Dance would get nothing from her until those barriers were lowered. In her interrogations and interviews the agent didn't practice classic hypnosis. She did, though, know that subjects who were relaxed and not focused on external stimuli could remember events that otherwise they might not. The agent directed Theresa to the comfortable couch and shut off the bright overhead light, leaving a single yellow desk lamp burning.
"You comfortable?"
"Sure, I guess." Still, she clasped her hands together, shoulders up, and smiled at Dance with her lips taut. Stress, the agent noted. "That man, Mr. Nagle, said you wanted to ask me about what happened the night my parents and brother and sister were killed."
"That's right. I know you were asleep at the time, but--"
"What?"
"I know you were asleep during the murders."
"Who told you that?"
"Well, all the news stories . . . the police."
"No, no, I was awake."
Dance blinked in surprise. "You were?"
The girl's expression was even more surprised. "Like, yeah. I mean, I thought that's why you wanted to see me."
Chapter 47
"Go ahead, Tare."
Dance felt her heart tapping fast. Was this the portal to an overlooked clue that might lead to Daniel Pell's purpose here?
The girl tugged at her earlobe, the one with five dots of metal in it, and the top of her shoe rose slightly, indicating she was curling her toes.
Stress . . .
"I was asleep earlier, for a while. Yeah. I wasn't feeling good. But then I woke up. I had a dream. I don't remember what it was, but I think it was scary. I woke myself up with a noise, kind of moaning. You know how that happens?"
"Sure."
"Or shouting. Only . . ." Her voice faded, she was squeezing her ear again.
"You're not sure it was you making the noise? It might've been somebody else?"
The girl swallowed. She'd be thinking that the sound had perhaps come from one of her dying family members. "Right."
"Do you remember what time?" The TODs were between six thirty and eight, Dance recalled.
But Theresa couldn't remember for sure. She guessed around seven.
"You stayed in bed?"
"Uh-huh."
"Did you hear anything after that?"
"Yeah, voices. I couldn't hear them real well. I was, you know, groggy, but I definitely heard them."
"Who was it?"
"I don't know, men's voices. But definitely not my father or brother. I remember that."
"Tare, did you tell anybody this back then?"
"Yeah." She nodded. "But nobody was interested."
How on earth had Reynolds missed it?
"Well, tell me now. What did you hear?"
"There were, like, a couple of things. First of all, I heard somebody mention money. Four hundred dollars. I remember that exactly."
Pell had been found with more than that when he was arrested. Maybe he and Newberg were going through Croyton's wallet and commenting on how much money was inside. Or was the phrase actually "four hundred thousand"?
"What else?"
"Okay, then somebody--a man, but somebody different--said something about Canada. And somebody else asked a question. About Quebec."
"And what was the question?"
"He just wanted to know what Quebec was."
Somebody not knowing about Quebec? Dance wondered if that was Newberg--the women had said that while he was a genius at woodworking, electronics and computers he was pretty damaged otherwise, thanks to drugs.
So, a Canadian connection. Is that where Pell wanted to escape to? A lot easier to get through that border than going south. A lot of mountaintops too.
Dance smiled and sat forward. "Go on, Tare. You're doing great."
"Then," Theresa continued, "somebody was talking about used cars. Another man. He had a really low voice. He talked fast."
Used-car dealerships were popular venues for money laundering. Or they might have been talking about getting a car for their escape. And it hadn't been just Pell and Newberg. Somebody else was there. A third person.
"Did your father do business in Canada?"
"I don't know. He traveled a lot. But I don't think he ever mentioned Canada. . . . I could never figure out why the police back then didn't ask me more about it. But since Pell was in jail, it didn't matter. But now that he's out . . . Ever since Mr. Nagle said you needed help finding the killer, I've been trying to make sense out of what I heard. Maybe you can figure it out."
"I hope I can."
"Anything else?"
"No, it was about then that I guess I fell back asleep. And the next thing I knew . . ." She swallowed again. "There was this woman in a uniform there. A policewoman. She had me get dressed and . . . that was it."
Dance reflected: four hundred dollars, a car dealership, a French Canadian province.
And a third man.
Was Pell intent on heading north now? At the very least she'd call Homeland Security and Immigration; they could keep an eye on the northern border crossings.
Dance tried again, walking the girl through the events of that terrible night.
But the efforts were useless. She knew nothing more.
Four hundred dollars . . . Canada . . . What's Quebec? . . . used cars . . . Did they contain the key to the Daniel Pell conspiracy?
And then Dance had a thought that, surprisingly, involved her own family: herself, Wes and Maggie. An idea occurred to her. She ran through the facts of the murder in her mind. Impossible . . . But then the theory grew more likely, though she didn't like the conclusion.
She reluctantly asked, "Tare, you said this was around seven P.M. or so?"
"Yeah, maybe."
"Where did your family eat?"
"Where? The den most of the time. We weren't allowed to use the dining room. That was just for, like, formal things."
"Did you watch TV while you were having dinner?"
"Yeah. A lot. Me and my brother and sister, at least."
"And was the den near your bedroom?"
"Like, right down the stairs. How did you know?"
"Did you ever watch Jeopardy!?"
She frowned. "Yeah."
"Tare, I'm wondering if maybe the voices you heard were from the show. Maybe somebody picking the category of geography for four hundred dollars. And the answer was 'the French-speaking province of Canada.' The question would be 'What is Quebec?' "
The girl fell silent. Her eyes were still. "No," she said firmly, shaking her head. "No, that wasn't it. I'm sure."
"And the voice talking about the dealership--could it have been a commercial? Somebody talking fast in a low voice. Like they do on car ads."
The girl's face flushed with dismay. Then anger. "No!"
"But maybe?" Dance asked gently.
Theresa's eyes closed. "No." A whisper. Then: "I don't know."
That was why Reynolds hadn't pursued the child's testimony. He too had figured out she was talking about a TV show.
Theresa's shoulders slumped forward, collapsing in on themselves. It was a very subtle movement but Dance could clearly read the kinesic signal of defeat and sorrow. The girl had been so certain that she'd remembered something helpful to find the man who'd killed her family. Now, she realized that her courageous trip here, defying her aunt . . . The efforts had been pointless. She was crestfallen. "I'm sorry. . . ." Tears pooled in her eyes.
Kathryn Dance smiled. "Tare, don't worry. It's nothing." She gave the girl a Kleenex.
"Nothing? It's terrible! I wanted to help so bad. . . ."
Another smile. "Oh, Tare, believe me, we're just getting warmed up."
*
In her seminars Dance told the story of the city slicker stopping in a small town to ask a farmer directions. The stranger looks at the dog sitting at the man's feet and says, "Your dog bite?" The farmer says no and when the stranger reaches down to pet the dog, he gets bitten. The man jumps back and angril
y says, "You said your dog didn't bite!" The farmer replies, "Mine doesn't. This here dog's not mine."
The art of interviewing isn't only about analyzing the subjects' answers and their body language and demeanor; it's also about asking the right questions.
The facts about the Croytons' murders and every moment afterward had been documented by police and reporters. So Kathryn Dance decided to inquire about the one period of time that no one had apparently ever asked about: before the murders.
"Tare, I want to hear about what happened earlier."
"Earlier?"
"Sure. Let's start with earlier that day."
Theresa frowned. "Oh, I don't even remember much about it. I mean, what happened that night, it kind of shoved everything else away."
"Give it a try. Think back. It was May. You were in school then, right?"
"Yeah."
"What day of the week?"
"Um, it was Friday."
"You remembered that pretty fast."
"Oh, because on a lot of Fridays Dad'd take us kids places. That day we were going to the carnival rides in Santa Cruz. Only everything got messed up because I got sick." Theresa thought back, rubbing her eyes. "Brenda and Steve--my sister and brother--and I were going, and Mom stayed at home because she had a benefit or something on Saturday she had to work on."
"But plans got changed?"
"Right. We were, like, on our way but . . ." She looked down. "I got sick. In the car. So we turned around and went home."
"What did you have? A cold?"
"Stomach flu." Theresa winced and touched her belly.
"Oh, I just hate that."
"Yeah, it sucks."
"And you got back home about when?"
"Five thirty, maybe."
"And you went straight to bed."
"Yeah, that's right." She looked out the window at the gnarled tree.
"And then you woke up, hearing the TV show."
The girl twined a brown strand of hair around a finger. "Quebec." A laughing grimace.
At this point, Kathryn Dance paused. She realized she had a decision to make, an important one.
Because there was no doubt that Theresa was being deceptive.
When she'd been making casual conversation and, later, talking about what Theresa had overheard from the TV room, the girl's kinesic behavior was relaxed and open, though she obviously was experiencing general stress--anyone who's talking to a police officer as part of an investigation, even an innocent victim, experiences this.
But as soon as she started talking about the trip to the Santa Cruz boardwalk she displayed hesitations of speech, she covered parts of her face and ear--negation gestures--and looked out the window--aversion. Trying to appear calm and casual, she revealed the stress she was experiencing by bobbing her foot. Dance sensed deception stress patterns and that the girl was in the denial response state.
Everything Theresa was telling her was presumably consistent with facts that Dance could verify. But deception includes evasion and omission as well as outright lying. There were things Theresa wasn't sharing.
"Tare, something troubling happened on the drive, didn't it?"
"Troubling? No. Really. I swear."
A triple play there: two denial flag expressions, along with answering a question with a question. Now the girl was flushed and her foot bobbed again, an obvious cluster of stress responses.
"Go on, tell me. It's all right. There's nothing you have to worry about. Tell me."
"Like, you know. My parents, my brother and sister . . . They were killed. Who wouldn't be upset?" A bit of anger now.
Dance nodded sympathetically. "I mean before that. You've left Carmel, you're driving to Santa Cruz. You're not feeling well. You go home. Other than being sick, what was there about that drive that bothered you?"
"I don't know. I can't remember."
That sentence, from a person in a denial state, means: I remember perfectly well but I don't want to think about it. The memory's too painful.
"You're driving along and--
"I--" Theresa began, then she fell silent. And lowered head to hands, breaking into tears. A torrent, accompanied by the sound track of breathless sobbing.
"Tare." Dance rose and handed her a wad of tissues as the girl cried hard, though quietly, the sobs like hiccups.
"It's okay," the agent said compassionately, gripping her arm. "Whatever happened, it's fine. Don't worry."
"I . . ." The girl was paralyzed; Dance could see she was trying to make a decision. Which way would it go? the agent wondered. She'd either spill everything, or stonewall--in which case the interview was now over.
Finally she said, "Oh, I've wanted to tell somebody. I just couldn't. Not the counselors or friends, my aunt . . ." More sobbing. Collapsed chest, chin down, hands in her lap when not mopping her face. The textbook kinesic signs that Theresa Croyton had moved into the acceptance stage of emotional response. The terrible burden of what she'd been living with was finally going to come out. She was confessing.
"It's my fault. It's all my fault they're dead!"
Now she pressed her head back against the couch. Her face was red, tendons rose, tears stained the front of her sweater.
"Brenda and Steve and Mom and Dad . . . all because of me!"
"Because you got sick?"
"No! Because I pretended to be sick!"
"Tell me."
"I didn't want to go to the boardwalk. I couldn't stand going, I hated it! All I could think of was to pretend to be sick. I remembered about these models who put their fingers down their throats so they throw up and don't get fat. When we were in the car on the highway I did that when nobody was looking. I threw up in the backseat and said I had the flu. It was all gross, and everybody was mad and Dad turned around and drove back home."
So that was it. The poor girl was convinced it was her fault her family'd been slaughtered because of the lie she told. She'd lived with this terrible burden for eight years.
One truth had been excavated. But at least one more remained. And Kathryn Dance wanted to unearth this one as well.
"Tell me, Tare. Why didn't you want to go to the pier?"
"I just didn't. It wasn't fun."
Confessing one lie doesn't lead automatically to confessing them all. The girl had now slipped into denial once again.
"Why? You can tell me. Go on."
"I don't know. It just wasn't fun."
"Why not?"
"Well, Dad was always busy. So he'd give us money and tell us he'd pick us up later and he'd go off and make phone calls and things. It was boring."
Her feet tapped again and she squeezed the right-side earrings in a compulsive pattern: top, bottom, then the middle. The stress was eating her up.
Yet it wasn't only the kinesics that were sending significant deception signals to Kathryn Dance. Children--even a seventeen-year-old high school student--are often hard to analyze kinesically. Most interviewers of youngsters perform a content-based analysis, judging their truth or deception by what they say, not how they say it.
What Theresa was telling Dance didn't make sense--both in terms of the story she was offering, and in terms of Dance's knowledge of children and the place in question. Wes and Maggie, for instance, loved the Santa Cruz boardwalk, and would have leapt at the chance to spend hours there unsupervised with a pocketful of money. There were hundreds of things for children to do, carnival rides, food, music, games.
And another contradiction Dance noted: Why hadn't Theresa simply said she wanted to stay home with her mother before they left that Friday and let her father and siblings go without her? It was as if she didn't want them to go to Santa Cruz either.
Dance considered this for a moment.
A to B . . .
"Tare, you were saying your father worked and made phone calls when you and your brother and sister went on the rides?"
She looked down. "Yeah, I guess."
"Where would he go to make the calls?"
&nbs
p; "I don't know. He had a cell phone. Not a lot of people had them then. But he did."
"Did he ever meet anybody there?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"Tare, who were these other people? The ones he'd be with?"
She shrugged.
"Were they other women?"
"No."
"You sure?"
Theresa was silent, looking everywhere but at Dance. Finally she said, "Maybe. Some, yeah."
"And you think they might've been girlfriends of his?"
A nod. Tears again. Through clenched teeth she began, "And . . ."
"What, Tare?"
"He said when we got home, if Mom asked, we were supposed to say he was with us." Her face was flushed now.
Dance recalled that Reynolds hinted Croyton was a womanizer.
A bitter laugh escaped the girl's trembling lips. "I saw him. Brenda and me, we were supposed to stay on the boardwalk but we went to an ice cream place across Beach Street. And I saw him. There was this woman getting into his car and he was kissing her. And she wasn't the only one. I saw him later, with somebody else, going into her apartment or house by the beach. That's why I didn't want him to go there. I wanted him to go back home and be with Mommy and us. I didn't want him to be with anybody else." She wiped her face. "And so I lied," she said simply. "I pretended I was sick."
So he'd meet his mistresses in Santa Cruz--and take his own children with him to allay his wife's suspicion, abandoning them till he and his lover were finished.
"And my family got killed. And it was my fault."
Dance leaned forward and said, "No, no, Tare. It's not your fault at all. We're pretty sure Daniel Pell intended to kill your father. It wasn't random. If he'd come by that night and you weren't there, he would've left and come back when your dad was home."
She grew quiet. "Yeah?"
Dance wasn't sure about this at all. But she absolutely couldn't let the girl live with the terrible burden of her guilt. "Yeah."
Theresa calmed at this tentative comfort. "Stupid." She was embarrassed. "It's all so stupid. I wanted to come help you catch him. And I haven't done anything except act like a baby."
"Oh, we're doing fine," Dance said with significance, reflecting some intriguing thoughts she'd just had.
"We are?"
"Yep . . . In fact, I've just thought of some more questions. I hope you're up for them." Dance's stomach gave a peculiar, and opportune, growl just at that moment. They both laughed, and the agent added, "Provided there're two Frappuccinos and a cookie or two in the near future."