More Twisted

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 . . .
    Dance forced the recollection of Pell’s words away.
    “What happened?” Sandoval asked, seemingly moreconcerned 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 true; 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 and told the truth.
    But there are different types of stress, and the sort that Dance had observed Pell exhibiting didn’t suggest deception.
    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 scratched his left hand absently. In the fleshy Y between the index finger and thumb was a scar, the remnant of a gang tat.
    “Exactly.”
    What, she wondered, was bothering him so much? Was it that—
    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 straight arrow. 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, “That 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 undependable 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.”
    “It wasn’t there one year ago.” Dance muttered. “ That’s why Pell was so stressed. I was getting close to the truth—somebody did get the hammer from his aunt’s in Bakersfield and had a fake wallet made up. Only it wasn’t to frame him.”
    “Oh, no,” TJ whispered.
    “What?” Millar asked, looking from one agent to the other.
    “Pell set the whole thing up himself,” she said. “He couldn’t escape from Capitola.” That facility, like Pelican Bay in the north of the state, was a high-tech superprison, reserved for the most dangerous prisoners. “But he could from here.”
    Kathryn Dance lunged for the phone.

A LSO BY J EFFERY D EAVER
    Carte Blanche
    Edge
    The Burning Wire*
    Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (Editor)
    The Watch List ( The Copper Bracelet and
    The Chopin Manuscript ) (Contributor)
    Roadside Crosses**
    The Bodies Left Behind
    The Broken Window*
    The Sleeping Doll**
    More Twisted: Collected Stories, Volume Two
    The Cold Moon*/**
    The Twelfth Card*
    Garden of Beasts
    Twisted: Collected Stories
    The Vanished Man*
    The Stone Monkey*
    The Blue Nowhere
    The Empty Chair*
    Speaking in Tongues
    The Devil’s Teardrop
    The Coffin Dancer*
    The Bone Collector*
    A Maiden’s Grave
    Praying for Sleep
    The Lesson of Her Death
    Mistress of Justice
    Hard