Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories, Volume 3 Read online

  O’Neil considered this and called Oakland PD. He learned that the CI had only heard about Paulson and Keplar, but it was certainly possible he decided to ask someone else along. The snitch had severed all contact with the BOL, worried that by diming out the operation he’d be discovered and killed.

  O’Neil texted Dance and let her know about the third perp, in case this would help in the interrogation. He informed the FBI’s Steve Nichols, too.

  He then disconnected and looked over the hundred or so people standing at the yellow police tape gawking at the activity.

  The third perp…Maybe he’d gotten out of the car earlier, after setting up the attack but before the CHP trooper found the suspects.

  Or maybe he’d bailed out here, when the Taurus was momentarily out of sight behind the outlet store.

  O’Neil summoned several other Monterey County officers and a few CHP troopers. They headed behind the long building searching the loading docks—and even in the Dumpsters—for any trace of the third suspect.

  O’Neil hoped they’d be successful. Maybe the perp had bailed because he had particularly sensitive or incriminating information on him. Or he was a local contact who did use credit cards and ATM machines—whose paper trail could steer the police toward the target.

  Or maybe he was the sort who couldn’t resist interrogation, perhaps the teenage child of one of the perps. Fanatics like those in the Brothers of Liberty had no compunction about enlisting—and endangering—their children.

  But the search team found no hint that someone had gotten out of the car and fled. The rear of the mall faced a hill of sand, dotted with succulent plants. The area was crowned with a tall chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire. It would have been possible, though challenging, to escape that way, but no footprints in the sand led to the fence. All the loading dock doors were locked and alarmed; he couldn’t have gotten into the stores that way.

  O’Neil continued to the far side of the building. He walked there now and noted a Burger King about fifty or sixty feet away. He entered the restaurant, carefully scanning to see if anyone avoided eye contact or, more helpfully, took off quickly.

  No one did. But that didn’t mean the third perp wasn’t here. This happened relatively often. Not because of the adage (which was wrong) about returning to or remaining at the scene of the crime out of a subconscious desire to get caught. No, perps were often arrogant enough to stay around and scope out the nature of the investigation, as well as get the identities of the investigators who were pursuing them—even, in some cases, taking digital pictures to let their friends and fellow gangbangers know who was searching for them.

  In English and Spanish he interviewed the diners, asking if they’d seen anyone get out of the perps’ car behind the outlet store. Typical of witnesses, people had seen two cars, three cars, no cars, red Tauruses, blue Camrys, green Chryslers, gray Buicks. No one had seen any passengers exit any vehicles. Finally, though, he had some luck. One woman nodded in answer to his questions. She pulled gaudy eyeglasses out of her blond hair, where they rested like a tiara, and put them on, squinting as she looked over the scene thoughtfully. Pointing with her gigantic soda cup, she indicated a spot behind the stores where she’d noticed a man standing next to a car that could’ve been blue. She didn’t know if he’d gotten out or not. She explained that somebody in the car handed him a blue backpack and he’d left. Her description of the men—one in combat fatigues and one in black cargo pants and a black leather jacket—left no doubt that the men in the car were Keplar and Paulson.

  “Did you see where he went?”

  “Toward the parking lot, I guess. I, like, didn’t pay much attention.” Looking around. Then she stiffened. “Oh…”

  “What?” O’Neil asked.

  “That’s him!” she whispered, pointing to a sandy-haired man in jeans and work shirt, with a backpack over his shoulder. Even from this distance, O’Neil could see he was nervous, rocking from foot to foot, as he studied the crime scene. He was short, about five three or so, explaining why the trooper might easily miss him in the back of the Taurus.

  O’Neil used his radio to call an MCSO deputy and have her get the woman’s particulars. She agreed to stay here until they collared the perp so she could make a formal ID. He then pulled his badge off his neck and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket, which he buttoned, to conceal the Glock.

  He started out of the Burger King.

  “Mister…Detective,” the woman called. “One thing…that backpack? You oughta know, when the guy handed it to him, they treated it real careful. I thought maybe it had something breakable in it. But now maybe I’m thinking it could be, you know, dangerous.”

  “Thanks.”

  It was then that the sandy-haired man glanced toward O’Neil.

  And he understood.

  He eased back into the crowd. Hiking the backpack higher on his shoulder, he turned and began to run, speeding between the buildings to the back of the mall. There he hesitated for only a moment, charged up the sand hill and scaled the six-foot chain-link O’Neil had surveyed earlier, shredding part of his jacket as he deftly vaulted the barbed wire. He sprawled onto the unkempt land on the other side of the fence, also mostly sand. It was a deserted former military base, hundreds of acres.

  O’Neil and two deputies approached the fence. The detective scaled it fast, tearing his shirt and losing some skin on the back of his hand as he crested the barbed wire. He leapt to the sand on the other side. He rolled once, righted himself and drew his gun, anticipating an attack.

  But the perp had disappeared.

  One of the deputies behind him got most of the way up the fence, but lost his grip and fell. He dropped straight down, off balance, and O’Neil heard the pop of his ankle as it broke.

  “Oh,” the young man muttered as he looked down at the odd angle. He turned as pale as the fog and passed out.

  The other deputy called for a medic then started up the fence.

  “No!” O’Neil shouted. “Stay there.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll handle the pursuit. Call a chopper.” And he turned, sprinting through the sand and succulents and scrub oak and pine, dodging around dunes and stands of dry trees—behind any one of which an armed suspect could be waiting.

  He hardly wanted to handle the pursuit alone but he had no choice. Just after he’d landed, he’d seen a sign lying faceup on the sand.

  DANGER UXO

  UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE

  It featured a picture of an explosion coming up from the ground. Red years ago, the paint was now pink.

  This area had been part of the military base’s artillery range, and reportedly thousands of tons of shells and grenades were buried here, waiting to be cleared as soon as the Pentagon’s budget allowed.

  But O’Neil thought of the two hundred people who’d die in less than two hours and began to sprint along the trail that the suspect had been kind enough to leave in the sand.

  The unreasonable idea occurred to him that if he took Kathryn Dance’s advice—to move fast—he might be past the cannon shell when it detonated.

  He didn’t, however, think an explosion like that was something you could outrun.

  * * *

  KINESIC ANALYSIS WORKS because of one simple concept, which Dance thought of as the Ten Commandments Principle.

  Although she herself wasn’t religious, she liked the metaphor. It boiled down to simply: Thou Shalt Not…

  What came after that prohibition didn’t matter. The gist was that people knew the difference between right and wrong and they felt uneasy doing something they shouldn’t.

  Some of this stemmed from the fear of getting caught, but still we’re largely hardwired to do the right thing.

  When people are deceptive (either actively misstating or failing to give the whole story) they experience stress and this stress reveals itself. Charles Darwin said, “Repressed emotion almost always comes to the surface in some form of body motion.”

/>   The problem for interrogators is that stress doesn’t necessarily show up as nail biting, sweating and eye avoidance. It could take the form of a pleasant grin, a cheerful nod, a sympathetic wag of the head.

  You don’t say…

  Well, that’s terrible…

  What a body language expert must do is compare subjects’ behavior in nonstressful situations with their behavior when they might be lying. Differences between the two suggest—though they don’t prove—deception. If there is some variation, a kinesic analyst then continues to probe the topic that’s causing the stress until the subject confesses, or it’s otherwise explained.

  In interrogating Wayne Keplar, Dance would take her normal approach: asking a number of innocuous questions that she knew the answers to and that the suspect would have no reason to lie about. She’d also just shoot the breeze with him, no agenda other than to note how he behaved when feeling no stress. This would establish his kinesic “baseline”—a catalog of his body language, tone of voice and choice of expressions when he was at ease and truthful.

  Only then would she turn to questions about the impending attack and look for variations from the baseline when he answered.

  But establishing the baseline usually requires many hours, if not days, of casual discussion.

  Time that Kathryn Dance didn’t have.

  It was now 2:08.

  Still, there was no option other than to do the best she could. She’d learned that there was another suspect, escaping through the old military ordnance storage and practice ground, with Michael O’Neil in pursuit (she knew the dangers of the base and didn’t want to think of the risks to him). And the Monterey Crime Scene team was still going over the Taurus and the items that Paulson and Keplar had on them when arrested. But these aspects of the investigation had produced no leads.

  Dance now read the sparse file once more quickly. Wayne Keplar was forty-four, high school educated only, but he’d done well at school and was now one of the “philosophers” at the Brothers of Liberty, writing many of the essays and diatribes on the group’s blogs and website. He was single, never married. He’d been born in the Haight, lived in San Diego and Bakersfield. Now in Oakland. He didn’t have a passport and had never been out of the country. His father was dead—killed in a Waco/Ruby Ridge–type standoff with federal officers. His mother and sister, a few years older than he, were also involved in the BOL, which despite the name, boasted members of both sexes. Neither of these family members had a criminal record.

  Keplar, on the other hand, did—but a minor one, and nothing violent. His only federal offense had been graffiti-ing an armed forces recruitment center.

  He also had an older brother, who lived on the East Coast, but the man apparently hadn’t had any contact with Keplar for years and had nothing to do with the BOL.

  A deep data mine search had revealed nothing about Keplar’s and Gabe Paulson’s journey here. This was typical of militia types, worried about Big Brother. They’d pay cash for as much as they could.

  Normally she’d want far more details than this, but there was no more time.

  Fast…

  Dance left the folder at the desk out front and entered the interrogation room. Keplar glanced up with a smile.

  “Uncuff him,” she said to Albert Stemple, who didn’t hesitate even though he clearly wasn’t crazy about the idea.

  Dance would be alone in the room with an unshackled suspect, but she couldn’t afford to have the man’s arms limited by chains. Body language analysis is hard enough even with all the limbs unfettered.

  Keplar slumped lazily in the gray padded office chair, as if settling in to watch a football game he had some, but not a lot of, interest in.

  Dance nodded to Stemple, who left and closed the thick door behind him. Her eyes went to the large analog clock at the far end of the room.

  2:16.

  Keplar followed her gaze then looked back. “You’re goin’ to try to find out where the…event’s takin’ place. Ask away. But I’ll tell you right now, it’s going to be a waste of time.”

  Dance moved her chair so that she sat across from him, with no furniture between them. Any barrier between interviewer and subject, even a small table, gives the perp a sense of protection and makes kinesic analysis that much harder. Dance was about three feet from him, in his personal proxemic zone—not so close as to make him stonewall, but near enough to keep him unsettled.

  Except that he wasn’t unsettled. At all. Wayne Keplar was as calm as could be.

  He looked at her steadily, a gaze that was not haughty, not challenging, not sexy. It was almost as if he were sizing up a dog to buy for his child.

  “Wayne, you don’t have a driver’s license.”

  “Another way for the government to keep tabs on you.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Oakland. Near the water. Been there for six years. Town has a bad rap but it’s okay.”

  “Where were you before that?”

  “San Diego.”

  She asked more about his personal life and travels, pretending not to know the answers. She’d left the file outside.

  His responses were truthful. And as he spoke she noted his shoulders were forward, his right hand tended to come to rest on his thigh, he looked her straight in the eye when he spoke, his lips often curled into a half smile. He had a habit of poking his tongue into the interior of his cheek from time to time. It could have been a habit or could be from withdrawal—missing chewing tobacco, which Dance knew could be as addictive as smoking.

  “Why’d you leave San Diego, Wayne? Weather’s nicer than Oakland.”

  “Not really. I don’t agree with that. But I just didn’t like it. You know how you get a vibration and it’s just not right.”

  “That’s true,” she said.

  He beamed in an eerie way. “Do you? You know that? You’re a firecracker, Kathryn. Yes, you are.”

  A chill coursed down her spine as the near-set eyes tapped across her face.

  She ignored it as best she could and asked, “How senior are you in the Brothers of Liberty?”

  “I’m pretty near the top. You know anything about it?”

  “No.”

  “I’d love to tell you. You’re smart, Ms. Firecracker. You’d probably think there’re some pretty all right ideas we’ve got.”

  “I’m not sure I would.”

  A one-shoulder shrug—another of his baseline gestures. “But you never know.”

  Then came more questions about his life in Oakland, his prior convictions, his childhood. Dance knew the answers to some but the others were such that he’d have no reason to lie and she continued to rack up elements of baseline body language and verbal quality (the tone and speed of speech).

  She snuck a glance at the clock.

  “Time’s got you rattled, does it?”

  “You’re planning to kill a lot of people. Yes, that bothers me. But not you, I see.”

  “Ha, now you’re sounding just like a therapist. I was in counseling once. It didn’t take.”

  “Let’s talk about what you have planned, the two hundred people you’re going to kill.”

  “Two hundred and change.”

  So, more victims. His behavior fit the baseline. This was true; he wasn’t just boasting.

  “How many more?”

  “Two hundred twenty, I’d guess.”

  An idea occurred to Dance and she said, “I’ve told you we’re not releasing Osmond Carter. That will never be on the table.”

  “Your loss…well, not yours. Two hundred and some odd people’s loss.”

  “And killing them is only going to make your organization a pariah, a—”

  “I know what ‘pariah’ means. Go on.”

  “Don’t you think it would work to your advantage, from a publicity point of view, if you call off the attack, or tell me the location now?”

  He hesitated. “Maybe. That could be, yeah.” Then his eyes brightened. “Now, I’m not inc
lined to call anything off. That’d look bad. Or tell you direct where this thing’s going to happen. But you being Ms. Firecracker and all, how ’bout I give you a chance to figure it out. We’ll play a game.”

  “Game?”

  “Twenty Questions. I’ll answer honestly, I swear I will.”

  Sometimes that last sentence was a deception flag. Now, she didn’t think so.

  “And if you find out where those two hundred and twenty souls’re going to meet Jesus…then good for you. I can honestly say I didn’t tell you. But you only get twenty questions. You don’t figure it out, get the morgue ready. You want to play, Kathryn? If not, I’ll just decide I want my lawyer and hope I’m next to a TV in”—he looked at the clock—“one hour and forty-one minutes.”

  “All right, let’s play,” Dance said, and she subtly wiped the sweat that had dotted her palms. How on earth to frame twenty questions to narrow down where the attack would take place? She’d never been in an interrogation like this.

  He sat forward. “This’ll be fun!”

  “Is the attack going to be an explosive device?”

  “Question one—I’ll keep count. No.”

  “What will it be?”

  “That’s question two but, sorry, you know Twenty Questions: has to be yes or no answers. But I’ll give you a do-over.”

  “Will it be a chemical/bio weapon?”

  “Sorta cheating there, a twofer. But I’ll say yes.”

  “Is it going to be in a place open to the public?”

  “Number three. Yes, sorta public. Let’s say, there’ll be public access.”

  He was telling the truth. All his behavior and the pitch and tempo of voice bore out his honesty. But what did he mean by public access but not quite public?

  “Is it an entertainment venue?”

  “Question four. Well, not really, but there will be entertainment there.”

  “Christmas related?”

  He scoffed. “That’s five. Are you asking questions wisely, Ms. Firecracker? You’ve used a quarter of them already. You could have combined Christmas and entertainment. Anyway, yes, Christmas is involved.”