“That’s not what I asked. I asked where the cash in your money clip came from.”

He looked down.

“You haven’t been honest with me, Ari. Which means you’re in serious trouble. Now, the money?”

“I don’t know. Probably some of it was from petty cash at my firm.”

“Which you got yesterday?”

“I guess.”

“How much?”

“I—”

“We’ll subpoena your employer’s books too.”

He looked shocked at this. He said quickly, “A thousand dollars.”

“Where’s the rest of it? Three hundred forty in the money clip. Where’s the rest?”

“I spent some at Hanover’s. It’s a business expense. It’s legitimate. As part of my job—”

“I was asking where the rest of it is.”

A pause. “I left some at home.”

“At home? Is your wife back now? Could she confirm that?”

“She’s still away.”

“Then we’ll send an officer to look for the money. Where is it, exactly?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Over six hundred dollars? How could you forget where six hundred dollars is?”

“I don’t know. You’re confusing me.”

She leaned closer still, into a more threatening proxemic zone. “What were you really doing on Cedar Street?”

“Walking to the fucking subway.”

Dance grabbed the map of Manhattan. “Hanover’s is here. The subway’s here.” Her finger made a loud sound with every tap on the heavy paper. “It makes no sense to walk down Cedar to get from Hanover’s to the Wall Street subway station. Why would you walk that way?”

“I wanted some exercise. Walk off the Cosmopolitans and chicken wings.”

“With ice on the sidewalks and the temperature in the teens? You do that often?”

“No. I just happened to last night.”

“If you don’t walk it often then how do you know so much about Cedar Street? The fact there’re no residences, the closing time of the restaurants and the construction work?”

“I just do. What the hell’s this all about?” Sweat was dotting his forehead.

“When you dropped the money, did you take your gloves off to get your subway pass out of your pocket?”

“I don’t know.”

“I assume you did. You can’t reach into a pocket with winter gloves on.”

“Okay,” he snapped. “You know so much, then I did.”

“With the temperature as cold as it was, why would you do that ten minutes before you got to the subway station?”

“You can’t talk to me this way.”

She said in a firm, low voice, “And you didn’t check the time on the subway platform, did you?”

“Yes, I did. It was nine thirty-five.”

“No, you didn’t. You’re not going to be flashing a five-thousand-dollar watch on the subway platform at night.”

“Okay, that’s it. I’m not saying anything else.”

When an interrogator confronts a deceptive subject, that person experiences intense stress and responds in various ways to try to escape from that stress—barriers to the truth, Dance called them. The most destructive and difficult response state to break through is anger, followed by depression, then denial, and finally bargaining. The interrogator’s role is to decide what stress state the suspect is in and neutralize it—and any subsequent ones—until finally the subject reaches the acceptance state, that is, confession, in which he finally will be honest.