Finally, she asked: What kind of “liar’s personality” does Waters have? There are several types: Manipulators, or “High Machiavellians” (after the ruthless Italian prince), lie with impunity, seeing nothing wrong with it, using deceit as a tool to achieve their goals in love, business, politics—or crime. Other types include social liars, who lie to entertain, and adaptors, insecure people who lie to make positive impressions.
She decided that, given his career as a life-long prison guard and the ease with which he’d tried to take charge of the conversation and lead her away from the truth, Waters was in yet another category. He was an “actor,” someone for whom control was an important issue. They don’t lie regularly, only when necessary, and are less skilled than High Machs, but they’re good deceivers.
Dance now took off her glasses—chic ones, with dark red frames—and on the pretense of cleaning them, set them aside and put on narrower lenses encased in black steel, the “predator specs” she’d worn when interrogating Pell. She rose, walked around the desk and sat in the chair beside him.
Interrogators refer to the immediate space around a human being as the “proxemic zone,” ranging from “intimate,” six to eighteen inches, to “public,” ten feet away and beyond. Dance’s preferred space for
interrogation was within the intermediate “personal” zone, about two feet away.
Waters noted the move with curiosity but he said nothing about it. Nor did she.
“Now, Tony. I’d just like to go over a few things one more time.”
“Sure, whatever.” He lifted his ankle to his knee—a move that seemed relaxed but in fact was a glaring defense maneuver.
She returned to a topic that, she now knew, had raised significant stress indicators in Waters. “Tell me again about the computers at Capitola.”
“Computers?”
Responding with a question was a classic indicator of deception; the subject is trying to buy time to decide where the interrogator is going and how to frame a response.
“Yes, what kind do you have?”
“Oh, I’m not a tech guy. I don’t know.” His foot tapped. “Dells, I think.”
“Laptops or desktops?”
“We have both. Mostly they’re desktops. Not that there’re, like, hundreds of them, you know.” He offered a conspiratorial smile. “State budgets and everything.” He told a story about recent financial cuts at the Department of Corrections, which Dance found interesting only because it was such a bald attempt at distracting her.
She steered him back. “Now,access to computers in Capitola. Tell me about it again.”
“Like I said, cons aren’t allowed to use them.”
Technically, this was a true statement. But he hadn’t said that consdon’t use them. Deception includes evasive answers as well as outright lies.
“Couldthey have access to them?”
“Not really.”
Sort of pregnant, kind of dead.
“How do you mean that, Tony?”
“I should’ve said, no, they can’t.”
“But you said guards and office workers have access.”
“Right.”
“Now, why couldn’t a con use a computer?”
Waters had originally said that this was because they were in a “control zone.” She recalled an aversion behavior and a slight change in pitch when he’d used the phrase.
He now paused for just a second as, she supposed, he was trying to recall what he’d said. “They’re in an area of limited access. Only nonviolent cons are allowed there. Some of them help out in the office, supervised, of course. Administrative duty. But they can’t use the computers.”
“And Pell couldn’t get in there?”
“He’s classified as One A.”
Dance noticed the nonresponsive answer. And the blocking gesture—a scratch of his eyelid—when he gave it.
“And that meant he wasn’t allowed in any…what were those areas again?”
“LA locations. Limited access.” He now remembered what he’d said earlier. “Or control zones.”
“Controlled or control?”
A pause. “Control zone.”
“Controlled—with aned on the end—would make more sense. You’re sure that’s not it?”
He grew flustered. “Well, I don’t know. What difference does it make? We use ’em both.”
“And you use that term for other areas too? Like the warden’s office and the guards’ locker room—would they be control zones?”
“Sure…. I mean, some people use that phrase more than others. I picked it up at another facility.”
“Which one would that be?”
A pause. “Oh, I don’t remember. Look, I made it sound like it’s an official name or something. It’s just a thing we say. Everybody inside uses shorthand. I mean, prisons everywhere. Guards’re ‘hacks’; prisoners are ‘cons.’ It’s not official or anything. You do the same at CBI, don’t you? Everybody does.”
This was a double play: Deceptive subjects often try to establish camaraderie with their interrogators (“you do the same”) and use generalizations and abstractions (“everybody,” “everywhere”).
Dance asked in a low, steady voice, “Whether authorized or not, in whatever zone, have Daniel Pell and a computer ever been in the same room at the same time at Capitola?”
“I’ve never seen him on a computer, I swear. Honestly.”
The stress that people experience when lying pushes them into one of four emotional states: they’re angry, they’re depressed, they’re in denial or they want to bargain their way out of trouble. The words that Waters had just used—“I swear” and “honestly”—were expressions that, along with his agitated body language, very different from his baseline, told Dance that the guard was in the denial stage of deception. He just couldn’t accept the truth of whatever he’d done at the prison and was dodging responsibility for it.
It’s important to determine which stress state the subject is in because that allows the interrogator to decide on a tactic for questioning. When the subject is in the anger phase, for instance, you encourage him to vent until he exhausts himself.
In the case of denial, you attack on the facts.
Which was what she now did.
“You have access to the office where the computers are kept, right?”