Sociopath (4 page)

9

I sat at a bench in a small park. The print dusting would have taken a week but they’d put in a special request saying it was evidence in the murder of a law enforcement officer. We would have it back by tonight.

I was pouring through the reports. Unfortunately, David never kept many notes so I wasn’t able to follow his line of thinking. On the autopsy report for Tiffany, he wrote, “Thumb,” and nothing else. I looked at the photos of her thumbs. One had suffered trauma. He’d attempted to cut through it, but there were injuries on both sides. A pair of sharp scissors or gardening shears might have done it, but why hadn’t he been able to simply cut it off?

I glanced through
the boyfriend’s autopsy report as well. One arrow wound from a bow or crossbow through the cheek. The round had shattered the bone, entered the skull, and severed the brain stem from the brain before exiting out of the neck. It would have to be something high-powered to do that kind of damage. Amazingly, there wasn’t a ballistics report. Ballistic specialists were expensive but the state crime lab or even a bigger, neighboring city would have sent someone for free.

I took out my cell phone and dialed the number Melissa had given me as her cell.

“This is Agent Harding.”

“Melissa, Jon Stanton. I had a quick question if you had a minute.”

“Yeah.”

“Why wasn’t there a ballistics analysis done?”

“Oh, we talked to the sheriff about that. She had asked one of her deputies to call the state lab and have them send someone and he just completely forgot. By the time it was all sorted out, the family had already buried the victim.”

“
Does the ME still have the arrow?”

“He’s given it back to the sheriff’s office.
David didn’t really follow up because he didn’t believe the boyfriend was the primary target of these murders.”

“Can we get a ballistics report?”
Silence on the other end. “Hey, look, I know this isn’t my case and I’m not even law enforcement anymore. I’m just trying to do what I can.”

“I know. And Kyle said to help you
in any way we can. Sure, I think we should send it back to Quantico or have the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s laboratories do it.”

“What’s the turnaround time in Quantico?”

“If it was involved in David’s death, we’ll be first.”

“Okay. I appreciate that, thank you.”

“Welcome.”

I hung up, grateful that Melissa had been the special agent assigned. I recalled days back in Homicide when the feds would come in and bulldoze a case. They would become the
pointmen for witnesses, media, laboratories, and even the victim’s families. Detectives would clam up and not provide new evidence that had been uncovered and it would usually disintegrate into two separate investigations, neither helping the other.

I flipped through the rest of the report and Sheriff Cannon’s notes on Dale Christensen interested me. He had been the one to find the bodies
, claiming he had been dumped by friends in a nearby location and came upon them by accident. Given how far into the woods the bodies had been found, that seemed extremely improbable. He was currently held at the jail on unrelated charges.

Driving to a jail made my heart pound in my chest and I saw the rings of sweat around my underarms as I parked. Each jail was different only in architecture. The interiors were all the same. A poet I liked had once said that you knew society was crumbling when the madhouses were closed and the jails were full.

The mentally ill were not given breaks in the criminal justice system. Most of them were housed in jails or prisons and force-fed medication in an attempt to keep them docile. But without proper treatment under a psychiatric staff, they spent their lives in quiet lunacy, ruled by hallucinations and ghosts.

I stepped out and walked across the parking lot
to the entrance, hesitating a moment before opening the door. Walking inside, I found the check-in desk. Visiting hours were over.

“Dale Christensen, please.”

“You’ll have to come back in the evening after dinner.”

“I’m a professional visit.” I pulled out my wallet and inside was my private investigator license for California.

She glanced from the photo to my face and back before saying, “Just a minute.”

It was a good twenty minutes before they were ready for me. I went through the metal detectors and
was then wanded before the metal doors clicked and slid open. I stood outside them a minute, staring at the gray walls.

“You
goin’ or stayin’?”

I walked past the guard and inside the
cell block. The corridor wasn’t long and I walked slowly until I found the visitors room. I sat down on a metal stool and behind glass sat a man who was probably in his forties but looked in his sixties. A life of hard and fast living shone on his face and revealed a heart and mind that was just as old. He was a man who was beaten down and bitter and I saw the tip of a swastika tattoo sticking out from his sleeve.

“Who the hell are
you?”

“I’m Jon Stanton. I’m a friend of the FBI agent that was killed,
David Lines.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Nice dude. Snuck me in some cigarettes
in exchange for some info.”

I grinned. “That sounds like him.”

“Well what’dya need?”

“I think the same person that killed
Tiffany Ochoa killed David. I just wanted to go through what you remembered about that day.”

“Man, I spoke with like five cops that day. Can’t you just go read them reports?”

“I’d rather hear it from you.”

He shrugged. “
Ain’t really that much to tell. I woke up near the campsite we was at. My fuckin’ so called friends left me there ‘cause I got loaded and I got up and started walkin’. I saw them bodies and when I got to town I called the cops.”

“What’d you see exactly?”

“The car and the dude that was in the driver seat. The girl was tied up to the tree.”

“Did you see anything around? Anything on the ground?”

“Nah, nothin’ like that. I saw the girl with her guts hangin’ out and I walked away, man.”

“Who did you speak with when you called the police?”

“I dunno, some dude.”

“Did they take you back to the site?”

“Yeah, just to show ‘em where it was. Then all the cops in the town came out and pulled out their yellow tape’n shit and they give me a ride home.”

“What friends left you out there?”

“I dunno, man. They was barely my friends. I didn’t know ‘em good.”

I had studied micro
-facial expressions in depth in my doctorate program with an eye toward application in law enforcement. I’d even conducted a study on the seven emotions expressed through micro-expressions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, contempt, surprise, and disgust. A professor named Ekman thought micro-expressions conveyed much more than the seven emotions and added several to the list, but the most important were guilt and shame.

Micro-
expressions did not express or cover lies. That was impossible. All they did was convey an emotion the subject was attempting to conceal.

A certain percentage of the
population, somewhere around three percent, are perfect liars. They show no physical manifestations when they lie and micro-facial expressions are useless on them. Sociopaths fit into this category as masters of manipulation and fraudulent behavior. They have an inability to feel any genuine emotion and it’s nearly impossible to detect a concealed emotion through their micro-expressions. But the rest of the population can’t help but have a slight tick or curl of the lip or a glance in another direction when they lie, attempting to hide their surprise or their guilt.

A coding system called the Facial Action Coding System or FACS
was developed by a Swedish anatomist named Carl Hjortsjö and was the basis of micro-facial expression analysis. The system uses a scoring mechanism called AU, for action units, to score a subject’s facial movements. In almost everything Dale told me, I saw an inner brow raise, an AU score of one, an upper lid raise, a score of five, and a stretch of the lip, a score of twenty.

Dale Christensen was lying to me.

10

I left the jail with practically no additional information but a strong sense that Dale had either killed Tiffany or knew who did. I checked the jail incarceration records before I left and he had been in custody when David was killed.

My phone rang
. It was Melissa.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey. Thought you’d wanna know that we got your print results.”

“That was quick.”

“David had a lot of friends.”

“What’d you find?”

“Three prints. Tiffany, you, and a John Doe. We ran the John Doe through IAFIS and got a hit on a Carl Velazquez in Park City.”

“It must be her
dealer.”

“That’s my guess. You
wanna head up there with me?”

“Sure. I’m
in the parking lot of the jail.”

“I’ll swing by right now.”

“Actually, I haven’t rented a room yet. There’s a Motel 6 down the block. Can you meet me there?”

“Yup. See you in a jiff.”

I hung up and got in the car and pulled out of the Justice Complex onto Main Street. I could see the big blue sign for Motel 6 and I drove there. It was rundown but I’d stayed in worse. I pulled to the front and went inside. A man was behind the counter with a permanent grimace on his face as he watched a daytime soap on a little color television behind the counter.

“Thirty-five a night or ninety
a week,” he said without looking at me.

“Let’s do a week.” I pulled out my credit card and handed it to him. He ran it, printed the receipt and a
use agreement without taking his eyes off the television.

Once I was checked in, I w
alked to the room on the second floor. I opened the door and went inside and was surprised that it was actually clean with fresh sheets on the bed that smelled like they’d just come out of a dryer. I sat down on the bed and took off my shoes and lay back, staring at the ceiling. My head was pounding and I wished I’d purchased some ibuprofen as well as the Tums yesterday.

I took out my cell phone and dialed my
ex-wife’s number, realizing that Agent Harding and my ex had the same first name. Even though it was inconsequential, I don’t know why I didn’t recognize it earlier.

“Hi
Jon.”

“Hi
. How’s Florida?”

“Humid as hell. How are you doing? Matt said you’re living in Honolulu now?”

“Yeah, we bought a little place.”

“You and the professor, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I could sense the hostility in her voice.
Melissa had been stunningly beautiful all her life, and like many gorgeous women, had never had to worry about her intellect, assuming that her looks would carry her through the rest of her life. As she found that looks, and the splendor they brought, faded with time, she grew bitter she hadn’t developed her intellect and was now beholden to men for her style of life. She had a degree but little career history and her husband was her sole source of support. I gladly would have supported her if she needed, but she didn’t know that and had never bothered to ask.

“The kids are out. I’ll tell them you called.”

“Jon Junior asked me something the other day.”

“What?”

I hesitated. “He asked if he could come live with me.”

The line went silent a long time.

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him I would speak with you.”

“He’s too young. And I don’t want to split them apart.”

“Is something going on?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something that would upset him?”

A sound came through like plastic against skin; she was chewing on her lower lip, which she only did when stressed. “He’s not doing well with my new marriage. He keeps saying that he thinks it’s my fault we divorced and that his father doesn’t live with us because of me.”

“He’s just angry. He was angry with me at first and now he’s angry with you. It’s natural.”

“It doesn’t feel natural. He’s ten and he told me he doesn’t have an emotional connection with me. What ten year old even knows what an emotional connection is, Jon?”

“He’s always been perceptive.
But … I don’t think it would be a bad idea for him to come out. At least for a little while and see what it’s like.”

“
You can’t be serious. With the life you lead?”

“I’m not a cop anymore, Mel. I’m not even a PI. I just teach at the University and come home. Nine to five.”

“Maybe you can fool your new wifey with that, Jon, but I know you. I know what you’re like. You have darkness in you. You’ve managed to control it and put it to good use, but it’s still there and it follows you around. It brings wickedness into your life. I don’t want my children around that. Not ever again.”

“I can’t respond to anything you’ve said. You make accusations that are unverifiable. And what I used to do has no bearing on what I am now.” I knew this was a lie. What frightened me was how correct she was in her assessment of me. Summing me up in just a few sentences.
A darkness in me that brought wickedness
. Would the darkness affect Emma too? Would it affect everyone who came near me like some medieval plague?

“I don’t want him living with you. It’s too dangerous.”

I heard honking out in the parking lot. “I have to go. We’ll talk more later.”

“Whatever.”

I hung up and went to the window and saw Melissa in the driver’s seat of a silver sedan. Stepping outside, I saw the man in the room next door come out too. He leaned over the railing and stared down at her but didn’t say anything.

“Hey,” I said, getting into the passenger seat.

“Hey.”

We pulled out onto Main Street and began heading to Park City.