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the time. Any idea what he was doing at her house that evening?”
    “No,” she said.
    He did not want to ask but the hunter in him needed to know.
    “Were you sleeping with McAllister?” he asked without inflection.
    She shuddered. “Lord, no. There’s no way I could have been attracted to a man like that. Brad McAllister was a liar.”
    His stomach clenched. She probably hated liars.
    “Everyone lies at one time or another,” he said.Including me.
    “Well, sure.” She sounded startlingly casual about that simple fact. “I don’t have a problem with most lies or the people who tell them, at least, not since I learned how to handle my talent. Heck, I tell lies myself sometimes. I’m pretty good at lying, actually. Maybe it goes with having a gift for detecting lies.”
    He was dumbfounded. That did not happen very often, he reflected wryly. It took him a couple seconds to regroup.
    “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re a human lie detector and you don’t mind that most people lie?”
    She smiled slightly. “Let me put it this way. When you wake up one morning at the age of thirteen and discover that because of your newly developed parasenses you can tell that everyone around you, even the people you love, lie occasionally and that you are going to be driven crazy if you don’t get some perspective, you learn to get some perspective.”
    He was reluctantly fascinated. “Just what kind of perspective do you have on the subject?”
    “I take the Darwinian view. Lying is a universal talent. Everyone I’ve ever known can do it rather well. Most little kids start practicing the skill as soon as they master language.”
    “So you figure there must be some evolutionary explanation, is that it?”
    “I think so, yes,” she said, calmly serious and certain. “When you look at it objectively it seems obvious that the ability to lie is part of everyone’s kit of survival tools, a side effect of possessing language skills. There are a lot of situations in which the ability to lie is extremely useful. There are times when you might have to lie to protect yourself or someone else, for example.”
    “Okay, I get that kind of lying,” he said.
    “You might lie to an enemy in order to win a battle or a war. Or you might have to lie just to defend your personal privacy. People lie all the time to diffuse a tense social situation or to avoid hurting someone’s feelings or to calm someone who is frightened.”
    “True.”
    “The way I see it, if people couldn’t lie, they probably wouldn’t be able to live together in groups, at least not for very long or with any degree of sociability. And there you have the bottom line.”
    “What bottom line?”
    She spread her hands. “If humans could not lie, civilization as we know it would cease to exist.”
    He whistled softly. “That’s an interesting perspective, all right. I admit I’ve never thought about the subject in those terms.”
    “Probably because you’ve neverhad to think about it. Most people take the ability to lie for granted, whether or not they approve of it.”
    “But not you.”
    “I was forced to develop a slightly different perspective.” She paused. “What I’ve always found fascinating is that the vast majority of people, nonparasensitive and sensitive alike,think they know when someone else is lying. That’s true around the world. But the reality is that the research shows that most folks can detect a lie only slightly better than fifty percent of the time. They might as well flip a coin.”
    “What about the experts? Cops and other law enforcement types?”
    “According to the studies they aren’t much better at picking out liars, at least not in a controlled lab situation. The problem is that the cues people assume correlate with lying, such as avoiding eye contact or sweating, generally don’t work.”
    “You can’t count on Pinocchio’s nose growing, huh?”
    “It’s not a total myth,” she said. “Physical cues do exist but they vary a lot from one individual to another. If you know a