Shakedown

by Joel Goldman

  Troy found his voice again, swallowing hard, slowing his pace, and lowering his voice to regain control.

  “I’ve got to follow the case wherever it goes, Jack. I can’t ignore Wendy’s history. You know that. It’s still obstruction of justice.”

  Wendy’s drug use had not been a secret. Things like that never stay under wraps. I had talked about it openly, proud that she was doing so well in recovery. Troy was twisting my pride into his suspicion.

  “You want to talk obstruction of justice? How about wasting everyone’s time trying to prove that someone on my squad tipped off whoever killed Marcellus and his people instead of working the hard facts of the case and finding my daughter?”

  I had five inches and twenty pounds on Troy, but I’d managed to set him off again. He stepped up, getting in my face, biting off his questions.

  “Is that what you think I’m doing? You think we haven’t run every bullet through ballistics, and every fingerprint, hair, fiber, blood sample, and scrap of DNA through the lab? You think we haven’t run down everyone who was a witness or could have been a witness? Do really think all I’ve been doing is sitting around with my thumb up my ass waiting for you to call Ammara to tell her what we should do next while you implicate Colby Hudson in a murder and your daughter goes missing?”

  I knew all that but none of it mattered. He had to see the whole picture. I didn’t. All I had to see was that my daughter was dragged into something not of her making. It didn’t matter why or how. The only thing that mattered was what I was going to do about it.

  “Then you know I haven’t gotten in your way and you know that I’m going to keep looking for my daughter.”

  Troy walked around me, hands on his hips, stopping in the middle of my yard. I turned, watching him.

  “Damnit, Jack. You’ve done this long enough to know better. I’ve got enough to do without looking over my shoulder for you. I don’t know what’s going on with Colby, but I’m not going to crucify him based on secondhand jailhouse rumors. And, if Wendy is in trouble, we’ll find her. If she’s mixed up with Colby and Colby’s in trouble, well, then she could be in trouble, too, and we’ll have to let the chips fall on that one. Don’t make it worse.”

  I would have made the same speech if our positions were reversed. The difference is I would have expected him to do the same things I had and he expected me to be a good civilian and sit by the phone waiting for it to ring with news good or bad. I had to back off him even if I wasn’t going to do what he wanted me to do.

  “Okay, I’ll stay out of your way but you’ve at least got to keep me in the loop. Let Ammara tell me what’s going on. I’m entitled to that much.”

  Troy thought for a minute, nodded, and let out a long breath. “That’s fair. Everyone on the squad who took the polygraph passed. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a dead issue except for Colby. The U.S. Attorney is looking at his purchase of Rice’s car and house. The warden at Leavenworth said Rice’s death was a suicide, but I agree with you that the timing with your visit is a little too neat. I’ll see what the warden says about a cop calling in a favor. That’s it. That’s where we are.”

  Chapter Forty-six

  Troy turned toward the car, emphasizing that our meeting was over. He may have been finished, but I wasn’t.

  “What about the gun that was found at the rail yard?” I asked.

  Ammara perked up, catching Troy’s eye. She tilted her head slightly toward me, urging him to answer. Troy stopped. He was holding back. He still didn’t trust me, which made us even.

  “It’s a match, isn’t it?” I asked. “The same gun was used to kill Javy Ordonez and the five people in Marcellus’s house.”

  “We aren’t letting that out, so if it gets out, I’ll know how,” Troy said, his back still turned toward me.

  “What about Oleta’s son? Same gun?”

  Troy shook his head. “No. Grisnik sent us the ballistics. Her son was killed with a nine millimeter. The gun found at the rail yard was a forty-five.”

  “What did you get on the registration for the forty-five?”

  He rotated slowly around, hands back on his hips, giving me his hard look again. I waited, letting my silence force him to tell me. He glanced at Ammara who nodded again, tipping the scales in my favor.

  “The gun was registered to a dealer in St. Louis,” Troy said. “He brought a pair of them to a show in Kansas City seventeen years ago. Reported them stolen along with a pair of night-vision goggles. He filed a police report claiming that a woman distracted him by ?ashing her tits while her partner, some guy, snatched the guns and goggles. Cops never made an arrest.”

  “What about the other gun, the mate to the one we found?”

  “Still missing.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “But it’s not enough, not by a long stretch,” Troy said.

  His cell phone rang and he walked out in the street to take the call. Ammara waited until Troy was out of earshot.

  “I can’t get you the files you wanted on Thomas Rice. Troy has them locked up. I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “Don’t sweat it. I put you in a tough spot. I’m the one who should be apologizing.”

  “Troy’s not doing a bad job. In fact, he’s doing a pretty good job. He’s just growing into being in charge. That comes naturally to you. It’s more of a process for him.”

  “Just don’t let him leave Wendy to the last.”

  “I won’t. By the way, I got a phone call from that guy who gave you the dog.”

  “Latrell Kelly?”

  “That’s him.”

  “You find anything else out about him?” I asked.

  “Nothing. One of the neighbors says he keeps odd hours, leaving the house late at night, coming home at dawn. That’s evidence of someone having a good time, not killing people.”

  “Latrell strike you as the party-hearty type?”

  She shook her head. “Not unless he has a secret identity.”

  “You better find out if he does. I gave him one of my cards and wrote your number on it. I told him to call you if he remembered anything else. What’d he have to say when he called?”

  “Nothing about the case. Just said he had some toys for the dog he forgot to give you. Asked me for your phone number. I told him that I couldn’t give it to him but that I’d pass the message on and you’d call him.”

  “You think he really has some toys for the dog or that he’d just rather talk to me than to you?”

  “I don’t know. I interviewed him when we did the neighborhood canvass. He seemed like one of the good guys. He doesn’t have a record. He has a regular job; his employer vouched for him. He keeps his place up and isn’t into the whole hip-hop gangsta bullshit thing. Maybe you clicked with him and I didn’t. After all, he gave you the dog.”

  Managing the information ?ow is key to any investigation. I had told my story to Troy in the order everything had happened, but that’s not how evidence is collected. Sometimes it comes in buckets, like at a crime scene. Sometimes it comes in dribs and drabs, crumbs picked up along the way that don’t become gems until something else gives it meaning and context. This was one of those moments.

  “Latrell lived behind Marcellus and he worked at the place where Javy Ordonez was killed.”

  “The rail yard is a lot bigger than his backyard. Harder to make that connection stick.”

  “It sticks until it falls off.”

  “What’s his motive?” Ammara asked.

  “You said he was one of the good guys. Maybe he decided to clean up his neighborhood.”

  “You saw him. He look like the Terminator to you? Even if he did Marcellus and his people, how does he lure Javy Ordonez out to the rail yard, get in the backseat of Javy’s car, and blow his brains all over the leather upholstery? And if he could pull that off, why would he throw the gun away under a Dumpster where it’s so likely to be found?”

  “It wouldn’t have been found for a long time if Javy’s body h
adn’t gotten stuck in the trash truck. Have you found anything to connect Latrell to Javy Ordonez?’

  “We haven’t looked, but we haven’t found anything, either. We’ve been working the drug angle.”

  “What about Bodie Grant, the meth dealer from Raytown?”

  “Disappeared. We’ve questioned his people. They think he’s dead. If he is, I’d say we’re in the middle of an epidemic of dead drug dealers.”

  “I’d still look for something that ties Latrell to Javy Ordonez.”

  “I will,” she said with a laugh, “but I won’t tell Troy you made the suggestion.”

  “Latrell wants me to call him, I’ll need his phone number.”

  “He said his number was unlisted, and if I wouldn’t give him your number, why should he give me his number? So I asked him how you were supposed to get in touch with him and he said that you knew where he lived. Said you could drop by if you were interested. You interested, Jack?”

  “Yeah, I think I am.”

  Troy finished his call, snapping the cell phone shut. “We done here?” he asked Ammara.

  “Yes, we are,” she said.

  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 express
ion 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.”

  Chapter Forty-eight

  It turned out that the two news anchors on Channel 6 had issues. In the midst of their happy-talk banter, the male anchor was checking out the female anchor’s chest, while she was sneering every time he opened his mouth. Not surprisingly, the weather wonk didn’t believe a word of her own forecast. All of that was revealed in the frame-by-frame breakdown of their facial expressions.

  “I can see the micro expressions when you freeze them but they blew by me in real time,” I told Kate.

  “You’re a rookie. I’ll get you the CD I was talking about. Spend a few hours with it on your computer and you’ll pick it up faster than you think. It will change the way you look at people. Let’s try a few more.”