Joel Goldman - Shakedown

“Even so, it’s hard to see beneath the surface. My earliest memories of my father are of him staring at me, taking notes, staring some more, studying my every move and mood. While other kids played outside, I played face?ash cards with my father, every card a different facial expression. I had to tell him what emotion the person was expressing.”

“I bet he gave you ice cream when you got them right.”

“Chocolate, and a lot of it. He discovered that I had an unusual aptitude for recognizing micro facial expressions in, literally, the blink of an eye. I was eight when my mother died. I grew up as my father’s research subject. Eventually I became his assistant and then his partner.”

“So, you’re like a mind reader.”

“No. A mind reader works Las Vegas lounges, her name lit up on the bottom of the casino marquee, pulling silver dollars out of customers’ ears, making them admit they’ve never met before telling the audience the names of everyone the customer slept with in high school.”

I was still a skeptic. “No ESP either, huh?”

“Not a drop. And I don’t bend spoons just by looking at them and I don’t see dead people.”

“What do you see?”

“I see people’s smiles, frowns, raised eyebrows, and?ared nostrils. I see their?ickering eyes, quivering cheeks, laugh lines, crow’s feet, and wrinkles.”

“So do I. Everyone does.”

“Except I see more. I see the involuntary, uncontrollable, soul-stripping micro expressions that lay people open like an autopsy.”

There was more resignation than bragging in her voice.

“What’s that like?”

“It depends on who I’m looking at. I see things people don’t want me to see. It’s great for business but it’s hell on relationships. There are times when I’m grateful for my skill and there are times when I wish I had cataracts.”

I took a chance. “What do you see in my face?”

She hesitated, setting her fork down, folding her arms across her chest, a half smile creeping out of the corner of her mouth.

“Well, Agent Davis, I can tell whether you just want to have lunch or whether you want to take the rest of the day and the night off.”

“Which is it?” I asked, stunned to hear her say what I was thinking.

Kate laughed. “You’re married. It doesn’t matter what we want since lunch is the only thing that we can have.”

I liked that she laid it out so there was no misunderstanding. And I liked that she said it didn’t matter what we wanted, not that it didn’t matter what I wanted. We both understood why she was right.

I found excuses for more lunches, always on the pretext of talking about a case I was working on, asking her advice about how to read suspects and witnesses. I would never trust myself when it came to reading faces after what happened to Kevin, but I loved listening to her talk. We let our lunches linger and wander, often coming back to the similarities between what we did. I caught bad guys. She caught lies. We both feared that we would be deceived by the guilty and fail the innocent.

We argued about the polygraph. I trusted it. She didn’t.

“The polygraph measures the response of the body’s limbic system, which controls emotion. It assumes that someone telling a lie will experience an involuntary increase in heart rate, pulse, temperature, breathing, all of which are controlled by the limbic system,” she said. “But a pathological liar can beat the polygraph.”

“How?”

“Wrong question. They answer is they lie. The right question is why aren’t their lies detected.”

“You’re going to tell me.”

“Of course. It’s my obligation to show you the errors of your ways,” Kate said with a grin. “A psychologist at the University of Southern California did a study on the brains of liars. It’s not conclusive, but it is interesting. He found that liars average 22 percent more white matter in the prefrontal cortex of their brains and 14 percent less gray matter.”

“So what?”

“The gray matter contains neurons, which are the brain’s networking material. Think of neurons like telephone wires that connect phones. And neurons link the prefrontal cortex to the limbic system. The fewer neurons someone has, the fewer connections there are to the limbic system. Pathological liars get away with lying because they don’t show any nervousness. They are genetically designed to lie.”

“But you can see it in their faces?”

“A psychopath or a natural liar is hard for anyone to catch. A psychopath doesn’t care about anything, so why get emotional? A natural liar, or someone who is trained to deceive, like actors or trial lawyers, they can be just as hard to figure out. The rest of us are a lot easier because micro facial expressions are almost impossible to control.”

“Aren’t they tied to emotions just like heart rate and breathing, which the polygraph measures?”

“You’re right, but people can learn to regulate their breathing and their heart rate. They can’t do that with micro expressions. And the polygraph is so unreliable no court will allow the results into evidence.”

“No court will allow a videotape of a defendant’s micro facial expressions into evidence either.”

“I don’t need them admitted into evidence. I just need to see them.”

“How can you be so certain what each expression means?”

“Facial expressions are universal in type and meaning across all cultures and ethnic groups,” she said.

“Show me the one that says you’re a liar.”

“That’s not how it works. Facial expressions, especially micro expressions, are clues. Someone pretends to be angry, but their face says they are afraid. They should be devastated but a smile lasting a fraction of a second shoots out of the corner of their mouth. I look for inconsistencies, asymmetries, things that don’t fit.”

“Like the dog that didn’t bark.”

“Exactly. If you know what to look for, they are the closest things to money in the bank for a lie catcher.”

“Well, then. I better not lie to you.”

“Not unless you want to get caught,” she said, her grin firmly in place.

I needed sleep more than I needed a doctor. It took me thirty minutes to get home, detouring around construction on I-35 to my house in Overland Park, a suburb on the Kansas side of the state line that bisects Kansas City.

The house looked like it always had from the outside-a boxy two-story with a two-car garage, beige stucco, short trees, and shorter grass. Walking inside, finding it almost empty after I agreed that Joy could take whatever furniture she wanted while the lawyers worked out the rest of the property settlement, it reminded me of a house whose owners I had arrested for selling dope to their kids’ friends. They held an estate sale to raise money so they could pay their lawyers. I took a tour when it was over. Everything worth having was gone, the picked-over remnants all that remained. They went to jail for a long time.

My dining room was empty; my beer-stained easy chair and ring-marked end table sat alone in the den, ruts in the carpet where the cherrywood entertainment center had stood. There was no kitchen table, just a pair of stools with their white paint chipped by careless heels, tucked under the black granite lip of the island anchored in the middle of the room. The walls were scarred with holes where pictures had hung. The drapes had been stripped from bare windows and my footsteps echoed off hardwood?oors.

Joy left me the nineteen-inch TV with a built-in DVR she kept in the kitchen to watch the Today Show and to tape soaps, along with a futon that I moved from the basement into the master bedroom. Looking around, I missed the comfortable familiarity from the furnishings of a bad marriage. This was my new normal.