Forests of the Night

by James W. Hall

  “You worthless punk,” he snarled at the camera. “Jerry Cox can’t even kill a freaking cat. A freaking alley cat. Jerry’s a scum-sucking dumb-ass bastard shit-for-brains. Can’t even kill a freaking freaking cat.”

  Charlotte knew he wasn’t going to shoot himself. The kid was spent. His eyes were dark vacuums, mouth slack, disgusted by his own grim appetites, his abject failure to accomplish a simple chore. For two or three seconds the boy struggled to pull the trigger, then he lowered the pistol and trudged to the camera and switched it off.

  Maybe the kid had wanted to be a voyeur of his own cruelty, or perhaps the tape was meant to win him admission into some ruthless cult of juveniles. Either way, the event turned out to be merely a testament to the boy’s utter ineptitude.

  The screen went black and Charlotte sagged in the padded chair.

  In the observation room, she heard voices, then the door between the rooms opened.

  “I should get fifty percent for the last one,” she said without turning from the empty screen. “He shot at the cat, but didn’t shoot himself.”

  Dr. Fedderman was silent. She could feel him looking at her. When he spoke, his voice was huskier than it had been earlier in the day.

  “When you voted no, you were reacting to the scene with the cat. You had no way to know the young man was going to consider suicide. This will count as an incorrect result.”

  “Hey, relax, Doc. I’m just kidding around with you.”

  “Oh,” Fedderman said. “I see.”

  “Why’re you so upset? Am I making you mad for some reason?”

  She swiveled her chair to catch his face. The room was still dim. Only the weak glow of the blank screen. Fedderman was a short, sleek man with a shaved head and a goatee. For two weeks he’d worn black turtlenecks and sharply creased blue jeans. Nobody in Miami wore black turtlenecks. Like he’d been time-warped in from a fifties Bleecker Street coffeehouse. Him and his bongo drums.

  “And why would I be angry at you, Officer Monroe?”

  “Maybe because I’m doing too well. Beating the averages.”

  “It’s research. I have no vested interest in any particular outcome.”

  “What about the software you’re peddling?”

  “You’re participating in a clinical trial. All data is useful.”

  “But if I keep beating your program, then your system isn’t as amazing as you say. Some ordinary patrol officer can do better, why should a department shell out the cash? Isn’t that why you’re pissed?”

  He stared at the empty screen and spoke with what was probably meant to sound like scientific detachment.

  “Ms. Monroe, so far you’ve produced fine results. They may turn out to be a statistical anomaly or they may not. If you continue to score this well over a longer period, then we’ll seek to explain how you accomplish these feats, and that information will help us refine our program. That’s the purpose of these experiments. Data collection. It is certainly not my intent to try to prove the superiority of my software over ordinary people.”

  “Your throat’s tight. There’s a squeak in your voice. You’re pissed.”

  He shifted his gaze and gave her a bleak appraisal. This was a man who knew the name and function of every muscle strand in the face and had learned through arduous practice how to tighten or relax them in every possible combination to signal the entire range of human emotions. Thousands upon thousands of expressions with only the subtlest differences among them.

  Facial coding, it was called, anatomical analysis of facial actions. This man knew his infraorbital triangle from his nasolabial furrow, and he was trying to fine-tune his computer program in facial recognition so it could sort out lies from truth, dangerous men from harmless ones. Charlotte had read up on him. Fedderman was renowned in his circle of scholars and researchers. Now he was trying to cash in, it seemed to her, make the jump from academia to where the serious money was, real-life applications.

  But at that moment there was no artifice in the good doctor’s face. He was so furious he was forced to swallow twice before he could speak again.

  “After lunch we’ll be doing faces alone,” Fedderman said. “Head shots. No body language, no other clues to put the expressions in context. Significantly more challenging than the scenarios you’ve been watching. More subtle and far more complex. This has just been the warm-up.”

  “No offense, Doc, but I’m out of gas. Two weeks of this is plenty. There’s real-life felons that need attending to.”

  Fedderman squeezed his lips into a smile that even a blind man could tell was insincere.

  “Lieutenant Rodriguez has volunteered your services for as long as I might need them. So we’ll see you at one o’clock on the dot. Faces in isolation. Have a lovely lunch, Monroe.”

  “May I?”

  The short man with a rigid crew cut held a cafeteria tray and nodded at the empty seat beside Charlotte.

  She said, “Sure,” and the man sat.

  A Caesar salad on his tray and a mug of coffee. He wore a blue shirt and dark trousers and a smile that was a little too twitchy.

  “Charlie Mears,” he said. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  He slid his business card across the table and she took it. Only his name and a cell number.

  “Officer Charlotte Monroe,” she said, and held out a hand. He took it and for an awkward second he seemed to consider bringing it to his lips. Then he squeezed it and let it go.

  She had that effect on some men, bringing out their latent gallantry. Though she’d never understood why. The woman she saw in the mirror was no stunner. Brown hair worn in a no-fuss straight cut that brushed her shoulders. Her eyes were hazel and on first glance appeared gentle, even vulnerable, but with a closer look, people usually caught the metallic flash of the woman she was. Focused, stubborn, with a low tolerance for bullshit. At five-foot-six, she was ten pounds too heavy to be called willowy. Most of those ten she’d earned in the gym, low weight, lots of reps. She’d inherited her mother’s jutting cheekbones and bronze complexion. Her mouth was a size larger than the fashion magazines endorsed. She’d been told it was her father’s mouth, though she’d never met the man.

  Across the table, Mears looked at his watch, then speared a few leaves of lettuce and munched thoughtfully.

  “To come to the point, Monroe. We’ve been following your progress with Dr. Fedderman. You’ve done quite well.”

  “Thanks.”

  When he’d swallowed, he said, “Actually, ‘quite well’ is a gross understatement. You’ve had remarkable results. So remarkable that I came down from D.C. especially to meet you.”

  She had a sip of tea and looked around at the bare walls of the cafeteria.

  “It’s just instincts,” she said. “Intuition and a little luck, no big deal.”

  She took a bite of her turkey sandwich, then laid it aside. Tried one of the potato chips. Stale.

  “Oh, no. It is a big deal, Monroe. A very big deal.”

  “Not to me it isn’t.”

  “Reason I’m here is, I’m heading up a new, somewhat unorthodox task force at the bureau. By traditional criminal science standards what we’re doing might be considered experimental. It’s forensics, but not the tweezers, microscope, black light variety.”

  “Forensic pathology.”

  “In that general area. But more specialized. Profiling serial killers, that’s still important, but we’re pioneering some new territory.”

  “If this is a recruiting pep talk, you wasted your trip. I’m a police officer, plain and simple street cop. I have no other professional aspirations.”

  He gave her an empty smile.

  “My team’s responsible for everything from forensic archaeology to the paranormal.”

  “Oh, come on. ESP? You guys believe in that horseshit?”

  “We believe in what works, whatever it may be based on. Skills like yours, for instance, may appear to be clairvoyant at first glance, but they aren’t. They’re
simply skills. Highly developed, perhaps. But still skills. You’re a gifted code cracker. Only your codes are human and emotional. It may be instinctive for you, but it’s nevertheless a very, very rare talent.”

  He ate more of his salad. Took a long swallow from his mug. He patted his mouth with the napkin and looked around at the room full of cops and secretaries. A couple of her friends were looking over at her curiously.

  “Let me ask you a couple of questions, Monroe?”

  “The answer is no. I’m happy doing what I’m doing.”

  “I understand that. But would you say that your ability to anticipate behavior and read body signals and facial expressions has benefited your police work? Perhaps even kept you safe at times?”

  “Maybe. That and good training.”

  “Think about it, Monroe. If we could learn more about these skills you possess and improve our methodology in teaching them to others, the applications would be immense. Take a Customs official at the airport, stamping passports, making eye contact, asking a couple of innocuous questions. He has maybe ten seconds to make a judgment about each person passing before him, an individual entering the country. He’s the last line of defense. What if that official was able to correctly distinguish honest answers from dishonest ones seventy, eighty percent of the time? Think of the impact, what catastrophes that might avert.”

  Charlotte was silent. Weighing his argument, but not buying it fully. Catching liars at airports was a long way from preventing catastrophes.

  “Could you do something for me right now, Charlotte? A small favor.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “When you look at me, at my face, my eyes, my mouth at this particular moment, what do you see?”

  “Hey, I’m off duty. It’s lunch, okay?”

  “Officer Monroe, from the results I’ve seen, I don’t think you’re ever off duty. Yours is the kind of gift that doesn’t shut down. I believe you’re always watching, evaluating, making highly informed judgments. Maybe it’s happening just below the surface of your awareness, but it’s there.”

  “Everybody does it.”

  “But few do it so well.”

  “Two weeks of tests. What does that prove?”

  “What I’m guessing is that you’re relieved to know you have this skill. Most of the time it probably feels like you’re eavesdropping on people’s thoughts. Invading their privacy. That’s how I’ve heard it described by one of the other members of our team. A man who’s incredibly good at reading faces and body language. Our most gifted associate. That is, until you cropped up. The best results we’ve ever come across, by the way, are from a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Thousands of hours of meditation have apparently given him the empathy and focus to detect and decode those fleeting facial expressions that can give away true emotions. Forty milliseconds, that’s how fast they come and go. But he can see them. And apparently so can you.”

  Charlotte put down the rest of the chip and looked into Mears’s eyes.

  “Fedderman said prison inmates were the best.”

  “That’s true, inmates score very high. Surrounded, as they are, by world-class deceivers and liars, it’s life or death to figure out who to trust.”

  “Buddhists and convicts, that’s quite a brotherhood.”

  “Like it or not, Monroe, you’re at the top of the class.”

  “So if I read your mind you’ll leave me alone?”

  Mears held her gaze but said nothing. His face neutral.

  “Okay. I see a guy who’s so good at hiding his feelings, he’s not sure what they are anymore.”

  Mears nodded, lips relaxing, then tightening.

  “Fair enough. Though that would be true for a lot of men. Especially in my profession.”

  “And I see a guy on edge. Anxious. Not as poised as he comes across. Like right at this moment, it’s like you’re waiting for a bomb to go off. Those tension lines below your eyes, a twitch in your right eyelid. The way you dab your tongue at the corner of your mouth. Four times in the last two minutes. You’re anxious, and I’m guessing that’s an unfamiliar feeling for you.”

  “You should be banned from the poker table, Monroe.”

  The cell phone on his belt chirped.

  Mears held her eyes for a moment and let it ring.

  “I believe this may be the bomb you were referring to, Ms. Monroe.”

  Mears snapped the phone open, listened, and said, “Yes, sir, she’s right here.”

  He handed the phone to Charlotte and a second later she was listening to a gruff, familiar voice. She’d never met the man, but she’d heard him speak on television often over the last nine years. Harold Benson, director of the FBI.

  He was courteous but aloof. Giving her a brisk speech that had the practiced rhythm of one he’d made a few hundred times before.

  As Charlotte was surely aware, the world had recently become a far more dangerous and unpredictable place than it was a few years before. And the FBI was responding aggressively and creatively to these new challenges. One way was by assembling teams of uniquely talented individuals with a variety of highly developed skills. Along those lines, the director had examined the results from the two weeks of testing Charlotte had undergone and he was highly impressed. She had an extraordinary gift, and he hoped she would consider the offer that Deputy Director Mears was making.

  His pitch was short and ended abruptly.

  “We know you have commitments in Miami. We could work around that. We need you, Monroe. Used properly, your skills could save lives and make a fundamental difference to your country. We’ll be in touch.”

  And without waiting for a response, he was gone.

  She handed the phone back to Mears. He smiled at her. No more tongue dabbing.

  “Triple your salary, big step up in your benefits package. Maybe a trip to D.C. now and then, but you’d be based here in Miami with Fedderman and a few others we’d send down. We’ll even give you a three-month grace period to try it out, see if it works. If for some reason it doesn’t suit you, your job’s still open at Gables PD. No need to decide right now. Tomorrow is fine.”

  Two

  Jacob Bright Sky Panther parked the red Ford pickup he’d stolen in Daytona Beach three blocks north of the Palm Beach address, tucked his Smith & Wesson .357 under the front seat, and set off down the beachfront boulevard, unarmed for the first time in months. He’d been told by his contact that the woman was harmless but would not do business with him if she found he was armed. Though it had been his experience that no man or woman was truly harmless, he took the risk and left his weapon behind.

  The sun floated in a cloudless sky, turning the Atlantic a flat, perfect blue. On the sharp line of the horizon Jacob watched a half dozen slender clouds glide southward like a war party of ghostly canoes. As if the ancient chiefs were monitoring him from afar, wagering on his chances for success.

  At the front gate of 267 Ocean Drive he buzzed the speaker button, and moments later a husky voice asked who the hell it was. Jacob gave his alias and the voice thought about it, then growled, “You’re twelve hours early.”

  Across the street, on the beach where the ocean crashed and foamed, white-haired people with big bellies marched back and forth as if guarding their stretch of sand from any riffraff who might try to sneak ashore.

  “I’m here now,” he said.

  Jacob waited. He watched the clouds thicken and re-form into clumsy battleships, and he listened to the explosions of surf. He watched the seagulls circle and splash.

  At the end of the broad avenue a white patrol car with a blue stripe appeared and came prowling his way. Motionless, Jacob watched it pass, offering his face to the policeman. Cowering wasn’t his way. If it was his fate to be captured at this place and time, then so be it.

  But the cop was gazing out to sea, missing an excellent opportunity to advance his career.

  When the gate finally buzzed, Jacob pushed it open and stepped through, shut it, and walked down the long bric
k pathway toward the main house.

  Scattered about the walkway were courtyards and columns topped by gargoyles. In tiled fountains, lazy goldfish circled the lily pads and naked cherubs pissed into the sultry air.

  Jacob advanced along the shaded walk, trailing his fingers across the cool braille of the stucco. It felt thick enough to withstand cannon fire.

  While he waited beside the double doors, Jacob turned and stared back through the front gate, watching the waves shatter against the white sand. He breathed the ocean air. Salty, with a hint of fresh oysters and sandalwood.

  Jacob blinked and drew a disciplined breath.

  He had spent his life in the mountains and hadn’t been prepared for the sea. It was bigger than he’d imagined. It went out so far, it disappeared into itself. A blue empty distance.

  Jacob wasn’t sure how long he waited on the front porch. He’d never worn a watch. What mattered was day and night, summer, winter, not the second or minute. What good were the clicking gears of a timepiece, pulverizing each day into fine, meaningless powder?

  He had a natural talent for keeping himself occupied. His senses perpetually alert, like now, feeling the prickle of sunlight on his skin, inhaling the mix of ocean scents and the new-cut grass. This instinctive watchfulness served him well this last year. Hunted as he was, his first impulse when arriving somewhere new was to chart the best path of escape.

  Behind him the hinges squealed, and he turned to find a woman, darkly tanned with tattoos circling her upper arms. Except for a tiny swatch of glittery green fabric over her crotch, she was naked.

  She eyed the length of his body, her gaze returning slowly to his face.

  “Who sent you?”

  The password ritual.

  “Levi,” Jacob said.

  The name clicked the tumblers in her eyes, and her jaw muscles eased.

  “You’re early. I don’t like early.”

  It was the voice from the speaker box, harsh and croaky as if she’d been gargling beach sand.