Goldman was going at him hard. Arlen just sat shaking his head, repeating over and over, “It’s not me. I didn’t do this.” Baldwin watched the nonverbal cues, looking for the lie. Looking for the trail Arlen had left for himself, the winding, narrow path back to reality. Back to the broken body of another little girl. The cues were all there. It wasn’t the obvious things he usually saw when interviewing child killers: the leering face during the interviews, the preening, the giggles. The dead eyes that got lively only when the crime-scene photos appeared under his nose. No, Arlen was much more subtle than that. It was all but invisible, masterfully contained below the surface. Arlen talked in rapid-fire denials, getting angrier and angrier the longer he was kept in the interrogation room. Baldwin was utterly shocked that he hadn’t asked for a lawyer. There was something wrong with that. They still had a young girl missing. There were no signs of her whereabouts found at Arlen’s house, no clues where she might be.
