Anatomy of Fear

by Jonathan Santlofer

  “Tim Wright.” Agent Collins’s voice, amplified by a mega-phone, crackled through the tension. “Don’t do this.”

  Wright turned in her direction, then away, muttering something about heaven and God, and taking his place, and it sounded bad to me. His facial muscles had gone placid, jaw eased, brows evened out, anger replaced by resignation and calm.

  “He’s going to do it,” I said to Terri.

  She looked at the SWAT team commander and nodded so slightly there was almost no movement at all, but he caught it and relayed it to his men.

  Collins called out again, “Wright. Don’t do this. There’s still time. What can I offer you to—”

  I saw Wright’s thumb twitch on the detonator, and I guess the SWAT team leader saw it too, because he yelled, “Fire!” and the crowd started screaming and running and the ensuing barrage of gunfire was lost in the blast of explosives as Tim Wright went up in a fireball of flames and smoke.

  The blast knocked me backward, Terri along with me, my body hurtling against stone as if I’d been lifted and thrown; then noise and darkness, colors exploding behind my eyes, maybe in front of them too, but I’m pretty sure I had my eyes squeezed shut. I felt Terri’s body hit mine, and I wrapped my arms around her, and then time slowed in a way that’s hard to explain. There was the noise, of course, a blast that became a roar, carried in the wind along with the ashes and dust and blood, and when it settled there was a moment when it was so still, as if someone had thrown the OFF switch and everything just stopped, at least that’s what it felt like; maybe it was simply the aftershock, my ears gone deaf, nerve endings numb.

  I managed to get to my feet and helped Terri up as the blackened air around us began to clear.

  The space where Tim Wright had been was hard to gauge. It appeared as if parts of the street, here and there, were on fire, thick gray smoke spiraling away from small smoldering masses, and I did not want to think what was burning.

  “You okay?” Terri asked.

  I nodded and asked her the same. “And my grandmother—?” I asked.

  “With O’Connell.”

  “Right,” I said, and remembered him putting her into a car just before the blast, which was when—hours, minutes ago?

  And then the switch was thrown back to ON, the quiet erupting into an ear-splitting aria of sirens and screams, and people rushing about; Bomb Squad and SWAT team, Crime Scene and EMT everywhere, and the street pulsating under my feet.

  Terri looked into my eyes, then touched my arm and went to join her men.

  I stared at the dark clouds of smoke, coiling and swirling into the air like venomous snakes, could see the church was still standing and that no one other than Wright had been hurt, and I thanked God and Chango, and thought: If only it could be this easy, one explosion to eradicate hate.

  Then Terri came back with Perez.

  “Jesus, Rodriguez, you okay?” he asked. “You look like shit.”

  I touched my face and my fingers came away red.

  “You’re going to need stitches,” said Terri, her face partially blackened but unmarked. We managed to exchange something that approximated a smile before I was lifted into an EMT van and got an ice pack against my jaw. A moment later I was floating on the sounds of sirens.

  59

  Tim Wright was famous. And, I guess, so was I.

  Some reporter had gotten the story as well as my sketch and splashed it across the paper. No one had yet asked me how I’d made the sketch, which was a good thing because I didn’t know how I was going to explain it.

  The life and death of Tim Wright was the lead story of every local television station and headlined in the morning papers. Queens neighbors were interviewed, one who described Wright as “a quiet man who always kept his lawn neat and trim”; others expressed shock and dismay that they could have been living next door to such a monster.

  They’d gotten to Wright’s mother, a sixty-something retired secretary, who cried on Fox News.

  TV reporters ferreted out Wright’s wife, who was living with her sister in Yonkers. They caught her coming out of a small house, not unlike the one in Queens. She was a pretty woman, petite and blond. She hugged her young daughter to her side and tried to get into her side-dented Ford Focus wagon, but the reporters were on her like a pack of dogs. She said she had begun to fear for her life due to her husband’s “growing fanaticism” and had left him several months earlier, taking their daughter with her. “Was it my fault because I left him?” she said, the camera zooming in for a close-up of her face, brow wrinkled, and eyes so sad it was almost embarrassing to watch, though I was rapt.

  Denton and Collins held a joint press conference that made it look like the feds and the locals had played well together, each of them taking credit in their own way. Denton made much of the fact that only Wright had exploded, not the church, that no one had been injured, that the NYPD had managed to save hundreds of lives when the police had cleared the street, the explosives having blackened the front of Saint Cecilia but that was all. Collins took it from there, noting that the bureau had uncovered, and were examining, hate organizations across the States.

  Terri had not participated in the press conference, but it was her name in every news article as the cop who had caught the Sketch Artist.

  I’d spent nearly six hours in Bellevue’s ER, having my nose reset and a three-inch gash on my chin stitched up, and Terri had been with me for most of it. Afterward, she told me to go home and sleep, but the calls wouldn’t stop.

  In the space of a few hours I turned down offers to appear on the Today show and Charlie Rose, but when a curator from the Whitney Museum called to offer me an exhibition of my forensic sketches, I debated, said no, then called back and said maybe.

  I finally disconnected the phone and the media must have decided they could carry on without me.

  I thought it was over until Terri called to say there was something she had to tell me. I expected she was excited about everything that had happened and her part in it and wanted to celebrate. But the minute I set foot in her office, I knew that wasn’t it.

  “I was just looking to get you some closure,” she said.

  “About what?”

  Terri started pacing. It brought me back to the first day I’d been in her office.

  “What is it? What’s going on?”

  She stopped fidgeting and sat down across from me. “I never meant this to happen. Not like this. But it’s okay now.”

  “Didn’t mean what to happen? Jesus, Terri, tell me already.”

  “I opened your father’s case, his murder book.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Like I said, I wanted to get you some closure. I thought if you knew what happened, you could—”

  “You opened my father’s case?” I didn’t know what to say; I was still processing it, what she’d done, everything I knew about the case.

  “When you told me about your father I could see how it was eating you up inside, the guilt and all, so I thought…I just wanted to help, but it backfired. It made the cops and feds more suspicious of you, but it’s okay now. I mean, now that you’re in the clear.”

  “Made them more suspicious of me—how?”

  “Well, they’re not. Not anymore.”

  “Terri.” I locked eyes with her. “Just tell me what’s been going on.”

  She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Nate. I didn’t mean to cause you any shit. It was the furthest thing from—”

  “Jesus, Terri, if you don’t tell me what this is all about—”

  “Okay,” she said. “I called you because I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else, that the case had been reopened—by me—and what’s been discovered.” She put her hand up before I could ask another question. “What they found were three distinct samples of DNA taken from the murder weapon, the gun that killed your father.”

  “Three?” I was trying to make sense of it, but the pictures I had always imagined about that night were f
lashing in my brain.

  “It means there were two other people on the scene other than your father, two other people who deposited their DNA on the gun. One left saliva, the other a tissue sample, flesh caught in the firing pin. It must have pinched his hand when he pulled the trigger. They couldn’t test DNA back then, but the DOJ kept the samples on ice. Cold Case just had them tested, sent the results out to data banks, and scored a hit. Actually, two hits.”

  When I didn’t say anything, she slid a report over to me. “Does the name Willie Pedriera mean anything to you?”

  There was something familiar about the name, but I couldn’t place it.

  “His DNA is one of the samples, the tissue sample. He’s serving life up in Green Haven for homicide. Don’t know how long that will be. According to Cold Case, he’s sick.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “It was a juvey case, sealed. That is, until Cold Case got the DOJ to open it about five minutes ago. Now they’ll arrest him.” She turned a paper around and I read the name.

  It took me a minute to process the information and recover from the shock. When I did, I begged her to get Cold Case and anyone else to hold off.

  Terri sucked on her bottom lip, thinking about it.

  “Trust me one more time. Can you do that?”

  She nodded.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I need to be the one to do this.”

  Ten minutes later I was in a cab heading down Broadway, a twenty-year-old memory coming back to me in a rush: My father finding the drugs and heading off in search of the dealer; and me, a scared kid who wasn’t thinking straight, calling Julio, telling him to warn the dealer, then to meet me uptown. For twenty years that was how I’d imagined it: The drug dealer had killed my father because I’d sent a warning. But now I was seeing it differently.

  60

  He’s with a client.”

  I walked past Julio’s secretary, into his office. He looked up, then at his client, a man in a chalk-striped suit.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  “Not now.” Julio smiled at his client and frowned at me.

  “Now,” I said. “It’s important.”

  The suit left and I handed Julio the results of the DNA test.

  “Hey, that was an important client. This is my job, Nate. Are you out of your mind?”

  “Read it.” I tapped the report. “It’s a DNA test. Twenty years old. Your DNA, Julio. On the gun that killed my father.”

  I was back in El Barrio twenty years ago, remembering how Julio had been stoned by the time I’d met up with him, edgy, and hardly talking. After I’d left, he’d taken the ill-fated joy ride that had landed him in Spofford, wrapped a stolen car around a lamppost, high as a kite, weed in his pocket. He’d called me from the station, used up his one call. He had something to tell me, he said, but I wouldn’t let him. My father had just died, and I’d killed him; it was all I could think about. Julio was sent to Spofford, and I wished it were me, a way to pay for what I’d done. I couldn’t face my mother, or my life. For a year I lost myself in drugs: stoned on grass, high on meth; anything to mask the pain and guilt. I was trying to kill myself and might have succeeded had it not been for Julio, who came out of Spofford a new person and helped me get clean. He stayed by my side when I was jumping out of my skin, and held my head when I was sick. We never spoke again about the night my father died. I knew what I’d done and I thought Julio was sharing my secret. I didn’t know he had one too.

  I stared at Julio, waiting. He didn’t say anything, but his face did, surprise mixing with sadness and pain. “You have to believe me, pana, I was trying to stop it.” He sighed and sagged into a chair.

  Then he told me how he’d been with the dealer, Willie Pedriera, when my father showed up; how my father had threatened Pedreira, who produced a gun; how he and Pedriera had struggled and fought; and then how he’d watched, helpless, as Pedriera shot my father. Pedreira threatened to kill him, and me, if he ever told anyone what had gone down.

  “Pedreira’s cousin was with me in Spofford,” he said. “He told me Willie was watching, that he would always be watching, and that he would kill me.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Nato, I saw him shoot your father. I knew what he was capable of.” Julio pinched the bridge of his nose. “He would call me every few months and remind me. “And then…” He took a deep breath. “…time passed. And I just, I just couldn’t tell you. It had been too long.”

  “Pedriera’s in prison,” I said. “And they’re going to arrest you because your DNA was on the gun.”

  “We fought, like I said. My hand was on the gun, my sweat; it’s possible.”

  “More than possible, Julio.”

  He nodded. “I wondered if this would ever happen. I used to have nightmares about it, but now…You believe me, don’t you?”

  My friend looked up at me, his features clear, no ambiguity in the muscles of his face. I could see he was telling the truth.

  “Yes, I believe you. But they know I’m here, Julio, the cops. And I have to call them. I have to bring you in.”

  He nodded, resigned. “I’ll go to them.”

  I called Terri, told her Julio would turn himself in, and asked if she would personally meet him. Then I asked him if I could borrow his car again.

  “Hey, pana…” Julio managed a smile. “You might end up keeping it.”

  “No,” I said. “Confia en mil. Trust me.”

  I called in every favor I had, even got Perez to do one for me, then got directions, borrowed an NYPD magnetic beacon, planted it on the hood of Julio’s Mercedes, and raced up the Taconic State Parkway.

  The Green Haven Correctional Facility was in upstate New York’s Dutchess County, in a town called Stormville, eighty miles from the city. I made it there in just over an hour.

  I parked the car in the lot and stared up at the thirty-foot-high wall and guard towers. It was like something out of Birdman of Alcatraz or The Shawshank Redemption.

  Green Haven was a maximum-security prison, most of the inmates serving long stretches, all of them for violent crimes.

  I showed my ID and a guard sent me through. They were expecting me, thanks to Perez, who had called the warden, a long-time buddy.

  I went through three checkpoints before a guard named Marshall, which struck me as ironic, met me. “Inmate you want is in UPD.”

  “UPD?”

  “Unit for the Physically Disabled. It’s over in C-Block, ground floor, ’cause of the wheelchairs.” Marshall was a large black man, affable, who kept up a running monologue as we headed over. He was proud of the jail, the dairy that was managed by the prisoners, and the profitable upholstery shop. He was full of information.

  “Green Haven is New York’s only execution facility. Used to have the electric chair, but they exchanged it for lethal injection. Lot better, if you ask me.”

  Neither option sounded good to me, but I nodded.

  UPD looked more like a hospital than a prison: nurses’ station, doctors walking the hallways with clipboards.

  Marshall stopped in front of a door, knocked, unlocked it, and waved me in.

  “I’ll be right outside.” He closed the door behind me.

  There was a man sitting in a wheelchair by a barred window; cheeks hollow, eyes sunken into sockets, skull visible beneath pale skin. I had seen Pedriera’s arrest sheet; he was only a few years older than me. But this guy looked about eighty. I thought Marshall must have made a mistake, but when I asked if he was Willie Pedriera he managed a nod. There was an IV in his arm, bruised and purplish welts on his skin. I recognized the illness.

  “I’m Nate Rodriguez,” I said.

  He turned his head toward me like a lazy lizard. “So…you’re the son.” His Barrio accent was strong. His eyes were rheumy and slightly unfocused; he was obviously doped on pain meds. “They told me you was coming.” He took a long, hard look at me. “You don’t look familiar.”

  Now I r
emembered him. Julio had always bought the drugs, but there was one time I’d been with him. I reminded Pedriera, and he shrugged. “That why you’re here? To buy some weed?” He laughed and coughed, the veins in his forehead swelling. He wiped spit off his chin, and reached for a small one-legged figurine he had propped beside a wooden cross on the windowsill.

  “You know Aroni, the midget healer?” he asked. “Has his work cut out for him with me, eh?”

  “You should have Inle too, for healing,” I said. “And Babalu-Aye, who governs the sphere of illness. And Lubbe Bara Lubbe, who will take care of your past—and your future too.”

  “I have no future,” he said, then squinted at me. “So, you are a believer?”

  I didn’t have time to consider my answer. “Yes,” I said, and it seemed right to me.

  He nodded, and closed his eyes, a faint smile on his lips.

  “My friend, Julio Sanchez, you remember him?” I asked.

  He took a minute. “Yeah…I remember.”

  “He was with you that night.”

  Pedriera sharpened. “Which night was that?”

  “The night you killed my father.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Not me.”

  Even with his facial muscles in decline I could see he was lying, the corners of his mouth ticking up one second, down the next, zygomatic muscles tugging at his flaccid cheeks, but failing, the contradictions playing out on his face.

  “That’s what I told those cops. I. Wasn’t. There. You hear me? Now…leave me alone. Can’t you see I’m dying?”

  “Yes, I see that,” I said. “So why lie?”

  “You think I should help those bastards?” His lip curled up in disgust. “I was eighteen the first time they locked me up. I sold some drugs, so what? They put me in with rapists and murderers.”