83

My sleeping pills did their trick, and I might have slept forever if Justice hadn’t pawed at me until I took him out at about 10 a.m. Chris had gotten up early to get ready for his sermon the next day and had fixed chocolate-chip pancakes for breakfast.

“What did I do to deserve a brother like you?” I asked.

My saint of a brother left at noon. I was still in my sleepshirt and a pair of shorts and planned on staying that way all day. I had received a few more phone calls and text messages, including ones from Mace James and LA. I was tempted to call LA, but I suddenly had mixed emotions about that relationship. It wasn’t just that our lack of discretion might have cost us the case. I was also getting bad feelings about the way LA could adjust the truth when it served his purposes. He came from a different place than me spiritually, and our values were very different.

Plus, there was the issue of trust. He had seemed as devastated as I was after his testimony, but what if that was all an act? My emotions were swinging wildly back and forth, which was precisely why everybody said you should never start a relationship in the middle of a pressure cooker like the Tate case.

When the doorbell rang at twelve thirty, Justice went flying from the family room toward the front door at full speed, barking all the way. I half expected to see LA standing there and maybe J-Lo on a leash. A big part of me wanted to see LA standing there. Instead, I opened the door and found myself looking into the eyes of a man I had never wanted to see again.

Justice squirmed through the crack in the door and jumped all over Professor Mace James.

“Justice!” I said. “Sit!”

But Justice, with his lousy lack of character judgment, ignored me. Mace laughed and rubbed Justice’s head. “He’s okay,” Mace said.

Though I wanted to tell Mace James to get out of my life forever, I found myself apologizing. “Sorry about that,” I said. “He thinks everybody comes to see him.”

Mace got down on one knee and patted Justice a little. He looked up at me. “His name’s Justice, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Fitting. You got a minute?”

Not for you. “I’m pretty busy.”

Mace stood to his full height. He was wearing a pair of jeans, flip-flops, and a white T-shirt tight enough to remind everyone he could bench-press a small car. He had on a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and it looked like he hadn’t shaved in a few days. “This really can’t wait,” he said.

I frowned.

“I know you don’t trust me, Jamie. But just give me a few minutes.”

It was late August and over ninety degrees outside, but I wasn’t about to let this man in my house. There were two wooden rocking chairs on the front porch, and I decided they would have to do. “Hang on a second,” I said.

I went into the house and got Justice’s leash, my running watch, and my shades. If I couldn’t see his eyes, I didn’t want him seeing mine. I came back out and pointed to the rocking chairs. “Three minutes,” I said. “Not a second more.”

The last time somebody had asked for a few minutes of my time was when Caleb Tate dropped the bombshell on me about my father. My stomach had a similar feeling this time.

We probably looked like quite the pair on my front porch, gently rocking back and forth. A six-two bodybuilder with sweat beading on his bald head and a five-eight former kayaker in her sleepshirt and shorts, her hair sticking up, her face void of makeup, her mouth in a permanent scowl, trying to look hard. Justice took a spot between us, still on his leash, his head resting on his front paws.

I started my stopwatch and Mace said, “I guess that’s my cue.”

“Two fifty left,” I said, looking at my watch.

Mace didn’t waste any more time. “Before Antoine Marshall died, I promised him I would keep working to vindicate his name. Though I had some doubts after the brain-scan test, I’ve spent two weeks reevaluating every aspect of his case. I reread the entire case file, asking myself if there were any hints that someone else might have murdered your mom. I researched a number of your mom’s and dad’s cases to see if they had any enemies. I also researched the two things that bothered me most about Antoine’s case. The first was the way Judge Snowden treated my client. The second was the fact that Antoine passed a polygraph, even though, to my surprise, he failed the brain-scan test.”

Mace took a breath, and I said, “Two minutes.” I realized where he was headed, and it made my heart start pounding. He must have discovered the connection between my dad and Judge Snowden. Deep breaths. Slow pulse. Relax.

“I figured that Caleb Tate must have done something to get on the bad side of Judge Snowden, so I looked at all his cases in front of her. I didn’t find any reason for their apparent animosity, but I did find something else that intrigued me.”

I was rocking faster, realized it, and forced myself to slow down.

“In three cases, Tate’s clients had taken lie detector tests and passed. In each case, Snowden ruled the results inadmissible.”

Some birds landed in the bushes in front of the house, and Justice’s ears perked up. “It’s all right,” I said, petting his head. He lay back down as if he were just as intrigued about this story as I was.

“I thought that was unusual, so I changed my research strategy. I went through all of Tate’s cases for the past ten years and found a total of nine defendants who had passed lie detector tests. Even though the tests were inadmissible, in seven of the cases, he worked out sweet deals for the defendants.”

Mace had been looking out over the cul-de-sac as he spoke, but now he turned to me. I suddenly had no idea where any of this was going.

“Jamie, you’ve been prosecuting long enough to know that no defense lawyer gets that many innocent clients. So how did Tate’s clients do so well on the polygraphs? I figured he must have had a polygraph expert on his payroll, so to speak.”

Mace James’s story had taken an interesting twist. I quit worrying about my father’s reputation. And I quit looking at my watch.

Mace returned his gaze to the street. “Wrong again. Instead, I discovered that the tests were performed by a variety of polygraph examiners. Nine tests. Five different examiners. So it must have been something else.”

He stopped and checked his own watch. “I’m sorry; I see my time is up.” Mace smiled. I did not. “Will the court give me an extra two minutes?”

“Just say what you came to say, and say it as fast as you can.”

“Anyway, as you know, the polygraph test doesn’t really detect lies. It detects physiological changes that occur because we get nervous when we lie. Increased heart rate. Perspiration. Blood-pressure changes. That type of thing.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday,” I said.

“Right. Sorry. So anyway, I assumed Tate had figured out a way to game the test. I talked to a few polygraph examiners and started researching countermeasures—”

“I’m aware of the countermeasures,” I interrupted. “I researched them for Antoine’s case.”

“I figured you had. Well . . . I actually met with several of Tate’s former clients who had taken the test, and they denied knowing anything about countermeasures. Plus, I think Antoine would have told me if he had used them. And another thing—these other clients didn’t seem all that sophisticated, yet every single one of them had passed the test. To the best of my knowledge, Tate never had a client fail a polygraph.”

“Where’s all this heading?” I asked.

Mace James stopped rocking. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “There’s another way to beat the lie detector—you make yourself honestly believe that you didn’t commit the crime. The polygraph can’t tell the difference between false memories and true memories; it can only test whether you think you’re telling the truth.

“I started focusing on this when I tried to reconcile Antoine’s polygraph results with his brain-scan results. Jamie, there’s this whole branch of neurology focused on suggestive memory creation, a form of hypnosis that works on a large segment of the population. The effectiveness is even greater if the subject is taking certain drugs. This isn’t carnival hypnosis with swinging watches and all that stuff; it’s a very sophisticated form of top-down processing that can be tracked using neurological studies. The CIA experimented with it more than twenty years ago to develop agents who would carry out certain assignments with no remorse and no memory of the events afterward. Physicians in India have used it as anesthesia when they perform surgery—even the amputation of limbs. This stuff is real, and it works.”

My mind was shooting in a hundred different directions. “It can re-create your memory?”

“For certain segments of the population—yes.”

“And Tate’s clients were nine for nine?”

“Nine for nine.”

“And ten for ten if you count Tate.”

“I think you’ve got the math pretty much figured out,” Mace said.

“But how does all this help me with Caleb Tate?” I asked. “Your text message said you might have something I could use.”

“I’m just getting started,” Mace said.

I was no longer worried about how long he was taking.