“I think he’s having a panic attack,” Bonilla said in a voice that was more bemused than sympathetic.

“Oh Jeez,” Sutton muttered. “You didn’t tell me the guy’s a wacko.”

“Do you have a paper bag?” Adrienne asked. “He’s hyperventilating.”

It took a moment, and then a bag was placed over his mouth and nose. Inhaling the woody smell, Duran took his breaths one at a time, listening to Adrienne’s encouragement. “That’s it… just like that. You’re going to be okay.”

It only took a minute or two for the attack to subside, and when it had, Duran felt mortified. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said, looking from Adrienne to Sutton, and then to Bonilla. “I seem to suffer from agoraphobia. Sometimes, when I go out… it comes and goes.”

Paul Sutton was a short man with a shaved head, a luxuriant mustache and a Boston accent. He regarded Duran with a skeptical eye. “You sure you’re all right with this? You sure you want to go on?”

Duran nodded. “Yeah,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’m okay. Let’s do it.”

The polygrapher led him into an adjacent room, where two chairs sat opposite each other across a conference table. On the table was a nineteen-inch monitor, a device that looked like an expensive amplifier—the lie detector, Duran guessed—and an array of attachments that were obviously meant for him. A cable ran from the lie detector to a computer that sat on the floor.

After seating Duran in one of the chairs, the polygrapher instructed him to unbutton his shirt and roll up his sleeve, which he did. Then he fastened a pneumograph tube to his subject’s chest, strapped a blood pressure pulse cuff to his right arm, and placed an electrode assembly on Duran’s left index finger. Bonilla and Adrienne stood just inside the doorway, watching.

“You know how this works, right?”

Duran shrugged. “I’ve seen it on television.”

“But you’re supposed to be a psychiatrist, or something, right?”

“A clinical psychologist,” Duran confirmed.

“Then you’ll know what I’m talking about when I tell you the machine can’t be beat. What we’re doing is, we’re measuring how your autonomic nervous system responds to the questions we ask and the answers you give. We’re talking blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and GSR. Things you can’t control.”

“What’s that last one?” Adrienne asked.

“Galvanic Skin Response,” Bonilla volunteered.

Seeing the blank look on Adrienne’s face, Sutton explained: “The skin’s resistance to electrical currents in the body.”

“And what does that tell us?” Adrienne inquired.

“It’s an indirect measure,” the polygrapher replied, “of cortical arousal. The skin becomes more conductive when the subject tells a lie, so the GSR changes.”

“Why is the skin more conductive?” Duran asked.

“Because lying’s stressful,” Sutton said. “It excites the cortex. And you can measure that.”

Then Sutton got to his feet, smiled and ushered Bonilla and Adrienne into the other room.

“What?” Bonilla protested. “We don’t get to watch?”

“No, you don’t,” Sutton told him. “This guy’s strung out enough as it is. With you in the room, it’s like having a junkyard dog—”

“You’re afraid I might give the guy’s cortex a hard-on, right?”

Adrienne rolled her eyes.

“Yeah,” Sutton replied sarcastically, “that’s what I’m afraid of.” Then he turned to Adrienne. “I have to tell you: a subject this jumpy? I don’t know what we’re going to get.”

“Oh, fahcrissake, that’s what he always says!” Bonilla exclaimed. “Just ask him the questions, would ya?”

Sutton returned to the testing room, and closed the door behind him. Adrienne went over to the window, and looked out. Bonilla ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. “Man,” he said, “did you see that guy? I swear, he could hardly breathe.”

Adrienne nodded. “I felt sorry for him,” she muttered, and it was true. For a moment, it seemed as if he was coming apart at the seams. Then he got it together. Somehow.

“Well, don’t get carried away,” Bonilla told her. “Just because he’s fucked up, that don’t make him a good guy.”

She nodded a second time. “I know,” she replied, and picked up phone to check the messages at her office. Behind the door, she could hear Duran and the polygrapher talking, but she couldn’t tell what was being said.

“Are you sitting in a chair? Wait to answer.”

Duran counted to three, and said, “Yes.”

“Is today November 8th?”

Again, he waited as he’d been told to do, and then replied, “Yes.”

The polygrapher watched the graph being drawn on his monitor. “Am I sitting across from you? Answer ‘No.’”

Duran did as he was told. And then they got down to business.

“Is your real name Jeffrey Duran?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a licensed clinical psychologist?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Just answer the question, yes or no,” Sutton scolded. “Are you a licensed clinical psychologist?”

“Yes.”

“Was your treatment of Nico Sullivan meant to be in her best interest?”

“Yes.”

After Duran had left in a taxi, Adrienne and Bonilla went into the testing room, where Sutton was printing out a copy of the results.

“So?” Bonilla asked, rubbing his hands together. “Whatta we got?”

The polygrapher looked at Adrienne, and shrugged. “What we’ve ‘got’… is George Washington.”

Bonilla frowned. “Paul… don’t do this to me. What are you talkin’ about?”

“He’s Jeffrey Duran.”

“No, he’s not,” Bonilla told him.

“Well, he thinks he is,” Sutton replied. “And when he says he’s a clinical psychologist, he thinks he’s telling the truth.”

“Get outa here,” Bonilla exclaimed. “We know he’s lying. He’s in the Death Index!”

The polygrapher shook his head, sat back in his chair, and turned the palms of his hands upward, as if to say, What can I tell you?

Adrienne spoke up. “Just before the test, you suggested the results might not be reliable.”

“That’s true,” Sutton admitted. “But that was because he was so overwrought, so stressed I was afraid everything he said would look like a lie. But that’s not what I got. Look,” he said and beckoned them around to his side of the table.

On the computer screen were four graphs, arranged in tiers, one on top of the other. Using the mouse, Sutton put the cursor on the line marked PNEUMO 1, and clicked. Instantly, the other lines disappeared, and PNEUMO 1 filled the screen. “See this?” he asked, moving the cursor to a sharp peak that spiked above the line’s median wave. “That’s a lie.”

“How do you know?” Adrienne asked.

“Question number 4: ‘Is my shirt yellow? Answer yes.’“ Sutton pinched the fabric of his white shirt, and shook it to illustrate the point. Then he flipped the monitor from one screen to another—PNEUMO 2, CARDIO, and GSR. Similar spikes could be seen in about the same place on each graph.

“So?” Bonilla asked.

“So we know what a lie looks like when Mr. Duran is telling one. Now, look at this,” he told them, moving the cursor to a wobble in the GSR line. “That’s the truth. You can see: there’s no stress at all.”

“What was the question?” Adrienne wondered.

“Another test question: ‘Are you sitting in a chair?’ Answer: ‘yes.’ He was sitting right across from me.”

“And when you asked him if he was Jeffrey Duran?”

Sutton consulted his notes, and moved the cursor to a part of the graph that was nearly flat. “You see what I mean?” Then he flipped the screens, one after another. “CARDIO. ABDOMINAL PNEUMOGRAPH. THORACIC PNEUMOGRAPH. There’s nothing. He’s practically flat lining.”

Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Finally, Bonilla chuckled. “The son of a bitch beat the polygraph!”

Sutton tried to object “You can’t beat—”

“He beat it, Paul! We know he’s not Duran.”