Read Blood Trail for Free Online Page A

I asked, “Are you really a cop?”
    â€œSure. I’m a detective.”
    â€œYou like it?”
    â€œYeah, it’s really interesting. I get to meet a lot of people this way, and most of them are great folks who just have to come in here because something bad happened. Like you.”
    I wondered whether he knew my father. A lot of the cops do, because Dad works courthouse security. But just as I thought of asking, the detective said, “C’mon, I’ll show you the polygraph.”
    He led me out of his office to another room—a bare little brown room with no window, and a bench screwed to one wall with a big steel pipe mounted above it, like, for handcuffs, and a big steel ring in the floor. I took one look at that place and I froze.
    The detective gave me a smile. “We do it in here because it’s quiet. No distractions, no interruptions.”
    He closed the door behind us, and yeah, it sure was quiet.
    â€œHere it is,” he said, and I got myself turned around to look. Against the wall opposite the handcuff bar and stuff was a plain table with a big black machine on it.
    The detective beckoned. “C’mere, I’ll show you how it works. All it does is measure your physiological response …” He showed me the ink bottles—red, blue, and black—and the needles and the graph paper the machine kept inching out. He sat me down in a folding chair and hooked me up: a black tube thing around my chest to measure my breathing, a cuff like the one they use in a doctor’s office on my arm to measure my blood pressure and my pulse, and little tubes on two of my fingers to measure my skin reflex. At that point I said, “Huh?”
    â€œYour skin’s an organ, just like your heart or your lungs—”
    â€œIt is?”
    â€œYeppers. And it responds … well, for starters, it puts out sweat, right?”
    It sure did. I was sweating already.
    â€œI have to establish a baseline first,” he said. “We’ll run a trial strip, okay? I want you to close your eyes and think of a number between one and five.”
    Whatever. I chose the number two. I sat there with my eyes closed thinking two and feeling him inflate the cuff on my arm.
    â€œOkay,” I heard him say, “I want you to answer ‘no’ to each question, all right? In other words, I want you to lie. Here we go.” A pause, then he asked. “Of the number you chose between one and five, was it number one?”
    â€œNo.”
    Another pause.
    â€œOf the number you chose between one and five, was it number two?”
    â€œNo.”
    He went on till five, then said, “Okay, you can open your eyes. Was it number two?”
    â€œYeah, it was!” I gawked at him. It was just a stupid trial, for God’s sake, not a real lie, and I hadn’t felt myself sweat or anything.
    â€œDo you want to see?” he asked.
    I looked at the graph paper. He had marked the numbers on the edge. At number two, all four lines jumped.
    â€œThere’s your physiological response,” he said. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”
    Yeah. Fascinating. Uh-huh.
    â€œOkay, now that I have an idea of your normal response, I’m going to ask you to close your eyes again.…”
    He asked easy questions at first, like, was my name Jeremy Matthew Davis? Yes. Was I seventeen years old? Yes. Questions like that, and then he eased into the real questions. Was I friends with Aaron Gingrich? Yes. Had we gone bike riding the day Aaron was murdered? Yes. And so on, everything I had told the first detective.
    â€œDid Nathan answer the third phone call?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDid he identify himself as Nathan?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œDid you recognize his voice?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAt that time, did Nathan say Aaron was not home?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œTo the best of your knowledge, was the time of that call approximately 5:15