'It could also be embarrassment,' he continued, 'but it's more likely to be guilty knowledge: withholding information.'
The discriminating stress cues, once Gabriel had pointed them out, began to appear obvious.
'Negation!' Jill pointed at Joss on screen, once again rubbing his palm up and down his nose, briefly covering his mouth. Negation behaviour, Gabriel had reminded her, was a subconscious effort to hide leaks of emotion from the face. In the video, Joss repeatedly put his hands up to the facial touch zone – the area from mid-nose to mid-chin – hiding his mouth when he spoke about the ringleader of the gang.
'Right. And what's that?' he asked her, tape paused on Joss making a sweeping gesture in response to a question asked by Gabriel.
'Aversion behaviour? He's blocking you, isn't he?'
'Figuratively, he's sweeping the question away. Remember I asked him to expand on what happened when the leader was questioning him on the ground. He used a bridging phrase: what did he say?' Gabriel looked down at the pad on his knee. '"The next thing I knew they were gone." The next thing I knew… It's a typical phrase used to cover gaps and omissions. He doesn't want to talk about what happened just before the offenders left.'
Gabriel paused the tape again and performed a yoga stretch on the loungeroom floor. His khaki shirt stretched tight over the muscles in his chest and back. Her shoulders felt stiff and she considered copying his pose, but instead she contented herself with stretching her neck from side to side.
'What else do we know about this guy?' he asked.
'Just the basic demographics, I think,' she answered. 'Age, address, family, his job. Probably we should look deeper.'
'Definitely. Look at the screen now.' Gabriel again sat up, cross-legged. 'See. That's another control behaviour. He's sitting on his hands. I think that he knows about stress cues and he's trying to suppress his nervous behaviours. Problem for him is that this tells us just as much – he's trying to be deceptive about his true emotions. When he freezes, or grips the chair, or sits on his hands within three to five seconds of a hot topic, he might as well have just let his hands do what they wanted to.
'But what I really want to know,' he said, standing and clicking off the TV, 'is where he learned that he should be monitoring his signals. I don't think he's always been a civilian, Jill.'
Jill also stood. She walked into the kitchen, and for no reason felt suddenly self-conscious. She wiped her hand across the four switches in the panel on the wall and flooded the apartment with light. What was it, six o'clock? She glanced at the clock on her wall.
'It's almost seven,' he said. 'What do you want to eat?'
'Ah…'
'We could just go grab some laksa?' He seemed to notice the startled expression on her face. 'Or maybe you're too tired. That's okay. I'll head off.'
'Where do you live?'
Was she supposed to offer to drive him home? This sucked. She didn't even know this guy, and now she felt responsible for getting him home. What do you do in these situations? The awkwardness of such personal exchanges was almost physically painful for her.
'Bus to Central. Central to Ryde,' he answered. 'I live in Ryde. It's an hour from here. I come out here all the time. I love the Thai restaurant up the strip.'
'Hang on a sec,' Jill surprised herself by saying. She suddenly realised she was starving. 'I'd love some laksa.'
She walked into her bathroom, splashed her face and fixed her hair in the mirror. Just before leaving, she turned back and slicked on some lip-gloss. What are you doing? she asked herself in the mirror. She left the room quickly and grabbed her handbag, not looking at Gabriel.
'Let's go,' she said, walking out of her flat.
19
'YOU LOOK LIKE you know your way around a gym,' he said.
It was only 7.45 a.m., and Jill had made the mistake of entering the taskforce meeting room without considering that she might be alone in there with Derek Reid. He'd moved on from his first-day suit to more casual clothes, and the three buttons undone at the top of his thin beige shirt showed too much tan and too little hair. She couldn't help but look twice. Yep, he waxed his chest. His sleeves barely contained his biceps. His eyes took her in, whole.
'You look like you could stay away from it for a couple of weeks,' she said. Stupid! Where did that come from? Oh my God, he thinks I'm flirting, she thought, horrified.
Reid's mouth turned up. The sheen on his copper skin caught the light as he actually flexed one bicep, pushing the fabric of his shirt almost beyond its limits.
'Maybe we could work out together this afternoon, what do you say?'
Maybe I could throw up now, she thought, but answered, 'I don't think so. I'm booked in for a spray tan.'
The corners of his smile dropped a little as he thought that through, and Jill turned to see David Tran entering the meeting room, leaning on his cane. She smiled, more than pleased to see him.
'Superintendent Last asked that I apologise for his being late this morning,' Tran spoke to them both. 'Apparently there's been a step forward in the case.'
'Do you know what it is, David?' asked Jill.
He shook his head, and they fell silent for several moments.
'So I wonder what Delahunt's excuse is for being late,' Reid said. 'I guess the Feds can show up whenever they're ready, huh?'
Jill ignored him. The service was full of people like Reid – always looking to put someone or something down. She found the constant negativity boring. She wondered what Tran was like. He certainly didn't seem to fit the usual mould. She decided to try to find out more about his experiences when he interviewed some of the past victims.
'So what did you think of Justine Rice?' she began. She directed the question to David Tran, but Reid answered.
'She gave us nothing,' he said. 'Not surprising, really, now it turns out that she was sexually assaulted by these freaks. She's not going to speak to a couple of blokes, is she?' He sounded defensive.
'There was more to it, I think, Jill,' said Tran. 'She and Ryan Temple took an instant dislike to me in particular. While it's often an advantage being an Asian cop around these suburbs, I'm afraid that it's alienated some of the vics in this case.'
Jill nodded. She could see his point. Even people who'd denounced racism all their lives could find themselves fearful or hostile towards people of a particular nationality when they'd been attacked by a member of that community. She knew from experience that when violent crime was paired with a certain ethnicity, many victims forever after avoided all members of that race.
'I have already made the observation to Superintendent Last. It is probably a good thing that some of these interviews are repeated,' said Tran. 'Because of my presence, there could be other things people are holding back.'
Reid turned away, but not before Jill caught him giving his partner a foul look.
Lawrence Last walked in, looking as haggard as ever, but this morning there was a light behind his eyes. Gabriel Delahunt followed him into the room.
'We've had the biggest breakthrough so far,' he told them as soon as everyone had taken a seat. 'Forensics came through late last night on the evidence collected at two of the crime scenes. Both names are in the system. The organic matter collected at Capitol Hill belonged to the stomach contents of a Dang Huynh, AKA Mouse. He last did time at Junee for an aggravated rob. Time before that at Parramatta for vehicle theft. He's got a bit of a juvie record. He's thirty-four now.'
'We don't know for sure that this bloke's got anything to do with the murder, do we?' Reid wanted to know.
'No, Derek, we know nothing about why Huynh was at the property. Jill and Gabriel haven't yet been able to speak to Donna Moser, the victim's daughter. He could have been there for some other reason, but we know that there was an eight- to twenty-four-hour window during which this man vomited at the residence. Beyond that, we don't know any more about the suspect than what I've just told you.