Caleb Moorhead

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People lie to me a lot.

It’s inherent in my line of work. It’s inevitable. Attorneys hear a lot of lies. Cops lie about their intentions, about their evidence, about all kinds of things, really. Witnesses lie about what they’ve seen. Sometimes my clients lie to me as well, which is always frustrating. It’s very hard to defend someone when you’re working with inaccurate information.

I would much rather work with someone who was open with me about being guilty than try to represent a client who pretended to be innocent when they were very clearly not. It isn’t as though I would rat them out if they told me; it would be wildly against my personal and professional ethical codes to do so. At most, I might decline or drop their case, and even then I wouldn’t tell the police or prosecutors a word about what they’d said, because that confidentiality is a cornerstone of the legal system, and I feel strongly about maintaining it as an absolute. A client has to be able to trust that what they tell their attorney will be kept strictly, entirely confidential.

In any case. People lie to me a lot. And I’ve been in this field for a while now. It’s safe to say that after spending a decade as a practicing criminal defense attorney, I have heard a lot of people lying in a lot of ways.

And thus, it is with some professional expertise that I can say that Kyoko is one of the worst liars I have ever met.

Oh, she can probably get away with it with a lot of people, especially strangers. Kyoko’s social cues in general tend to be a little odd, and a lot of nonverbal markers don’t show through very clearly as a result. Her body language, her patterns of eye contact and tone, these things are atypical as a rule.

Her cognitive processing also tends to be odd; she’s sometimes prone to the same kinds of circumstantial and tangential thought process that show up in schizophrenic or manic people when they’re having an episode. With how often the mentally ill are accused of crimes, I’ve heard those patterns often enough to recognize them, and it’s coming on top of the actual manic episodes I’ve seen in her. Other elements of her logic are atypical as well; she is prone to reasoning by analogy, and she uses extended metaphors that other people often don’t understand, simply because they’re grounded in synesthetic perceptions other people don’t share. She tends to flip between the casual, sarcastic artist and the intelligent, sharply analytical scientist without warning. So the other major method of catching someone in a lie—finding inconsistencies or internal contradictions in what they’re telling you—is also unreliable.

At first. But her patterns aren’t hard to observe, not really; they’re just idiosyncratic. Once you figure them out and you know what to watch for, she’s a terrible liar, one of the worst I have ever met. I’m pretty sure that she’s so used to people not understanding her that she has almost no experience with lying to someone who does, and after fifteen years of knowing her I think it’s safe to say that I’m familiar with how she thinks.

And so, when she gives me another poorly executed nonanswer, says something obviously indicative of internalized guilt, and hangs up, I just sigh and set the phone down. I can’t even be upset with her at this point. I’m just tired. I’ve been waiting for her to come clean for, oh, quite a few years now. It’s getting old.

I get up, wincing as one of my knees pops in the process. Early-onset osteoarthritis, the doctors tell me, probably exacerbated by the ligament that tore when a client with serious anger management problems shoved me down a staircase. It aches sometimes. I’m used to that. It’s just how life is.

I’m late leaving the office. Most of the staff are already gone. I walk out past empty desks and quiet cubicles. There are a few people still working, but not many, and those who are don’t have the energy to do more than nod vaguely in my direction as I leave. Broadly speaking, people don’t work overtime here unless they have more to do than they have time and energy for, so when someone does, they’re already tired and overburdened even before they put those extra hours in.

I’m something of an exception. Oh, I’m not here late every day, nothing like that. But it’s not an infrequent occurrence, if I don’t have anything else to do in the evening. Sitting on the computer at the office isn’t much different than sitting on the computer at home, all things considered, particularly now that I have enough seniority to largely be left to my own devices at work. The senior partners trust that I’m going to do my job, and they don’t care overly much what hours I prefer to work or what my workflow is like while I do. The work will get done.

It’s cool out, which is nice. Summer is too damn hot here, and humid. I don’t like that about this city. Better than Georgia, but that’s not saying much at all. And in the winter my knee isn’t happy about the cold. Transitional seasons are the good parts of the year.

The lot is almost empty, and it’s not hard to find my car. It’s not as nice as a lot of people somehow expect. I suppose that I can understand the thought process; criminal defense isn’t one of the higher-paying specializations of the field, but I’m still reasonably well off. I just don’t see any reason to use that money to buy the newest model of car, and I prioritize handling and comfort over speed or style. People tend to be surprised when they see that I drive a Subaru from, oh, it must be more than five years ago now.

I don’t rush. I very rarely do. I remember being in more of a hurry when I was younger, but it doesn’t really seem worth the bother anymore, and I’m too tired for it. Not just physically, either, as I’m reminded when I sit down and see the little silver wolf charm dangling from the mirror.

How long has it been since Kyoko gave me that? I find I can’t recall, and something about that seems very sad to me, somehow.

I really wish she’d just talk to me. It would make things so much simpler. And, honestly, I have to admit that at this point I’m a little insulted. It’s a relatively small feeling, not as strong as the concern or the hurt, but it’s there. I’m pretty sure she still thinks I haven’t caught on, and the implicit assessment of my intelligence isn’t exactly flattering.

In her defense, I suppose that a lot of people wouldn’t have been willing to believe it. I had been very reluctant to, myself, and it had taken a while for me to accept what my instincts were telling me. While ignoring those cues would be foolish, I would have been at least as idiotic to believe this without serious reservation.

Much like her skills with deception, she must be accustomed to people being so reluctant to believe that she barely even needs to try to convince them she’s human. The disguise must seem convincing if you don’t actually look at it.

I sigh, and start the car.

It feels like a long drive home. It’s dark by the time I get there, and I’m feeling drained. The stairs of the apartment building smell foul, as they usually do; tonight the odor resembles overcooked spinach. I dislike it, and it makes my knee hurt more, but it’s only three flights and I dislike it less than elevators. I’ve never been fond of them; they feel enclosed, and they twig my claustrophobia.

I collect my mail, mostly just a handful of bills. There’s a flier from the local church telling me I should recant my sins and find Jesus, which always amuses me. I suppose I understand it in a way, but I have to wonder how they can imagine that this would convert me. Do they think I have somehow made it to adulthood without ever seeing one of these? That I had been simply waiting to be informed that the Christian church exists and feels that I should involve myself in that existence?

I sigh as I unlock my apartment door and go inside. It’s dark inside, and quiet. I live alone, as I have for quite a few years now. Many of my colleagues, many of my friends, have families by now. The people I went to high school with, those few of them I’m still in touch with, have kids. But I live alone. There were a few brief flings in college and shortly thereafter, but I have been largely celibate since then. I’m not sure why, or at least not in a way I could explain. Usually, when someone asks I just laugh and say something about being too busy with work.

In a way, this is true. I think that it does owe a great deal to my work. But it’s not exactly that I’m busy. I could work fewer hours if I wanted, and even as it is I still have a fair amount of personal time. The issue is more the experiences I have had in the course of doing that job. It’s something social workers run into as well—I’ve talked with quite a few over the years, unsurprisingly, and the topic has come up. I just see such a broad range of the worse things this world has to offer that it makes it hard to have a social life. When your friends start talking about their work, and your own work that week involves extended time looking into hate crimes, the conversation tends to stall.

Similarly, it can be hard to care about people when I’m so aware of what might happen to them. There’s a sort of distance that I notice, like I’m preemptively limiting my investment so that when something awful happens it won’t hurt so much. Hard to have a healthy romance when you’re already cognitively distancing yourself from your girlfriend in case she experiences some atrocity.

Oh, it’s not as though violent crime is the only kind of case I take. The vast majority of criminal cases aren’t anything that grotesque. But the brain is an imperfect tool, and I’m prone to negativity bias (I picked up the habit of using terms drawn from psychology in part from Kyoko and in part because it’s important in my line of work to understand how heuristic reasoning works). The terrible things I’ve heard about or seen evidence of are more prominent in my memory than the benign or pleasant ones, all else being equal. I know this bias is there, but it doesn’t make it easier to dismiss the perception.

And granted, I do take more of those cases than most of my colleagues, so maybe it makes sense that I feel this more sharply than they seem to. It’s not unrelated to why I went into this field in the first place. I had initially been planning on another specialty, contract law had been my expectation when I started my undergraduate education.

The problem is that you can’t learn about the legal system without also learning that it’s fundamentally broken. When over ninety percent of criminal cases are settled by plea bargaining, and evidence does not suggest that over ninety percent of criminal charges are actually true, something has gone wrong. It is, in practice, not far away from the use of torture to compel confession to crime. When someone knows that all they have to do to reduce suffering is admit guilt, they will confess practically anything for fear of the consequences.

And so by the time I was halfway through undergrad, I couldn’t ignore this reality. I still can’t. When I meet with people who are patently innocent, who are accused of things that they cannot believably be guilty of and for which evidence is sparse, the system continues to disgust me. Over ninety percent of them will, under ordinary circumstances, end up being convicted for something they had no part in, because this judicial system is that fucked up.

My current primary case is a prime example. This kid is only nineteen. He’s black, and has a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder on record; the mentally ill are a very easy target for this kind of false prosecution, because that illness makes it easy for people to believe them capable of heinous acts. The fact that this assumption is completely without support, and that people with mental illnesses are far more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators, doesn’t seem to matter. Having met this kid and interacted with him, I’m certain he has no involvement with the armed robbery he’s accused of. He’s a nice kid.

He’s also rich, or rather his parents are, at least by the standards of the average person on the street. That’s really the only reason he has any chance of getting out of this without being convicted. I don’t love it that most of my clients are wealthy, and at first I had thought I would be a public defender instead for exactly that reason. But I had quickly realized that if I did, I would be unable to help anyone at all. Public defenders simply do not have the time, the resources, or the general ability to do much. I would just be filing the exact sort of plea bargain that disgusts me so much.

So, I work at the firm. Almost partner now, I’m pretty sure, which doesn’t mean nearly as much to me as it used to. I help the limited population I can. My colleagues don’t understand why I do so much pro bono work, and I don’t try to explain anymore.

My computer is slow to start tonight. That’s fine; I’m feeling tired anyway, and I doubt I’m going to do much tonight. I think I’ll probably go to bed early.

I have to wonder what Kyoko is doing tonight. I imagine it’s something violent. The internalized guilt, bitterness, and evasive tone are characteristic. This, too, is something I have heard enough times for it to be familiar with it. As with her other deceptions, I think she relies almost entirely on the fact that most people will either fail to recognize it in her or dismiss it as their imagination. I’m pretty sure that she thinks this is a secret I have yet to notice, too. I feel a little sad when I think about that.

I really wish she’d just fucking talk to me. She’s probably worried I’ll judge her or react badly. You’d think she would know better given that I spend all my time working with accused criminals, not all of whom are innocent. I’m pretty good at accepting that people do what they need to, that sometimes someone does something they aren’t proud of because they don’t have a better idea. I’m aware that sometimes people are under pressures I don’t understand, and I don’t pretend to understand them, but I do understand that these things happen.

It’s been almost ten years now, I think, since I suspected. Five since I started actively looking into things. Two since I was sure. And frankly, at this point, I’m just…tired. I miss actually talking with Kyoko, having her as a friend. I’ve been waiting for her to just tell me in her own time, trying to seem receptive, because it seems deeply rude to push her on this. But at this point I’m exhausted, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ll have to stage an actual intervention. I don’t want to pressure her, but this is just getting ridiculous.

I give up on getting anything done, and just go to bed, and stare at the ceiling in the dark until sleep eventually happens.
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