“I’ll buy the first, but how do you figure the second?”
“Okay. If you meet someone, do you think you’d recognize them the next time you saw them?”
I thought for a moment. “Yeah. I may not remember their name, but I never forget a face.”
“Then you’re better at reading faces than the one in fifty people that have some form of face blindness.”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
“It’s called prosopagnosia. Usually someone with the condition has a hard time recognizing the same set of facial features again and again. It can be so severe that you could show a person who has the condition a picture of Elvis and she will think it’s Madonna, anybody except Elvis. In the worst cases, people don’t even recognize their own faces.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“Sure. Things could always be worse. Can you tell when someone is angry?”
“Sure.”
“How about when they’re happy or sad?”
“Of course.”
“You make judgments all day long about what someone is really thinking or feeling. You don’t do it just based on what they say and do. You do it based on their body language, their facial expressions, and their tone of voice.”
“But I’m not interested in their emotions. I’m interested in whether they are telling the truth.”
“Then you are definitely interested in their emotions. For most people, lying is stressful. That stress impacts their emotions, and the emotions a liar is trying to conceal will leak. That’s when you can catch them in a lie.”
“Give me an example.”
“Okay,” Kate said. “Some emotions just don’t go together. It’s very hard for someone who is angry to fake being afraid, or vice versa. The involuntary muscle movements associated with anger and fear just don’t go together. Fear moves the brows up and anger pulls them down. It’s impossible for your brows to be in two places at one time.”
“That’s it? The eyebrows are the windows to the soul?”
“Just don’t pluck them. No single gesture, facial expression, or muscle twitch will prove that someone is lying, but they are clues of emotions that don’t fit. That’s what I mean by leakage.”
“I remember you telling me that some people don’t leak.”
“Natural liars, sociopaths, actors, politicians, and trial lawyers are all used to convincing an audience of something whether or not they believe it. To varying degrees, deception doesn’t bother them. It’s what they do. They delight in having duped someone. But even they can leak because it’s impossible to completely control facial expressions. Too many of them are involuntary.”
“Like the micro facial expressions, the ones that happen so quickly you can’t see them.”
“Precisely. Genuine expressions don’t last long. The duration from onset to offset can be less than a second. Micro expressions?ash on and off the face in less than a quarter of a second. If the expression is asymmetrical, stronger on one side of the face than the other, or if the timing is wrong, or the duration is too long, those are all good signs that the expression shown is false.”
“But how does that prove someone is lying? I’ve interviewed plenty of people who it turned out were telling the truth but were scared to death I wouldn’t believe them.”
“That’s why context is so critical. The fear of not being believed is virtually impossible to distinguish from the fear of being caught lying.”
“Okay. Since I didn’t grow up playing with facial expression?ash cards like you did, how do I learn to recognize micro expressions?”
“Practice,” she said, rummaging through her purse. “Damn!”
“Don’t tell me you left your?ash cards at home.”
Kate poked me in the arm. “Don’t make fun of the teacher or I’ll rap your knuckles with my ruler. We don’t use?ash cards any more. We use images on a CD, which I left at my office.”
“So school is out?”
“Not so fast,” she said, examining my television. “Your TV has a DVD player with a freeze-frame feature. Do you have any movies?”
“Not anymore. Joy got them in the property settlement.”
“Well, at least the two of you settled something. Have you recorded anything? We could play it back and break it down frame by frame.”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve been recording the local news to keep track of stories about the drug house murders. We can take a look at that.”
“It’s not?ash cards but we’ll make it work.”
Chapter Forty-eight
It turned out that the two news anchors on Channel 6 had issues. In the midst of their happy-talk banter, the male anchor was checking out the female anchor’s chest, while she was sneering every time he opened his mouth. Not surprisingly, the weather wonk didn’t believe a word of her own forecast. All of that was revealed in the frame-by-frame breakdown of their facial expressions.
“I can see the micro expressions when you freeze them but they blew by me in real time,” I told Kate.
“You’re a rookie. I’ll get you the CD I was talking about. Spend a few hours with it on your computer and you’ll pick it up faster than you think. It will change the way you look at people. Let’s try a few more.”
The next segment in the news broadcast was the interview with Marcellus’s neighbors, LaDonna Simpson, Tarla Hicks, and Latrell Kelly. Kate slowed the recording down when LaDonna Simpson appeared on the screen.
“Skip her,” I said. “And the next person, another woman. Go to the last guy interviewed. His name is Latrell Kelly. He lives directly behind Marcellus.”
“You seem awfully interested in him.”
“I should be. He gave me the dog. Play the interview straight through, then go back and break it down.”
Kate pushed the play button and Latrell began speaking, his slow, quiet voice now familiar. I mouthed the words as he said again “nobody takes care of a little boy, you see what happens.”
Kate gasped. “Unbelievable!”
“What? I didn’t see a thing.”
She rewound the tape, freezing it as Latrell finished speaking. In that instant, he looked straight into the camera. His placid, respectful, sorrowful face melted away, replaced by a vicious snarl a pit bull would have killed for. His lips were?attened and pulled back, his teeth bared, his eyes trimmed to narrow slits, and his nostrils?ared. His devil’s face vanished in the next frame.
We stared at him, neither of us saying a word. Kate rewound the segment once more, walking through it frame by frame. There were other micro expressions. I started to ask her what they meant, but she raised her hand, telling me to be quiet.
“Unbelievable,” she said for the second time when she finished her review. “Usually, I see ordinary expressions, the kind we associate with guilt or shame or pleasure. And I see a lot of anger and fear. But I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“What’s he lying about?”
Kate sat back in her chair, her arms folded across her chest. “Oh, he’s not lying about anything. When he said nobody takes care of a little boy, you see what happens, he was absolutely telling the truth.”
“One of the murder victims was a little boy, Keyshon. Is that who Latrell was talking about?”
“I don’t think so. I think he was talking about himself.”
“So who didn’t take care of him?” I asked. “His parents?”
“Probably. He could have been abused or abandoned. Whatever it was, he’s carrying around a lot of rage.”
“Enough to kill five people, including a mother and her little boy, and then blow away another drug dealer two nights later?”
“What other drug dealer?”
“The gun used in the drug house murders was also used to blow away one of Marcellus’s competitors. A guy named Javy Ordonez.”
“If he was angry enough, but the mother and her little boy are the only ones who make any sense at all.”
“How?”
“There’s a lot of pain that goes with all that rage. People who hurt that bad sometimes kill themselves because that’s the only way they can stop the pain. Other times they kill someone they think caused their pain or someone they think is them, like a mother and a little boy that remind him too much of what happened to him.”