Nothing inside at all. Had been empty for a couple of days actually.” He looked up, his lips tight, as he seemed to be debating. Then his eyes dipped as he said, “I didn’t catch it.”
“Catch what?”
“The thing is, I’ve worked the Q and Soledad and Lompoc. Half dozen others. We learn to look for certain things. See, if something big’s going down, the cons’ cells change. Things’ll disappear—sometimes it’s evidence that they’re going to make a run, or evidence of shit a con’s done that he doesn’t want us to know about. Or what he’sgoing to do. Because he knows we’ll look over the cell with a microscope after.”
“But with Pell you didn’t think about him throwing everything out.”
“We never had an escape from Capitola. It can’t happen. And they’re watched so close, it’s almost impossible for a con to move on another one—kill him, I mean.” The man’s face was flushed. “I should’ve thought better. If it’d been Lompoc, I’d’ve known right away something was going down.” He rubbed his eyes. “I screwed up.”
“That’d be a tough leap to make,” Dance reassured him. “From housekeeping to escaping.”
He shrugged and examined his nails. He wore no jewelry but Dance could see the indentation of a wedding band. It occurred to her that, for once, this was no badge of infidelity but a concession to the job. Probably, circulating among dangerous prisoners, it was better not to wear anything they might steal.
“Sounds like you’ve been in this business for a while.”
“Long time. After the army I got into corrections. Been there ever since.” He brushed his crew-cut, grinning. “Sometimes seems like forever. Sometimes seems like just yesterday. Two years till I retire. In a funny way, I’ll miss it.” He was at ease now, realizing he wouldn’t be horsewhipped for not foreseeing the escape.
She asked about where he lived, his family. He was married and held up his left hand, laughing; her deduction about the ring proved correct. He and his wife had two children, both bound for college, he said proudly.
But while they chatted, a silent alarm was pulsing within Dance. She had a situation on her hands.
Tony Waters was lying.
Many falsehoods go undetected simply because the person being deceived doesn’t expect to be lied to.
Dance had asked Waters here only to get information about Daniel Pell, so she wasn’t in interrogation mode. If Waters had been a suspect or a hostile witness, she’d have been looking for stress signs when he gave certain answers, then kept probing those topics until he admitted lying and eventually told the truth.
This process only works, though, if you determine the subject’s nondeceptive baseline behaviorbefore you start asking the sensitive questions, which Dance, of course, had had no reason to do because she’d assumed he’d be truthful.
Even without a baseline comparison, though, a perceptive kinesic interrogator can sometimes spot deception. Two clues signal lying with some consistency: One is a very slight increase in the pitch of the voice, because lying triggers an emotional response within most people, and emotion causes vocal cords to tighten. The other signal is pausing before and during answering, since lying is mentally challenging.
One who’s lying has to think constantly about what he and other people have said previously about the topic, then craft a fictitious response that’s consistent with those prior statements and what he believes
the interrogator knows.
In her conversation with the guard, Dance had become aware that at several points his voice had risen in pitch and he’d paused when there was no reason for him to. Once she caught on to this, she looked back to other behaviors and saw that they suggested deception: offering more information than necessary, digressing, engaging in negation movement—touching his head, nose and eyes particularly—and aversion, turning away from her.
As soon as there’s evidence of deception, an interview turns into an interrogation, and the officer’s approach changes. It was at that point in their conversation that she’d broken off the questions about Pell and had begun talking about topics he’d have no reason to lie about—his personal life, the Peninsula, and so on. This was to establish his baseline behavior.
As she was doing this, Dance performed her standard four-part analysis of the subject himself, to give her an idea of how tactically to plan the interrogation.
First, she asked, what was his role in the incident? She concluded that Tony Waters was at best an uncooperative witness; at worst, an accomplice of Pell’s.
Second, did he have a motive to lie? Of course. Waters didn’t want to be arrested or lose his job because intentionally or through negligence he’d helped Daniel Pell escape. He might also have a personal or financial interest in aiding the killer.
Third, what was his personality type? Interrogators need this information to adjust their own demeanor when questioning the subject—should they be aggressive or conciliatory? Some officers simply determine if the subject is an introvert or extrovert, which gives a pretty good idea of how assertive to be. Dance, though, preferred a more comprehensive approach, trying to assign code letters from the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, which includes three other attributes in addition to introvert or extrovert: thinking or feeling, sensing or intuitive, judging or perceiving.
Dance concluded that Waters was a thinking-sensing-judging-extrovert, which meant that she could be more blunt with him than with a more emotional, internalized subject, and could use various reward-punishment techniques to break down the lies.