Mr. Peanut Read Online Free PDF Page A

hallway to the bedroom was lined with framed posters, screen shots of video games with the titles splashed across the top (Bang, You’re Dead! Escher X, Lamb to the Slaughter), and Escher prints—not reproductions but the real things, signed and numbered. Sheppard had to stop and admire them. Was there ever an artist who made the eye move as much as that Dutch master? Who invited and then thwarted your efforts to grasp the whole, at the same time making you feel trapped? White and black swans migrating on a Möbius strip. Angels tracing the shapes of demons and vice versa, shrinking from a circle’s center in infinite tessellation. A man of pure white interlocked with a black gnome, the two-dimensional figures becoming three-dimensional as they split off from each other in the background, circling on separate paths toward a terminal encounter. Sheppard continued on. The hallway led past a small study to the bedroom, the space dominated by a king-size bed and a flat-screen television on the wall across from it. Bookshelves framed the headboard and climbed above it, filled with knickknacks, sculptures, photographs: she swimming with a dolphin, he in a sea kayak, the two of them arm in arm, backpacking in Hawaii or waving on a bridge in Paris. In this one Alice Pepin had grown extraordinarily fat.
    Who says people can’t change?
    In the interrogation room, Sheppard waited while Pepin collected himself. The suspect had been leaning forward with his elbows on the table, staring at his folded hands, but then sat up and rubbed the back of his wrist across his runny nose and sniffed, pressing his forearms across his wet eyes. He cleared his throat, crossed his arms, and seemed strong suddenly, focused and ready. “All right,” he said, “ask away.” He was a large man, heavy-boned and sausage-fingered with coarse black hair bristling on his arms, so thickly, Sheppard thought, that you could rest a pencil on it. He grew his black mustache down to his beard and had combed his thick black hairstraight back. He looked like a biker, a Hells Angel, so if you weren’t careful you might underestimate his intelligence. And there was an undeniable handsomeness about him, a startling confidence in his barrel-chested physicality and sloe-eyed gaze—a surprisingly regal charisma, Sheppard observed. He looked like a Jewish Henry VIII.
    “Let’s backtrack a little,” Sheppard said. “Where were you today? Take me through it.”
    He had the basic story but now wanted Pepin to expand it, to tell it again so he could watch for the telltale signs: details dropped or added, narrative inconsistencies, lies and their microgestures—split-second tells—with the body giving you away as blatantly as a kid waving behind a TV reporter. There were too many of these to count: liars often turned their shoulders away from the questioner, increased their blinking, or fiddled with the nearest thing they could find. Like actors, they needed props. They breathed shallowly. Their eyes darted. They swallowed excessively when the mouth went dry. Their pupils dilated, widening visibly, like a camera shutter expanding. They had a whole array of facial tics, whether crinkling the nose, tightening the lips, or narrowing their eyes, miniexertions that carved lines in the face over time, grooves you could learn to read like hieroglyphics. Of course, Sheppard thought, a lie didn’t become untruth until another person was present. After that—especially during an interrogation—it was like an invisible, physical thing between two people, push and push back, something Sheppard felt in his very core. Yet truth tellers had their own tics: they stared off to the left, their gaze drifting inward, memory taking over. They went still when they spoke and weren’t necessarily articulate. In fact, verbosity or fluency—seamless storytelling—was to be trusted least of all. But when they told the truth, ironically, the innocent often appeared utterly arrested.
    “Did