected traces of a southeastern accent in the distraught voice. The Monterey Peninsula drew people from all over the world. Dance and Waters were alone at the moment. Michael O’Neil was checking on the forensics from the scene of the escape.
“You were in charge of the wing where Pell was incarcerated?” Dance asked.
“That’s right.” Bulky and with stooped shoulders, Waters sat forward in the chair. He was in his midfifties, she estimated.
“Did Pell say anything to you—about where he’s headed?”
“No, ma’am. I’ve been racking my brain since it happened. That was the first thing I did when I heard. I sat down and went through everything he’d said in the past week or more. But, no, nothing. For one thing, Daniel didn’t talk a lot. Not to us, the hacks.”
“Did he spend time in the library?”
“Huge amount. Read all the time.”
“Can I find out what?”
“It’s not logged and the cons can’t check anything out.”
“How about visitors?”
“Nobody in the last year.”
“And telephone calls? Are they logged?”
“Yes, ma’am. But not recorded.” He thought back. “He didn’t have many, aside from reporters wanting to interview him. But he never called back. I think maybe he talked to his aunt once or twice. No others I remember.”
“What about computers, email?”
“Not for the prisoners. We do for ourselves, of course. They’re in a special area—a control zone. We’re very strict about that. You know, I was thinking about it and if he communicated with anybody on the outside—”
“Which he had to do,” Dance pointed out.
“Right. It had to be through a con being released. You might want to check there.”
“I thought of that. I’ve talked to your warden. She tells me that there were only two releases in the past month and their parole officers had them accounted for this morning. They could’ve gotten messages to someone, though. The officers’re checking that out.”
Waters, she’d noted, had arrived empty-handed, and Dance now asked, “Did you get our request for the contents of his cell?”
The guard’s mood darkened. He was shaking his head, looking down. “Yes, ma’am. But it was empty. Nothing inside at all. Had been empty for a couple of days actually.” He looked up, his lips tight, as he seemed to be debating. Then his eyes dipped as he said, “I didn’t catch it.”
“Catch what?”
“The thing is, I’ve worked the Q and Soledad and Lompoc. Half dozen others. We learn to look for certain things. See, if something big’s going down, the cons’ cells change. Things’ll disappear—sometimes it’s evidence that they’re going to make a run, or evidence of shit a con’s done that he doesn’t want us to know about. Or what he’s going to do. Because he knows we’ll look over the cell with a microscope after.”
“But with Pell you didn’t think about him throwing everything out.”
“We never had an escape from Capitola. It can’t happen. And they’re watched so close, it’s almost impossible for a con to move on another one—kill him, I mean.” The man’s face was flushed. “I should’ve thought better. If it’d been Lompoc, I’d’ve known right away something was going down.” He rubbed his eyes. “I screwed up.”
“That’d be a tough leap to make,” Dance reassured him. “From housekeeping to escaping.”
He shrugged and examined his nails. He wore no jewelry but Dance could see the indentation of a wedding band. It occurred to her that, for once, this was no badge of infidelity but a concession to the job. Probably, circulating among dangerous prisoners, it was better not to wear anything they might steal.
“Sounds like you’ve been in this business for a while.”
“Long time. After the army I got into corrections. Been there ever since.” He brushed his crew-cut, grinning. “Sometimes seems like forever. Sometimes seems like just yesterday. Two years till I retire. In a funny way, I’ll miss it.” He was at ease now, realizing he wouldn’t be horsewhipped for not foreseeing the escape.
She asked about where he lived, his family. He was married and held up his left hand, laughing; her deduction about the ring proved correct. He and his wife had two children, both bound for college, he said proudly.
But while they chatted, a silent alarm was pulsing within Dance. She had a situation on her hands.
Tony Waters was lying.
Many falsehoods go undetected simply because the person being deceived doesn’t expect to be lied to. Dance had asked Waters here only to get information about Daniel Pell, so she wasn’t in interrogation mode. If Waters had been a suspect or a hostile witness, she’d have been looking for stress signs when he gave certain answers, then kept probing those topics until he admitted lying and eventually told the truth.
This process only works, though, if you determine the subject’s nondeceptive baseline behavior before you start asking the sensitive questions, which Dance, of course, had had no reason to do because she’d assumed he’d be truthful.
Even without a baseline comparison, though, a perceptive kinesic interrogator can sometimes spot deception. Two clues signal lying with some consistency: One is a very slight increase in the pitch of the voice, because lying triggers an emotional response within most people, and emotion causes vocal cords to tighten. The other signal is pausing before and during answering, since lying is mentally challenging. One who’s lying has to think constantly about what he and other people have said previously about the topic, then craft a fictitious response that’s consistent with those prior statements and what he believes the interrogator knows.
In her conversation with the guard, Dance had become aware that at several points his voice had risen in pitch and he’d paused when there was no reason for him to. Once she caught on to this, she looked back to other behaviors and saw that they suggested deception: offering more information than necessary, digressing, engaging in negation movement—touching his head, nose and eyes particularly—and aversion, turning away from her.
As soon as there’s evidence of deception, an interview turns into an interrogation, and the officer’s approach changes. It was at that point in their conversation that she’d broken off the questions about Pell and had be
gun talking about topics he’d have no reason to lie about—his personal life, the Peninsula, and so on. This was to establish his baseline behavior.
As she was doing this, Dance performed her standard four-part analysis of the subject himself, to give her an idea of how tactically to plan the interrogation.
First, she asked, what was his role in the incident? She concluded that Tony Waters was at best an uncooperative witness; at worst, an accomplice of Pell’s.
Second, did he have a motive to lie? Of course. Waters didn’t want to be arrested or lose his job because intentionally or through negligence he’d helped Daniel Pell escape. He might also have a personal or financial interest in aiding the killer.
Third, what was his personality type? Interrogators need this information to adjust their own demeanor when questioning the subject—should they be aggressive or conciliatory? Some officers simply determine if the subject is an introvert or extrovert, which gives a pretty good idea of how assertive to be. Dance, though, preferred a more comprehensive approach, trying to assign code letters from the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, which includes three other attributes in addition to introvert or extrovert: thinking or feeling, sensing or intuitive, judging or perceiving.
Dance concluded that Waters was a thinking-sensing-judging-extrovert, which meant that she could be more blunt with him than with a more emotional, internalized subject, and could use various reward-punishment techniques to break down the lies.
Finally, she asked: What kind of “liar’s personality” does Waters have? There are several types: Manipulators, or “High Machiavellians” (after the ruthless Italian prince), lie with impunity, seeing nothing wrong with it, using deceit as a tool to achieve their goals in love, business, politics—or crime. Other types include social liars, who lie to entertain, and adaptors, insecure people who lie to make positive impressions.
She decided that, given his career as a life-long prison guard and the ease with which he’d tried to take charge of the conversation and lead her away from the truth, Waters was in yet another category. He was an “actor,” someone for whom control was an important issue. They don’t lie regularly, only when necessary, and are less skilled than High Machs, but they’re good deceivers.
Dance now took off her glasses—chic ones, with dark red frames—and on the pretense of cleaning them, set them aside and put on narrower lenses encased in black steel, the “predator specs” she’d worn when interrogating Pell. She rose, walked around the desk and sat in the chair beside him.
Interrogators refer to the immediate space around a human being as the “proxemic zone,” ranging from “intimate,” six to eighteen inches, to “public,” ten feet away and beyond. Dance’s preferred space for interrogation was within the intermediate “personal” zone, about two feet away.
Waters noted the move with curiosity but he said nothing about it. Nor did she.
“Now, Tony. I’d just like to go over a few things one more time.”
“Sure, whatever.” He lifted his ankle to his knee—a move that seemed relaxed but in fact was a glaring defense maneuver.
She returned to a topic that, she now knew, had raised significant stress indicators in Waters. “Tell me again about the computers at Capitola.”
“Computers?”
Responding with a question was a classic indicator of deception; the subject is trying to buy time to decide where the interrogator is going and how to frame a response.
“Yes, what kind do you have?”
“Oh, I’m not a tech guy. I don’t know.” His foot tapped. “Dells, I think.”
“Laptops or desktops?”
“We have both. Mostly they’re desktops. Not that there’re, like, hundreds of them, you know.” He offered a conspiratorial smile. “State budgets and everything.” He told a story about recent financial cuts at the Department of Corrections, which Dance found interesting only because it was such a bald attempt at distracting her.
She steered him back. “Now, access to computers in Capitola. Tell me about it again.”
“Like I said, cons aren’t allowed to use them.”
Technically, this was a true statement. But he hadn’t said that cons don’t use them. Deception includes evasive answers as well as outright lies.
“Could they have access to them?”
“Not really.”
Sort of pregnant, kind of dead.
“How do you mean that, Tony?”
“I should’ve said, no, they can’t.”
“But you said guards and office workers have access.”
“Right.”
“Now, why couldn’t a con use a computer?”
Waters had originally said that this was because they were in a “control zone.” She recalled an aversion behavior and a slight change in pitch when he’d used the phrase.
He now paused for just a second as, she supposed, he was trying to recall what he’d said. “They’re in an area of limited access. Only nonviolent cons are allowed there. Some of them help out in the office, supervised, of course. Administrative duty. But they can’t use the computers.”
“And Pell couldn’t get in there?”
“He’s classified as One A.”
Dance noticed the nonresponsive answer. And the blocking gesture—a scratch of his eyelid—when he gave it.
“And that meant he wasn’t allowed in any . . . what were those areas again?”
“LA locations. Limited access.” He now remembered what he’d said earlier. “Or control zones.”
“Controlled or control?”
A pause. “Control zone.”
“Controlled—with an ed on the end—would make more sense. You’re sure that’s not it?”
He grew flustered. “Well, I don’t know. What difference does it make? We use ’em both.”
“And you use that term for other areas too? Like the warden’s office and the guards’ locker room—would they be control zones?”
“Sure. . . . I mean, some people use that phrase more than others. I picked it up at another facility.”
“Which one would that be?”
A pause. “Oh, I don’t remember. Look, I made it sound like it’s an official name or something. It’s just a thing we say. Everybody inside uses shorthand. I mean, prisons everywhere. Guards’re ‘hacks’; prisoners are ‘cons.’ It’s not official or anything. You do the same at CBI, don’t you? Everybody does.”
This was a double play: Deceptive subjects often try to establish camaraderie with their interrogators (“you do the same”) and use generalizations and abstractions (“everybody,” “everywhere”).
Dance asked in a low, steady voice, “Whether authorized or not, in whatever zone, have Daniel Pell and a computer ever been in the same room at the same time at Capitola?”
“I’ve never seen him on a computer, I swear. Honestly.”
The stress that people experience when lying pushes them into one of four emotional states: they’re angry, they’re depressed, they’re in denial or they want to bargain their way out of trouble. The words that Waters had just used—“I swear” and “honestly”—were expressions that, along with his agitated body language, very different from his baseline, told Dance that the guard was in the denial stage of deception. He just couldn’t accept the truth of whatever he’d done at the prison and was dodging responsibility for it.
It’s important to determine which stress state the subject is in because that allows the interrogator to decide on a tactic for questioning. When the subject is in the anger phase, for instance, you encourage him to vent until he exhausts himself.
In the case of denial, you attack on the facts.
Which was what she now did.
“You have access to the office where the computers are kept, right?”
“Yeah, I do, but so what? All the hacks do. . . . Hey, what is this? I’m on your side.”
A typical denier’s deflection, which Dance ignored. “And you said it’s possible some prisone
rs would be in that office. Has Pell ever been in there?”
“Nonviolent felons are the only ones allowed in—”
“Has Pell ever been in there?”
“I swear to God I never saw him.”
Dance noted adaptors—gestures meant to relieve tension: finger-flexing, foot-tapping—his shoulder aimed toward her (like a football player’s defensive posture) and more frequent glances at the door (liars actually glance at routes by which they can escape the stress of the interrogation).
“That’s about the fourth time you haven’t answered my question, Tony. Now, was Pell ever in any room in Capitola with a computer?”
The guard grimaced. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be, you know, difficult. I just was kind of flustered, I guess. I mean, like, I felt you were accusing me of something. Okay, I never saw him on a computer, really. I wasn’t lying. I’ve been pretty upset by this whole thing. You can imagine that.” His shoulders drooped, his head lowered a half inch.
“Sure I can, Tony.”
“Maybe Daniel could’ve been.”
Her attack had made Waters realize that it was more painful to endure the battering of the interrogation than to own up to what he was lying about. Like turning a light switch, Waters was suddenly in the bargaining phase of deception. This meant he was getting close to dropping the deception but was still holding back the full truth, in an effort to escape punishment. Dance knew that she had to abandon the frontal assault now and offer him some way to save face.
In an interrogation the enemy isn’t the liar, but the lie.
“So,” she said in a friendly voice, sitting back, out of his personal zone, “it’s possible that at some point, Pell could’ve gotten access to a computer?”
“I guess it could’ve happened. But I don’t know for sure he was on one.” His head drooped even more. His voice was soft. “It’s just . . . it’s hard, doing what we do. People don’t understand. Being a hack. What it’s like.”
“I’m sure they don’t,” Dance agreed.
“We have to be teachers and cops, everything. And”—his voice lowered conspiratorially—“admin’s always looking over our shoulders, telling us to do this, do that, keep the peace, let them know when something’s going down.”
Kathryn Dance Ebook Boxed Set : Roadside Crosses, Sleeping Doll, Cold Moon (9781451674217) Page 50