“How can you be so certain what each expression means?”
“Facial expressions are universal in type and meaning across all cultures and ethnic groups,” she said.
“Show me the one that says you’re a liar.”
“That’s not how it works. Facial expressions, especially micro expressions, are clues. Someone pretends to be angry, but their face says they are afraid. They should be devastated but a smile lasting a fraction of a second shoots out of the corner of their mouth. I look for inconsistencies, asymmetries, things that don’t fit.”
“Like the dog that didn’t bark.”
“Exactly. If you know what to look for, they are the closest things to money in the bank for a lie catcher.”
“Well, then. I better not lie to you.”
“Not unless you want to get caught,” she said, her grin firmly in place.
Chapter Twelve
I needed sleep more than I needed a doctor. It took me thirty minutes to get home, detouring around construction on I-35 to my house in Overland Park, a suburb on the Kansas side of the state line that bisects Kansas City.
The house looked like it always had from the outside-a boxy two-story with a two-car garage, beige stucco, short trees, and shorter grass. Walking inside, finding it almost empty after I agreed that Joy could take whatever furniture she wanted while the lawyers worked out the rest of the property settlement, it reminded me of a house whose owners I had arrested for selling dope to their kids’ friends. They held an estate sale to raise money so they could pay their lawyers. I took a tour when it was over. Everything worth having was gone, the picked-over remnants all that remained. They went to jail for a long time.
My dining room was empty; my beer-stained easy chair and ring-marked end table sat alone in the den, ruts in the carpet where the cherrywood entertainment center had stood. There was no kitchen table, just a pair of stools with their white paint chipped by careless heels, tucked under the black granite lip of the island anchored in the middle of the room. The walls were scarred with holes where pictures had hung. The drapes had been stripped from bare windows and my footsteps echoed off hardwood?oors.
Joy left me the nineteen-inch TV with a built-in DVR she kept in the kitchen to watch the
I woke up in the late afternoon to an undercurrent of tremors-sensations, I called them-shakes in the making. I showered, nicked my chin shaving and shaking at the same time, and then left Kate a message that I needed to talk to her.
I?ipped on the early news in time to see a report on the murders. Adrian Williams was the spokeswoman for our office, a polished fashion plate who knew how to feed the media beast. She recited what little was known, made the usual comments about an ongoing investigation, and appealed to the public for patience and help.
By now, I knew the preliminary forensics report would be finished. The number of shots fired, the estimated distance between shooter and victims, the number and quality of fingerprints-all that and more would have been laid out for my squad. A more detailed rundown on the neighborhood canvass, together with the list of known associates, would have yielded a chart of people to interview, priorities?agged with a red check alongside their names.
I tried watching the rest of the news but couldn’t concentrate on the latest fistfight between dueling county commissioners or the postseason prospects for the Royals and the early odds on the Chiefs breaking their Super Bowl drought. I didn’t care about the coming changes in the weather or the latest triumph of the station’s Problem Solvers.
I cared about Keyshon Williams, imagining the paramedics unraveling the boy’s fingers from his mother’s hair and picturing the coroner laying his arms alongside his body in preparation for removing, weighing, and measuring his vital organs. I already knew the cause of Keyshon’s death, but the person who had caused it was still upright and breathing. I couldn’t live with that.
I called Ammara Iverson, remembering the tears in her eyes when Troy Clark led me out of Marcellus’s backyard. I hoped her soft spot hadn’t hardened.
“Hey, Ammara. I just saw Adrian on the news.”
“Girl looked good too, I bet.”
“Like a million damn dollars of taxpayer money.”
Her laugh came from deep in her throat, full and honest. I liked the sound.
“How are you doing, Jack? Feeling any better?”
“Yeah. I got some sleep. I’ll find a doctor tomorrow and get this thing figured out.”
“That’s great.”
“Listen, what did CSI come up with?”
She lowered her voice. “I’m sorry, Jack. I can’t help you with that.”
“Can’t help me? What does that mean? I’m taking some time off. I didn’t go over to the other side.”
“It’s not my decision. Troy and Ben Yates sat us down, told us how it would be. Said any leaks and somebody’s going to get their ass kicked.”
“I’m not a reporter, you know.”
“Troy made a special point that we weren’t supposed to talk to you about the investigation.”
I was standing in the kitchen and slid onto one of the stools. “Why me?”
I heard her breathing, deciding what to say. “Troy said that since we don’t know what’s wrong with you or how stable you are right now, we can’t evaluate the risk of keeping you in the loop. I’m sorry, Jack.”
I was scared I had a brain tumor or a fatal disease. Troy just thought I was crazy. I wasn’t sure which was worse. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
“You still there, Jack?” Ammara asked.
“Yeah, I’m here. Listen, we never had this conversation, okay?”
“Sure. Take care of yourself.”
Troy had pushed me to do the right thing, to take myself out, to get help. If I’d been shot or run over or just had a bad cold, he would have told me the same thing. If I had refused, he would have passed it off as admirable stubbornness and devotion to the job. Instead, when he found me shaking uncontrollably under the tree in Marcellus’s backyard, he saw a security risk, someone no longer to be trusted.
Troy couldn’t let go of the possibility that someone on our squad or close to it had leaked the existence of the surveillance camera to whoever was responsible for the murders. If he were right, he wouldn’t trust anyone, least of all me.
I spun Troy’s scenario until it snagged on something I had felt but not been able to pin down since I first saw the cash lying on the ground. I’d caught a glimpse of someone running away from the scene, vaguely familiar but not clear enough to identify in the dark.
Colby Hudson fit the profile, as did thousands of other men in Kansas City. Except Colby had shown up in the morning looking like he’d run a marathon in the storm after having an unauthorized, unsupervised, unrecorded meeting with Javy Ordonez at the same time five people were executed, possibly on Javy’s instructions.
I went over the timing in my mind, suddenly realizing that I had been wrong when I told Colby that he was Javy’s alibi, a statement Colby hadn’t denied. Colby had said that Javy learned about the murders a couple of hours after they happened while the two of them were at an after-hours club. I was in Marcellus’s backyard less than an hour after the shootings. Colby could have been the person I had seen running away and still made it to his meeting with Javy. He could even have been the person who told Javy that Marcellus was dead. If so, there was only one way he could have known that.
I worried that my suspicions were feeding off my feelings about Colby’s relationship with Wendy and Troy’s leak paranoia. I didn’t like it, but that didn’t mean I was wrong. If I was right, Wendy could be caught in the middle. I called her, treading softly.
