Death Trap by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online Page B

afterward?”
    “Nope.”
    Jeff wasn’t going to say much more than yes or no. He was either obviously hiding something or this was the way he reacted to questions from anyone. Williams and Vance had nothing to compare his reactions to. They had just met him. And the guy was easy not to like right from the start, Williams said. “We wanted to know about these depositions—what happened before, after, and so on,” she explained later. “What he knew about them being in Alabama. What he knew about where they went, and what the plan was for them to pick up the children.”
    But Jeff McCord kept “talking in circles,” Williams said.
    “Just tell us, then,” Williams stated at one point during the interview, now a bit frustrated and impatient with this fellow cop, “what you did, Officer McCord? What did you do yesterday since the time you got up? Talk us through your day until right now.”
    For Vance and Williams, they got the idea Jeff was being uncooperative. “We had no idea if this was the way he was or [if] he was actually hiding something. We had no idea how he processed things, or how to gauge when to be alerted about something. He was just very . . . very quiet.”
    Jeff’s posture told another story—and this was something Williams studied furtively, intuitively. It stood out after a time. Jeff appeared defensive in his movements, especially the way he reacted to questions—which is something else entirely. A suspect cannot camouflage how his body reacts to questions put in front of him, no matter how hard he tries. It’s instinct. All people do certain things with their hands, legs, maybe a crinkle of the brow, an eyebrow lift, a rub of the nose. Makes no difference how hard a suspect might try to conceal his actions and movements. His ticks. Cops just need to figure these out and they can give a lie detector test on the spot without a person even realizing it’s going on.
    “It was like pulling teeth,” Williams said, “getting information”—even basic stuff—“out of him, and then when he decided to talk, he ran us in circles.”
    Did Jeff know this trick, too?
    As the interview carried forth, Jeff rattled on and on and seemed to be talking about nothing. So Williams interrupted him. “What point is it that you’re trying to make, Officer McCord?”
    Jeff lifted his shoulders and dropped them back down. Did he even know?
    What is going on with this guy? Williams thought at that moment. “It was beginning to concern us, just because he was so matter-of-fact at times and jabbering at others.”
    Up and down.
    This turned out to be another red flag. The fact that the guy was all over the place was cause for concern. He was apparently hiding something.
    “What did you and your wife do last night?” Williams asked, breaking it down into bites. She decided to start back at the beginning.
    Jeff went into a long “spiel, this convoluted” story, Williams explained, about what they had done.
    “We saw Lord of the Rings, ” he began. “Then snuck into Black Hawk Down. We went for a river walk and drove around. . . . Oh yeah, and . . . well . . . Jessica wanted to go to a strip club, so we went.”
    “Okay . . .”
    Strip club?
    “Well, look,” Jeff said, reaching into his back pocket, pulling out his wallet, “I have the movie stubs.”
    How convenient, Williams thought. Time- and date-stamped movie stubs.
    The GBI had already contacted the HPD and had gotten them involved. By now, both agencies had positive confirmation that the bodies were Alan and Terra Bates’s. They had been murdered. As originally thought, they were dead before being stuffed into the trunk of Alan’s rental car.
    Once the GBI knew Alan and Terra were supposed to pick up the children at the McCord house the previous evening, they decided to put a surveillance on Jeff and Jessica’s house. Philip and Joan Bates mentioned there was some animosity between the two families, and Jessica hated her ex-husband and was