“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.