Free The Perfect Candidate: A Lance Priest / Preacher Thriller (No. 1) by Christopher Metcalf

least 80 times since the start of the exam. Lance knew now that gentleman sometimes went by the name Drew Marsco.
    He watched from above as Marsco eyed him. It didn’t bother Lance much, he was quite used to garnering the attention of others, including those of the same sex. It had just always been like this. But the way Marsco was watching him was different. The guy was trying to keep it undercover, but he was constantly watching. At the time, Lance had struggled to come up with a word to describe what Marsco’s watching felt like. He knew now. It was surveillance.
     
    What Lance couldn’t see were the thoughts going through the psychologist’s head. Indeed, surveillance is half art and half science. Stuart Braden had mastered neither. As a psychologist and a subject evaluation specialist, he is an expert in the intricacies of the human condition, with an emphasis, or specialty, as he likes to call it, in body language.
    For Braden, the human body is a book with a cover that does tell a story – often the whole story. He trained alongside the elite psychologists in the country in evaluating a person’s feelings, state of mind, desires, hidden secrets and greatest fears – all visible in the furrow of a brow, flutter of an eye, rise and fall of the chest and bounce tap-rate of a foot. Braden is a walking, talking lie detector.
    Instead of going into practice for himself, he practiced his craft on behalf of the intelligence-gathering arm of the U.S. government.
    Braden found himself in Tulsa on a rainy Saturday in September to do what he does best – evaluate people. In this case, one person. The subject in this instance being a candidate. But this particular setting in a university classroom was not ideal, not even close. Instead of evaluating a subject in a controlled and secure interview or interrogation room or even a somewhat secure courtroom, he was asked by Seibel to examine this candidate in a pressure setting.
    His mark was Lance Priest, male, 21, student, part-time car salesman. The young man set off a few alarm bells with his T12A questionnaire response. It was the first time Braden could recall this particular trigger.
    Looking across the room at young Mr. Priest, Braden tried to be as discrete as possible, but field surveillance was simply not his bag. His notes, written on a single sheet of notebook paper, so as not to stick out among the other exam takers, detailed a mixture of observations recorded over the past two hours. Looking over his notes again, one word kept showing up. C omfortable . Braden had written comfortable multiple times across the page. “Comfortable, is that the best word to describe candidate Priest?” he furrowed his brow.
    At ease, casual, stress-free; all applied, but comfortable best captured the kid’s essence. Glancing around the room, Braden could play his one-word association game with everyone taking the exam. “ Bored ” fit the heavyset woman two desks over. “ Flummoxed ” best detailed the young man dressed in denim. “ Perched ” most accurately described a female student with a long nose and glasses. “ Lonely ” applied to the boy trying very hard to be a man directly across from him.
    But comfortable just fit Priest. A detailed observation h2t, or head-to-toe for non-government intelligence professionals, revealed a healthy, attractive young man completely at ease in a potentially stressful situation. Braden’s notes had captured the following details -- breathing normal, no fidgeting, eye movement steady, facial expression relaxed. Yet, there was something that Braden couldn’t quite nail down that lay just below the comfortable quilt of sorts this kid had wrapped around him. If he had to say, he would call it awareness . This kid was comfortably aware of everything going on around him. It was not overt, but it was there in his eyes. Braden wrote comfortably aware .
    And the psychologist had no doubt Candidate Priest had caught him several times. In