October skies

Good enough.

The British police were amateur enough to read this as an unhappy accident. He doubted whether the two murders would be linked anytime soon. If some bright young go-getter in the CID intelligence office did eventually get round to noticing they both shared an acquaintance by the name of Julian Cooke, it would be too late to haul him in for questioning, because Mr Cooke was about to become a statistic; another poor, unfortunate, ill-prepared trekker who had vanished in the wilderness of the Sierra Nevadas.

He unmuted the TV, recessed expensively in the granite wall. A news programme was on. He stopped for a few seconds to watch, intrigued by how differently news appeared to be presented and packaged here in the UK.

The British like their presenters ugly and old.

He was bemused by that, contrasting the pair of presenters on screen with the tanned and well-groomed young studio-brats he was used to watching back home.

Interesting.

He wandered downstairs, checking that he’d left no telltale signs of intrusion, then went back through the lounge into the kitchen, to the window he’d eased open, out into the yard, over a fence and was gone into the night.

CHAPTER 62

Thursday

Palo Cedro, California

Rose smiled and slurped on an iced Becks. ‘So, I’m not exactly sure what Forensic Linguistics is. It sounds impressive.’

The young man grinned. A chiselled dimple in each cheek made him look like a youthful Brad Pitt. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s real interesting. They’re just beginning to use it more in other countries. The FBI’s been using it for years.’

Rose smiled. Lance, the guy from the diner, was good-looking, pretty smart too, but already she was finding him a little on the self-absorbed side.

Let’s talk about me… me… me…

‘They use it in corporate security too, filtering emails for phrases and communication patterns that are suspicious.’ He nodded his head. ‘That’s where I wanna be at. Big dollars in corporate security, fuck yeah.’

‘Wow,’ she offered.

‘It’s really clever shit though, Rose,’ he said, chugging his Becks from the bottle. ‘The way people communicate, the choice of words they use when they’re, like, talking the truth and when telling a lie. Going through a bogus email, or a fabricated suicide note, when you know how it works, how the brain processes stuff… it’s so obvious.’

He leaned forward, putting his feet up on the rungs of her bar stool either side of her legs and casually planted a hand on her thigh. ‘Take a faked suicide note. We studied one taken from an actual real crime. This husband knew his wife was cheating on him, so he decided to kill her ’cause he was pissed about it, but also because he had a big ol’ life insurance policy on her. So one night, when he had an alibi covering his ass, he sneaked home and forced her to write her own suicide note, before blowing her brains out with the family shotgun.’

‘Nice.’

Lance grinned. ‘He went out again, then came home from his alibi, found her body and called the police. This guy nearly got away with it. The police were sure they were looking at a suicide until the note was run past the Feds. And this is the cool bit,’ he said, nodding. ‘They didn’t find any tissue, fibre or prints to link to her husband. The handwriting was hers, of course. There was nothing there they could get him on, except… the language she used in the note.’

The language? Rose was intrigued. ‘How do you mean?’

‘It wasn’t suicide language.’

‘Uh?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the language was, like, too depressed to be genuine.’

‘Too depressed?’ Rose shook her head. ‘Er… she supposedly shot herself. Surely depressed is exactly how she’d sound in her note?’

‘No, see, that’s the common mistake. Most people think a person about to take their own life is miserable as shit. But that isn’t the case, because they’ve found a way through what’s troubling them. See? They’ve found a solution, so it’s, like, all right now — everything is, you know, cool… I got myself a way out.’

‘The solution being suicide?’

‘That’s right! So, when they’re writing the note, it’s full of, like, positives, it’s optimistic, happy even.’ He grinned that winning, sexy smile of his, inches away from her face.

‘And that’s a genuine suicide note. This husband guy forced his wife to write a doom-n-gloom, I-hate-this-evil-world-and-I’m-gonna-end-it-all-right-now kind of letter.’

He sat back and laughed. ‘Dude was a dumb-ass. That’s how the Feds got him.’

She looked at him, an idea germinating. ‘So, you’re telling me you can look at the language of a written piece of work and tell whether the writer is telling the truth, or making it up?’

‘Sure. Like I say, Forensic Linguistics is the future.’

He took another swig, planting the bottle heavily on the counter. ‘See, somebody lying will use one of two or three deception strategies. It’s just a case of spotting which strategy is being used, counting the ratio of adjectives to nouns… stuff like that. Simple when you know how it works.’