"Not exactly." Dance sat down, peered into the coffee cup she'd left on the desk forty-five minutes ago. Nondairy creamer scummed the surface. "I rate it as, oh, one of the least successful interrogations of all time."
"You look shook, boss," said a short, wiry young man, with freckles and curly red hair, wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a plaid sports coat. TJ's outfit was unconventional for an investigative agent with the CBI--the most conservative law-enforcement agency in the Great Bear State--but so was pretty much everything else about him. Around thirty and single, TJ Scanlon lived in the hills of Carmel Valley, his house a ramshackle place that could have been a diorama in a counterculture museum depicting California life in the 1960s. TJ tended to work solo much of the time, surveillance and undercover, rather than pairing up with another CBI agent, which was the bureau's standard procedure. But Dance's regular partner was in Mexico on an extradition and TJ had jumped at the chance to help out and see the Son of Manson.
"Not shook. Just curious." She explained how the interview had been going fine when, suddenly, Pell turned on her. Under TJ's skeptical gaze, she conceded, "Okay, I'm a little shook. I've been threatened before. But his were the worst kinds of threats."
"Worst?" asked Juan Millar, a tall, dark-complexioned young detective with the Investigations Division of the MCSO--the Monterey County Sheriff's Office, which was headquartered not far from the courthouse.
"Calm threats," Dance said.
TJ filled in, "Cheerful threats. You know you're in trouble when they stop screaming and start whispering."
The little ones spend a lot of time alone. . . .
"What happened?" Sandoval asked, seemingly more concerned about the state of his case than threats against Dance.
"When he denied knowing Herron, there was no stress reaction at all. It was only when I had him talking about police conspiracy that he started to exhibit aversion and negation. Some extremity movement too, deviating from his baseline."
Kathryn Dance was often called a human lie detector, but that wasn't accurate; in reality she, like all successful kinesic analysts and interrogators, was a stress detector. This was the key to deception; once she spotted stress, she'd probe the topic that gave rise to it and dig until the subject broke.
Kinesics experts identify several different types of stress individuals experience. The stress that arises primarily when someone isn't telling the whole truth is called "deception stress." But people also experience general stress, which occurs when they are merely uneasy or nervous, and has nothing to do with lying. It's what someone feels when, say, he's late for work, has to give a speech in public or is afraid of physical harm. Dance had found that different kinesic behaviors signal the two kinds of stress.
She explained this and added, "My sense was that he'd lost control of the interview and couldn't get it back. So he went ballistic."
"Even though what you were saying supported his defense?" Lanky Juan Millar absently scratched his left hand. In the fleshy Y between the index finger and thumb was a scar, the remnant of a removed gang tat.
"Exactly."
Then Dance's mind made one of its curious jumps. A to B to X. She couldn't explain how they happened. But she always paid attention. "Where was Robert Herron murdered?" She walked to a map of Monterey County on Sandoval's wall.
"Here." The prosecutor touched an area in the yellow trapezoid.
"And the well where they found the hammer and wallet?"
"About here, make it."
It was a quarter mile from the crime scene, in a residential area.
Dance was staring at the map.
She felt TJ's eyes on her. "What's wrong, boss?"
"You have a picture of the well?" she asked.
Sandoval dug in the file. "Juan's forensic people shot a lot of pics."
"Crime scene boys love their toys," Millar said, the rhyme sounding odd from the mouth of such a Boy Scout. He gave a shy smile. "I heard that somewhere."
The prosecutor produced a stack of color photographs, riffled through them until he found the ones he sought.
Gazing at them, Dance asked TJ, "We ran a case there six, eight months ago, remember?"
"The arson, sure. In that new housing development."
Tapping the map, the spot where the well was located, Dance continued, "The development is still under construction. And that"--she nodded at a photograph--"is a hard-rock well."
Everybody in the area knew that water was at such a premium in this part of California that hard-rock wells, with their low output and unreliable supply, were never used for agricultural irrigation, only for private homes.
"Shit." Sandoval closed his eyes briefly. "Ten years ago, when Herron was killed, that was all farmland. The well wouldn't've been there then."