Reprisal by Colin T. Nelson

to get her mother off the phone. Zehra feared the true reason for the invitation.
    “Okay, dear.” A pause. “Oh, one last thing I forgot. I’ve invited a nice, young friend to come too. I’m sure you’ll like him. Goodbye.”
    Snapping the phone off, Zehra shook her head. Probably another loser!
    “Something wrong?” Jackie looked at Zehra closely.
    “My mother. Still trying to set me up. In her generation, arranged marriages sometimes happened amongst Muslim women. I guess it had some merit to it—my parents were arranged, and they’re still happily married. But, I don’t like the idea at all. I try to be nice to my mother, but I just get mad at myself for not saying, ‘no.’”
    A penetrating voice carried into the office from the hallway.
    “That’s BJ,” Zehra told Jackie.
    The resonant sound of singing was followed by a large black man. He turned sharply into the office and pulled up straight until he finished a phrase. “Jazz,” he told them. “Beautiful, beautiful music. Too bad the kids don’t learn this stuff in school. A lot better than gangsta rap for them.” He nodded to each of them. “These black kids are losing their roots if they don’t understand jazz.”
    Zehra looked up at him. He stood over six feet, had a shaved head, a gray goatee, and liquid brown eyes that never stopped moving. When speaking, Zehra noticed he over-enunciated his words, like Denzel Washington. Probably because BJ also had large, beautiful teeth like the actor, which seemed to get in the way when he talked. Sometimes, to kid him, she called him Denzel.
    Jackie asked, “Do you play jazz?”
    “Got my own group. ‘Gabriel’s Horns,’ we call it. I play the trumpet. We just put out a new CD.”
    “BJ, I was just telling Jackie about the FACS training you had.”
    “Yeah, cool stuff.”
    Jackie offered him her chair. “How’s it work?” she asked.
    “Well, it’s a system for breaking down human facial expressions into a series of muscle movements, called action units.”
    “You mean like every time I wrinkle my face or smile, you’re checking me out?” Jackie said. “Wicked.”
    “Exactly,” BJ said. “We memorize about seventy muscle and head movements, and the combination of those can tell us what a person is really thinking. It’s not perfect, but it helps me when interviewing people to have a sense if they’re lying or not.”
    “Is it something new?”
    “Researchers developed it in the seventies, and law enforcement is starting to use it. There was a famous case of a woman in South Carolina who went on TV to plead for the return of her kidnapped kids. I saw the video in training. The woman’s cheeks lifted in a smile while the corners of her mouth tried to suppress it. The disconnect between a smile and her pleading led investigators to question her further. Turns out, she killed her two kids and made up the kidnapping.”
    “Awesome.”
    He took the chair and scowled.
    “Don’t tell me, BJ …” Zehra held her breath.
    His eyes darted from one to the other. “I warned them sons of bitches,” he said. “This wasn’t gonna work. ‘Oh, no,’ they said. ‘You’re black. They’ll open doors for you.’” BJ waved his hands in the air. “May as well’ve sent Linda, the white chick that works next to me, for all the good black did me.”
    “We all warned Mao,” Zehra said. “None of us want this case.”
    BJ kept talking, “Besides, I was a cop for twenty years. Some of these cases are just too close to home. This is ugly—a young kid slashed to death. You know I’ll do my job, but how about a nice auto thief instead?”
    “BJ,” Zehra said, “Did you interview the main witness, the one from the porch, to see what he says?”
    He stopped abruptly and sat still. “Z, we didn’t score.”
    “What happened?” The tension tightened the muscles low in her body. In her mind she saw a digital clock clicking over, crossing off the days until she had to start the