Anatomy of Fear

by Jonathan Santlofer

  That did it.

  It has taken nearly two hours for the heat to die down after he switched it off.

  Now, as he tiptoes down the dimly lit hallway, he mutters his favorite new word, Rassenhygiene, German for race hygiene.

  He finds the rusting metal door and stops to unsheathe his new mail-order hunting knife. He leans an ear to the door and hears a TV sitcom laugh track, and is thankful for the distraction it will provide. It takes him less than a minute to pop the lock.

  40

  Crime Scene shuffled around the room, cotton booties swishing along dusty floors as they collected evidence, difficult to ascertain what was new and what was old, the place a mess. They’d chalked an outline around the body and beyond that an eight-by-eight-foot square, off-limits to everyone other than the medical examiner until they completed their search.

  Terri had received the call around 4:00 A.M., tearing her from a dream of Rodriguez on top of her. She was smiling when she’d raised the phone to her ear. This was Midtown North’s jurisdiction, but the drawing had been noted and the bureau had been called, and they were officiating, Terri and her men assigned to supporting roles.

  It was now almost 6:00 A.M.

  Terri watched the scene, holding her breath, a sourness growing in her stomach. She had not eaten and worried she might be sick.

  Across the room, Agent Richardson was asking questions and making notes in a pad.

  The ME was leaning over the body and Terri saw him pluck a thermometer out of a wound. Then he rolled the body over and noted the way the blood had pooled under the skin. “Lividity suggests approximately six to eight hours.”

  Terri did the math. He’d been killed sometime between ten and midnight.

  Another technician was scraping under the nails and bagging the hands.

  The ME opened the victim’s shirt. “Four, maybe five stab wounds here. Difficult to tell till we wash him down.”

  “A bit more brutal than the others,” said Perez. “Could be he’s getting angrier.”

  “Maybe he’ll get sloppier too,” said Dugan, trying to stifle a yawn.

  A photographer tiptoed around the body as if he were practicing ballet, snapping pictures, a flash blinding Terri every few seconds.

  “Press is going to love this,” said Perez. “But hey, it’s the G’s headache, not ours, right?”

  “Shut up,” said Terri.

  “Sor-ry,” said Perez, hands up.

  Terri took a deep breath and made her way over to Agent Collins. This imbalance of power had gone on long enough. “I need to see that drawing,” she said.

  “Go home, detective. We’ve got it under control.”

  Terri made a show of looking at the body, then back at the agent, the message clear: Sure as shit doesn’t look like you have it under control. “I need to compare it to the other drawings.”

  “Our lab will run the tests,” said Collins. “Type the paper, the pencil, see if it’s a match with the others. I imagine it is, but with all the press there could be a copycat out there who wants to get his name in the funny papers.”

  “I understand that, but—”

  Agent Archer interrupted. “He’s Spanish, which fits the profile.”

  Collins’s cell phone rang. “Yes, sir. No, sir. There’s no press on the scene. Yes, sir. I think we can contain it, keep it under control.”

  Terri glared at the agent. Why was the bureau always so concerned about control, the press, keeping everything such a god-damn secret? Didn’t they know it was hopeless? Didn’t they know about Watergate and Travelgate and Monica Lewinsky and Abu Ghraib? Didn’t they know the press eventually got it all?

  “Hopefully this one will give us the information we need, sir.” Collins had the cell phone pressed against her ear with one hand, the sketch in the other.

  Terri tried to sneak a peek.

  Agent Richardson was still across the room asking questions. She should get over there, she thought, but wanted a good look at the drawing first.

  She glanced up at Collins.

  The woman looked exhausted.

  Terri could see she was under a lot of pressure, her job probably at stake—and she knew the feeling. She recalled the look of disappointment on Collins’s face when Schteir had gotten to play the starring role in Karff’s interrogation. Maybe she had more in common with this woman than she had originally thought, and if not, she could play it.

  She laid her hand on the agent’s arm. “How are you holding up?”

  Collins’s eyes narrowed. “I’m doing just fine, Detective.”

  “I know the kind of pressure you’re under and have no intention of adding to it or getting in your way.”

  “Well, that’s just great to hear.” Collins let out a deep sigh. “Listen, I know we can look like the bad guys to the locals, but we’ve got a job to do, just like you.”

  “I hear you.” Terri offered Collins a sympathetic look. “To be honest, it’s a relief not to have all the responsibility, everyone just waiting for you to screw up.” She paused to see if Collins was taking it the right way. “But I’ve been on the case from the outset and I’m happy to help you out any way I can.” Terri paused. “I understand the drawing has to go to Quantico for analysis, but if I could just see it…”

  Collins let out another deep sigh.

  “Here,” she said, and handed her the drawing.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Terri crossed the room, sketch in her gloved hand.

  “You mind if I have a word with him?” she asked Richardson, meaning Nate.

  Terri waited till Richardson moved away.

  “You okay?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Terri turned the drawing toward him. “I need you to look at this.”

  “I’ve seen it,” said Nate.

  “I realize that, but I need you to tell me about it, if it’s the same or…I don’t know, but it looks different. He’s added a little sketch on the side, maybe a close-up of the vic’s mouth? Or maybe it’s something left over from when he started the sketch. I’m not sure. What do you think?”

  Nate’s hands were trembling. He’d seen the detail too, and it had sent a shiver down his spine, though he didn’t know why. He’d been up all night, too tired to focus. “It looks…more developed, less sketchy. And that separate mouth on the side…” He felt the chill again, glanced around the room, the windowless basement apartment, rent receipts and papers stacked up on an old fax machine, dirty dishes piled in the sink, and the super dead on the floor. He still couldn’t believe it.

  “You think it was made by the same guy?”

  “Who else could it be?”

  “Well, the drawings, the MO, have made it into the media. So it could be a copycat. I just want to be sure.”

  Nate squinted at it with tired eyes. “There is something different, it’s a little softer, and I don’t see the pronounced crosshatching, but…maybe he’s just using another kind of pencil—” Another chill shook his body. “Can I take it out of the plastic?”

  Terri cadged a glance over her shoulder. Collins was huddled with her men.

  She handed Nate a pair of gloves. “Make it fast. And put these on.”

  Nate tugged on the gloves and removed the drawing. “Yes, it’s a softer pencil than he ordinarily uses. He’s blending and modeling more too.”

  “And what’s this?”

  “I can’t tell,” said Nate, but the chill intensified. “Maybe it’s another one of those white supremacist symbols.”

  “I need to get it magnified, but there’s no way Collins is going to let me hold on to this.” She glanced over at the fax machine, then back at Collins, who was half turned away, her cell phone at her ear.

  Terri didn’t waste any time. She slid the papers and bills off the fax machine and fed the sketch into it. Thirty seconds later she was folding a halfway decent copy into her pocket. She handed the original back to Collins.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I appreciat
e it.”

  “It tell you anything new?”

  Terri shook her head. “Not really.”

  Collins turned to Nate. “You’ve got to come with me to give a statement.”

  “I thought I already did that,” said Nate.

  “Yes,” said Collins. “But it has to be official.”

  41

  He could stop now and no one would ever know.

  But is that what he wants? To never be known? With his most important project still ahead of him?

  He spreads a few sketches he has made for inspiration across his work table.

  Yes, this is it, but he wants to see it all again, to consider the where and when.

  He stops a moment to think about the drawing he’s taken, what he has done, and how to take it a step further.

  Yes, he is seeing it, the place and the idea fixing in his mind.

  Now he has to get the timing right. This one has to be big. This one has to be perfect.

  42

  This was the second time in a week I was walking down the corridors of FBI Manhattan, this time less comfortably between Agents Collins and Richardson. My adrenaline had kicked in for the third or fourth time of the day. I felt edgy and itchy, the way I did when I was fourteen and had pulled an all-nighter high on drugs. Richardson kept up a steady stream of chat—baseball, politics, the weather—but Collins was quiet.

  They ushered me into a windowless room with two chairs and a desk, and asked me to wait. They said they’d be back in a minute. Ten minutes passed. Then another ten. I paced, measuring the room with my steps, twelve one way, nine the other. I kept seeing Cordero lying on the floor, blood pooled under him. I checked my watch every other minute, and chewed my cuticles. Another twenty minutes passed before Collins came back.

  She took a seat, carefully tucking her skirt under her, ladylike, but there was nothing ladylike in her face, which was frozen, intentionally immobilized. She flipped open a notepad and angled her head toward a video camera wedged into a corner where the wall met the ceiling. “We’re recording this,” she said. “It’s procedure.”

  “Guess the FBI videotapes everything, huh?” I forced a laugh.

  She didn’t, just looked up at the camera, stated the date and time, her name and mine, then asked what time I’d come home from Boston, which I’d already told them more than once, and asked about my relationship to Manuel Cordero.

  “We didn’t have a relationship. He was the superintendent of my building.”

  “Did you get along?”

  “What the hell sort of question is that?”

  “Take it easy,” she said.

  I couldn’t. There was something in her tone and even more in her frozen face that was setting me on edge.

  Collins cadged a look at the video camera, then at a mirrored wall. I knew there was someone on the other side, watching.

  She referred to her notepad. “So you found Manuel Cordero’s body around eleven-thirty.”

  “Yes, I said that earlier, to Richardson.”

  “But now you’re saying it to me.” Her eyes narrowed, lids compressing the way they do with the onset of anger.

  “I’m really tired,” I said, losing patience, adrenaline seeping out of my veins like I was donating blood.

  “We’re all tired. But you’ve got to say it for the camera.”

  “Yeah, it was sometime around eleven-thirty.”

  “And you know that because…?”

  “Because I looked at my watch.”

  “Before or after you found the body?”

  “Before. When I was upstairs. I had been debating whether or not it was too late to go downstairs.”

  “And you decided it wasn’t?”

  “Obviously.”

  Collins glared at me. “I don’t think that response was called for.”

  Maybe it wasn’t, but I didn’t feel like apologizing.

  “So it was eleven-thirty,” she said, flipping pages in the coroner’s report.

  “Give or take a few minutes.”

  She made a note in her pad. “And Cordero was lying facedown when you found him?”

  “Yes. I’ve already said that. About ten times tonight.”

  “Did you touch him? Roll him over or anything?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “No. I didn’t touch him. I could see he was dead.”

  “And you could see that how?”

  “He was lying facedown in a pool of blood—a lot of blood—and he wasn’t moving. That spelled dead to me.”

  “Really?” Collins noted something in her pad, then looked up at me, face neutralized though there was some leakage in the way the triangularis muscle had tightened around her mouth. “Because some people might have thought the man was just hurt, injured, you know, but somehow you knew he was dead.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “And his door was open?”

  “Yes—”

  “So you could see in?”

  “Yes. Well, no—”

  “Which is it?”

  “It was only open a couple of inches, so no, I couldn’t really see in. I explained that to Richardson, and—”

  “Could you please stop referring to Agent Richardson’s report?”

  “No, I don’t think I can.” My heart was pounding and the muscles in the back of my neck had tightened. “I’m getting tired of saying the same thing over and ov—”

  “I explained that.” Collins nodded at the camera. “I don’t know why you’re making this so difficult.” Her icy tone matched her frozen mask. “It really doesn’t look good.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I could feel things unhinging, as if screws were being loosened to allow easy entry to my brain and psyche.

  “So you went in.”

  “What?”

  “To the apartment. You went in.”

  “Yes. You know that. I knocked, but he didn’t answer. I waited a minute and knocked again. I could hear the television and I could see the kind of bluish light that comes off a TV screen. It was reflecting into the hallway. You know how that is.”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “I just did.”

  “All you told me was that the door was ajar and you went in. You didn’t explain why you went in.”

  “Well, I…” Why had I gone in? “I had a feeling—”

  “A feeling?” Collins’s mask was cracked by a raised eyebrow.

  “Like I said, the door was partially open. I knocked and—”

  “Went in. Yes, you already said that.” Collins scratched her head with the back of her pencil. “You mean to tell me the man’s door was unlocked and open in a basement apartment in a fairly crappy neighborhood in New York City? I don’t mean to insult your neighborhood, Rodriguez, but come on.”

  “Hey, I know it’s not Park Avenue. But what’s your point?”

  “My point is, it’s weird. The door just being open like that, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yeah, I fucking would agree. It was unlocked because it had obviously been left open by the perp, the unsub, by whoever killed Cordero.” I could feel my pressure rising, blood pulsing in my ears.

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I don’t know it for a fact, but like you, I was there when Crime Scene said the lock had been popped, and since I didn’t do it, I’m presuming it was done by whoever killed Cordero, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I don’t say so. Crime Scene said so.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “What are you suggesting? That I…killed Cordero?” My palms were sweating. I had that feeling you get when a store security guard is watching you: that you’re guilty though you haven’t done anything.

  “I’m not suggesting—”

  “I’ve had enough. I’m leaving.” I stood up.

  “Sit down,” said Collins. She glanced first at the mirror, then at the video camera, and I remembered people were watching
me, that I was being filmed acting guilty when I had nothing to be guilty about.

  “Just take it easy, Rodriguez; relax.”

  I took a deep breath, but I did not relax.

  “Just a few more questions. Nothing to get so upset about.” She offered up a clipped fake smile, and I sat down.

  “Let’s get back to what you did when you came in and saw Cordero on the floor.”

  “Like I said, I called 911.”

  “Right away?”

  “No. Not immediately. I was frozen for a minute, stunned, I guess. Then I noticed the drawing beside the body and it hit me that it wasn’t just some ordinary break-in.”

  “So you waited to make the call?”

  “I didn’t think about it right away, no. And…I wanted to see the drawing.”

  “So you went over to look at it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is why the soles of your shoes had Cordero’s blood on them and why you tracked your footprints across the room.”

  It sounded awful when she said it. “I didn’t realize what I was doing at the time or I never would have done it.” Jesus, what the hell had I been thinking? I knew all about contaminating a crime scene. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “But you were thinking straight enough to go over and see the drawing.”

  “I’ve been working this case—” My annoyance ratcheted up a notch toward anger. “So, yeah, I wanted to see if it was like the others.”

  “And then?” I could see she was assessing me, head tilted back, eyes narrowed.

  “I looked at the drawing and made the call.”

  “Could you look at the camera and repeat that? And say who you called?”

  “Who the hell do you think I called, my broker?”

  “There’s no need for sarcasm. This is simply procedure.”

  “Really? Because it doesn’t seem like it.” I blew a breath out of the corner of my mouth. “Look, I’m tired. I’ve been up all night and—”