I found excuses for more lunches, always on the pretext of talking about a case I was working on, asking her advice about how to read suspects and witnesses. I would never trust myself when it came to reading faces after what happened to Kevin, but I loved listening to her talk. We let our lunches linger and wander, often coming back to the similarities between what we did. I caught bad guys. She caught lies. We both feared that we would be deceived by the guilty and fail the innocent.
We argued about the polygraph. I trusted it. She didn’t.
“The polygraph measures the response of the body’s limbic system, which controls emotion. It assumes that someone telling a lie will experience an involuntary increase in heart rate, pulse, temperature, breathing, all of which are controlled by the limbic system,” she said. “But a pathological liar can beat the polygraph.”
“How?”
“Wrong question. They answer is they lie. The right question is why aren’t their lies detected.”
“You’re going to tell me.”
“Of course. It’s my obligation to show you the errors of your ways,” Kate said with a grin. “A psychologist at the University of Southern California did a study on the brains of liars. It’s not conclusive, but it is interesting. He found that liars average 22 percent more white matter in the prefrontal cortex of their brains and 14 percent less gray matter.”
“So what?”
“The gray matter contains neurons, which are the brain’s networking material. Think of neurons like telephone wires that connect phones. And neurons link the prefrontal cortex to the limbic system. The fewer neurons someone has, the fewer connections there are to the limbic system. Pathological liars get away with lying because they don’t show any nervousness. They are genetically designed to lie.”
“But you can see it in their faces?”
“A psychopath or a natural liar is hard for anyone to catch. A psychopath doesn’t care about anything, so why get emotional? A natural liar, or someone who is trained to deceive, like actors or trial lawyers, they can be just as hard to figure out. The rest of us are a lot easier because micro facial expressions are almost impossible to control.”
“Aren’t they tied to emotions just like heart rate and breathing, which the polygraph measures?”
“You’re right, but people can learn to regulate their breathing and their heart rate. They can’t do that with micro expressions. And the polygraph is so unreliable no court will allow the results into evidence.”
“No court will allow a videotape of a defendant’s micro facial expressions into evidence either.”
“I don’t need them admitted into evidence. I just need to see them.”
“How can you be so certain what each expression means?”
“Facial expressions are universal in type and meaning across all cultures and ethnic groups,” she said.
“Show me the one that says you’re a liar.”
“That’s not how it works. Facial expressions, especially micro expressions, are clues. Someone pretends to be angry, but their face says they are afraid. They should be devastated but a smile lasting a fraction of a second shoots out of the corner of their mouth. I look for inconsistencies, asymmetries, things that don’t fit.”
“Like the dog that didn’t bark.”
“Exactly. If you know what to look for, they are the closest things to money in the bank for a lie catcher.”
“Well, then. I better not lie to you.”
“Not unless you want to get caught,” she said, her grin firmly in place.
Chapter Twelve
I needed sleep more than I needed a doctor. It took me thirty minutes to get home, detouring around construction on I-35 to my house in Overland Park, a suburb on the Kansas side of the state line that bisects Kansas City.
The house looked like it always had from the outside-a boxy two-story with a two-car garage, beige stucco, short trees, and shorter grass. Walking inside, finding it almost empty after I agreed that Joy could take whatever furniture she wanted while the lawyers worked out the rest of the property settlement, it reminded me of a house whose owners I had arrested for selling dope to their kids’ friends. They held an estate sale to raise money so they could pay their lawyers. I took a tour when it was over. Everything worth having was gone, the picked-over remnants all that remained. They went to jail for a long time.
My dining room was empty; my beer-stained easy chair and ring-marked end table sat alone in the den, ruts in the carpet where the cherrywood entertainment center had stood. There was no kitchen table, just a pair of stools with their white paint chipped by careless heels, tucked under the black granite lip of the island anchored in the middle of the room. The walls were scarred with holes where pictures had hung. The drapes had been stripped from bare windows and my footsteps echoed off hardwood?oors.
Joy left me the nineteen-inch TV with a built-in DVR she kept in the kitchen to watch the Today Show and to tape soaps, along with a futon that I moved from the basement into the master bedroom. Looking around, I missed the comfortable familiarity from the furnishings of a bad marriage. This was my new normal.
I woke up in the late afternoon to an undercurrent of tremors-sensations, I called them-shakes in the making. I showered, nicked my chin shaving and shaking at the same time, and then left Kate a message that I needed to talk to her.
I?ipped on the early news in time to see a report on the murders. Adrian Williams was the spokeswoman for our office, a polished fashion plate who knew how to feed the media beast. She recited what little was known, made the usual comments about an ongoing investigation, and appealed to the public for patience and help.
By now, I knew the preliminary forensics report would be finished. The number of shots fired, the estimated distance between shooter and victims, the number and quality of fingerprints-all that and more would have been laid out for my squad. A more detailed rundown on the neighborhood canvass, together with the list of known associates, would have yielded a chart of people to interview, priorities?agged with a red check alongside their names.
I tried watching the rest of the news but couldn’t concentrate on the latest fistfight between dueling county commissioners or the postseason prospects for the Royals and the early odds on the Chiefs breaking their Super Bowl drought. I didn’t care about the coming changes in the weather or the latest triumph of the station’s Problem Solvers.
I cared about Keyshon Williams, imagining the paramedics unraveling the boy’s fingers from his mother’s hair and picturing the coroner laying his arms alongside his body in preparation for removing, weighing, and measuring his vital organs. I already knew the cause of Keyshon’s death, but the person who had caused it was still upright and breathing. I couldn’t live with that.
I called Ammara Iverson, remembering the tears in her eyes when Troy Clark led me out of Marcellus’s backyard. I hoped her soft spot hadn’t hardened.
“Hey, Ammara. I just saw Adrian on the news.”
“Girl looked good too, I bet.”
“Like a million damn dollars of taxpayer money.”
Her laugh came from deep in her throat, full and honest. I liked the sound.
“How are you doing, Jack? Feeling any better?”
“Yeah. I got some sleep. I’ll find a doctor tomorrow and get this thing figured out.”
“That’s great.”
“Listen, what did CSI come up with?”
She lowered her voice. “I’m sorry, Jack. I can’t help you with that.”
“Can’t help me? What does that mean? I’m taking some time off. I didn’t go over to the other side.”
“It’s not my decision. Troy and Ben Yates sat us down, told us how it would be. Said any leaks and somebody’s going to get their ass kicked.”
“I’m not a reporter, you know.”
“Troy made a special point that we weren’t supposed to talk to you about the investigation.”