A Person of Interest by Susan Choi

Author:Susan Choi [Choi, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-11-13T03:27:59+00:00

180 S U S A N C H O I

“A lie-detector test implies the person being tested is suspect,” Lee said after a moment. Despite being on the defensive, he spoke to Morrison admonishingly. He felt offended to his core. At the same time, he still was a prisoner of panic. The panic interfered with his indignation: it would soon deplete it.

“The test itself implies nothing. Only the results are meaningful. If you’re telling me the truth, the polygraph shouldn’t be any problem for you.”

“It isn’t,” Lee heard himself saying. “Of course it’s no problem.”

“You consent?”

“If it will resolve this confusion, yes, of course,” Lee said, with what he hoped was calm dignity, but as he rose from the table, he was aware he was trembling—he never had eaten lunch nor, for that matter, breakfast this morning, and he found himself, like a frightened child longing for bed, picturing the warm meal he would make for himself, then the bath he would take and the beer he would drink, and the sated, self-confident man he would be when the test, which he assumed would be scheduled, like a cholesterol test at the doctor’s, was in some hazy future administered—

“If you’ll follow us, then, unless you’d rather not bring your own car. But you’re free to, of course.” And with that the remote, swift-moving, palpably malcontent man who had only a few days before begged to just be called “Jim” was replacing his notebook and pen in his pocket and departing, while Lee stumbled half blind in his wake.

16.

FOLLOWING THE FAMILIAR SEDAN, HE HAD TO STRUGGLE

to keep up when Agent Shenkman exceeded the speed limit, but even as his car plodded, his heart was a riot. He’d absorbed from somewhere that polygraphs measured heart rate and breathing, but he lacked all concrete sense of how that might work. Surely the accelerated heartbeat of a man in the grip of confusion and fear, if subjected to polygraph measurement, wouldn’t point to that man as a liar? Most racing hearts, ardent or fearful, were entirely innocent hearts. The A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 181

machine would know that, wouldn’t it? By the time he was trying to follow the sedan into the parking lot of a Motel 6 he had never noticed at the intersection of old Route 19 with the interstate highway, Lee had difficulty turning the wheel with his petrified hands. Could the machine tell the wild pulse of terror apart from mendacity? Morrison waved him into a space, and then he was following the two agents through a tiny generic lobby, past tall plastic sentinel plants, down a dim, Windex-smelling hallway lined with black numbered doors.

He didn’t notice the number of the door that swung open to Morrison’s knock, and once shuffled into the cramped entry space between the room’s closet and the door to its bathroom, he felt scarcely able to digest his surroundings, although at the same

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