Xo (Kathryn Dance 3)

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 shrapne

l.

"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--cliche 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.