Richardson glanced back at the computer screen. The interview with Rodriguez was playing again. “He sure does look nervous.”
“Rodriguez is carrying a lot of pain,” said Schteir. “His father, a cop, shot and killed when he was a teenager. And if this latest wrinkle is true”—she tapped the report from Cold Case—“we might be looking at something much more serious.”
“It isn’t conclusive,” said Collins.
“I said might, Agent Collins. But there is certainly some ambiguity according to what these detectives have turned up.”
“How come the PD was already investigating this?” asked Richardson. “They have some suspicion about Rodriguez?”
“The Cold Case detectives said Detective Russo came to them to reopen the Juan Rodriguez shooting, but asked them to keep it quiet,” said Collins.
“Do we know why she did that?” asked Schteir.
“No,” said Collins. “But I’ll find out.”
Agent Archer was skimming the Cold Case report. “So they now have DNA that was not available twenty years ago.”
“Yes, and it’s being fed through the Department of Justice DNA data bank to see if they can find a match.”
“Is Rodriguez in the bank?”
“He hasn’t turned up, no.”
“So that will fall to us?” asked Archer.
Collins was thinking again about her conversation with Perry Denton and the surprise follow-up call, the invitation to dinner. “It’s better if the PD takes care of that in-house. Once they get all the data-bank updates, they will undoubtedly collect DNA from Rodriguez for comparison. That would be standard operating procedure. And once they get his DNA they will turn it over to us.” Denton had promised her that. “That way we get it without having to step on their toes or embarrass them.” Collins looked at her men, and managed a smile for Roberta Schteir. She suspected that anything she said would be reported and was careful in her choice of words. “There’s a solid team sorting through everything at Quantico. This case will not get away from us.”
“But it seems odd,” said Archer. “I mean, Rodriguez wanting to be on the PD case.”
“He was asked on by Russo,” said Collins.
“It’s not uncommon to find that a killer has been close to a case,” said Schteir. “How many times has an unsub been found in the crime scene photographs of bystanders to a crime?”
“Yeah,” said Archer, “but there’s still some distance there. This is up close and personal. I mean, committing a murder while you’re actually on the case?”
“Well, here’s one for you,” said Schteir. “Martin Smithson, Seattle PD, investigating officer in the deaths of six young women raped and murdered between 1998 and 2000. Smithson volunteered to head up the investigation and…he was the one who had killed them. Being literally on the case could be viewed as a brilliant move. Rodriguez would know everything the PD was doing and be one step ahead of them. Think about it. You’re a killer, a cool, manipulative, narcissistic personality who thinks you are not only above the law, but above society’s rules. How would it feel to push the envelope that much further, to commit a heinous act right under the nose of authority?” Schteir thought a moment. “I found Rodriguez to be an amiable, charming guy. But I don’t have to tell you that fits a whole category of sociopaths.”
“Bundy, for one,” said Collins.
Schteir nodded. “You ever read the transcripts of Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler? In it, DeSalvo describes a family gathering where his sister says, ‘I’m taking judo lessons to protect myself,’ and DeSalvo says, ‘So you think you can handle the Strangler?’ and she says ‘Yes,’ so he gets her in a stranglehold and says, ‘Try and get out of this!’ and practically kills her while everyone is sitting around laughing—at least that’s the way DeSalvo describes it. You see what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” said Collins, happy to find some commonality with the Quantico profiler. “David Berkowitz would join in conversations with his fellow postal workers about the Son of Sam, about whether or not the guy was crazy, and say things like, ‘I hope they catch that son of a bitch!’”
“And he’d sing after each killing.”
“And DeSalvo would go home, have dinner, and play with his kids right after committing rape and murder.”
Archer looked from Collins to Schteir. He had a feeling the two women could go on like this for hours. “Okay, I get the point. But then Rodriguez screwed up, right? I mean, if we’re looking at him for this, he’s not so smart after all.”
“Could be that he’s gotten tired,” said Schteir. “Ready to get caught.” She scanned the bureau stats on Rodriguez. “He’s a loner, never married, and certainly has the talent to make the drawings. And there’s the father issue.”
“Okay,” said Archer, thinking it through. “But our unsub is targeting minorities. He’s a hate killer. And Rodriguez is Puerto Rican. Does that make any sense?”
“I’m sure you know that serial killers hunt in their own pack,” said Schteir.
“He’s the product of two minorities,” said Collins.
“And he probably took a lot of grief for that growing up,” Richardson added.
“We could be looking at self-hatred turned outward,” said Schteir. “Eradicating people like himself, symbolically wiping himself out, killing the part of himself he despises.”
“I don’t know. Plenty of people take crap for being Puerto Rican or Jewish or black,” said Archer, thinking about his own life experiences. “And they don’t become serial killers.”
“Absolutely correct,” said Schteir. “There is always the unknown component. What makes one person, say, merely sensitive, and another, a killer. Science is investigating that, and one day we may have the answer. Look, I’m not saying Rodriguez is your man. I’m just saying it’s a possibility.”
“So we wait for the DNA,” said Richardson.
“Yes,” said Collins.
Schteir glanced up at the Cordero crime scene pictures, then at the recent sketch. She plucked it off the wall. “You must have copies of earlier drawings left at the scenes, yes?”
“Of course,” said Collins. “Why?”
“I’m not sure,” said Schteir. “But there’s something about this one that’s a little different, isn’t there?”
48
I had become a suspect. It seemed inconceivable, but true.
Terri promised she’d help, but didn’t say how. She told me to be patient, but didn’t tell me how to do that either.
I couldn’t sit still. My head was throbbing, muscles in my neck and jaw at a level of tightness I did not think humanly possible. Was I going to have a heart attack? A stroke? It felt like it. I took two aspirin. I chewed my cuticles. I called Julio.
The law offices of Russell, Bradley and Roach looked like the fanciest funeral parlor in the world, everything muted and gray, including Julio’s office. Even Julio was in gray pinstripes.
“Pana, take it easy. No way they think this is you.”
I had told him about Cordero’s murder, my tattoo in the sketch along with the detail that was exactly like one of my drawings, my pencil at the scene; that it was only a matter of time before they connected it all to me.
“Circumstantial,” he said, trying hard not to frown. “All of it.”
I reminded him he was a real estate lawyer, not criminal, and he kidded me and tried to make me laugh but his face betrayed him, the worry impossible to hide.
Then his phone rang. He was late for a meeting. Mi pana a broqui, my bodyguard, had to go. I painted on a smile and told him I’d be fine. He said I should go to his apartment and hang out till he got off work, that he’d think of what to do. But I did not want to be a child who needed babysitting.
I just went home.
I checked the Eleggua. It looked ridiculous, wilted licorice sticks lying over the rocks. I thought about taking the candy out before it attracted roaches, but didn’t, because I was afraid to offend the gods.
&nb
sp; I’d never felt like this in my life. But this was like no other time in my life. I tried to think of what I could do, and there was only one thing: I had to finish the sketch.
I went to get my pad and it wasn’t there. I had a moment of panic. Had he been here again?
Then I remembered I’d left it at my grandmother’s.
My abuela was happy to see me, but worried too. I told her I just needed my drawing pad. I could see she wanted to ask me a million questions, but controlled herself, and left me alone. I went into the living room and opened my pad to review the sketches I’d made of the unsub’s face so far.
I sharpened a pencil and waited for inspiration, something to guide me, but nothing happened. I closed my eyes and tried to relax, but I couldn’t clear my mind enough to let anything in.
My grandmother came into the room with a beer—an excuse to interrupt me. She saw the look on my face, sat down beside me, and touched my cheek. It was all it took to reduce me to her little nene. I told her what was going on, how I feared I was already a suspect.
“This is loco.” She shook her head and muttered, “Coño carajo,” words I had never heard come out of her mouth.
“This man—este demonio desgraciado—he has put a curse on you.”
“No,” I said, trying hard to look confident for my grandmother. “It’s just a…mistake.”
“No hay errores, chacho. Everything happens for a reason.” She stood up and told me to wait. I could hear her on the phone in the other room. A minute later she was back.
“Entra.”
“Where?”
My grandmother stood over me, all five feet two inches, hands on hips, eyes narrowed. “You are coming with me, chacho, and you will not say no.”
I could see she was serious, but I was no longer feeling like little nene; not quite grown up, but old enough to ask where she was planning to take me.
“To the botánica.”
“What for? A radish root? A frog? This is serious, uela, and you can’t make it go away with herbs and incantations.”
“And you have fixed it? You, who are here now in my house with your pad and pencils and looking like hell?” Her face was screwed up tight. I’d never seen her like this. “I have done what I could, Nato, prayed to Chango, Osain, and Ochosi, but it is not working. I do not know why, but the forces have turned against you. It is time to try something more powerful.”
“More powerful than what?” I asked.
“Than me, or you. Ven.”
49
We walked six blocks, my grandmother nervously playing with a strand of rosary beads. We turned onto 118th Street and I saw it, the bótanica. It looked like a junk shop, signs in English for party favors and gifts mixed in with hand-painted lettering in Spanish.
“It looks closed,” I said, with a sense of relief. A part of me wanted to run.
“No para nosotros.” My grandmother rapped on the window. “I know the consejos espirituales. She is expecting us, and she will help.”
A moment later a big dark-skinned woman opened the door.
“Nato,” said my grandmother. “This is Maria Guerrero.”
Guerrero, the Spanish word for warrior. She looked it.
“Entra, mi hijo.” She put her hand on my arm to steer me in.
Inside, the place was small, crowded with herbal remedies, statuary, glass-encased candles, fake flowers and real ones, a large plastic Madonna beside one painted black. There were rows of multicolored beaded necklaces hanging from hooks above mundane religious articles one could find in a Christian gift shop. On the floor near the door, a shrine with cowrie shells not unlike the one I’d created at home. A few weeks ago I would have been shaking my head and sighing, but I had just made my own Eleggua, so how could I?
“You know Quincy Jones?” asked Maria Guerrero. “A very nice man. He comes whenever he is in Nueva York.” She smiled, showing two front teeth plated with gold. “My customers are black and white, Catholics and Jews. Only two days ago, a rabbi. I am a Catholic, but I welcome all people. But I am also a santera, and before that an espiritista. I was born an espiritista.” She looked me over and said she was glad I was wearing a white shirt or she would have made me change. I remembered what my abuela had said the last time about my white shirt, and I knew white was an important color for Santeria, the bóveda referred to as the Mesa Blanca, the white table, a color of purity, empowerment, associated with Obatala, the sculptor of human form, all the lessons my abuela had taught me coming back to me.
Maria Guerrero laid her hand on my chest and told me there was much pain in my heart. At first I flinched, but she kept it there for several minutes and I began to relax, the warmth from her hand spreading through me. Then she touched my forehead and asked how long I had suffered from dolor de cabeza.
“Headache,” my grandmother translated.
How did she know?
She recommended tea made from rosemary, plucked a statue off the Mesa Blanca, Saint Jude, patron of the hopeless, waved him over my head, and said, “For the dolor de cabeza.” It seemed ridiculous, but seconds later my headache disappeared. I touched my head, trying to locate the pain that had been there a moment ago.
“Muy bien,” she said, and was right. I was much better.
But how was it possible?
She closed her eyes and said, “Dios está en la atmósfera.”
“God is in the air,” said my grandmother.
I looked around the shop, at the beads and candles, dusty shelves crowded with herbal remedies and statuary, my rational brain still protesting. There isn’t room for God among this mess.
Maria Guerrero said, “This is no bilongo.”
“Witchcraft,” said my grandmother and frowned at me.
Then the espiritista said it was time, and my grandmother handed her a wad of bills. I didn’t know how much, but the bill on the outside was a twenty and the wad was thick; it could have been a couple of hundred. I was appalled, but my grandmother gave me a look and I didn’t say anything.
Maria Guerrero led us into the back room. It was stark and simple, in contrast to the packed storefront—white walls dotted with a few pictures of saints and a Mesa Blanca, the focal point, with plastic saints, glasses of water, a wooden crucifix wrapped with beads, angel figurines, books, and candles waiting to be lit.
I was trying hard to be open-minded—was it really any different from a church, a synagogue, a Buddhist temple?—but a part of me was still resisting, having trouble giving myself over, believing.
“Is importante to believe.” Maria Guerrera touched my head, then my heart.
It was as if she’d just read my mind. She smiled, then excused herself.
When she was out of the room I turned to my grandmother. “You gave her money.”
“Por supuesto. She is working. It is the derecho, and expected.”
“This is crazy, ulea.”
My grandmother put a finger to my lips and told me to be “tranquilo,” that Maria Guerrero would hear me. Then she took my hand and held it firmly. “There are things we do not understand, Nato. Things that are not easy to explain because they come from another place, el más alto, from the espiritus. But when we see them we start to believe. You must believe.” She looked into my eyes. “Sometimes it is necessary to believe in something to get out of something else, entiendes?”
I didn’t know if I understood or not. I had spent a lifetime of not believing. Could I start believing now? I took a couple of deep breaths and tried to relax. My grandmother squeezed my hand, sending support and love while trying to telegraph her entire belief system into my being. I could see it in her face, every muscle constricted with concentration.
Maria Guerrero returned wearing a white smock. In her right hand she was holding a knife.
I took a step backward.
“The cuchilla,” she said softly. “Used to cut through problems.” She laid it on the Mesa Blanca and picked up one of the books. “Colección de Oraciones escogidas,” she said,
and my abuela translated, “Prayer book.”
She crushed some powdered incense into a small iron pot and lit it, whisked the smoke into the air, handed me a box of wooden matches, and asked me to light two white candles on the table.
My hands were shaking, but I did.
She recited a prayer from the book, turned off the lights, and the room took on a warm glow. She touched my hands and they stopped shaking; tapped my forehead and my thoughts stopped racing; drew her fingers across my chest and my breathing and heartbeat slowed. Then she said she was going to perform a limpia, a ritual cleansing. She sent my grandmother into the front of the bótanica. She came back with an aerosol dispenser decorated with a bird and a Native American in full feather headdress, the words CAST OFF EVIL printed on the label. She gave it to Maria Guerrero, who sprayed it toward the ceiling, the altar, and finally on me. It didn’t have any detectable scent and it seemed like nothing but bottled air with a fancy label.
But I felt something, a sense of being physically lighter, as if I’d lost weight or someone had lifted something off my chest.
Then she started lighting the other candles, and explained they were for “protección,” brown to ward off ill will, the black to help me against my enemies. I tried hard to believe her. I wanted it to be true.
She closed her eyes. “I see a man and he means to do you harm. And I see a corona.”
“He’s wearing a crown?” I asked.
“No.” She shook her head, eyes still closed. “Not on the man. The corona is…está dentro del circulo.”
The crown symbol in The White Man’s Bible that had appeared in my grandmother’s vision and in the crime scene drawing.
There were things to be done, she said, and sprinkled me with powders and pungent herbs and spoke of Eleggua, who would either open or close the roads for me, and I thought: Please open them. She told me to stop eating red meat and potato chips—and how she knew I lived on burgers and chips I didn’t know, but she was making a believer out of me. She said I had to change my life patterns, start eating well and exercising, stop drinking beer and engaging in premarital sex. That last one got to me, but I nodded. She slipped a beaded necklace around my neck. “Un collar,” she said. As she did, the muscles in my neck eased in a way they had not in weeks.
Anatomy of Fear Page 21
