City of Fire (13 page)

“Who do you guys want to call in for the polygraph?” Barrera finally asked.

“Cesar Rodriguez,” Rhodes said.

Novak agreed. “If they’re trying to beat it, Cesar gets the call.”

“Then get him in here in a hurry,” Barrera said. “I want to get this over with before these shit heads change their minds.”

LENA watched Brant step out of the men’s room. His eyes were clear, his face washed. In spite of his rumpled clothing and two-day beard, he looked remarkably fresh.

“My client’s ready,” Paladino announced.

She didn’t react or say anything as they walked down the hall to the elevators. It was 6:25 p.m., more than six hours after the time they agreed upon, and Lena now considered herself immune to the real-life aura of Buddy Paladino.

The attorney had been stalling since noon with a variety of excuses.

At first she thought the delay might be a legitimate attempt by Paladino to talk his client out of taking the polygraph. Brant was under no obligation, and the results could easily be more damaging than not taking the test at all. But an hour ago Lena had finally lost her patience, convincing SID to switch the camera back on in the interview room. When the tech walked out, her hand
inadvertently
knocked against the audio button and up came the sound.

Paladino was seated at the table, conducting an interview over his cell phone while sipping a Coke and adjusting his $300 tie. His client was sprawled out on the floor, mouth open and eyes closed, in what looked like a deep, untroubled sleep.

It had been a waiting game. A play. The entire day had been wasted so that Paladino could frame his story in the media and give his client a chance to rest.

Half an hour later, the attorney stepped out of the interview
room insisting that the test be conducted in a neutral setting, the battery on his cell phone apparently dead. But it was another game. When a brief tour of Parker Center yielded nothing close to neutral, Paladino finally agreed that the test should be conducted in one of the regular examination rooms on the fourth floor. Not that Cesar Rodriguez, the forensic psychophysiologist who got the call, would particularly have minded. His equipment was digital, amounting to a computer, two rubber tubes with bellows that calculated a subject’s respiratory rate, a simple cuff to measure heart rate and blood pressure, and two finger plates to assess skin moisture. A notebook version of the package was completely portable and easily fit inside a briefcase. The test could be performed anywhere.

Lena escorted the men into the examination room, introducing them to Cesar Rodriguez, who shook their hands and greeted them with an affable smile. Rodriguez was of average height and had a quiet, almost fatherly way about him that seemed to set people at ease. Over the years he’d examined thousands of subjects. He was methodical, liked to explain the process as he went along, and had a reputation of becoming a subject’s advocate if he thought the test revealed a lack of deception.

But he was also known for being extremely thorough. And he had to be, Lena thought, because of the countermeasures some people used when trying to beat the test. Antiperspirant sprayed on the fingertips to prevent sweating, antihistamines or sedatives to raise or lower blood pressure, tacks placed in shoes and stepped on after every question to equalize the physiological response. Ever since corporations started using polygraph tests on employees, Web sites had sprung up on the Internet detailing countermeasures for anyone with a problem who might be facing the box.

Rodriguez pointed to the chair on the other side of his workstation, removing his glasses and digging into his pocket for a handkerchief. The room wasn’t much bigger than an interview room but was decidedly more comfortable. The
lights were on a dimmer switch. The subject’s chair was padded and reclined.

“We’ll spend an hour or so just getting to know each other,” Rodriguez said to Brant. “This is your chance to tell me about yourself. Your chance to tell me your side of the story, James.”

Brant slid into the chair, visibly anxious but determined.

“After we get to know each other, I’ll make up a list of questions. The list will be short. Ten, maybe fifteen questions at the most. Then we’ll go over each one before the test until both of us feel comfortable.”

“Before the test?”

“The way we phrase the questions is as important as the questions themselves.”

Brant appeared confused. Rodriguez huffed on a lens and wiped it dry.

“Let’s say I asked someone if they ever used cocaine, James. Let’s take it even further. Let’s say I asked them a blanket question like that and they said no because they really never had. But let’s say the question triggers a memory. Two years ago they saw friends use the drug at a party. In this setting just the thought of that party makes them feel uneasy. If we didn’t talk about it first, if I didn’t know about that experience and rephrase the question, there’s a good chance the result would be a false positive. In other words, they answered the question truthfully, but it read like they didn’t. That wouldn’t help anyone. See what I mean?”

Brant nodded, eyeing the computer on the table. Rodriguez slipped his handkerchief into his pocket and continued.

“We won’t do the actual test until we’ve gone over each question and determined your comfort level. And then we’re ready. I ask the questions, you answer them as best you can, and we’re done. It’s as simple as that, James. So why don’t you slip out of those shoes and relax.”

Brant reached down for his laces.

“I’d like a chance to review those questions,” Paladino said.

Rodriguez ushered the attorney and Lena out of the room.

“You will, Counselor, you will. When we’re finished, it would be my pleasure to print you out a copy of the results.”

Rodriguez smiled and closed the door. For the next two hours, he and Brant would be working alone. Lena turned to Paladino as they stood there, surprised by the faint presence of fear she saw in the attorney’s eyes. It lasted for only a split second, but it was there. A momentary scratch in the man’s polish and a measure of the risk he was taking. Then the attorney shrugged, excusing himself and heading briskly down the hall toward the elevators.

Lena chose the opposite direction, using the stairs. As she entered the bureau floor and sat down at her desk, Rhodes gave her a look from the other end of the room. He was speaking in a low voice to someone on the phone. Probably his girlfriend. Lena nodded back at him and turned away, fighting off a yawn.

The bureau was empty.

Barrera and Wemer had left after their initial meeting, requesting the results from the polygraph once the exam was completed. Novak and Sanchez were making a food run and hadn’t balked when Lena asked for two cups of coffee from the Blackbird Café. She thought they might. In spite of its proximity to Parker Center, the Blackbird wasn’t exactly a cop hangout. The café catered to artists migrating downtown as loft space became more available. Musicians mostly, seeking a quiet place to sip coffee and talk in subdued lighting. Lena had never entered the café without catching a hint of grass wafting from the alley, but always ignored it. She wasn’t sure how Novak or Sanchez might react, though they seemed well aware of the café’s reputation and knew they would be spotted as cops the moment they stepped through the door.

She checked her watch, guessing they wouldn’t return for another ten minutes. Fighting off another yawn, she realized that she had been up for almost forty hours. The length of most people’s workweek. She needed something to keep her mind occupied while she waited on the caffeine fix. Something
to beat back the sleep weighing down her eyelids. As she settled into her chair, she looked at the murder book with Nikki Brant’s name on it. But another blue binder was leaning against her computer monitor, similarly labeled, though with a different victim’s name.

Teresa Lopez.

The case still merited pause. The condition of the body when they’d found it still seeped into her dreams. Teresa Lopez had been employed for ten years by Global Kitchen & Bath, a plumbing supply store located three miles from her home in Whittier along the San Gabriel River. Her husband, Jose, drove a bus for the city and claimed early on that he had been delayed at work on the night of the murder.

But a polygraph hadn’t been necessary to turn Jose around. Proof of his wife’s infidelity had finally broken him down. The statements they showed him during the interview from numerous men Teresa worked with claiming that she liked to fool around. Rumors of several affairs she had with other men from their neighborhood who refused to come forward. A lab report indicating that the cum they found inside his wife was from a third party. An eyewitness who stated that he saw her lover leap from the bedroom window when Jose returned home from work earlier than expected. The man seen running away was thought to be Teresa’s manager at Global Kitchen & Bath, Terrill Visconte. Unfortunately, Visconte was married, and Lena held little hope that he would cooperate with them before the trial. At the crime scene they found Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in the CD player on the bedside table, along with a copy of
The Times.
The crossword puzzle was partially filled in. During an interview at the plumbing supply store, Visconte acknowledged that while he liked music, even puzzles, he wasn’t about to ruin his marriage and admit to something he hadn’t done over a piece of music or a stupid word game.

In the end, they probably wouldn’t need his statement.

Lopez had confessed, and Lena could still remember the moment he did as if it had happened that very day. They were sitting in Room 1 with Lopez and his attorney. Novak
pulled a crime scene photo out of the murder book and threw it down on the table. As Jose stared at the picture of his wife lying on the bed with her throat slashed, Novak told him that the case was simple. As old as time itself. Teresa Lopez was a beautiful woman full of life, and that night Jose caught her with another man. When he realized the rumors were true, when he saw with his own eyes that his wife was a whore, his anger reached a fever pitch and he blew.

It happened in a heartbeat, Novak told the man.

Lopez was caught in an emotional overload, caught in a rush of despair, and so it was no wonder he lost control. It was a crime of passion, and his wife had committed a great sin. Something anyone who was married could understand. That was why he used the box cutter from her tool belt and painted the cross on the sheet with her own blood.

BUDDY Paladino eyeballed the graph on Cesar Rodriguez’s computer, working on his game face but looking more like a man who was just struck by lightning. He remained silent, huddled with the others around Rodriguez’s chair at the workstation as he took the jolt.

Lena didn’t need to see the monitor to know that Brant had failed the polygraph. She could tell the outcome the moment Rodriguez opened the examination room door. It was written in his body language. The way his eyes appeared to be poking through his glasses and bumping off the ground.

“Mr. Brant didn’t miss a question here or there,” Rodriguez was saying. “He spiked out on every single one.”

Paladino grimaced, his gaze riveted to the screen. As Rodriguez continued, Lena glanced through the doorway at Brant, fidgeting in a chair at an empty desk in the room across the hall. Unaware that he was being watched, he seemed preoccupied with that coffee stain on his shirt, and she thought he might even be talking to himself. After a while, he gave up on the stain and opened a bottle of spring water.

As he took a long swig, Lena tried to reconcile the differences between the man she’d met yesterday morning with the one she was staring at now. When she showed him that photo of his wife, he was upset, a grieving husband. Even though most murders of a spouse still pointed to the surviving partner, the crime had been horrific enough, even strange enough, that Lena had thought it would end in a much different way. She remembered sitting on the steps at Rustic
Canyon Park, her first thought upon entering the bedroom and seeing the corpse—the idea that only a madman could have committed this murder.