Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel (5 page)

“Sacred!” the crowd took up.

“Killers,” Fisk shouted, his voice surprisingly resonant for such a scarecrow.

Though it wasn’t directed at her, Dance felt a chill and flashed back to the incident in the ICU, when enraged Julio Millar had grabbed her from behind as Michael O’Neil and another companion intervened.

“Killers!”

The protesters took up the chant. “Kill-ers. Kill-ers!” Dance guessed they’d be hoarse later in the day.

“Good luck,” she told the security chief, who rolled his eyes uncertainly.

Inside, Dance glanced around, half expecting to see her mother. Then she got directions from reception and hurried down a corridor to the room where she’d find the witness in the Roadside Cross Case.

When she stepped into the open doorway, the blond teenage girl inside, lying in the elaborate hospital bed, looked up.

“Hi, Tammy. I’m Kathryn Dance.” Smiling at the girl. “You mind if I come in?”

ALTHOUGH TAMMY FOSTER
had been left to drown in the trunk, the attacker had made a miscalculation.

Had he parked farther from shore the tide would have been high enough to engulf the entire car, dooming the poor girl to a terrible death. But, as it happened, the car had gotten bogged down in loose sand not far out, and the flowing tide had filled the Camry’s trunk with only six inches of water.

At about 4:00 a.m. an airline employee on his way to work saw the glint from the car. Rescue workers got to the girl, half conscious from exposure, bordering on hypothermia, and raced her to the hospital.

“So,” Dance now asked, “how you feeling?”

“Okay, I guess.”

She was athletic and pretty but pale. Tammy had an equine face, straight, perfectly tinted blond hair and a pert nose that Dance guessed had started life with a somewhat different slope. Her quick glance at a small cosmetic bag suggested to Dance that she rarely went out in public without makeup.

Dance’s badge appeared.

Tammy glanced at it.

“You’re looking pretty good, all things considered.”

“It was so cold,” Tammy said. “I’ve never been so cold in my life. I’m still pretty freaked.”

“I’m sure you are.”

The girl’s attention swerved to the TV screen. A soap opera was on. Dance and Maggie watched them from time to time, usually when the girl was home sick from school. You could miss months and still come back and figure out the story perfectly.

Dance sat down and looked at the balloons and flowers on a nearby table, instinctively searching for red roses or religious gifts or cards emblazoned with crosses. There were none.

“How long are you going to be in the hospital?”

“I’m getting out today, probably. Maybe tomorrow, they said.”

“How’re the doctors? Cute?”

A laugh.

“Where do you go to school?”

“Robert Louis Stevenson.”

“Senior?”

“Yeah, in the fall.”

To put the girl at ease, Dance made small talk: asking about whether she was in summer school, if she’d thought about what college she wanted to attend, her family, sports. “You have any vacation plans?”

“We do
now,
” she said. “After this. My mom and sister and me are going to visit my grandmother in Florida next week.” There was exasperation in her voice and Dance could tell that the last thing the girl wanted to do was go to Florida with the family.

“Tammy, you can imagine, we really want to find whoever did this to you.”

“Asshole.”

Dance lifted an agreeing eyebrow. “Tell me what happened.”

Tammy explained about being at a club and leaving just after midnight. She was in the parking lot when somebody came up from behind, taped her mouth, hands and feet, threw her in the trunk and then drove to the beach.

“He just left me there to, like, drown.” The girl’s eyes were hollow. Dance, empathetic by nature—a gift from her mother—could feel the horror herself, a hurting tickle down her spine.

“Did you know the attacker?”

The girl shook her head. “But I know what happened.”

“What’s that?”

“Gangs.”

“He was in a gang?”

“Yeah, everybody knows about it. To get into a gang, you have to kill somebody. And if you’re in a Latino gang you have to kill a white girl. Those’re the rules.”

“You think the perp was Latino?”

“Yeah, I’m sure he was. I didn’t see his face but got a look at his hand. It was darker, you know. Not black. But he definitely wasn’t a white guy.”

“How big was he?”

“Not tall. About five-six. But really, really strong. Oh, something else. I think last night I said it was just one guy. But I remembered this morning. There were two of them.”

“You saw two of them?”

“More, I could
feel
somebody else nearby, you know how that happens?”

“Could it have been a woman?”

“Oh, yeah, maybe. I don’t know. Like I was saying, I was pretty freaked out.”

“Did anybody touch you?”

“No, not that way. Just to put tape on me and throw me in the trunk.” Her eyes flashed with anger.

“Do you remember anything about the drive?”

“No, I was too scared. I think I heard some clanks or something, some noise from inside the car.”

“Not the trunk?”

“No. Like metal or something, I thought. He put it in the car after he got me in the trunk. I saw this movie, one of the
Saw
movies. And I thought maybe he was going to use whatever it was to torture me.”

The bike, Dance was thinking, recalling the tread marks at the beach. He’d brought a bicycle with him for his escape. She suggested this, but Tammy said that wasn’t it; there was no way to get a bike in the backseat. She added gravely, “And it didn’t sound like a bike.”

“Okay, Tammy.” Dance adjusted her glasses and kept looking at the girl, who glanced at the flowers and cards and stuffed animals. The girl added, “Look at everything people gave me. That bear there, isn’t he the best?”

“He’s cute, yep. . . . So you’re thinking it was some Latino kids in a gang.”

“Yeah. But . . . well, you know, like now, it’s kind of over with.”

“Over with?”

“I mean, I didn’t get killed. Just a little wet.” A laugh as she avoided Dance’s eyes. “They’re definitely freaking. It’s all over the news. I’ll bet they’re gone. I mean, maybe even left town.”

It was certainly true that gangs had initiation rites. And some involved murder. But killings were rarely outside the race or ethnicity of the gang and were most often directed at rival gang members or informants. Besides, what had happened to Tammy was too elaborate. Dance knew from running gang crimes that they were business first; time is money and the less spent on extracurricular activities the better.

Dance had already decided that Tammy didn’t think her attacker was a Latino gangbanger at all. Nor did she believe there were two of them.

In fact, Tammy knew more about the perp than she was letting on.

It was time to get to the truth.

The process of kinesic analysis in interviewing and interrogation is first to establish a baseline—a catalog of behaviors that subjects exhibit when telling the truth: Where do they put their hands, where do they look and how often, do they swallow or clear their throats often, do they lace their speech with “Uhm,” do they tap their feet, do they slouch or sit forward, do they hesitate before answering?

Once the truthful baseline is determined, the kinesic expert will note any deviations from it when the subject is asked questions to which he or she might have reason to answer falsely. When most people lie, they feel stress and anxiety and try to relieve those unpleasant sensations with gestures or speech patterns that differ from the baseline. One of Dance’s
favorite quotes came from a man who predated the coining of the term “kinesics” by a hundred years: Charles Darwin, who said, “Repressed emotion almost always comes to the surface in some form of body motion.”

When the subject of the attacker’s identity had arisen, Dance observed that the girl’s body language changed from her baseline: She shifted her hips uneasily and a foot bobbed. Arms and hands are fairly easy for liars to control but we’re much less aware of the rest of our body, especially toes and feet.

Dance also noted other changes: in the pitch of the girl’s voice, fingers flipping her hair and “blocking gestures,” touching her mouth and nose. Tammy also offered unnecessary digressions, she rambled and she made overgeneralized statements (“Everybody knows about it”), typical of someone who’s lying.

Convinced that the girl was withholding information, Kathryn Dance now slipped into her analytic mode. Her approach to getting a subject to be honest consisted of four parts. First, she asked: What’s the subject’s role in the incident? Here, Tammy was a victim and a witness only, Dance concluded. She wasn’t a participant—either involved in another crime or staging her own abduction.

Second, what’s the motive to lie? The answer, it was pretty clear, was that the poor girl was terrified of reprisal. This was common, and made Dance’s job easier than if Tammy’s motive were to cover up her own criminal behavior.

The third question: What’s the subject’s general personality type? This determination would suggest what approach Dance should adopt in pursuing the
interrogation—should she, for instance, be aggressive or gentle; work toward problem solving or offer emotional support; behave in a friendly manner or detached? Dance categorized her subjects according to attributes in the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, which assesses whether someone is an extravert or introvert, thinking or feeling, sensing or intuitive.

The distinction between extravert and introvert is about attitude. Does the subject act first and then assess the results (an extravert), or reflect before acting (introvert)? Information gathering is carried out either by trusting the five senses and verifying data (sensing) or relying on hunches (intuitive). Decision making occurs by either objective, logical analysis (thinking) or by making choices based on empathy (feeling).

Although Tammy was pretty, athletic and apparently a popular girl, her insecurities—and, Dance had learned, an unstable home life—had made her an introvert, and one who was intuitive and feeling. This meant Dance couldn’t use a blunt approach with the girl. Tammy would simply stonewall—and be traumatized by harsh questioning.

Finally, the fourth question an interrogator must ask is: What kind of
liar’s
personality does the subject have?

There are several types. Manipulators, or “High Machiavellians” (after the Italian political philosopher who, literally, wrote the book on ruthlessness), see absolutely nothing wrong with lying; they use deceit as a tool to achieve their goals in love, business, politics or crime and are very, very good at deception.
Other types include social liars, who lie to entertain; adaptors, insecure people who lie to make positive impressions; and actors, who lie for control.

Dance decided Tammy was a combination of adaptor and actor. Her insecurities would make her lie to boost her fragile ego, and she would lie to get her way.

Once a kinesic analyst answers these four questions, the rest of the process is straightforward: She continues questioning the subject, noting carefully those queries that elicit stress reactions—indicators of deception. Then she keeps returning to those questions, and related ones, probing further, closing in on the lie, and noting how the subject is handling the increasing levels of stress. Is she angry, in denial, depressed or trying to bargain her way out of the situation? Each of these states requires different tools to force or trick or encourage the subject to finally tell the truth.

This is what Dance did now, sitting forward a bit to put herself in a close but not invasive “proxemic zone”—about three feet away from Tammy. This would make her uneasy, but not overly threatened. Dance kept a faint smile on her face and decided not to exchange her gray-rimmed glasses for her black frames—her “predator specs”—which she wore to intimidate High Mach subjects.

“That’s very helpful, Tammy, everything you’ve said. I really appreciate your cooperation.”

The girl smiled. But she also glanced at the door. Dance read: guilt.

“But one thing,” the agent added, “we have some reports from the crime scene. Like on
CSI,
you know?”

“Sure. I watch it.”

“Which one do you like?”

“The original. You know, Las Vegas.”

“That’s the best, I hear.” Dance had never seen the show. “But from the evidence it doesn’t seem like there were two people. Either in the parking lot or at the beach.”

“Oh. Well, like I said, it was just a, like, feeling.”

“And one question I had. That clanking you heard? See, we didn’t find any other car wheel tread marks either. So we’re real curious how he got away. Let’s go back to the bicycle. I know you didn’t think that was the sound in the car, the clanking, but any way it could have been, you think?”

“A bicycle?”

Repeating a question is often a sign of deception. The subject is trying to buy time to consider the implications of an answer and to make up something credible.

“No, it couldn’t. How could he get it inside?” Tammy’s denial was too fast and too adamant. She’d considered a bicycle too but didn’t want to admit the possibility, for some reason.

Dance lifted an eyebrow. “Oh, I don’t know. One of my neighbors has a Camry. It’s a pretty big car.”

The girl blinked; she was surprised, it seemed, that Dance knew the make of her car. That the agent had done her homework was making Tammy uneasy. She looked at the window. Subconsciously, she was seeking a route of escape from the unpleasant anxiety. Dance was on to something. She felt her own pulse tap harder.

“Maybe. I don’t know,” Tammy said.

“So, he could’ve had a bike. That might mean he
was somebody your age, a little younger. Adults ride bikes, sure, but you see teenagers with them more. Hey, what do you think about it being somebody in school with you?”

“School? No way. Nobody I know would do something like that.”

“Anybody ever threaten you? Have any fights with anybody at Stevenson?”