Roadside Crosses

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’sfavorite 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.