"Hm." Pell gave an easy smile. "Okay, I'll go with the second one. The police. It's a set-up. I'm sure that's what happened."
She looked him in the eyes, green on blue. "Okay, let's take the situation apart: First, where would the police have gotten the hammer?"
He thought. "When they arrested me for that Carmel thing."
"The Croyton murders in ninety-nine?"
"Right. All the evidence they took from my house in Seaside."
Dance's brows furrowed. "I doubt that. Evidence is accounted for too closely. No, I'd go for a more credible scenario: that the hammer was stolen recently. Where else could somebody find a hammer of yours? Do you have any property in the state?"
"No."
"Any relatives or friends who could've had some tools of yours?"
"Not really."
Which wasn't an answer to a yes or no question; it was even slipperier than "I don't recall." Dance noticed too that Pell put his hands, tipped with long, clean nails, on the table at the word "relatives." This was a deviation from baseline behavior. It didn't mean lying, but he was feeling stress. The questions were upsetting him.
"Daniel, you have any relations living in California?"
He hesitated, must have assessed that she was the sort to check out every comment--which she was--and said, "The only left's my aunt. Down in Bakersfield."
"Is her name Pell?"
Another pause. "Yep . . . . That's good thinking, Officer Dance. I'll bet the deputies who dropped the ball on the Herron case stole that hammer from her and planted it. They're the ones behind this whole thing. Why don't you talk to them?"
"All right. That explains the hammer. Now let's think about the wallet. Where could that've come from? . . . Here's a thought. What if it's not Robert Herron's wallet at all? What if this rogue cop we're talking about just bought a wallet, had R.H. stamped in the leather, then hid that and the hammer in the well. It could've been last month. Or even last week. What do you think about that, Daniel?"
Pell lowered his head--she couldn't see his eyes--and said nothing.
It was unfolding just like she'd planned.
Dance had forced him to pick the more credible of two explanations for his innocence--and proceeded to prove it too wasn't credible at all. No sane jury would believe that the police fabricated evidence and stole tools from a house hundreds of miles away from the crime scene. Pell was now realizing the mistake he'd made. The trap was about to close on him.
Checkmate . . .
Her heart thumped a bit and she was thinking that the next words out of his mouth might be to suggest his willingness to accept a plea bargain.
She was wrong.
Daniel Pell attacked her.
His eyes snapped open and bore into hers with pure malevolence. He lunged forward as far as he could. Only the chains hooked to the metal chair, grounded with bolts to the tile floor, stopped him from sinking his teeth into her.
She jerked back, gasping.
"You goddamn bitch! You have no idea what it's like to be set up! You're part of it too! Oh, yeah, blame Daniel. It's always my fault! I'm the easy target. And you come in here sounding like a friend, asking me a few questions. Jesus, you're just like the rest of them!"
Her heart was pounding furiously and she was afraid but noted quickly that the restraints were secure and he couldn't reach her. She turned to the mirror behind which the officer manning the video camera was surely rising to his feet right now to help her. But she shook her head. It was important to see where this was going.
Then suddenly the fury was replaced with a cold calm. He sat back, caught his breath, and looked her over again. "You're in your thirties, Officer Dance. You're somewhat pretty. You seem straight to me, so I guarantee there's a man in your life. Or has been." A third glance at the pearl ring.
"If you don't like my theory, Daniel, let's come up with another one. About what really happened to Robert Herron."
As if she hadn't even spoken. "And you've got children, right? Sure, you do. I can see that. Tell me all about them. Tell me about the little ones. Close in age, and not too old, I'll bet."
This unnerved her and she involuntarily thought of Maggie and Wes. But she struggled not to react. He doesn't know I have children, of course. He can't. But he sure acts as if he's certain. Was there something about my behavior he noted? Something that suggested to him that I'm a mother?
They're studying you as hard as you're studying them . . . .
"Listen to me, Daniel," she said in a pond-calm voice. "An outburst isn't going to help anything."
"I've got friends on the outside, you know. They owe me. They'd love to come visit you. Or hang with your husband and children. Yeah, it's a tough life being a cop. The little ones spend a lot of time alone, don't they? They'd probably love some friends to play with."
Dance returned the gaze, never flinching. She asked, "Could you tell me about your relationship with that prisoner in Capitola?"
"Yes, I could. But I won't." His emotionless words mocking her, making clear that, for a professional interrogator, she'd phrased her question carelessly. In a soft voice he added, "I think it's time to go back to my cell."
Chapter 2
Alonzo "Sandy" Sandoval, the Monterey County prosecutor, was a handsome, round man with a thick head of black hair and an ample moustache. He sat behind a desk littered with files in his office, two flights above the lockup. "Hi, Kathryn. So, our boy . . . did he beat his breast and cry 'mea culpa'?"
"Not exactly." Dance sat down, peered into the coffee cup she'd left on the desk forty-five minutes ago. Nondairy creamer scummed on the surface. "I rate it as, oh, one of the least successful interrogations of all time."
"You look shook, Boss," said a short, wiry Anglo with curly red hair and wearing jeans, T-shirt and plaid sports coat. TJ's outfit was unconventional for an investigative agent with the CBI--the most conservative law enforcement agency in the Great Bear State--but so was pretty much everything else about him. Around thirty and single, TJ lived in the hills of Carmel Valley, his house a ramshackle place that could have been a diorama in a counterculture museum depicting California life in the 1960s. TJ tended to work solo much of the time, surveillance and undercover, rather than pairing up with another CBI agent, which was standard procedure. But Dance's regular partner was in Mexico on an extradition, and when the Pell case came up, TJ jumped at the chance to meet the Son of Manson.
"No, just curious." She explained how the interview had been going fine, when--suddenly--Pell turned on her. Under TJ's skeptical gaze, she conceded, "Okay, I'm a little shook. I've been threatened before. But his were the worst kind of threats."
"Worst?" asked Juan Millar, a tall, dark-complexioned young detective with the MSO--the Monterey County Sheriff's Office, which was headquartered not far from the courthouse.
"Calm threats," Dance said.
TJ filled in, "Cheerful threats. You know you're in trouble when they stop screaming and start whispering."
The little ones spend a lot of time alone . . .
Dance forced the recollection of Pell's words away.
"What happened?" Sandoval asked, seemingly more concerned about the state of his case than threats against Dance.
"When he denied knowing Herron, there was no stress reaction at all. It was only when I had him talking about police conspiracy that he started to exhibit aversion and negation. Some extremity movement too, deviating from his baseline."
Kathryn Dance was often called a human lie detector, but that wasn't true; in reality she, like all successful kinesic analysts and interrogators, was a stress detector. This was the key to deception; once she spotted stress, she'd probe the topic that gave rise to it and dig until the subject broke and told the truth.
But there are different types of stress, and the sort that Dance had observed Pell exhibiting didn't suggest deception.
She explained this and added, "My sense was that he'd lost control of the interview and couldn't get it back. So he
went ballistic."
"Even though what you were saying supported his defense?" Lanky Juan Millar scratched his left hand absently. In the fleshy Y between the index finger and thumb was a scar, the remnant of a gang tat.
"Exactly."
What, she wondered, was bothering him so much? Was it that--
Then Dance's mind made one of its curious jumps. A to B to X. She couldn't explain how they happened. But she always paid attention. "Where was Robert Herron murdered?" She walked to a map of Monterey County on Sandoval's wall.
"Here." The prosecutor touched an area in the yellow trapezoid.
"And the well where they found the hammer and wallet?"
"About here, make it."
It was a quarter mile from the crime scene, in a residential area.
Dance was staring at the map.
She felt TJ's eyes on her. "What's wrong, Boss?"
"You have a picture of the well?" she asked.
Sandoval dug in the file. "Juan's forensic people shot a lot of pics."
"Crime Scene boys love their toys," Millar said, the rhyme sounding odd from the mouth of such a straight arrow. He gave a shy smile. "I heard that somewhere."
The prosecutor produced a stack of color photographs, riffled through them until he found the ones he sought.
Gazing at them, Dance asked TJ, "We ran a case there six, eight months ago, remember?"
"The arson, sure. In that new housing development."
Tapping the map, the spot where the well was located, Dance continued, "That development is still under construction. And that"--she nodded at a photograph--"is a hard-rock well."
Everybody in the area knew that water was at such a premium in this part of California that hard-rock wells, with their low output and undependable supply, were never used for agricultural irrigation, only for private homes.
"Shit." Sandoval closed his eyes briefly. "Ten years ago, when Herron was killed, that was all farmland. The well wouldn't've been there then."
"It wasn't there one year ago." Dance muttered. "That's why Pell was so stressed. I was getting close to the truth--somebody did get the hammer from his aunt's in Bakersfield and had a fake wallet made up. Only it wasn't to frame him."
"Oh, no," TJ whispered.
"What?" Millar asked, looking from one agent to the other.
"Pell set the whole thing up himself," she said. "He couldn't escape from Capitola." That facility, like Pelican Bay in the north of the state, was a high-tech superprison, reserved for the most dangerous prisoners. "But he could from here."
Kathryn Dance lunged for the phone.
JEFFERY DEAVER is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty-two suspense novels, and the originator of the acclaimed detective hero Lincoln Rhyme, featured in the bestsellers The Cold Moon, The Twelfth Card, The Vanished Man, The Stone Monkey, The Empty Chair, The Coffin Dancer, and The Bone Collector. His new thriller, The Sleeping Doll, is available in hardcover from Simon & Schuster. As William Jefferies, he is the author of Shallow Graves, Bloody River Blues, and Hell's Kitchen. His short fiction is anthologized in two collections: Twisted and More Twisted, both published by Pocket Books. He is a five-time Edgar Award nominee, an Anthony Award nominee, a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader's Award for Best Short Story of the Year, and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. He has also won a Steel Dagger for best thriller of the year for Garden of Beasts and a Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association. His novel The Bone Collector became a Universal Pictures feature film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. A former attorney, Deaver has been hailed as "the best psychological thriller writer around" (The Times, London).
Visit his website at www.jefferydeaver.com.
ALSO BY JEFFERY DEAVER
Carte Blanche
Edge
The Burning Wire*
Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (Editor) The Watch List (The Copper Bracelet and The Chopin Manuscript) (Contributor) Roadside Crosses**
The Bodies Left Behind
The Broken Window*
The Sleeping Doll**
More Twisted: Collected Stories, Volume Two The Cold Moon*/**
The Twelfth Card*
Garden of Beasts
Twisted: Collected Stories The Vanished Man*
The Stone Monkey*
The Blue Nowhere
The Empty Chair*
Speaking in Tongues
The Devil's Teardrop
The Coffin Dancer*
The Bone Collector*
A Maiden's Grave
Praying for Sleep
The Lesson of Her Death Mistress of Justice
Hard News
Death of a Blue Movie Star Manhattan Is My Beat
Hell's Kitchen
Bloody River Blues
Shallow Graves
A Century of Great Suspense Stories (Editor) A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime (Editor) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Introduction) *Featuring Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs **Featuring Kathryn Dance
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"A Dish Served Cold" previously appeared online in Amazon Shorts, May 2006.
"Born Bad" previously appeared in Dangerous Women, edited by Otto Penzler (Mysterious Press, 2005).
"Chapter and Verse" previously appeared in Greatest Hits, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Carroll and Graf, 2005).
"The Commuter" previously appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, April 1998.
"Copycat" previously appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, June 2003, and A New Omnibus of Crime, edited by Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert (Oxford University Press, 2005).
"Double Jeopardy" previously appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September/October 1997.
"Interrogation" previously appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, April 1996, and Law and Order, edited by Cynthia Manson (Berkley Prime Crime, 1997).
"A Nice Place to Visit" previously appeared in Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block (Akashic Books, 2006).
"Ninety-eight Point Six" previously appeared in Hot and Sultry Night for Crime, edited by the author (Berkley Prime Crime, 2003).
"The Poker Lesson" previously appeared in Men from Boys, edited by John Harvey (Heinemann, London, 2003).
"Surveillance" appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, August 2002, and The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, 4th Edition, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg (Forge, 2003).
"Tunnel Girl" appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, December 2005.
"The Westphalian Ring" appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2004, and The Adventure of the Missing Detective, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg (Carroll and Graf, 2005).
SIMON & SCHUSTER, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 2006 by Jeffery Deaver All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
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Cover design by Jae Song. Tree (c) Gullaume/Trevillion ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4128-8
ISBN-10: 1-4165-4128-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4424-1 (eBook)
Jeffery Deaver, More Twisted: Collected Stories - 2
(Series: # )
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