Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [14]
“I’m sorry,” said Jack. “I’ll do whatever I can today to transfer the case to you. But I’m out.”
Neil just smiled, completely unfazed. “Like old times, isn’t it?”
It was indeed déjà vu. Jack had probably resigned a dozen times from the institute before actually packing up and leaving. It wasn’t just the emotional drain of defending the guilty. As he’d told Neil more than ten years ago, he probably could have stuck it out if he had met just one guy on death row who was genuinely sorry for what he’d done. But those weren’t the kind of cases that the institute handled.
“Give me one chance to change your mind,” said Neil.
“It won’t work.”
“I’ll cut off my ponytail if it doesn’t.”
Whoa. That was serious. “You’re on,” said Jack.
The guard unlocked the door from the inside, and the two lawyers entered.
“I’ll be back in thirty minutes,” the guard said, and then he closed the door.
The fluorescent lights overhead were so bright that Jack almost needed sunglasses. The floor was bare concrete, and the cinder-block walls were pale yellow with no windows. Seated at the Formica-topped table was Jamal Wakefield. The transformation since Gitmo was startling. A shave and a haircut alone made him look years younger, and even after three years of incarceration, it was easy to see how handsome McKenna’s boyfriend had once been. Jack truly didn’t recognize him.
The silver-haired man seated beside Jamal, however, was another story.
“Long time no see,” said Peter Swenson.
In a classic case of overcorrection, Jack had literally switched sides after leaving the institute, spending the next two years of his career as a federal prosecutor. As Neil knew well, Swenson was the polygraph examiner that Jack had used regularly to test his informants.
“With my ponytail on the line, I wanted Jamal to be examined by someone you trust,” said Neil.
“All right,” said Jack. “You got my attention.”
Advance clearance was required to administer a polygraph in jail, but Neil had taken care of that, and Swenson’s equipment was ready to go. Two fingers on Jamal’s left hand were wired to electrodes. Pneumograph tubes wrapped his chest and abdomen. An inflatable rubber bladder rested on the seat of the hard wooden chair beneath him, and another was behind his back. A blood pressure cuff squeezed his right bicep.
“Time’s a-wastin’,” said Neil. “Let’s roll.”
Swenson turned his attention to his cardio amplifier and galvanic skin monitor atop the table. The paper scroll was rolling as the needle inked out a pulsating line.
“All set,” he said.
Jack knew the drill, and Swenson had taken care of the preliminaries before his arrival. The first task was to put the subject at ease. He started with questions that would make Jamal feel comfortable with him as an interrogator. Do you like music? Have you ever owned a car? Is your hair purple? They seemed innocuous, but with each answer Swenson was monitoring the subject’s physiological response to establish the lower parameters of his blood pressure, respiration, and perspiration. It was almost a game of cat and mouse. The examiner needed to quiet him down, then catch him in a small lie that would serve as a baseline reading for a falsehood. The standard technique—Jack had seen it unfold many times—was to ask something even a truthful person might lie about.
“Have you thought about sex in the last ten minutes?”
“Uh, no.”
Jamal blinked about five times. It wasn’t something that men necessarily liked to admit—especially when charged with the obsession-driven murder of their girlfriend—but it was a scientific fact that anyone with a Y chromosome thought about sex every three minutes. The room fell silent as the