“I don’t believe you, you know, when you deny being in law enforcement. My dad and brothers are all in the field, and I can spot an officer a mile away.” She squinted at me. “Not patrol or dispatch, more like a crime expert of some kind.”

I took a deep breath. “I’m a forensic linguist.”

“I knew it. I knew it! That’s like analyzing ransom notes, lies in what people write, stuff like that?”

“I examine words people use. What they write. What they say.”

Angie moved from the door and pulled out a chair. “Give me an example.”

“I really can’t talk about actual cases.”

“Come on, Darby. Something!”

I sighed and thought for a moment. “Okay, the easiest part of what I do is related to lying and deception.”

“Aren’t those the same thing?”

“No. Most people don’t lie, but they do deceive. A lie is false information. The reason most people don’t lie is they can’t remember what they said. People commonly do deceive. They’ll stick to the truth as much as possible, just concealing one thing. So if you have, say, a case where an employee took some money from the boss’s desk, the employee will keep to the real events and just leave out the theft.”

“And you can tell that how?”

“The truth will be full of detail—where they were, how they were feeling, what was going on around them. When they get to the deception, the story will be lean, little detail, and full of certain phrases like ‘the next thing I knew,’ or ‘later on.’ You want to listen to exactly what people say. You don’t add to it or subtract from it.”

Angie picked up a pencil and twirled it. “Go on.”

“Deception happens all the time in advertising. For example, marketers claim a supplement works because it was clinically tested.”

“So?”

“Clinically tested doesn’t mean the same as clinically proven. They’re not saying it works, only that it was tested. Sometimes they can’t even say that, so they’ll say that it’s the bestselling supplement, implying that if a bunch of people buy it, it must work.”

“Oh, that’s good. Who are the best liars?”

“The best liars,” I said slowly, “and the most devastating lies, come from the people you’d never believe would lie to you.”

Clang, clang, clang. Someone rang a triangle outside the lodge.

“That’s the signal that the supply wagon’s leaving in half an hour.” Angie stood. “I’ll keep looking for those drawings and let you know when I find them.”