“You didn’t have to say anything. Your face did all the talking.”
Kate was forty-one, divorced from her husband, Alan, after a fifteen-year marriage she described as a war of attrition. The one thing they agreed on was each other’s talent. They were both psychologists. Alan conducted mock-jury trials, using the results to craft questionnaires for the real jurors. She knew of no one better. Congratulating themselves on being mature adults, they agreed that their business relationship as jury consultants would survive their divorce. Her father, Dr. Henry Scranton, had started the firm and she and Alan were his partners. Alan, Kate said, had regretted the divorce the moment the ink was dry on the decree, but she knew it was the right decision.
Her thirteen-year-old son, Brian, split time between his parents. Her sister, Patty, was the poster child for happily married soccer moms, always nagging Kate to quit her job, patch things up with Alan, and provide their son a more stable home. Her father agreed on everything except quitting her job.
“How do you do it?” I asked her.
“Do what?”
“Get it so right in the courtroom.”
“It’s how my father raised me.”
“Not good enough.”
Kate shoved the leftover scraps of olives, pepperoni, anchovies, and onions into a small mound, scooped them into her mouth, chewing and then smiling.
“My father is an expert in the Facial Action Coding System,” she explained.
“I was absent that day in school.”
“It’s a catalog of over three thousand facial expressions people make every day. A psychologist, Paul Ekman, developed the system. The majority of our facial expressions are involuntary. They?ash by in milliseconds, too fast for most people to even see them. But they are there. You can videotape someone and break down their expressions frame by frame.”
“I thought the eyes were the windows into the soul.”
“Very romantic, but the eyes are cloudy windows at best. Facial expressions can reveal whether someone is cheating on their spouse or their taxes or whether their heart is filled with mercy or murder, if you can put their expressions in the right context.”
We debated whether that was true, matching our experiences. I told her about Kevin. She eased back in her chair.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she explained. “You didn’t know what to look for.”
“That’s not an excuse. My job is to know what to look for.”
“Even so, it’s hard to see beneath the surface. My earliest memories of my father are of him staring at me, taking notes, staring some more, studying my every move and mood. While other kids played outside, I played face?ash cards with my father, every card a different facial expression. I had to tell him what emotion the person was expressing.”
“I bet he gave you ice cream when you got them right.”
“Chocolate, and a lot of it. He discovered that I had an unusual aptitude for recognizing micro facial expressions in, literally, the blink of an eye. I was eight when my mother died. I grew up as my father’s research subject. Eventually I became his assistant and then his partner.”
“So, you’re like a mind reader.”
“No. A mind reader works Las Vegas lounges, her name lit up on the bottom of the casino marquee, pulling silver dollars out of customers’ ears, making them admit they’ve never met before telling the audience the names of everyone the customer slept with in high school.”
I was still a skeptic. “No ESP either, huh?”
“Not a drop. And I don’t bend spoons just by looking at them and I don’t see dead people.”
“What do you see?”
“I see people’s smiles, frowns, raised eyebrows, and?ared nostrils. I see their?ickering eyes, quivering cheeks, laugh lines, crow’s feet, and wrinkles.”
“So do I. Everyone does.”
“Except I see more. I see the involuntary, uncontrollable, soul-stripping micro expressions that lay people open like an autopsy.”
There was more resignation than bragging in her voice.
“What’s that like?”
“It depends on who I’m looking at. I see things people don’t want me to see. It’s great for business but it’s hell on relationships. There are times when I’m grateful for my skill and there are times when I wish I had cataracts.”
I took a chance. “What do you see in my face?”
She hesitated, setting her fork down, folding her arms across her chest, a half smile creeping out of the corner of her mouth.
“Well, Agent Davis, I can tell whether you just want to have lunch or whether you want to take the rest of the day and the night off.”
“Which is it?” I asked, stunned to hear her say what I was thinking.
Kate laughed. “You’re married. It doesn’t matter what we want since lunch is the only thing that we can have.”
I liked that she laid it out so there was no misunderstanding. And I liked that she said it didn’t matter what
I found excuses for more lunches, always on the pretext of talking about a case I was working on, asking her advice about how to read suspects and witnesses. I would never trust myself when it came to reading faces after what happened to Kevin, but I loved listening to her talk. We let our lunches linger and wander, often coming back to the similarities between what we did. I caught bad guys. She caught lies. We both feared that we would be deceived by the guilty and fail the innocent.
We argued about the polygraph. I trusted it. She didn’t.
“The polygraph measures the response of the body’s limbic system, which controls emotion. It assumes that someone telling a lie will experience an involuntary increase in heart rate, pulse, temperature, breathing, all of which are controlled by the limbic system,” she said. “But a pathological liar can beat the polygraph.”
“How?”
“Wrong question. They answer is they lie. The right question is why aren’t their lies detected.”
“You’re going to tell me.”
“Of course. It’s my obligation to show you the errors of your ways,” Kate said with a grin. “A psychologist at the University of Southern California did a study on the brains of liars. It’s not conclusive, but it is interesting. He found that liars average 22 percent more white matter in the prefrontal cortex of their brains and 14 percent less gray matter.”
“So what?”
“The gray matter contains neurons, which are the brain’s networking material. Think of neurons like telephone wires that connect phones. And neurons link the prefrontal cortex to the limbic system. The fewer neurons someone has, the fewer connections there are to the limbic system. Pathological liars get away with lying because they don’t show any nervousness. They are genetically designed to lie.”
“But you can see it in their faces?”
“A psychopath or a natural liar is hard for anyone to catch. A psychopath doesn’t care about anything, so why get emotional? A natural liar, or someone who is trained to deceive, like actors or trial lawyers, they can be just as hard to figure out. The rest of us are a lot easier because micro facial expressions are almost impossible to control.”
“Aren’t they tied to emotions just like heart rate and breathing, which the polygraph measures?”
“You’re right, but people can learn to regulate their breathing and their heart rate. They can’t do that with micro expressions. And the polygraph is so unreliable no court will allow the results into evidence.”
“No court will allow a videotape of a defendant’s micro facial expressions into evidence either.”
“I don’t need them admitted into evidence. I just need to see them.”
