The Cold Moon (9 page)

Dance came from a locale where the temperature was seventy-five, give or take, all year-round and you had to drive up Carmel Valley Road a long, long way to find enough sledding snow to keep your son and daughter happy. In her last-minute packing for the seminar here in New York, somehow she'd forgotten that the Northeast plus December equals the Himalayas.

She was reflecting: Here I can't drop the last five pounds of what I gained in Mexico last month (where she'd done nothing but sit in a smoky room, interrogating a suspected kidnapper). If I can't lose it, at least the extra weight ought to do its duty as insulation. Ain't fair... She pulled her thin coat more tightly around her.

Kathryn Dance was a special agent with the California Bureau of Investigation, based in Monterey. She was one of the nation's preeminent experts in interrogation and kinesics — the science of observing and analyzing the body language and verbal behavior of witnesses and suspects. She'd been in New York for the past three days presenting her kinesics seminar to local law enforcement agencies.

Kinesics is a rare specialty in police work, but to Kathryn Dance there was nothing like it. She was a people addict. They fascinated her, they electrified her. Confounded and challenged her too. These billions of odd creatures moving through the world, saying the strangest and most wonderful and terrible things... She felt what they felt, she feared what scared them, she got pleasure from their joy.

Dance had been a reporter after college: journalism, that profession tailor-made for the aimless with insatiable curiosities. She ended up on the crime beat and spent hours in courtrooms, observing lawyers and suspects and jurors. She realized something about herself: She could look at a witness, listen to his words and get an immediate sense of when he was telling the truth and when he wasn't. She could look at jurors and see when they were bored or lost or angry or shocked, when they believed the suspect, when they didn't. She could tell which lawyers were ill-suited to the bar and which were going to shine.

She could spot the cops whose whole heart was in their jobs and the ones who were only biding their time. (One of the former in particular caught her eye: a prematurely silver-haired FBI agent out of the San Jose field office, testifying with humor and panache in a gang trial she was covering. She finagled an exclusive interview with him after the guilty verdicts, and he finagled a date. Eight months later she and William Swenson were married.)

Eventually bored with the reporter's life, Kathryn Dance decided on a career change. Life turned crazy for a time as she juggled her roles as mother of two small children and wife and grad student, but she managed to graduate from UC-Santa Cruz with a joint master's in psych and communications. She opened a jury consulting business, advising attorneys which jurors to choose and which to avoid during voir dire jury selection. She was talented and made very good money. But six years ago, she decided to change course once again. With the help of a supportive, tireless husband and her mother and father, who lived in nearby Carmel, she headed back to school once more: the California State Bureau of Investigation training academy in Sacramento.

Kathryn Dance became a cop.

The CBI doesn't break out kinesics as a specialty so Dance was technically just another investigative agent, working homicides, kidnappings, narcotics, terrorism and the like. Still, in law enforcement, talents are spotted early and news of her talent quickly spread. She found herself the resident expert in interview and interrogation (fine with her, since it gave her some bargaining power to trade off undercover and forensic work, which she had little interest in).

She now glanced at her watch, wondering how long this volunteer mission would take. Her flight wasn't until the afternoon but she'd have to give herself plenty of time to get to JFK; traffic in the city was horrendous, even worse than the 101 Freeway around San Jose. She couldn't miss the plane. She was eager to get back to her children, and — funny about caseloads — the files on your desk never seem to disappear when you're out of the office; they only multiply.

The cab squealed to a stop.

Dance squinted out the window. "Is this the right address?"

"It's the one you gave me."

"It doesn't look like a police station."

He glanced up at the ornate building. "Sure don't. That'll be six seventy-five."

Yes and no, Dance thought to herself.

It was a police station and yet it wasn't.

Lon Sellitto greeted her in the front hallway. The detective had taken her course in kinesics the day before at One Police Plaza and had just called, asking if she could come by now to give them a hand on a multiple homicide. When he'd telephoned he'd given her the address and she'd assumed it was a precinct house. It happened to be filled with nearly as much forensic equipment as the lab at the Monterey CBI headquarters but was, nonetheless, a private home.

And it was owned by Lincoln Rhyme, no less.

Another fact Sellitto had neglected to mention.

Dance had heard of Rhyme, of course — many law enforcers knew of the brilliant quadriplegic forensic detective — but wasn't aware of the details of his life or his role in the NYPD. The fact he was disabled soon failed to register; unless she was studying body language intentionally, Kathryn Dance tended to pay most attention to people's eyes. Besides, one of her colleagues in the CBI was a paraplegic and she was accustomed to people in wheelchairs.

Sellitto now introduced her to Rhyme and a tall, intense police detective named Amelia Sachs. Dance noted at once that they were more than professional partners. No great kinesic deductions were necessary to make this connection; when she walked in, Sachs had her fingers entwined with Rhyme's and was whispering something to him with a smile.

Sachs greeted her warmly and Sellitto introduced her to several other officers.

Dance was aware of a tinny sound coming from over her shoulder — ear-buds dangling behind her. She laughed and shut off her iPod, which she carried with her like a life-support system.

Sellitto and Sachs told her about the homicide case they needed some help on — a case that Rhyme seemed to be in charge of, though he was a civilian.

Rhyme didn't participate much in the discussion. His eyes continually returned to a large whiteboard, on which were notations of the evidence. The other officers were giving her details of the case, though she couldn't help but observe Rhyme — the way he squinted at the board, would mutter something under his breath and shake his head, as if chastising himself for missing something. Occasionally his eyes would close. Once or twice he offered a comment about the case but he largely ignored Dance.

She was amused. The agent was used to skepticism. Most often it arose because she simply didn't look like a typical cop, this five-foot-five woman with dark blond hair worn usually, as now, in a tight French braid, light purple lipstick, iPod earbuds dangling, the gold and abalone jewelry her mother had made, not to mention her passion — quirky shoes (chasing perps didn't usually figure in Dance's daily life as a cop).

Now, though, she suspected she understood Lincoln Rhyme's lack of interest. Like many forensic scientists, he wouldn't put much stock in kinesics and interviewing. He'd probably voted against calling her.

As for Dance herself, well, she recognized the value of physical evidence, but it had no appeal to her. It was the human side of crime and crime solving that made her own heart race.

Kinesics versus forensics...

Fair enough, Detective Rhyme.

While the handsome, sardonic and impatient criminalist continued to gaze at the evidence charts, Dance absorbed the details of the case, which was a strange one. The murders by the self-anointed Watchmaker were horrific, sure, but Dance wasn't shocked. She'd worked cases that were just as gruesome. And, after all, she lived in California, where Charles Manson had set the standard for evil.

Another detective from the NYPD, Dennis Baker, now told her specifically what they needed. They'd found a witness who might have some helpful information but he wasn't forthcoming with details.

"He claims he didn't see anything," Sachs added. "But I have a feeling he did."

Dance was disappointed that it wasn't a suspect but a witness she'd be interviewing. She preferred the challenge of confronting criminals, and the more deceitful the better. Still, interviewing witnesses took much less time than breaking suspects and she couldn't miss her flight.

"I'll see what I can do," she told them. She fished in her Coach purse and put on round glasses with pale pink frames.

Sachs gave her the details about Ari Cobb, the reluctant witness, laying out the chronology of the man's evening, as they'd been able to piece it together, and his behavior that morning.

Dance listened carefully as she sipped coffee that Rhyme's caregiver had poured for her and indulged in half a Danish.

When she'd gotten all the background Dance organized her thoughts. Then she said to them, "Okay, let me tell you what I've got in mind. First, a crash course. Lon heard this yesterday at the seminar but I'll let the rest of you know how I handle interviewing. Kinesics traditionally was studying somebody's physical behavior — body language — to understand their emotional state and whether they were being deceptive or not. Most people, including me, use the term now to mean all forms of communication — not just body language but spoken comments and written statements too.

"First, I'll take a baseline reading of the witness — see how he acts when he's answering things that we know are truthful — name, address, job, things like that. I'll note his gesturing, posture, word choice and the substance of what he says.

"Once I have the baseline I'll start asking questions and find out where he exhibits stress reactions. Which means he's either lying or has some important issues with the topic I'm asking him about. Up until then, what I've been doing is 'interviewing' him. Once I suspect he's lying, then the session will become an 'interrogation.' I start to whittle away at him, using a lot of different techniques, until we get to the truth."

"Perfect," said Baker. Although Rhyme was apparently in charge, Dennis Baker, Dance deduced, was from headquarters; he had the belabored look of a man on whose shoulders an investigation like this ultimately — and politically — rested.

"You have a map of the area we're talking about," Dance said. "I'd like to know the geography of the area involved. You can't be an effective interrogator without it. I like to say I need to know the subject's terrarium."

Lon Sellitto gave a fast laugh. Dance smiled in curiosity. He explained, "Lincoln says exactly the same about forensics. If you don't know the geography, you're working in a vacuum. Right, Linc?"

"Sorry?" the criminalist asked.

"Terrarium, you like that?"

"Ah." His polite smile was the equivalent of Dance's son saying, "Whatever."

Dance examined the map of lower Manhattan, memorizing the details of the crime scene and of Ari Cobb's afterwork schedule the previous day, as Sachs and a young patrol officer, named Pulaski, pointed them out.

Finally she felt comfortable with the facts. "Okay, let's get to work. Where is he?"

"A room across the hall."

"Bring him in."

Chapter 7

A moment later an NYPD patrol officer brought in a short, trim businessman wearing an expensive suit. Dance didn't know if they'd actually arrested him but the way he touched his wrists told her that he'd been in cuffs recently.

Dance greeted the man, who was uneasy and angry, and nodded him to a chair. She sat across from him — nothing between them — and scooted forward until she was in a neutral proxemic zone, the term referring to the physical space between a subject and an interviewer. This zone can be adjusted to make the subject more or less comfortable. She was not too close to be invasive but not so far away as to give him a sense of security. ("You push the edge of edgy," she'd say in her lectures.)

"Mr. Cobb, my name's Kathryn Dance. I'm a law enforcement agent and I'd like to talk to you about what you saw last night."

"This is ridiculous. I already told them" — a nod at Rhyme — "everything I saw."

"Well, I just arrived. I don't have the benefit of your previous answers."

Jotting responses, she asked a number of simple questions — where he lived and worked, marital status, and the like — which gave her Cobb's baseline reaction to stress. She listened carefully to his answers. ("Watching and listening are the two most important parts of the interview. Speaking comes last.")

One of the first jobs of an interviewer is to determine the personality type of the subject — whether he's an introvert or extrovert. These types aren't what most people think; they're not about being boisterous or retiring. The distinction is about how people make decisions. An introvert is governed by intuition and emotion more than logic and reason; an extrovert, the opposite. Assigning personalities helps the interviewer in framing the questions and picking the right tone and physical demeanor to adopt when asking them. For instance, taking a gruff, clipped approach with an introvert will make him withdraw into his shell.