warrior with the machete.
The devil with the knife turned to smile at Joss; to tell him with his eyes that he could cut this family to pieces, and that Joss could do nothing but salvage anyone left when he'd had his fill.
Not this time.
Joss watched himself moving forward to meet the enemy.
On the couch, feeling as though his head had played host to a wasp's nest, Joss's hand reached between the cushions, and pulled out that for which it had been searching. He wiped the knife against his thigh, and put it back in its resting place. Close.
He let his head fall back against the lounge.
18
'YOU SEE, HE'S doing it again,' said Gabriel, cross-legged on her floor. The glow of the TV screen lit up his face. They otherwise sat in shadow, the gathering gloom of dusk waited on the balcony.
'So that would be another cluster?'
'Yup.' He kept his eyes on the screen, but she saw him make a mark in the notepad perched on his knee.
There hadn't been time to be awkward. Gabriel had walked straight to the TV upon entering Jill's apartment and had wheeled it around to expose the leads at the back. Before she'd even offered coffee, the Balmain room and Joss Preston-Jones had filled the screen. Gabriel had been animated from the start.
'I don't get it,' he'd said to her. 'I've got to see it again. This guy was throwing up deception cues all over the place. Come in here and watch this.'
She'd taken a seat on her chocolate leather sofa and leaned backwards, her arms across her chest, an eyebrow raised.
'You're sceptical,' he said.
'You think he's lying?'
'He's not telling us the whole truth. He's being deceptive again and again and again.'
'How do you know?'
'Same way I can tell that you think I'm full of shit right now. Incriminating and discriminating stress cues; verbal and non-verbal signs.' He turned back to the TV. 'You gotta watch this.'
Jill had always been interested in the principles of interrogation, and had thought she had a good sense of when a subject was lying. She knew well that most of the time what a suspect actually said during an interrogation was only half the story. The way they said it, their body posture and movements told the rest. What she learned in her loungeroom over the next two hours, though, surpassed all of the behaviour analysis training she'd had to date, and gave words to a lot of her instinctual knowledge and hunches.
'Okay, so we know that no single behaviour can tell us whether someone is being truthful or deceptive, right?' He continued without expecting a response. 'But when we repeatedly observe some kind of stress reaction, or even better, a cluster of stress reactions when a particular issue is being discussed, then we can assume it's not a random behaviour.'
From Jill's point of view, anyone speaking about a brutal home invasion would radiate stress signals. Preston-Jones was wrecked after the interview, as was almost every victim she'd ever talked to. Gabriel's eyes and voice were compelling, however. She leaned forward in her seat.
'Of course, even innocent subjects will be nervous, and we'll detect that every time. But Joss exhibits markers suggestive of poor credibility at several key points through the interview, signals that I wouldn't expect in subjects who are telling the whole truth. What we've got to figure out now is what he's omitting from his statement. What he's not telling us. But more importantly,' Gabriel turned his eyes from Jill back to the screen, 'why he's omitting it.'
Jill finally found herself on the rug next to Gabriel, propped cross-legged with her back against the lounge to better see the screen. He paused the tape at key moments and time and again showed her movements made by Joss that stood out from his typical signs of tension.
'I'm picking up more evasion than deception,' he said.
She estimated that they were around halfway through the tape.
'It could also be embarrassment,' he continued, 'but it's more likely to be guilty knowledge: withholding information.'
The discriminating stress cues, once Gabriel had pointed them out, began to appear obvious.
'Negation!' Jill pointed at Joss on screen, once again rubbing his palm up and down his nose, briefly covering his mouth. Negation behaviour, Gabriel had reminded her, was a subconscious effort to hide leaks of emotion from the face. In the video, Joss repeatedly put his hands up to the facial touch zone – the area from mid-nose to mid- chin – hiding his mouth when he spoke about the ringleader of the gang.
'Right. And what's that?' he asked her, tape paused on Joss making a sweeping gesture in response to a question asked by Gabriel.
'Aversion behaviour? He's blocking you, isn't he?'
'Figuratively, he's sweeping the question away. Remember I asked him to expand on what happened when the leader was questioning him on the ground. He used a bridging phrase: what did he say?' Gabriel looked down at the pad on his knee. ''The next thing I knew they were gone.' The next thing I knew… It's a typical phrase used to cover gaps and omissions. He doesn't want to talk about what happened just before the offenders left.'
Gabriel paused the tape again and performed a yoga stretch on the loungeroom floor. His khaki shirt stretched tight over the muscles in his chest and back. Her shoulders felt stiff and she considered copying his pose, but instead she contented herself with stretching her neck from side to side.
'What else do we know about this guy?' he asked.
'Just the basic demographics, I think,' she answered. 'Age, address, family, his job. Probably we should look deeper.'
'Definitely. Look at the screen now.' Gabriel again sat up, cross-legged. 'See. That's another control behaviour. He's sitting on his hands. I think that he knows about stress cues and he's trying to suppress his nervous behaviours. Problem for him is that this tells us just as much – he's trying to be deceptive about his true emotions. When he freezes, or grips the chair, or sits on his hands within three to five seconds of a hot topic, he might as well have just let his hands do what they wanted to.
'But what I really want to know,' he said, standing and clicking off the TV, 'is where he learned that he should be monitoring his signals. I don't think he's always been a civilian, Jill.'
Jill also stood. She walked into the kitchen, and for no reason felt suddenly self-conscious. She wiped her hand across the four switches in the panel on the wall and flooded the apartment with light. What was it, six o'clock? She glanced at the clock on her wall.
'It's almost seven,' he said. 'What do you want to eat?'
'Ah…'
'We could just go grab some laksa?' He seemed to notice the startled expression on her face. 'Or maybe you're too tired. That's okay. I'll head off.'
'Where do you live?'
Was she supposed to offer to drive him home? This sucked. She didn't even know this guy, and now she felt responsible for getting him home. What do you do in these situations? The awkwardness of such personal exchanges was almost physically painful for her.
'Bus to Central. Central to Ryde,' he answered. 'I live in Ryde. It's an hour from here. I come out here all the time. I love the Thai restaurant up the strip.'
'Hang on a sec,' Jill surprised herself by saying. She suddenly realised she was starving. 'I'd love some laksa.'
She walked into her bathroom, splashed her face and fixed her hair in the mirror. Just before leaving, she turned back and slicked on some lip-gloss. What are you doing? she asked herself in the mirror. She left the room quickly and grabbed her handbag, not looking at Gabriel.
