Twenty-Seven Bones Read Free Page A

finest weed (her only vice) at reasonable, or at least nonruinous, prices.
    The circular bar in the middle of the raised cement dance floor was shaded by a round tin roof. Holly sat down facing the ocean. “What’s new and good, Vincent?”
    The Trinidadian leaned over the bar and beckoned her closer. “High-altitude, sout’-slope, two-toke rain forest chronic. Local grown, shade-dried, mellow as mudder’s milk, fifty an eight’.”
    “What’s old and cheap?”
    “Dirty Colombian for twenty-five. But I’ll make ya a deal—you work dis damn kink out of me neck, I’ll sell ya de chronic, same price.”
    “Take your shirt off,” said Holly. “And no extras.”

3
    “Back in the day—waaay back in the day—when I was a sheriff’s deputy in upstate New York, my boss used to boast that there was no murder he couldn’t solve.”
    At the lectern, Special Agent E. L. Pender, FBI, Ret., paused dramatically; the red- and blue-shirted students waited with their pens poised.
    “What he’d do, he told me, he’d take the first person to find the body and the last one to see the vic alive, then beat the crap out of both of ’em until one of ’em confessed.”
    Muted consternation in the auditorium. The red shirts were the best and brightest of the nation’s law enforcement officers, attending the FBI’s eleven-week National Academy training course at Quantico; the blue shirts were FBI trainees.
    “Right,” said Pender. “Judging from your response, I can see I don’t have to tell you that those days are gone. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m just saying it’s over. And that is why I’m in front of you today to spread the gospel of the affective interview.
    “As you already know, when two interrogators team up for good cop, bad cop, it’s almost always good cop who ends up inside the interrogation room taking the confession, if any, while bad cop watches through the one-way glass. What you may not know, however, is that unless bad cop has the freedom to ratchet up to a realistic threat level, the game isn’t worth the candle.
    “For every perp who comes clean, you’ll get five who either clam up or lawyer up or have their confessions thrown out on the grounds of coercion—and that’s not even taking into account witnesses slash suspects who turn out to be innocent, but have information of probative value that they’re not going to share with an interrogator who’s been threatening or frightening them, or who reminds them even subconsciously of the schoolyard bully who terrorized them when they were itty-bitty citizens.
    “And to anticipate your next question: what if the person you’re interviewing is the schoolyard bully. Won’t he be more likely to respond to a show of toughness and a threat of force?
    “The answer, surprisingly, is no. Why? Because as any psychiatrist will tell you, it is a fact of life, a psychological home truth, that every human being from Mother Teresa to Jack the Ripper operates from the same basic needs, using the same basic defenses, and accessing the same basic pool of emotions as every other human being. Deep down below the surface, we all want to be safe, we all want to be loved, and we all want to be respected.
    “The affective interview takes all that into account, recognizes the basic emotional needs and the feelings of the interviewee, and makes use of them in order to extract what should, and I emphasize should, be the goal of every interview a law enforcement officer ever conducts: the truth. You’re not in that room to get a confession or to corroborate a theory, you’re there to elicit truthful information.
    “Now we have a lot of ground to cover this morning. Before break I hope to get through the basics of proxemics, kinesics, and paralinguistics, and if there’s time we’re going to break into small groups for role-playing. Any questions before we get started?”
    “Yeah.” Red shirt slouched in the