XO (34 page)

His boots, with pointed toes tipped in metal, were scuffed but looked expensive.

“You mind if I take notes?” she asked.

“Not at all. You can even record this.” He looked around the room as if he knew they were doing just that; Dance wasn’t obligated to tell him, since they’d gotten a magistrate’s okay, given that he was a suspect in the murders.

Dance remained placid but was troubled by his perception, or intuition. And his utterly calm demeanor. That false wisp of a smile added to the eeriness.

“Any time you want to take a break for some coffee or a smoke, you just let me know.”

“I stay away from coffee,” he said and gave no reaction to the other offer. Was he being coy? Dance had been fishing to find out about his current
smoking habit. But whether he’d outmaneuvered her or just hadn’t thought to refer to the vice didn’t matter; she’d raised the issue once and couldn’t bring it up again without giving something away—as Madigan had done throughout the first interview.

He then surprised her further by asking casually, “How long’ve you been in law enforcement, Agent Dance?”

Just the sort of question she herself would ask early in an interview to establish a baseline for kinesic analysis.

“For some time now. But please call me Kathryn. Now, what can I do for you?”

He smiled knowingly as if he had expected such a deflecting answer. “‘Some time.’ Ah. You seem seasoned. That’s good. Oh, and you can call me Edwin.”

“All right, Edwin.”

“You enjoying Fresno?”

“I am.”

“Little different from Monterey, isn’t it?”

Dance wasn’t surprised that she herself had been the subject of Edwin’s own investigation. Though she wondered how far his knowledge of her life extended.

He continued, “It’s pretty there. I don’t like the fog much. Do you live near the water?”

“So, what can I do for you, Edwin?”

“You’re busy, I know. Let’s get to the nut of it. That was an expression of my mother’s. I thought it was about squirrels, hiding nuts. I never did find out what it meant. She had all sorts of great expressions. She was quite a woman.” His eyes scanned her face, dipped to her chest and belly, though not in a lascivious way, then back to her eyes. “I wanted to talk to you because you’re smart.”

“Smart?”

“I wanted to talk to somebody involved in this situation who’s smart.”

“There’re a lot of good people here, on the sheriff’s office staff.” She waved her arm, wondering if he’d follow the gesture. He didn’t. He continued to study her intently, soaking up images.

And that smile …

“Nobody as smart as you. That’s a fact and a half. And the other thing is you don’t have an agenda.” He grimaced and his brows furrowed even
more. “Don’t you hate phrases like that? ‘Having an agenda.’ ‘Sending messages.’ ‘Drinking the Kool-Aid.’ Clichés. I regret saying that about the agenda. Sorry. Put it another way: You’ll stay focused on the truth. You won’t let your … let’s say ‘patriotism’ for Kayleigh mess up your judgment, like’s happened with the deputies here.”

She noted he was articulate, which she recalled was true of his emails as well. Most erotomanic or love-obsessional stalkers were above average in intelligence and education, though Edwin seemed smarter than most. Lord knew, if he was behind the killings, he was clever. This, of course, had nothing to do with a completely skewed sense of reality—like believing Kayleigh would actually be touched that he’d murdered her stepmother or a file sharer stealing her songs.

He continued, “Officers here, they won’t listen to me. End. Of. Story.”

“Well, I’ll be happy to hear what you have to say.”

“Thanks, Kathryn. Basically, it’s real simple. I didn’t kill Bobby Prescott. I don’t believe in file sharing but I wouldn’t kill anybody because they did it. And I didn’t attack Sheri Towne.”

He would have learned about the second and third attacks in the press. And she noted that he didn’t say, “or anyone with her.” The stories had
not
reported Dance’s own presence at the incident involving Sheri.

“You tell me that, Edwin. But everyone I interview denies the crime, even when we have them dead to rights—”

“Hey! Another expression of my mother’s.”

“I don’t really know you well enough to determine if you’re capable or inclined to hurt anybody or not. Tell me a little about yourself.”

Again, a knowing look, eerie. But he played along. And for five minutes or so he went through facts that she largely knew—his unfortunate, but not tortured, family history. His jobs in Seattle. His impatience with formal education. He said he often got bored in class; his teachers and professors were slower than he was—which might explain his checkered record at school.

He downplayed but didn’t deny his skill at computers.

He didn’t mention his romantic life, past or present.

“You have a girlfriend?”

That caught him a bit off guard as if he was thinking: Obviously, I do. Kayleigh Towne.

“Last year I dated somebody in Seattle. We lived together for a while.
Sally was okay but she wasn’t into doing anything fun. I couldn’t get her to go to concerts or anything. I had to break up with her. Felt kind of bad about it. She really wanted to get married, but … it wouldn’t’ve worked out. I mean, is it too much to ask to have fun with somebody, to laugh, to be on the same, you know, wavelength?”

Not at all, Dance reflected but gave no response. She asked, “When did you break up?”

“Around Christmas.”

“I’m sorry about that. It must’ve been tough.”

“It was. I hate hurting people. And Sally was real nice. Just … you know, with some people things click, some not.”

She now had enough information and decided it was time to start her kinesic analysis. She asked him again what specifically she could do for him, noting his behavior closely.

“Okay, I’m not the brightest bulb on the tree. Another Mom expression, ha. And I’m not very ambitious. But I’m smart enough to figure out that I’m the victim here and I’m hoping you’re smart enough to take that seriously. Somebody’s setting me up—probably the same people who were spying on me last weekend. Behind the house, checking me out, my car, even my trash.”

“I see.”

“Look, I’m not the ogre everybody says I am. Deputy Madigan and Lopez? I’m sorry I had to have them arrested but I didn’t start it. They broke the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments and some other state statutes by detaining me and searching my house. Those souvenirs were important to me. If you break the law there have to be consequences. That’s exactly what
your
job is all about. I read that article you wrote when you were a reporter a few years ago, about the justice system? In the paper in Sacramento. That was a good article. All about presumed innocence.”

Again, Dance struggled to keep the surprise off her face.

“Did you get a look at who was watching you?”

“No. They stayed in the shadows.”

Did his smile deepen at the word “shadows”? Just a faint reaction? She couldn’t tell.

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“Why do you assume I didn’t?”

She’d known that he had; he’d told Madigan about the incident when she’d been observing in the interrogation room when Edwin was detained. She’d wanted to see his consistency. “You did?”

His eyes narrowed. “Nine-one-one. And they asked me if the man was trespassing and I guess technically he wasn’t.”

“You’re sure it was a man?”

A hesitation. “Well, no. I just assumed.” His odd smile. “That’s good, Kathryn. See, that’s what I mean. You’re being smart.”

“Why would somebody make you a fall guy?”

“I don’t know. It’s not my job to prove my innocence. All I know is I haven’t hurt anybody but someone’s going to a lot of trouble to make it look like I have.” His eyes scanned her face closely. “Now, here’s where I need your help. I was by myself when Bobby was killed and the file sharer too. But when Sheri Towne was attacked, I have an alibi.”

“Did you tell the deputies?”

“No. Because I don’t trust them. That’s why I wanted to talk to you now. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea—because you’re a friend of Kayleigh’s—but after reading that article you wrote, after meeting you, I decided you wouldn’t let your friendship interfere with your judgment. Maybe that comes from you being a mother.” He dropped that sentence without adding anything further or even looking for a response. Dance wondered if her face ticked with the alarm she felt.

“Tell me about the alibi,” she calmly asked.

“I was going to go to the luncheon, for the fan? I didn’t think they’d let me in but I thought I could watch from a distance, I didn’t know. Maybe hear Kayleigh sing. Anyway, I got lost. Around Cal State I stopped and I asked directions. It was twelve-thirty.”

Yes, just around the time of the attack.

“Who’d you talk to?”

“I don’t know her name. It was a residential area near the sports stadium. This woman was working in a garden. She went inside to get a map and I stayed at the door. The noon news was just finishing.”

At the time I was dodging bullets and being hit by fire extinguisher shrapnel.

“The street name?”

“Don’t know. But I can describe her house. It had a lot of plants hanging from baskets. The bright red little flowers. What’re they called?”

“Geraniums?”

“I think so. Kayleigh likes to garden. Me, not so much.”

As if he were talking about his wife.

“My mother did too. She had—cliché alert!—a real green thumb.”

Dance smiled. “Anything more about the house?”

“Dark green. On the corner. Oh, and the house had a carport, not a garage. She was nice so I moved some bags of grass seed for her. She was in her seventies. White. That’s all I remember. Oh, she had cats.”

“All right, Edwin. We’ll look into that.” Dance jotted down the information. “Will you give us permission to search the yard where you saw that intruder?”

“Of course, sure.”

She didn’t look up but asked quickly, “And inside your house too?”

“Yes.” A microsecond of hesitation? She couldn’t tell. He added, “If Deputy Madigan had asked in the first place I would have let him.”

Dance had called his bluff, which may not have been a bluff at all, and said she’d schedule a time for deputies to come by.

And she asked herself the big question: What did the kinesics reveal? Was Edwin Sharp telling the truth?

She frankly couldn’t say. As she’d told Madigan and the others in the briefing on Monday, a stalker is usually psychotic, borderline or severely neurotic, with reality issues. That meant he might be reciting what he believed was the truth, even though it was completely false; therefore his kinesics when lying would be the same as his baseline.

Adding to the difficulty was Edwin’s diminished affect—his ability to feel and display emotion, such as stress. Kinesic analysis works only when the stress of lying alters the subject’s behavior.

Still, interviewing is a complex art and can reveal more than just deception. With most witnesses or suspects, the best information is gathered by observations of, first, body language, then, second, verbal quality—pitch of voice and how fast one talks, for instance.

The third way in which humans communicate can sometimes be helpful: verbal content—
what
we say, the words themselves. (Ironically, this is generally the least useful because it is the most easily manipulated and prone to misunderstanding.)

Yet with a troubled individual like Edwin, where kinesics weren’t
readily available, looking at his verbal content might be the only tool Dance had.

But what had he offered that could be helpful?

He shook his head as if answering her silent question, and the smile deepened. It was unprofessional but she wished he’d lose the grin. The expression was more unnerving to her than the worst glare from a murderer.

“You think I’m smart, Edwin. But do you think I’m straightforward?”

He considered this. “As much as you can be.”

“You know, with everything that’s been happening, don’t you think it might make sense for you to get back to Seattle, forget about the concert. You could see Kayleigh some other time.”

She said this to prime the pump, see if he’d offer facts about his life and plans—facts that she might use for content-based analysis.

She certainly didn’t expect the laugh of disbelief and what he then said: “I can hardly do that, now, can I?”

“No?”

“You know that song of hers, ‘Your Shadow’?”

There wasn’t a single clue in his face that this song was a calling card for murder. She said casually, “Sure. Her big hit. You thought it was the best song she ever wrote.”

Edwin’s grin for once took on a patina of the genuine. “She told you that, did she?” He glowed; his lover had remembered something about him. “Well, it’s about her, you know.”

“About her, Kayleigh?”

“That’s right. The first verse is about how people take advantage of her as a musician. And then there’s a verse about that car crash—when her mother died. Kayleigh was fifteen. You know Bishop was driving, drunk.”