Abandoned: A Thriller (18 page)

Hollister indicates that we should sit on the couch. Alan puts himself in the position closest to Hollister. Burns sits next to him. I stay standing. Nothing like a little unevenness to keep things uncomfortable.

I glance into the backyard as Alan begins speaking. It’s a big backyard, devoid of trees but filled with lush green grass.

“Something happened yesterday, Mr. Hollister,” Alan says. “Do you remember what day your first wife went missing?”

“Heather?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hollister thinks about it, still sweating away. “Um … let’s see. It was after her cardio class. Middle of the week. Wednesday. Yes. Wednesday. Why?”

“Where were you at the time?”

A flash of anger passes over Hollister’s face, but he answers without hesitation. This is solid ground for him. “I was at home.”

“What were you doing at the time?”

Hollister’s quiet, remembering. “I was watching a movie. My sons were asleep. I was watching …
Dirty Harry.”

Alan smiles. “Clint. My man. What’s your opinion? You think he was better as an actor or a director?”

Burns gives me a sideways look. I ignore him. He doesn’t know what Alan’s up to. I do.

Hollister seems as mystified but answers. “I think he’s better as a director. I love the
Dirty Harry
movies and the westerns, but he really came into his own as a director.”

“I agree. Which do you think is his best movie? As a director, I mean?”

Hollister considers it. Of course, the fact that he’s answering any of these questions at all makes me almost certain he’s guilty. The guilty, when confronted with an interrogation situation, jump at any chance to bond. They think being friendly will make us trust them more. Hollister is too desperate to be liked by Alan to wonder why the subject is Clint Eastwood.

“Mystic River
, I guess.”

“Your wife Heather was found alive.” Alan shifts gears without bothering to acknowledge Hollister’s answer.

You could hear a pin drop. Hollister stares at Alan. He swallows once, a huge, nervous gulping, like a gagging fish. “She was found?” he finally says. “W-where?”

I frown.
Found?
Not
found alive?
Odd choice of words.

“She was pushed out of a car into a hotel parking lot. My colleagues and I were attending a wedding there. We think he chose that location because of its proximity to a large group of law enforcement.”

“Large group? What do you mean?”

Again, Hollister’s questions are very, very strange.

“Almost everyone attending was either FBI or LAPD.”

Hollister looks away. His eyes find me and then dart in another
direction. He’s sweating more profusely now. I peer closer. Sweat stains have actually appeared on the underarms of his shirt.

“Wow,” he manages. “I don’t know what to say. This is kind of shocking.”

Kind of?

He points a finger at Burns, and his face twists in righteous indignation. “See! I told you I didn’t kill her. You kept persecuting me, but she’s alive. She’s fine.”

My mouth almost falls open. “I wouldn’t say she’s fine, sir. We think she’s been held in isolation for eight years. She’s in a psychotic state. Fine? I’m not sure that’s the best selection of words.”

I sense Alan’s eyes on me, warning me off. I rein myself in.

“You’re right,” Hollister says, holding a hand up in commiseration. “I’m sorry. I feel like a pinball in a pinball machine right now. It’s just …” He puts his hands together between his knees and looks down at them. “Eight years is a long time. When Heather disappeared, it nearly killed me. Then I was accused of being the one responsible for her disappearance and maybe her murder.” He looks at Burns. “I know you were just doing your job. I apologize for my outburst.”

“No problem,” Burns says, playing along, though I can sense his tenseness.

“Where is she?” he asks. “Is she injured? Can I see her?”

All the questions now that he should have asked from the start.

“She’s still being examined,” Alan says. “So far, she doesn’t show any signs of permanent physical harm, but her mental state is another matter. The doctors would prefer that she have no visitors right now.”

I’m always amazed at how simply Alan can change his mode of speaking. In normal situations, he’s very easygoing. A little bit of slang at times, a peppering of profanity. Man on the street. Now he sounds so formal, almost stilted.

“I understand,” Hollister says, agreeing a little
too
quickly for my taste. “Do you have any idea yet? About who might have done this to her?”

This is the question he really wants answered. Alan waits, letting the pause hang a little too long as he stares at Hollister. “No,” he finally says. “I’m afraid not. We’re hopeful that Ms. Hollister can shed some light on things when she is ready to start talking again. If she’s ever ready.”

Hollister leans forward, ever so slightly. It’s an almost imperceptible eagerness. “And?” he asks. “Do you think she’ll ever be ready?”

God, I marvel. Either this guy is the world’s worst liar or he’s still too shook up to get his bearings.

Again, that too-long pause from Alan. He lets it go long enough now that one of Hollister’s eyes twitches with tension. “That’s an unknown at the moment, I’m afraid.”

“I see,” Hollister replies. He smiles again, that awful, desperate grin. “Does anyone want a beer?” he asks. “I sure could use a beer!”

It’s utterly incongruous. Alan takes it in stride.

“We can’t, sir, but thank you. We’re almost done with what we came to find out—I mean, to do here. If I could just ask you to be patient a little while longer.”

Alan’s “slip of the tongue” was anything but. Hollister’s eye twitches again at the words
find out.

“Uh, okay,” he says, staring at Alan. His mouth sounds as though it’s filled with cotton, overdry.

“Is there anything you can think of that might help us, sir? Heather’s reappearance is obviously a new development. Has anything happened in your life recently that might correspond to that? Has anyone contacted you, emailed you, left strange messages?”

“No, nothing like that,” Hollister says.

“Anything at all you can think of?”

“No, I’m afraid not. That’s the strange thing. Three days ago, everything was like it always is. Now everything has changed.”

This is the truth. I can hear it in his voice. The problem is, again, in his choice of words. Three days ago is too long a window. Heather showed up yesterday.

Alan nods in sympathy. “That’s how it goes sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes we’re sure we have all the bases covered, and then we make a mistake.”

“Uh-huh,” Hollister agrees, staring at Alan with a kind of dreadful fascination.

“Mr. Hollister, you have two sons, don’t you?”

“Yes. Avery and Dylan.”

“How do you think they’re going to react to this?”

“I have no idea.”
Douglas Hollister’s affect has changed. His eyes have gone colder. His voice is flat. Why?

Alan’s picked up on this as well. “Mr. Hollister, where are Avery and Dylan right now?”

“At a friend’s.”

Alan stares at the man and I know something is up. For the first time since we’ve arrived, he breaks eye contact with Hollister. He looks at me. He is very, very troubled. He turns back to Hollister. “Let me just confer with my boss for a few moments, sir, and then we should be out of your hair. You and Detective Burns can catch up in the meantime.”

Hollister eyes Burns dubiously. “Yeah. Sure.”

Alan gets up and walks me into the kitchen. “We have a problem,” he says. “What?”

“He’s lying about Avery and Dylan being at a friend’s. Why? Who needs to lie about where their kids are?”

I’m slow to arrive at the answer he wants, but when I do, I freeze. “You think they’re here?”

Alan is quiet for a moment. “I think it’s a possibility, which is not good. Hollister’s obviously off the deep end. Something or someone’s got him bugalooed. Last time I saw behavior like this with a suspect while questioning him in his home, it turned out he’d killed his wife just before we arrived. Took a long time to answer the door, just like Hollister. Know why?”

“He was hiding the body?”

“Close. He was washing the blood off his hands. The body was stuffed behind the couch while we were interviewing him.”

“Jesus.” I feel my hackles go up at the pure creepiness of this. “What do you want to do?”

I focus my attention on Hollister, who’s holding up his end of a terse conversation with Burns. Probable cause is the name of the game. He invited us into his home, but we’re not here on a warrant. Evidence we can use is limited to what we can actually see.

“It’s time to turn up the heat,” I tell Alan. “We don’t have a legal reason, yet, to search his home. If we do it anyway, we run the risk of whatever we find being inadmissible. Somehow, we need to crack him here and now.”

“And if we don’t?”

I study Alan. “What’s your gut? Are the boys alive or dead?”

“Dead.” He says it without hesitation. “He emptied out when I brought up Avery and Dylan.”

“If you don’t break him, I’ll think of something.”

Alan cracks his knuckles, watching Hollister again. “I think the direct approach is the one to take at this point.” His voice is thoughtful. “I’ll start by explaining neurolinguistics to him. Then we’ll see.”

We head back out to the living room. Alan takes his seat again. I remain standing.

“Sorry about that,” Alan says.

“No problem,” Hollister replies. He looks relieved not to have to continue his conversation with Burns.

“I want to talk to you about neurolinguistic interviewing, Mr. Hollister.”

Hollister frowns. “Neuro what?”

“Neurolinguistic interviewing. There’s a lot of technical jargon, but I’ll simplify it for you. It’s a way of finding out when someone you are interviewing is using their cognitive process and when they’re remembering something. By cognitive process, I mean thinking. Creating an answer to a problem. Like, when I asked you earlier what movie was Eastwood’s best directing effort, you had to review the movies you’d seen and then come up with an answer based on the data you have. You follow?”

“I guess.”

“When you remember something, you don’t have to use the cognitive process. It’s a memory. You have to locate it. We access different parts of the brain for each function, and we have specific physiological reactions when we do that.” He leans forward. “It’s in the eyes.”

The tic in Hollister’s own eye starts again. “The eyes?” he repeats, somewhat moronically.

Alan nods. “Yes, sir. Most people, when they are remembering something, look up and to the right. When they’re solving a problem, they generally look down and to the left. It varies, but you ask each kind of question and establish a baseline. You know why?”

“So you can tell when they’re lying,” Hollister whispers, hollow-eyed and dreadful again.

“That’s right. If you ask them for a memory, and they access the cognitive function of their brain, that means they’re lying. When I
asked you to remember what day your wife was abducted, for example, you weren’t lying. You were remembering.” He shrugs. “There’re other indicators, of course. Nervousness is an obvious one.” Alan smiles. “You were already nervous and sweating like a pig when we arrived. You said you were sick and napping, but I don’t think so.”

Hollister says nothing. He’s turned into the bird. Alan is the cobra.

“Here’s the thing I’m really concerned about, Mr. Hollister.” Alan moves closer, parting Hollister’s knees with one of his own, creating an unconscious threat to his manhood. “When I asked you about your sons? When I asked where Avery and Dylan are? You lied to me. I could see it. And that bothers me—us—Mr. Hollister. Why would you need to lie about the location of your sons?”

Hollister’s eyes have gone wide. His mouth is hanging open, though I doubt he realizes it. He’s falling apart right in front of us.

“We’re also trained to keep an eye on what we call ‘affect,’ Mr. Hollister. Do you know what that is? Roughly, it’s the observable effects of someone experiencing a particular emotion or emotions. You can have a bored affect, a sad affect, so on.” He moves in even closer, pushing his knee in further. It’s now only an inch or two away from Hollister’s crotch.

Hollister farts, once. He’s unaware of it. It’s a small toot, but it’s telling. You see this, and sometimes belching, in a highly skilled interrogation. The person doesn’t even have to be guilty. It’s a physiological reaction of fear.

“Your affect when I asked you about your sons went from fearful to a near total absence of emotion. Do you know who I see that kind of reaction in the most?” He cranes his neck forward, so that his nose is almost touching Hollister’s. “I see it in murderers.”

“Gahhh …” Hollister says.

He is shattering now. Most people have no idea how devastating an interrogation can be. Men have fainted dead away when faced with nothing more than an accusation and a badge.

“Jesus, he’s wetting himself,” Burns mutters.

I see the stain spreading before the smell reaches my nose. Alan doesn’t move.

“Where are Avery and Dylan’s bodies, sir?” Alan asks.

Hollister doesn’t reply. He doesn’t have the presence of mind for words. He extends his arm and he points. Upstairs.

I waste no time. I leave Douglas Hollister to Alan and Burns and I race up the beige-carpeted stairwell to the second floor. The lights are on in the upstairs hallway. The walls are white and covered in a patchwork of framed and carefully hung photos. I was wrong about the bedrooms. I see only two here: the double door of a master, and then a single door on the right at the end of the hallway. The other is a bathroom; I can tell because it’s open.

I begin with the master. I open the door and am hit with the faint odor of feces. I curl my nose and pull my gun and enter. It’s an unimaginative but entirely acceptable room. A ceiling fan hangs above a king-size bed. There’s a dark-blue accent wall, but the rest is white. All the furniture is wood, neither too old nor too new.

I’m never going to look at beige the same way again.