Shakedown

Chapter Forty-seven

I wasn’t one of those people who could compartmentalize his life, tucking each competing component into a sanitized clean room where it existed independently of everything else. My life was like a teenager’s room. Everything was scattered on the?oor and I was always tripping over something.

That’s the way it was with Wendy, Joy, Kate, and this case. I was consumed with finding Wendy, confused about my feelings for Joy and Kate, and haunted by the images of Keyshon and Kevin begging me not to forget them. It would have been easier to live my life in a straight line-one person, one problem at a time.

“Food first,” Kate said when I came inside and found her in the kitchen.

She had changed into faded jeans, a navy blue V-neck cotton sweater and a scruffy pair of Nikes. Her new outfit may not have been a slinky black dress, but the effect was the same-dazzling.

We ate quickly, neither of us suggesting that the wine would have gone better with the sea bass than the tap water we drank from plastic cups. We rinsed the dishes, left them in the sink, and set up shop on the kitchen table.

“Where do you want to start?” she asked.

“I need to know who’s lying and who’s telling the truth but I don’t have a portable polygraph.”

“The polygraph isn’t a lie catcher’s only mechanical option anymore. A lot of research is being done on deception. Some of it involves using an MRI scan of the brain to look for neurological changes associated with lying. The subject pushes a button to answer questions during the brain scan. The MRI picks up changes in brain activity that are associated with lying.”

“Does it work?”

“Some of the research suggests that it’s as effective as the polygraph, but that’s no great comfort if you ask me. The polygraph is limited because it depends on peripheral nervous system activity. Deception is a cognition event that is controlled by the central nervous system. The MRI research has shown an increase in prefrontal and parietal activity when someone lies, but I don’t thing a judge is going to admit the results into evidence any time soon.”

“I don’t see people lining up to lay down inside an MRI. It’s claustrophobic and noisy as hell. I’d think that would produce enough stress to skew any results you’d get.”

“Have you ever had an MRI?”

“Not since this morning. Wendy called her mother after she saw me shaking the other night when we didn’t have dinner. Joy set it up and she also got me an appointment with a neurologist on Monday.”

“What about the movement disorder clinic at the KU Hospital?”

“They were happy to see me in two months. I didn’t mind waiting, but Joy did.”

Kate studied me with the bar-code scanning eyes I’d seen her use in the courtroom, her lids three-quarters open, pinched at the corners, her face?at with concentration. It was like she had X-ray vision into my soul. I imagined a torrent of micro expressions?ashing across my face like the ticker at the bottom of the screen on CNN. She leaned forward at the table, her chin in her hand, straightening up when she’d seen what she was looking for.

“You’ve got a lot on your plate, don’t you, Jack?”

“More than I asked for.”

“Well, you don’t have a portable polygraph or a portable MRI, which leaves you with me.”

“I could do worse.”

“Yes, you could. A lot worse.”

We let it hang there, both of us clear what we were talking about, neither willing to push it.

“Two things,” she said, rubbing her palms on her thighs and filling the dead air. “First, the Facial Action Coding System is not a silver bullet and, second, you’re probably better at reading faces than you give yourself credit for.”

“I’ll buy the first, but how do you figure the second?”

“Okay. If you meet someone, do you think you’d recognize them the next time you saw them?”

I thought for a moment. “Yeah. I may not remember their name, but I never forget a face.”

“Then you’re better at reading faces than the one in fifty people that have some form of face blindness.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“It’s called prosopagnosia. Usually someone with the condition has a hard time recognizing the same set of facial features again and again. It can be so severe that you could show a person who has the condition a picture of Elvis and she will think it’s Madonna, anybody except Elvis. In the worst cases, people don’t even recognize their own faces.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“Sure. Things could always be worse. Can you tell when someone is angry?”

“Sure.”

“How about when they’re happy or sad?”

“Of course.”

“You make judgments all day long about what someone is really thinking or feeling. You don’t do it just based on what they say and do. You do it based on their body language, their facial expressions, and their tone of voice.”

“But I’m not interested in their emotions. I’m interested in whether they are telling the truth.”

“Then you are definitely interested in their emotions. For most people, lying is stressful. That stress impacts their emotions, and the emotions a liar is trying to conceal will leak. That’s when you can catch them in a lie.”

“Give me an example.”

“Okay,” Kate said. “Some emotions just don’t go together. It’s very hard for someone who is angry to fake being afraid, or vice versa. The involuntary muscle movements associated with anger and fear just don’t go together. Fear moves the brows up and anger pulls them down. It’s impossible for your brows to be in two places at one time.”

“That’s it? The eyebrows are the windows to the soul?”

“Just don’t pluck them. No single gesture, facial expression, or muscle twitch will prove that someone is lying, but they are clues of emotions that don’t fit. That’s what I mean by leakage.”

“I remember you telling me that some people don’t leak.”

“Natural liars, sociopaths, actors, politicians, and trial lawyers are all used to convincing an audience of something whether or not they believe it. To varying degrees, deception doesn’t bother them. It’s what they do. They delight in having duped someone. But even they can leak because it’s impossible to completely control facial expressions. Too many of them are involuntary.”

“Like the micro facial expressions, the ones that happen so quickly you can’t see them.”

“Precisely. Genuine expressions don’t last long. The duration from onset to offset can be less than a second. Micro expressions?ash on and off the face in less than a quarter of a second. If the expression is asymmetrical, stronger on one side of the face than the other, or if the timing is wrong, or the duration is too long, those are all good signs that the expression shown is false.”

“But how does that prove someone is lying? I’ve interviewed plenty of people who it turned out were telling the truth but were scared to death I wouldn’t believe them.”

“That’s why context is so critical. The fear of not being believed is virtually impossible to distinguish from the fear of being caught lying.”

“Okay. Since I didn’t grow up playing with facial expression?ash cards like you did, how do I learn to recognize micro expressions?”

“Practice,” she said, rummaging through her purse. “Damn!”

“Don’t tell me you left your?ash cards at home.”

Kate poked me in the arm. “Don’t make fun of the teacher or I’ll rap your knuckles with my ruler. We don’t use?ash cards any more. We use images on a CD, which I left at my office.”

“So school is out?”

“Not so fast,” she said, examining my television. “Your TV has a DVD player with a freeze-frame feature. Do you have any movies?”

“Not anymore. Joy got them in the property settlement.”

“Well, at least the two of you settled something. Have you recorded anything? We could play it back and break it down frame by frame.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve been recording the local news to keep track of stories about the drug house murders. We can take a look at that.”

“It’s not?ash cards but we’ll make it work.”