“Yeah, it sucks.”

“And you got back home about when?”

“Five thirty, maybe.”

“And you went straight to bed.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” She looked out the window at the gnarled tree.

“And then you woke up, hearing the TV show.”

The girl twined a brown strand of hair around a finger. “Quebec.” A laughing grimace.

At this point, Kathryn Dance paused. She realized she had a decision to make, an important one.

Because there was no doubt that Theresa was being deceptive.

When she’d been making casual conversation and, later, talking about what Theresa had overheard from the TV room, the girl’s kinesic behavior was relaxed and open, though she obviously was experiencing general stress—anyone who’s talking to a police officer as part of an investigation, even an innocent victim, experiences this.

But as soon as she started talking about the trip to the Santa Cruz boardwalk she displayed hesitations of speech, she covered parts of her face and ear—negation gestures—and looked out the window—aversion. Trying to appear calm and casual, she revealed the stress she was experiencing by bobbing her foot. Dance sensed deception stress patterns and that the girl was in the denial response state.

Everything Theresa was telling her was presumably consistent with facts that Dance could verify. But deception includes evasion and omission as well as outright lying. There were things Theresa wasn’t sharing.

“Tare, something troubling happened on the drive, didn’t it?”

“Troubling? No. Really. I swear.”

A triple play there: two denial flag expressions, along with answering a question with a question. Now the girl was flushed and her foot bobbed again, an obvious cluster of stress responses.

“Go on, tell me. It’s all right. There’s nothing you have to worry about. Tell me.”

“Like, you know. My parents, my brother and sister…They were killed. Who wouldn’t be upset?” A bit of anger now.

Dance nodded sympathetically. “I mean before that. You’ve left Carmel, you’re driving to Santa Cruz. You’re not feeling well. You go home. Other than being sick, what was there about that drive that bothered you?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

That sentence, from a person in a denial state, means: I remember perfectly well but I don’t want to think about it. The memory’s too painful.

“You’re driving along and—

“I—” Theresa began, then she fell silent. And lowered head to hands, breaking into tears. A torrent, accompanied by the sound track of breathless sobbing.

“Tare.” Dance rose and handed her a wad of tissues as the girl cried hard, though quietly, the sobs like hiccups.

“It’s okay,” the agent said compassionately, gripping her arm. “Whatever happened, it’s fine. Don’t worry.”