The Art of Deception

by Ridley Pearson

  “Lou, that’s preposterous, and you know it! Walker stumbled onto this in the Underground, nothing more.”

  “The various sections of Underground don’t connect, Daffy. You’ll need a better explanation than that.”

  “Maybe they do somehow and we just haven’t found it yet.”

  Reading his wristwatch, Boldt signaled the end of the discussion, telling her, “In twenty-five minutes Tim Peterson from the U.S. Attorney’s office is going to be arriving here to meet with Mahoney and Tony Shapiro.”

  “Shapiro?”

  “There’s a report he took the case pro bono as of about an hour ago. That’s why I said I think things may change. If Shapiro has taken the case, then it’s going to be a media circus. The guy lives for it. Worse, he’ll sew Vanderhorst’s lips shut and feed him through a straw.”

  She understood then that this hurried effort to interrogate Vanderhorst resulted from Boldt’s hand being forced—they were about to lose their suspect to the wheels of television justice. The time frame of twenty-five minutes seemed laughable— typically barely enough time to get a couple cups of coffee into the Box. Win a confession in that amount of time?

  “Lou?” she said.

  “Listen, the PD must not like Shapiro’s grandstanding any more than we do, or he wouldn’t have advised his client to sit down with us. I’m not sure who to fear more, Shapiro or the feds. Peterson’s a good guy, and I know he thinks he’s helping us by putting out the possibility of extradition to a death penalty state, but all it really means is we’ll lose Vanderhorst, and I just don’t like that idea.”

  “So it’s a full-court press,” she said. Another LaMoiaism. Boldt’s expression registered complaint.

  “Something like that,” he said. About to throw the door open, he said in a whisper, “In any case, it’s show time.”

  With the out-of-state crime scene photos in hand, Boldt stepped into Homicide’s conference room A—the largest of three such rooms—Matthews close on his heels. She gently shut the door. Initially, neither of them acknowledged Vanderhorst’s presence on the far side of the small table. Instead, they moved chairs around, Boldt took off his sport coat and hung it on the back of a chair like a man ready to spend the rest of the day here, and Matthews switched off her cell phone and took a seat alongside Boldt—the combined impression that of two people digging in.

  Vanderhorst, transferred from lockup, wore the humiliating orange jumpsuit issued by county jail, manacles on his ankles and a waist harness that secured the chain of his handcuffs to where his hands were free to move but their motion limited.

  Boldt started the double-cassette tape recorder, introduced himself and Matthews, and naming the suspect, stated that Vanderhorst had requested counsel, had met with counsel several times over the past twenty-four hours, and that counsel had been notified of this interview and was “expected any minute.”

  Boldt carefully placed the seven pages facedown in front of Vanderhorst and, like a Vegas card dealer, then rolled three of them over, as deliberately and dramatically as possible. With no time to waste, he had to forgo the usual “warm-up” of introducing the suspect to the roles that would be played, of the small talk that often began such an interrogation in an effort to establish a rapport. There was no time for a rapport. This was to be the emotional equivalent of slapping the man around.

  Stabbing each in succession with a determined index finger, Boldt said, “Fort Worth, Little Rock, Santa Fe.” The victims hung from walls, their ankles taped to their thighs with duct tape, their garments torn, their chests and crotches exposed.

  Boldt had hoped for the power of shock value. He saw no response. He yielded to Matthews, who said, “You remember each of these as if it happened yesterday, don’t you, Per? Is it all right that I call you Per?” she asked rhetorically, not allowing him to respond. “The way the air smelled just before you abducted them...that incredible rush as you overpowered them . . .”

  Vanderhorst looked up from the photos, met eyes with Matthews. She felt nothing from him. Disappointed, she pressed on.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “I know how it felt for you.”

  The suspect lowered his head, but more out of boredom, she thought. No remorse, no excitement, no fear or trepidation. This, in turn, filled her with curiosity, for she had expected, at the very least, a sense of surprise from him. She felt the clock running, ticking off the minutes, and wished Boldt hadn’t told her about the arrival of the attorneys.

  Boldt figured the photos had to have surprised the man, regardless of his outward appearance. He followed this with what he hoped would be another surprise, sliding the evidence bag containing the skeleton key across the table.

  Vanderhorst looked up, the first seams of terror breaking his cool façade.

  “Been looking for that?” Boldt asked.

  The man’s eyes tightened. “Never seen it before.”

  They had him talking. Matthews leaned back in the steel chair.

  Boldt said, “We found them.”

  The suspect cocked his head like Blue when he heard an errant noise. Matthews experienced a shudder of cold. She glanced up at the room’s air vent, then back to the suspect.

  Boldt leaned across the table and rolled over the next photographs—first Randolf, then Hebringer. “Five women in four states in the last eighteen months. The best chance you have is to get ahead of this, Vanderhorst. Once it breaks, there isn’t a juror you can draw who hasn’t heard something about it— judges, too, for that matter. No matter what jurors and judges claim about their remaining objective, it just isn’t possible. The smart money says you preempt all that by getting in front of it.”

  “I’ve never seen any of them,” Vanderhorst claimed. “Never seen that key, either.”

  “Is that right?” Boldt said. “Then you wouldn’t have any interest in seeing the videotape of you entering that elevator car, of you keying the back panel and disappearing into that shaft. That video confirms you had both the necessary knowledge and access to move the bodies once you’d abducted them in front of the ATMs.” His intention was to keep stacking evidence on him, one surprise after another. “You think we won’t find physical evidence that those two women made that trip? You were in a hurry, Vanderhorst. Of course there’s evidence, and the more we collect the less agreeable we are to listening to your side of this.” He’d leave Matthews to sort out or to exploit the man’s guilt and what she believed would prove to be his relief at having been caught and stopped.

  Vanderhorst studied the final two blank pages in the line of seven but made no attempt to turn them over.

  Feeling the time pressure, Matthews saw no choice but to go for the jugular. She said, “This is the last time you’ll see any of these. You understand that, don’t you . . . that it’s over?”

  His brow furrowed. She considered any and all responses victories. She caught a flicker from Boldt’s sideways glance— he saw it, too.

  “What do you feel with it being over?” she asked. “Relief? Anger?”

  Vanderhorst’s attention remained on the final two sheets of paper that remained facedown.

  She thought she saw him shrug his shoulders, but it might have been nothing more than him trying to get comfortable, an impossibility in these chairs.

  “Does it feel good that it’s over?”

  She thought for sure he’d nodded.

  “You tried, but you couldn’t stop yourself.” She made it a statement, quickly adapting to the asocial personality she believed in front of her. “You left each city, not because you were afraid of being caught, but because you thought the change of scenery might allow you to stop.”

  Boldt signaled her to notice the tape recorder: He wanted Vanderhorst’s answers spoken onto tape.

  “You can talk to us,” she said calmly. A part of her disliked playing so deceptively sweet to killers like Vanderhorst; she owed it to the victims to show more disgust and abhorrence with the nature of the crimes. A part of her enjoyed the game, the c
hallenge of tricking the criminal mind into unraveling, exploiting the guilt, when present, the sense of remorse, if any. The art of deception here was feigning empathy and understanding in the pursuit of truth and discovery. She, too, had victims: the perpetrators of these crimes who allowed themselves to open up to her and admit those things they had protected so carefully.

  “It’s not like what you think,” he said.

  She felt a wave of relaxation just hearing him speak. “Help us out here.”

  “I don’t know anything about any of this.”

  “We might surprise you,” she said. “Maybe we know more about it than you think.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  Matthews knew there were no voices in Vanderhorst’s head, no whispered “messages from God” to kill. She wasn’t dealing with a display of a so-called psychopath, but with a man suffering from antisocial personality disorder—APD—a person so distanced from his fellow human beings and a sense of right and wrong that he committed these acts with little understanding of the consequences. The time had come to prove herself, to convince Vanderhorst she knew more about him than he knew about himself. And, she thought, just maybe she did.

  “You watched women in their hotel rooms,” she said, knowing him much better already. “In their apartments and condominiums. Undressing. Bathing. You imagined yourself in there with them, leading a normal life, a part of their lives.”

  Vanderhorst cringed, shifting in the chair nervously. He studied her intently and she stood up to it, not to be undermined.

  Boldt regarded her with a pale face and nervous expression.

  A knock on the door gave them all a moment’s pause. A uniformed woman officer entered and handed Matthews a pink telephone memo. She said, “I wouldn’t have bothered you, but the girl apparently sounded pretty bad and said it was urgent.” The message read: “Problems with the baby. Please come. I’m above Mario’s.” It was signed Margaret. Matthews thanked the officer, folded up the message, and tucked it away in her jeans pocket, disappointed in herself for briefly abandoning the teen but knowing the time line of the interrogation had to take precedence.

  With the door shut again, she confidently told Vanderhorst, “You followed them—some of them—hoping they might notice you, might speak to you. So much of your life you’ve spent just wanting to be noticed. And yet it terrifies you when a woman actually notices you, doesn’t it?” She knew by his squirming that she had him pegged. He looked both shell-shocked and curious. Just right. “Susan Hebringer . . . you peeped her, and then, surprise, she showed up at the ATM. And you had to have her. Randolf? That was what: a look she gave you? The way she said hello to you? Tell me.” Knowing that at some point he would attempt to tune her out, she quickly continued, “You were caught between those two worlds, weren’t you, Per—wanting the attention, yet not wanting it?” His eyes held on to hers all the more tightly. Stay with me, she silently encouraged. “What were their crimes, Per? For what did you punish them? Did they say hello to you? Ask you the time of day? Or was it simply a look they gave you—a look you took as an invitation? It’s only women that confuse you, isn’t it? The men you can handle. Lieutenant Boldt comes by the bank and you have no problem talking to him, do you? But a woman? Am I confusing you now? You’re feeling anger toward me, aren’t you? I can sense that, Per. It’s all around me, that anger. Because you know what I’m going to say next, you know who I’m going to mention, don’t you?” His eyes went increasingly wider, increasingly whiter. “And you don’t want her mentioned, do you? You want her left out of this. Her dark hair, her sending you mixed signals. What was it she did to you to deserve this?” she asked, touching the second of the crime scene photographs. “Criticize you, no matter what you did? Dress you up like a little girl and show you off to her friends and laugh at you? Take baths with you? Showers? When you were old enough to respond to that—to her—in ways you didn’t want to respond but couldn’t help responding, she laughed at you—at it—didn’t she? She thought it was funny, cute. Didn’t she? But it wasn’t funny, not at all. It was humiliating. It was awful for you, her laughing like that. Or maybe it was her walking around in panties and underwear, showing way too much to a boy your age. Maybe that’s why you like looking through windows now. Or was it her slipping in beside you on those cold nights, or the ones with thunder and lightning, or was it that she’d had a little too much to drink and wanted the company? The same way you want company now.”

  Vanderhorst didn’t answer with words, but she had his face in a sweat. Boldt looked as if he wanted to stop her, or wanted to leave the room himself, but he sat calmly beside her, his pencil taking down notes on a legal pad as if writing a grocery list.

  She addressed Vanderhorst and said, “You never wanted any of it, did you, Per? Never volunteered for any of it. She teased you in front of her friends, in front of your friends; she cut you off from everyone around you. You brought a friend home, she made a fool of you. And you, you loved her all the more for it. Loved her like nothing else in this world. And this proved the most confusing of all.” His rheumy eyes seemed ready to spill tears. He was no criminal animal but a poor, pathetic creature who’d lost sight of the out-of-bounds markers. She felt Boldt’s precious minutes slipping past. “Later,” she said, “when you were older— what, fourteen, fifteen?—she was still coming into your room at night, only now for things unimaginable to you a year or two before. Now you ran, didn’t you? You hid. First the closet. But she found you. Then the bathroom . . . but she found you.” With each statement she looked for any unintended response on his part—a shortening of breath, a twitch to his eyes, a dilation of his pupils, using these as her signposts. “And finally . . . the basement,” she said, knowing in advance she would score a direct hit. Indeed, he looked away and to the floor, wearing his shame. “The one place she never did find you. Tell me I’m wrong, Per. Tell me you didn’t unscrew the lights down there and hide in the dark, because you knew she was afraid of the dark and that she’d never find you.” She based this on the discovery of the underground lair. The location of that hideout was no accident. “That’s where you feel the safest, isn’t it? In the dark. Alone. Your back pushed up against a cold wall.” She worked from her own experience in the Shelter. “The musty smell—it’s almost like perfume to you. You brought them down there, and you did those things to them—those things she did to you—and then you felt bad about it, didn’t you? Then you wanted to keep them alive, if you could. In the dark. Locked in the room. There when you needed them.”

  It hadn’t been about torturing his victims but trying to save them. His mistake had been hanging them from the wall—he’d unintentionally crucified them. She suspected that if she could travel back in time to his mother’s apartment she would find Jesus on the cross in nearly every room. She’d read about extreme cases of APD, the Per Vanderhorsts of this world; she’d just never interviewed one.

  She wondered how any of this could bring a sense of excitement, of fulfillment for her, and yet it did.

  She said, “It’s easier now that it’s over, isn’t it? There’s nothing to hide any longer.” In point of fact they knew almost nothing. It was far from clear if they had enough evidence to convict Vanderhorst. The DNA blood evidence and the semen collected from the corpses might put him away, but without that evidence firmly in hand (and it was still a day or two away), she knew that Boldt needed a confession.

  Boldt said, “You’re about to be traded back and forth like a pro ball player, Vanderhorst. Texas uses lethal injection. You know that, right? Capital murder equals capital punishment in that state, and you killed a woman in Fort Worth, and you need to think about that. The U.S. Attorney’s office has the authority to move your trial to Texas, and they’ll argue for that because they’re going to want you on death row. This attorney general is tough on crime—you understand that, right? But they’re basically good guys, better guys than you’d think. They won’t take you away from us if we have a better case to m
ake against you here. You see how this works?” He added, “Or maybe it doesn’t work—the system. Not all that well. But it’s what we’ve got at the moment, and you’re square in the middle of it.”

  Worry crept into the man’s eyes.

  “What’s it going to take?” Boldt asked Matthews in a familiar game to them.

  “I think he knows,” Matthews replied.

  “You see where this leaves you?” Boldt asked him.

  Matthews said to Vanderhorst, “You and I both know you’re of sound mind, fit to stand trial. That’s not an out for you, Per. We’ll run the usual tests, of course, but you’re going to pass them. The decision you need to make now, before you lose the chance, is who is going to control your destiny. If you want it in the hands of the feds, that’s up to you.”

  Boldt said, “You’re curious about those last two photographs, aren’t you?”

  Vanderhorst eyed him suspiciously.

  “Go ahead, take a look,” Boldt said.

  Vanderhorst didn’t move a muscle.

  “Curious about how we got the key, I’ll bet.”

  Vanderhorst narrowed his eyes, both angry and unnerved, and Matthews saw the opening Boldt had given her.

  She said, “We thought you’d worked them alone, Per. The ATM machines. The basement of the bank. That was one of our mistakes—one of the things that took us so long to catch you— this idea you were smart enough to plan this on your own.” She leaned across the table—Vanderhorst reared backward, overreacting, and nearly went over—and rolled the second to last sheet, revealing Ferrell Walker’s head shot from central booking. “This is the man who gave us the key to that room. He says that he planned it all—that it was his brains—but that you did the actual killing.”

  “I don’t even know this guy,” Vanderhorst said.

  “He says you do.”

  “He gave us the key to that room,” Boldt repeated.

  “He stole it.”

  “The key?” Matthews asked.

  “That’s right,” Vanderhorst said, dipping his toes into the confessional waters.