Triple Threat

buildings to the back of the mall. There he hesitated for only a moment, charged up the sand hill and scaled the six-foot chain-link O’Neil had surveyed earlier, shredding part of his jacket as he deftly vaulted the barbed wire. He sprawled onto the unkempt land on the other side of the fence, also mostly sand. It was a deserted former military base, hundreds of acres.
    O’Neil and two deputies approached the fence. The detective scaled it fast, tearing his shirt and losing some skin on the back of his hand as he crested the barbed wire. He leaped to the sand on the other side. He rolled once, righted himself and drew his gun, anticipating an attack.
    But the perp had disappeared.
    One of the deputies behind him got most of the way up the fence, but lost his grip and fell. He dropped straight down, off balance, and O’Neil heard the pop of his ankle as it broke.
    “Oh,” the young man muttered as he looked down at the odd angle. He turned as pale as the fog and passed out.
    The other deputy called for a medic then started up the fence.
    “No!” O’Neil shouted. “Stay there.”
    “But—”
    “I’ll handle the pursuit. Call a chopper.” And he turned, sprinting through the sand and succulents and scrub oak and pine, dodging around dunes and stands of dry trees—behind any one of which an armed suspect could be waiting.
    He hardly wanted to handle the pursuit alone but he had no choice. Just after he’d landed, he’d seen a sign lying face up on the sand.
    DANGER UXO
    UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE
    It featured a picture of an explosion coming up from the ground. Red years ago, the paint was now pink.
    This area had been part of the military base’s artillery range, and reportedly thousands of tons of shells and grenades were buried here, waiting to be cleared as soon as the Pentagon’s budget allowed.
    But O’Neil thought of the two hundred people who’d die in less than two hours and began to sprint along the trail that the suspect had been kind enough to leave in the sand.
    The unreasonable idea occurred to him that if he took Kathryn Dance’s advice—to move
fast
—he might be past the cannon shell when it detonated.
    He didn’t, however, think an explosion like that was something you could outrun.
    # # #
    Kinesic analysis works because of one simple concept, which Dance thought of as the Ten Commandments Principle.
    Although she herself wasn’t religious, she liked the metaphor. It boiled down to simply: Thou Shalt Not…
    What came after that prohibition didn’t matter. The gist was that people knew the difference between right and wrong and they felt uneasy doing something they shouldn’t.
    Some of this stemmed from the fear of getting caught, but still we’re largely hardwired to do the right thing.
    When people are deceptive (either actively misstating or failing to give the whole story) they experience stress and this stress reveals itself. Charles Darwin said, “Repressed emotion almost always comes to the surface in some form of body motion.”
    The problem for interrogators is that stress doesn’t necessarily show up as nail biting, sweating and eye avoidance. It could take the form of a pleasant grin, a cheerful nod, a sympathetic wag of the head.
    You don’t say…
    Well, that’s terrible…
    What a body language expert must do is compare subjects’ behavior in nonstressful situations with their behavior when they might be lying. Differences between the two suggest—though they don’t prove—deception. If there
is
some variation, a kinesic analyst then continues to probe the topic that’s causing the stress until the subject confesses, or it’s otherwise explained.
    In interrogating Wayne Keplar, Dance would take her normal approach: asking a number of innocuous questions she knew the answer to and that the suspect would have no reason to lie about. She’d also just shoot the breeze with him, no agenda other than to note how he behaved when feeling no stress. This would establish his kinesic “baseline”—a catalog of his body language, tone of voice and choice of expressions when he was at ease and truthful.
    Only then would she turn to questions about the impending attack and look for variations from the baseline when he answered.
    But establishing the baseline usually requires many hours, if not days, of casual discussion.
    Time that Kathryn Dance didn’t have.
    It was now 2:08.
    Still, there was no option other than to do the best she could. She’d learned that