“Did you tell the deputies?”

“No. Because I don’t trust them. That’s why I wanted to talk to you now. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea—because you’re a friend of Kayleigh’s—but after reading that article you wrote, after meeting you, I decided you wouldn’t let your friendship interfere with your judgment. Maybe that comes from you being a mother.” He dropped that sentence without adding anything further or even looking for a response. Dance wondered if her face ticked with the alarm she felt.

“Tell me about the alibi,” she calmly asked.

“I was going to go to the luncheon, for the fan? I didn’t think they’d let me in but I thought I could watch from a distance, I didn’t know. Maybe hear Kayleigh sing. Anyway, I got lost. Around Cal State I stopped and I asked directions. It was twelve-thirty.”

Yes, just around the time of the attack.

“Who’d you talk to?”

“I don’t know her name. It was a residential area near the sports stadium. This woman was working in a garden. She went inside to get a map and I stayed at the door. The noon news was just finishing.”

At the time I was dodging bullets and being hit by fire extinguisher shrapnel.

“The street name?”

“Don’t know. But I can describe her house. It had a lot of plants hanging from baskets. The bright red little flowers. What’re they called?”

“Geraniums?”

“I think so. Kayleigh likes to garden. Me, not so much.”

As if he were talking about his wife.

“My mother did too. She had—cliché alert!—a real green thumb.”

Dance smiled. “Anything more about the house?”

“Dark green. On the corner. Oh, and the house had a carport, not a garage. She was nice so I moved some bags of grass seed for her. She was in her seventies. White. That’s all I remember. Oh, she had cats.”

“All right, Edwin. We’ll look into that.” Dance jotted down the information. “Will you give us permission to search the yard where you saw that intruder?”

“Of course, sure.”

She didn’t look up but asked quickly, “And inside your house too?”

“Yes.” A microsecond of hesitation? She couldn’t tell. He added, “If Deputy Madigan had asked in the first place I would have let him.”

Dance had called his bluff, which may not have been a bluff at all, and said she’d schedule a time for deputies to come by.

And she asked herself the big question: What did the kinesics reveal? Was Edwin Sharp telling the truth?

She frankly couldn’t say. As she’d told Madigan and the others in the briefing on Monday, a stalker is usually psychotic, borderline or severely neurotic, with reality issues. That meant he might be reciting what he believed was the truth, even though it was completely false; therefore his kinesics when lying would be the same as his baseline.

Adding to the difficulty was Edwin’s diminished affect—his ability to feel and display emotion, such as stress. Kinesic analysis works only when the stress of lying alters the subject’s behavior.