White Lies (The Arcane Society #2)(9)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

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 never had 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 person well, you’ve got a much better shot at picking up on a lie, but otherwise it’s a crapshoot. Like I said, lying is a natural human ability and we’re all probably a lot better at it than we want to admit.”

“You said that Brad McAllister’s lies were different.”

“Yes.”

“What did you mean?”

“Brad was a different kind of liar,” she said quietly. “He was ultraviolet.”

“Ultraviolet?”

“My private code for evil.”

“Heavy word.”

“It was the right one for Brad, trust me. The ability to lie is a very powerful tool. In and of itself, I consider it to be value-neutral, sort of like fire.”

“But like fire it can be turned into a weapon, is that it?”

“Exactly.” She folded her arms. “You can cook a meal with fire or burn down a house. In the hands of a person with evil intent, lying can be used to cause enormous damage.”

“What makes you think Brad McAllister was evil? From all accounts he was a devoted husband who stuck with Elizabeth through her nervous breakdown.”

She whipped around in the seat, suddenly fierce and furious. “That image was the biggest Brad McAllister lie of all. And it really pisses me off that it still stands, even though the bastard is dead.”

He absorbed that. “What did McAllister do to make you dislike him so much?”

“Brad didn’t stick by Elizabeth while she went through her nervous breakdown. He caused her breakdown. But Elizabeth and I have given up trying to make anyone, including Archer and Myra, believe that. As far as the whole town of Stone Canyon is concerned, Brad was a heroic choirboy right to the end.”

Jake gave that some thought. “Okay, what’s your theory of the murder?”

She hesitated and then sank slowly back into the seat. “There doesn’t seem to be any reason to doubt the cops’ version of events. Brad probably did interrupt a burglary in progress.”

“Now who’s lying? You don’t believe that for a minute, do you?”

She sighed. “No. But I don’t have a better answer, either.”

“Not even a tiny theory?”

“All I know is that Brad was evil. Evil people collect enemies. Maybe one of them tracked him down and killed him that night.”

“But you have no motive, aside from the fact that Brad was not a nice person.”