Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Logan
L et me be straight, watching someone being questioned wasn’t like in the movies. You couldn’t usually just ask outright what’d happened or piece it together as easily, it took patience.
And patience really sucked when you wanted to know the answers right then and there, but you weren’t getting them or were being given the wrong ones.
The whole time you spoke to the person, you were trying to read between the lines as well.
What were they going to do next?
What did the eye shift and shoulder shrug mean?
And I’d been watching all of this for going on two hours now.
Leaving the woman, Cinder Murphy, with her lawyer, Alex came out and joined us in the room attached to the one he’d been in
“What do you think?”
I didn’t take my eyes off her as I answered. “I don’t think her tears were fake. Her recent memory recollection is to the left and slightly down. Her farther back memory is to the top right, and she accessed it about sixty percent of the time. When you asked her who took Mrs. Johansen’s medication, she blinked rapidly, signaling increased anxiety and adrenaline.”
There was a misassumption that it was an exact science—everybody looks in one precise direction if they were lying. No, it was individual to each person, so you had to watch and read everything they were doing when they answered carefully.
DB was standing with his arms crossed, watching and listening to Cinder and her lawyer whispering. “I agree with Logan, and,” he glanced at me, “I’m kind of impressed right now you paid that much attention to the body language course.”
“Pays to be able to understand body language if you go into a situation thinking someone’s innocent, then they pull a gun or knife on you, or totally lose their shit and attack you.” The latter was something I had a lot of experience of, the former only a little experience, but it only took once for you to approach calls differently.
Moving to stand between us, Alex copied his son’s pose and frowned at the two people in the room in front of us. “What else did you see?”
“When you asked her if she knew about what’d happened, she did a lot of grooming inside her mouth with her tongue when she replied with that long-winded story.”
“Damn,” DB murmured, “he’s right. I saw that but didn’t add it to my list.”
“That’s important, son. The buildup of proteins inside the mouth happens because of increased anxiety, so the suspect will instinctually lick around their cheeks and where they feel it gathering.”
“That can happen if someone’s stressed because they’re innocent, though.”
Clapping DB on the shoulder, Alex pointed out, “That’s where the rest of the body language and the context of the situation all come into play to help you make a choice.” Then, turning to me, he asked, “What do you think? ”
“I don’t think she’s guilty of all of the crime,” I hedged. “I do think she was part of it and is covering for Diego Mantoya, though.”
The crime itself was breaking and entering into an elderly lady called Mrs. Albright’s home, knocking her out with one punch to the eighty-eight-year-old woman’s face. They then stole cash, jewelry, and her medications, some of which they’d be able to sell for a lot of money, given that it included drugs like Gabapentin and Morphine.
We’d found three sets of fingerprints on the jewelry box and medicine cabinet that didn’t belong to her or her daughter and had traced them back to Cinder Murphy, Diego Mantoya, and one unknown suspect.
The key was getting her to talk.
“Why don’t you send in Logan?” Garrett asked, laughing in the doorway. “When she saw him as we were bringing her through, she stopped and practically drooled.”
The two Bells—DB and Alex—looked at me, making me feel uncomfortable.
“You up for it?”
Was I ?
Cracking my knuckles, I nodded toward the door. “Let’s do it, but you’re coming in with me,” I told Alex, needing the support for this.
As we entered the room, the shifty-looking lawyer sneered at me. “Is it rookie day?”
Ass wank.
Ignoring the guy, Alex introduced me to Cinder, and both of us made to sit down on the uncomfortable plastic chairs. Thanks to my nerves and how uncomfortable I was, I dragged mine and made the feet screech loudly across the floor.
Thankfully it acted as an ice breaker. “My bad, I apologize for that.”
Cinder burst out laughing, and miraculously so did the skeezy lawyer .
“I hate it when my chair does that. Like, in high school, I was always in trouble ‘cause we had these stools that were old and falling apart. If you breathed, it made it sound like an owl screeching,” Cinder giggled.
Leaning in, I smiled gently, and started on the basics of making her comfortable so that I could read her body language correctly like I’d been taught. “That must have been really embarrassing. Which school did you go to?”
Her blink rates were normal, and she looked slightly down to her left. “One in Kansas that you’ve never heard of. It’s kind of a small town, so people don’t really know it.”
The lawyer, aka the skeezy rat, sighed and drummed his fingers on the table, but no one paid him any attention.
“Did you just move here recently?”
Her whole body tensed slightly, and her jaw shifted. “Yeah, only five weeks ago.”
Hoping to keep her relaxed for as long as possible, I asked more questions about her childhood, her favorite things about Piersville, and her favorite places that she’d been to, all the while gauging her responses. I’d been right before with where her eyes went to for farther back memories and more recent ones. Awesome.
Knowing the time was right, I asked gently, “Where did you meet Diego Mantoya?”
When she looked up to the left, I discreetly watched the rest of her body language as she replied. “I only just met him at a party. He’s a friend of a friend type of guy, so I don’t really know him at all.”
After a couple more questions about the party and the friend, she started to change her answers.
“We’d been hanging out, and when he said he needed to visit his grandma, I didn’t think anything of it.” Nodding encouragingly at her, I kept my body language relaxed. “I wasn’t even inside the house when he and his brother went in. I stayed outside and had a smoke. ”
That was strange, seeing as how his brother wasn’t involved in things usually. “Cullan Watts was there?”
“No, Ashesh. At least, he introduced him as his brother.”
After getting identifying details for Ashesh, she confirmed she’d be able to work with our artist on getting a sketch together.
Looking at her lawyer for confirmation, he sneered, “My client intends to work with you fully to clear her name.”
“I appreciate that,” I murmured, looking down at the paper with fingerprints on it that Alex slid across the table to me. “The thing is, Cinder, we found fingerprints on some items of furniture in the house. We’ve cross-referenced them with the ones we took when you first came in, and they match. Can you tell us how they got there?”
What followed was hell on my brain. She twitched, she grasped at excuses, she backtracked, and then she broke.
“He pulled me inside and made me go through drawers and shit to find everything possible. The medicine cabinet kept closing, so he made me hold it while he emptied everything—and she had a lot of stuff in there. It was orange bottles, not stuff you get in a store, you know?”
“We know,” I assured her, leaning forward to show her I was genuine. “The problem is, Cinder, a lot of the medications in there are serious. If someone takes them, it could easily kill them, so we need to find out where they could be. The lady also has a heart problem, so if she hadn’t been taken into hospital after Diego knocked her out, she might have died without them.”
Chewing on her lower lip, she mumbled, “That’s bad shit. I don’t want anyone to die because of me.”
“So you understand why we need to track them down?”
Taking a deep breath, she flashed me a wide smile. “I do. I think I know where he has them.”
Holding his hand in the air, Alex asked, “You think, or you know?”
“Oh, I know. Diego didn’t tell me they could kill someone, and I’m not down with that. I ran out of the house as soon as I could, but I should have called 911 for the old lady.”
And that’s how we ended up paying a ‘visit’ to one of the newly built houses, right across the road from where Jarrod Klein and his fiancée lived.
The proximity to him was just as well because we were grateful for the water in their faucets by the time we were done, thanks to the pepper spray bombs that went off ‘accidentally’ during it.
Being the kind people we were, we also helped out Diego, and his non-brother brother, Ashesh, who’d been separating the pills into baggies when we’d turned up.
That didn’t mean any of us came out of it without some sort of problem.
They’d grabbed modified canisters that continued spraying without someone holding the trigger on them and had thrown them around the small room when we went in thinking they were smoke bombs, and releasing pepper spray that burned your eyes, skin and lungs.
The thing was, Diego Mantoya was a skinny little kid whose real name was Jordy Watts. He just used the other name to scare people into thinking he was some big-time guy, and when he met with people, he introduced himself as one of Diego’s enforcers. It was Ashesh who ended up being the one we should’ve worried about.
At two-hundred and eighty pounds, he hit me like a linebacker before using my chest as a trampoline to launch off of as he tried to escape. Fortunately, I had quick hands, and even with no oxygen in my lungs and my eyes burning, I managed to grab onto him and hold on for life.
As it was, DB had needed to get his eyes flushed, and Garrett was going to have some wicked swollen eyes for a while after he’d reacted badly to it. My throat that like I’d rubbed it raw with acid, and my sinuses were so full, it felt like they were overflowing out my eyes. And that didn’t even take into account the bruises from the bull, Ashesh.
Once it was all done and they were transferred back to the department for questioning and a stay in the cells, I walked out, knowing I was going to go to the only person who could clear my mind of my day. I was struggling to see and was a total mess, but I didn’t even think about not going to her.
I didn’t have my Bexley back yet, but at least she was here, and was talking to me. Every moment I could take with her was something that soothed my soul. For seven years I’d had something eating away inside me, missing her and hating myself for what’d happened. Now that she was back, it’d changed to wanting and needing her.
She was the one person who’d ever made me feel whole. And I needed her back.
I just hoped she didn’t have that damn dog with her.