Jack Davis Mystery - 01 - Shakedown (29 page)

“Give me an example.”

“Okay,” Kate said. “Some emotions just don’t go together. It’s very hard for someone who is angry to fake being afraid, or vice versa. The involuntary muscle movements associated with anger and fear just don’t go together. Fear moves the brows up and anger pulls them down. It’s impossible for your brows to be in two places at one time.”

“That’s it? The eyebrows are the windows to the soul?”

“Just don’t pluck them. No single gesture, facial expression, or muscle twitch will prove that someone is lying, but they are clues of emotions that don’t fit. That’s what I mean by leakage.”

“I remember you telling me that some people don’t leak.”

“Natural liars, sociopaths, actors, politicians, and trial lawyers are all used to convincing an audience of something whether or not they believe it. To varying degrees, deception doesn’t bother them. It’s what they do. They delight in having duped someone. But even they can leak because it’s impossible to completely control facial expressions. Too many of them are involuntary.”

“Like the micro facial expressions, the ones that happen so quickly you can’t see them.”

“Precisely. Genuine expressions don’t last long. The duration from onset to offset can be less than a second. Micro expressions ?ash on and off the face in less than a quarter of a second. If the expression is asymmetrical, stronger on one side of the face than the other, or if the timing is wrong, or the duration is too long, those are all good signs that the expression shown is false.”

“But how does that prove someone is lying? I’ve interviewed plenty of people who it turned out were telling the truth but were scared to death I wouldn’t believe them.”

“That’s why context is so critical. The fear of not being believed is virtually impossible to distinguish from the fear of being caught lying.”

“Okay. Since I didn’t grow up playing with facial expression ?ash cards like you did, how do I learn to recognize micro expressions?”

“Practice,” she said, rummaging through her purse. “Damn!”

“Don’t tell me you left your ?ash cards at home.”

Kate poked me in the arm. “Don’t make fun of the teacher or I’ll rap your knuckles with my ruler. We don’t use ?ash cards any more. We use images on a CD, which I left at my office.”

“So school is out?”

“Not so fast,” she said, examining my television. “Your TV has a DVD player with a freeze-frame feature. Do you have any movies?”

“Not anymore. Joy got them in the property settlement.”

“Well, at least the two of you settled something. Have you recorded anything? We could play it back and break it down frame by frame.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve been recording the local news to keep track of stories about the drug house murders. We can take a look at that.”

“It’s not ?ash cards but we’ll make it work.”

It turned out that the two news anchors on Channel 6 had issues. In the midst of their happy-talk banter, the male anchor was checking out the female anchor’s chest, while she was sneering every time he opened his mouth. Not surprisingly, the weather wonk didn’t believe a word of her own forecast. All of that was revealed in the frame-by-frame breakdown of their facial expressions.

“I can see the micro expressions when you freeze them but they blew by me in real time,” I told Kate.

“You’re a rookie. I’ll get you the CD I was talking about. Spend a few hours with it on your computer and you’ll pick it up faster than you think. It will change the way you look at people. Let’s try a few more.”

The next segment in the news broadcast was the interview with Marcellus’s neighbors, LaDonna Simpson, Tarla Hicks, and Latrell Kelly. Kate slowed the recording down when LaDonna Simpson appeared on the screen.

“Skip her,” I said. “And the next person, another woman. Go to the last guy interviewed. His name is Latrell Kelly. He lives directly behind Marcellus.”

“You seem awfully interested in him.”

“I should be. He gave me the dog. Play the interview straight through, then go back and break it down.”

Kate pushed the play button and Latrell began speaking, his slow, quiet voice now familiar. I mouthed the words as he said again “nobody takes care of a little boy, you see what happens.”

Kate gasped. “Unbelievable!”

“What? I didn’t see a thing.”

She rewound the tape, freezing it as Latrell finished speaking. In that instant, he looked straight into the camera. His placid, respectful, sorrowful face melted away, replaced by a vicious snarl a pit bull would have killed for. His lips were ?attened and pulled back, his teeth bared, his eyes trimmed to narrow slits, and his nostrils ?ared. His devil’s face vanished in the next frame.

We stared at him, neither of us saying a word. Kate rewound the segment once more, walking through it frame by frame. There were other micro expressions. I started to ask her what they meant, but she raised her hand, telling me to be quiet.

“Unbelievable,” she said for the second time when she finished her review. “Usually, I see ordinary expressions, the kind we associate with guilt or shame or pleasure. And I see a lot of anger and fear. But I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“What’s he lying about?”

Kate sat back in her chair, her arms folded across her chest. “Oh, he’s not lying about anything. When he said nobody takes care of a little boy, you see what happens, he was absolutely telling the truth.”

“One of the murder victims was a little boy, Keyshon. Is that who Latrell was talking about?”

“I don’t think so. I think he was talking about himself.”

“So who didn’t take care of him?” I asked. “His parents?”

“Probably. He could have been abused or abandoned. Whatever it was, he’s carrying around a lot of rage.”

“Enough to kill five people, including a mother and her little boy, and then blow away another drug dealer two nights later?”

“What other drug dealer?”

“The gun used in the drug house murders was also used to blow away one of Marcellus’s competitors. A guy named Javy Ordonez.”

“If he was angry enough, but the mother and her little boy are the only ones who make any sense at all.”

“How?”

“There’s a lot of pain that goes with all that rage. People who hurt that bad sometimes kill themselves because that’s the only way they can stop the pain. Other times they kill someone they think caused their pain or someone they think is them, like a mother and a little boy that remind him too much of what happened to him.”

“Are you saying you think Latrell is the killer?”

“No. I’m just a jury consultant. I can tell you which version of the evidence the jury is more likely to believe or which juror is more likely to find for the plaintiff or the defendant. I can tell you the odds that a witness is a liar. But I can’t tell you if Latrell is a murderer, although there is one thing I can tell you for sure about him.”

“What’s that?”

She spread her palms ?at on the table. “Don’t piss him off.”

I nodded. “Good to know since he wants to talk to me.”

“You? How do you know that and why does he want to talk to you?”

I summarized my trips to Quindaro since the murders, my conversation with Latrell, and his phone call to Ammara asking for my number. Kate peppered me with questions about how Latrell looked, talked, and acted when I was with him, smiling when I told her that I had gone back to the neighborhood not just to find witnesses but that I was also following her instructions to get a dog.

Kate’s smile lit up her face, the room, and my heart. I would have freeze-framed it if only I knew what to do with it. She chuckled, watching me watch her.

“You’re so busy trying to figure everyone else out, you don’t hide much of yourself.”

“Actually, I’m a pretty good poker player but I’m not trying to bluff you.”

“At the risk of choking on trite metaphors,” she said, “you’ve got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. Now what do you say we get back on task? Are you going to talk to Latrell?”

“I’ve got to.”

Kate studied me some more, nodding. “I see that. You can’t sit back and wait for something to happen even if Latrell had nothing to do with the murders and nothing to do with Wendy. You’ve got to find out for yourself.”

“I can’t hide that from you or anybody else.”

“So,” she said, clicking off her conclusions one finger at a time, “you’ll go tomorrow, when it’s light out and you’ve had some rest. And you’ll take someone with you. Maybe Ammara Iverson or that detective from Kansas City, Kansas.”

I stood and turned off the television.

“I’ll go tonight because I can’t sit around waiting for something to happen and I’ll go alone because if I show up with the FBI or the cops, he won’t talk to me.”

Kate stood, grabbing my wrist. “Then I’m going with you.”

“I don’t think so. You’re going home.”

“You said it yourself. You’re lousy at reading faces and you didn’t pick up on the micro expressions we just watched. You want to know if Latrell is telling the truth, you have to take me with you.”

“How do I explain to Latrell why I brought you along?”

She smiled again. “Tell him that I like dogs.”

“And if that doesn’t do it?”

“Then tell him that I’m your girlfriend.”

She wrapped her arms around my neck, pulled my lips to hers, and kissed me so hard I shook.

Latrell knew that Jack Davis would come. He would knock on the door. Latrell would open it and let him in. Davis would walk past him into the living room. Maybe he would turn around and maybe he wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. Latrell didn’t care whether he shot Davis in the back or the front as long as he was dead when he hit the ?oor.

He held a .45 caliber Marine pistol in his right hand, the mate to the gun he’d used to kill Marcellus. Johnny McDonald had stolen the pair seventeen years ago, bragging to Latrell how he had taken them and the night-vision goggles off a gun dealer with his mother’s help, cackling as he described how she had distracted the dealer by showing him her titties, his Adam’s apple, big as a grapefruit, bobbing up and down his long neck as he told the story.

Latrell had looked at his mother. She was sprawled on the sofa, the same one that he was sitting on now while he waited for Jack Davis, her eyes closed, smiling that dreamy smile she got when she was high, her lips twitching, the only part of her knowing the high wouldn’t last.

Latrell had followed Johnny into the basement, Johnny asking him did he want to hold one of the guns. Yeah, Latrell told him, asking was it loaded, Johnny saying damn straight it was loaded. How do you shoot it, Latrell asked, Johnny telling him it’s simple kid, just pull the trigger. Like this? Latrell asked, and shot Johnny in his Adam’s apple, the target so big he couldn’t miss even if it was the first time he had shot anybody. Latrell buried Johnny in the basement, adding his mother’s body the next day after she came on to him, asking would he get her fixed up.

Latrell kept that gun in the cave and the mate in the bottom drawer of his dresser, never firing it, not even once to see that it worked. He wasn’t religious, but he saw the spare gun as his salvation, the way to make things right one last time. So he saved it, keeping it pure and clean, for the moment he would need it. He checked the magazine for the fifth time, making certain it only held two bullets. That was all he would need.

He’d woken up that morning lying on the ?oor of the cave, hugging his knees to his chest so tightly that when he stretched out he had no feeling in his legs. Soon Latrell’s skin started to tingle, his muscles warmed, and he staggered to his feet, bracing himself with one hand against the cave wall, breathing in the moist cool air coming off the underground lake.

The last thing he remembered from the night before was how he had screamed when he discovered that Davis had been in his cave, had stolen his gun and his special things. Latrell didn’t remember his screams giving way to sobs or his sobs giving way to sleep, but he knew that’s what had happened because it had been that way so many times before.

The candles he had lit had all burned out and the batteries in his ?ashlight had died. The impenetrable darkness of the cave was broken only by shimmering ?ecks of green light that dotted the ?oor and walls, a mysterious glowing mineral that reminded him of the sparks he saw when he squeezed his eyes shut as hard as he could.

Latrell was at ease in the blackness that made everything, including him, invisible. He knew the contours of the cave as well as he knew his own house and could easily navigate by touch and memory. Still groggy, he knelt at the edge of the lake, splashing the icy water on his face, then rocked back on his haunches, thinking about what he had to do and how he would do it.

He was convinced that Davis had followed him to the cave and waited until Latrell was gone so he could sneak inside, learn his secrets, and steal his gun and the picture of him and his mother that Johnny McDonald had taken in front of their house. He didn’t know what had made Davis suspect him, but he should have known something was up when Davis tried to play him with that bullshit story about losing his son.

Davis, he was certain, had given his gun to the FBI, who would figure out that it had been used to kill Marcellus, the Winston brothers, Jalise, and Keyshon. Davis would tell them how he’d followed Latrell to the cave and found the gun there and then they would come for him. He didn’t know how long these things took but guessed it would be today or tomorrow.

He thought about running but didn’t know where he would go or how he would live. He needed a place in the world, like his house and his job, and he needed a safe place away from the world, like the cave. Otherwise he would never survive.

From the instant Latrell had killed Johnny McDonald, he knew that it would eventually end like this no matter how many times he tried to make things right. It wasn’t fair. He hadn’t asked for the life he’d had. He’d only wanted to be taken care of, and, when he wasn’t, he took care of himself the only way he knew how.