Anatomy of Fear Read online

  She continued to talk and I kept drawing. Twenty or thirty minutes passed.

  “I’m going to need you to look at this.”

  I waited a second before I turned it around.

  That sound again, air sucked into her lungs, a stifled gasp.

  I didn’t say anything, just waited, chewing on the back end of my pencil, a bad habit I couldn’t kick.

  “It looks like him, but…the chin is wrong.”

  Defense attorneys often argue that you cannot depend on a victim or eyewitness for identification, but plenty of people have damn good visual memories. Over the years I’d made hundreds of sketches from witnesses and victims, and more than half of them have resulted in an arrest and conviction, so I beg to differ with the suits.

  Laurie was staring at the drawing and I saw something change in her eyes, a bit of excitement now mixing in with the dread, something I’d seen lots of times.

  “There’s something else,” she said. “Something missing, but I don’t know what.”

  “Hold on a sec.” I reached for my stack of cards: images I had collected over the seven years I’d been doing this job, from newspapers, books, and paintings, cut out and laminated, all sorts of faces, all races, mostly men. I sorted through them, selected a group, and spread them onto the table. “Anything in these?”

  Laurie ran her tongue over her sore lip and shook her head.

  I tried another group. “What about these?”

  “No, but…wait. That’s it! His chin! It wasn’t that it was pointy. It was that he had a, you know, a goatee, like that guy there, in that picture.”

  I quickly sketched it in. “What about a mustache?”

  “Yes. No. More like he hadn’t shaved in a while.” She looked up and glanced at my cheeks. “Like you—stubble, you know, only it was fuller on his chin, like I said, and pointy.”

  I reworked the drawing for a minute, then turned it back for her to see.

  Laurie let out a startled gasp.

  “It’s like him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But wait—he was wearing a hat!”

  “What kind? A cap or—”

  “Yes, a cap, a woolen one.”

  We were really into it now, our minds connecting.

  “It was…rough. It rubbed against—” She shook her head back and forth as if trying physically to dislodge the memory.

  “Stay with me, Laurie.”

  “Yes,” she said, “yes. The hat—it was one of those knit caps, you know, that you just pull on. It covered the top of his head, and—” Her eyes were tight slits of concentration. “It just covered the tops of his ears.”

  I sketched it in and turned the pad around.

  “Jesus,” she whispered, blinking, as if she wanted to look and not look at the same time. “It’s…him.”

  “Is there anything else you can remember about his face, anything that I should change?”

  She shook her head no, holding her breath.

  I touched her hand again. “He’s on paper now, remember? Not in your head.”

  She looked at me, good eye narrowed to match the bruised one. “He’ll always be in my head.”

  “Try closing your eyes.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Maybe he won’t be there.”

  I could see she was scared to try.

  “C’mon,” I said, without pushing too hard.

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I still see him.”

  “But he’s fading, right?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe he is.”

  “And soon he’ll be gone.” I hoped my face was not betraying the lie. No way he’d ever leave her. Certain pictures remain etched on the brain. I knew that to be a fact, but I didn’t say it. I told her she’d done a great job, that she’d be okay.

  When she left I stayed behind, got lost in the drawing for a while, added shading, blending areas with soft cardboard stumps or my fingertips, attempting to give the face more dimension and life, then I sat back and assessed it.

  It wasn’t bad, not exactly art with a capital A. Not science, either. It was sort of like me: not quite a cop, not quite an artist, more like I was swimming around the periphery of each.

  I took the sketch into a hallway, sprayed it with fixative so it wouldn’t smudge, and dropped it onto Detective Schmid’s desk.

  Afterward, I stopped into the men’s room, washed the graphite off my hands, splashed my face with cold water, and felt a chill. It was one of those bad feelings you can’t explain until the bad thing happens and then you think: Was that it?

  2

  The room, a windowless cell of his own design, is like his mind, focused to the point of obsession, shut down to everything and anything other than this moment, the only sound his pencil scratching against paper hard and fast, flecks of graphite catching in the fine blond hairs of his muscled forearms, until lines become forms and imagery takes shape—the bodies everywhere, strewn across the pavement like broken marionettes, arms and legs at impossible angles.

  But how to depict cries and groans?

  He stops to consider the question.

  Shattered bodies, cracked sidewalks, exploding cars he can replicate. But cries? He doesn’t think so. Of course the sound track always comes later. True Dolby surround-sound. The real thing.

  He stares at the drawing, pale blue eyes riveted.

  No, he is getting ahead of himself. This one is for later.

  He exchanges the drawing for a folder, puffs at imaginary specks of dust, begins to skim notes of timed entrances and exits until his visual memory is triggered and he sees the man coming out of the brownstone in split-second fragments.

  Yes, this is what he is after, what he needs to do now.

  He swipes his gloved fingers across a clean page in the sketch pad and sets to work.

  One fragment. Then another.

  But the picture is incomplete, the rest of it stuck in a synapse.

  Damn.

  He paces across the room, drops to the floor, does a quick set of push ups, and now, now, with his heart pumping fast and breath coming in one tiny explosion after another, he sees more of it, bits and pieces that he hurries to get down on paper before they are lost.

  But still they remain fragments.

  Why can’t it ever be born in its entirety?

  Must he always get lost to find his way? He tries to locate the part of himself that knows this is simply how it is, that his mind works like some fucked-up computer gathering bits of data that will eventually coalesce.

  He takes a deep breath and flips to a clean page, draws and redraws, each time a bit more information added.

  Yes, that’s it, there it is.

  The one picture is finished; the relic no longer headless, he sets it aside. He is halfway there, one part of the process complete.

  But another image is already pressing against his frontal lobe demanding attention.

  Pencils sharpened quickly, electric impulses from his brain telegraphing tiny muscles in his hand to make specific and nonspecific strokes, another enigmatic drawing begins.

  But what is it?

  His cognitive power to recognize has not yet caught up to his hand.

  Trust it. You have been here before.

  The pencil starts up again like an extension of his hand, a simple repetitive mark-making machine, stroke after stroke until finally…there it is.

  He sits back, gloves stained with graphite, adrenaline pumping in his veins, and surveys his work.

  The drawings have made sense of it.

  Now he knows what to do and how he will do it.

  3

  For Christ’s sake, keep those people back.”

  Badge out in front of her, Terri Russo made her way past the uniforms who were trying to maintain order on the Brooklyn street. It was dark, but the combination of yellow street lamps and flashing red beacons bathed the crowd of fifty or sixty people, all angling for a better view, in an eerie orange glow.
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  Damn it, thought Terri. Didn’t they know better? Perhaps the line between real life and entertainment had finally become so blurred, people just thought it was another reality show.

  She stopped a moment, her eyes on the crowd. He could be here.

  Her pivotal case had been one of those—a creep who just couldn’t help himself, had to be there, right under the uniforms’ and detectives’ collective noses, watching them clean up his ugly mess. She’d spotted him from a police sketch, followed him without stopping to think, without calling for backup, which some would call foolish—and did—particularly as she’d taken a bullet to her right shoulder. Worth it, if you asked Terri; it was the collar that had catapulted her into her current position, heading up an NYPD Homicide Resource Division out of Midtown North. Hell, she ought to thank the little creep.

  “What have we got?” she asked the Brooklyn detective, though she already knew. It was the reason she’d been called—the drawing pinned to the dead man, same as the guy who’d been stabbed in midtown Manhattan.

  Stabbed, she thought, not shot. That didn’t make sense.

  The Brooklyn detective’s eyes did a slow dance over Terri’s breasts beneath her tight jean jacket, then back up to her face, her dark hair pulled into a ponytail that made her look about eighteen, though she’d be thirty-one in a week.

  He handed her the dead man’s wallet. “African American male, shot between six and six-thirty,” he said, stifling a yawn. “Couple of witnesses confirmed the attack, heard the shots, but didn’t see the shooter. Vic’s name is Harrison Stone, lives just there.” He pointed to a four-story brownstone. “Wife’s already made a positive ID, arrived on the scene about the same time the patrol cars did, approximately ten minutes after the shooting.” He angled his head toward a group of detectives, a couple of uniforms, a blond woman crying. “The wife,” he said, maybe sneering,

  Terri wasn’t sure.

  She noticed one of the crime scene crew removing the sketch from the dead man, about to bag it.

  “Over here,” she said, pulling on gloves.

  Chief of Department Perry Denton arrived at the scene as if he was expecting a red carpet, klieg lights, and Joan Rivers to ask: Who are you wearing? He wasn’t a big man, but carried himself as if he was. He stuck an unlit cigar between his teeth and surveyed the scene.

  Terri thought it was funny that people assumed she’d fucked Denton to get where she was. The truth, if it had been up to Denton she would never have gotten the promotion, not when she’d abruptly ended their affair less than a month after it had started. But that had been over a year ago, when Denton was still heading up Narcotics. How was she to know he’d end up being her boss?

  The chief of department took the sketch from her hand, his arm, accidentally-on-purpose, brushing against her chest.

  Terri wondered if his wife knew he fucked anything that didn’t have a dick. She turned and headed in the opposite direction. She introduced herself to the dead man’s wife, a glacial beauty who reminded her of that fifties actress Grace Kelly, though right now the woman’s pale blue eyes were red-rimmed, cheeks streaked with mascara. Terri said she was sorry.

  “Why…Harrison? It…it makes no sense. Can you tell me…why?” She stared into Terri’s face, waiting for an answer.

  “Maybe you can help us figure that out,” Terri said softly.

  The woman shook her head, blond page-boy hair swirling like a skirt around her sculpted jawline.

  Denton signaled Terri over with a crook of his finger and the kind of smile that had caused all the trouble in the first place. He moved in close as he talked, lemony aftershave she remembered commingling with the smell of cigar. There were another detective and a couple of CS techies flanking him, just enough audience. He waved the sketch. “I want the lab to go over this like they were going through a murdered whore’s pubic hair, you got that?”

  Terri flipped open a small notepad and spoke while she wrote, “Like…a…murdered…whore’s…pubic…hair. Got it.”

  “Funny,” said Denton. He locked his hand on to her shoulder and kneaded it through her jacket.

  She slid out of his grip, her shoulder throbbing. It was the exact spot where she’d been shot. Had Denton realized that? She knew the answer. It hadn’t taken her long to discover the man was a sadist.

  He whispered in her ear, “Need a ride back to the city?”

  It had been almost a year and she had no intention of changing her mind. I’d rather swim, she thought. “Got my car,” she said, trying to keep the attitude out of her voice. She had to be careful. The man could make her life miserable. Of course she could do the same for his. “I should hang out awhile,” she said. “See what the immediate canvass produces.” This was her second chance and she did not want to blow it.

  “Right,” said Denton. “You just do that.”

  4

  Nate is Spanish the way Madonna is Jewish.”

  My friend Julio grinned at his wife, both junior partners at a downtown law firm where they each argued they were the token, Jessica the woman, he the Latino; their baby asleep in a nearby bassinette while we ate dinner ordered in from the local Chinese restaurant.

  “Cálmate,” I said.

  The truth was sometimes I didn’t know who I was—my Grandma Rose’s tatelleh or my Abuela Dolores’s chacho.

  Hector Lavoe’s La Voz, the voice, was playing in the background, but only because I’d brought the newly reissued CD of the Puerto Rican salsa singer’s groundbreaking 1975 album with me. Otherwise it would have been Mozart or Beethoven, which I still couldn’t get used to hearing in Julio’s house.

  I looked around at the leather couch, Persian rugs and antiques, two floors of a brownstone on Ninety-fourth between Fifth and Madison. Ironic, I thought, Julio living the good life only minutes away from the mean streets of El Barrio where he’d grown up.

  “This place is too good for you, man.”

  Julio made a fist, tapped his heart, and slid into the street talk of his youth. “Don’ worry, brothuh, even though I’m at the top, you still my main-mellow man, mi pana.”

  Jess rolled her eyes. “Must you guys always act like teenagers when you get together?”

  “Yo, mira, I think so.” Julio winked at me.

  We’d been buddies forever. Julio’s aunt lived in the same tenement as my grandmother and he’d hang out there because it was better than the peeling paint and roaches of the project where he lived with his single mom, who worked day and night to keep a roof over their heads. We met one day in the stairwell, Julio hiding out so his aunt wouldn’t see and tell his mother that her son was smoking dope at age eleven, and he gave me a toke, my first. When I recovered from the coughing fit we started talking, bonding over the music of Prince and Carlos Santana. From that day on we were brothers.

  After that I started going uptown all the time. El Barrio was an ugly ghetto, but compared to where I lived—the Penn South apartments on Eighth Avenue and Twenty-fourth, which was filled with old people and had about as much life as a funeral parlor—it was exciting. My parents didn’t like it, but I told them I was in search of my Spanish heritage. Of course that was bullshit. What Julio and I were searching for was alcohol and drugs—and we found them.

  Julio would buy weed off the local salesman, some guy who hung around his junior high, then we’d get stoned and go lie around my grandmother’s apartment watching TV, playing Nintendo, and laughing. She was always asking “¿Qué es tan chistoso?’’ which would make us laugh even harder.

  Julio asked if I was okay and I nodded, but a piece of my past had started to play and I couldn’t stop it. I was back in my parents’ apartment on Eighth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, reliving that night, seeing it all—my room with its posters of Che and Santana, but mostly the look on my father’s face.

  It was inevitable that he would find out. Maybe I even wanted him to. I thought I was cool and dangerous, bringing shit home with me, grass and crack pipes, not bothering to hide them w
ell. Ironic, you might say, me discovering drugs and my father being a narc with the NYPD. When he found the stash he went ballistic.

  Don’t you know what I do for a living? Don’t you know every week I find kids like you dead, OD’d? What’s wrong with you?

  He went on like that for a long time, face bright red, veins in his forehead standing out in high relief. He wouldn’t stop until I told him where I’d bought my stuff, then he stormed out in search of the guy who was turning his son into a junkie. I was scared shitless. I called Julio, told him to warn the dealer, and asked him to meet me uptown.

  I came back to the moment, rubbing my temple.

  “Headache, pana?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  I’d started getting headaches after things went bad. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me, so my mother sent me to a shrink. He told me it was displaced anger or guilt and I told him to shove it and never went back. But it wasn’t anger or guilt that was giving me a headache right now. It was a combination of my past and the nonspecific dread I’d felt earlier in the day that was still with me. I couldn’t shake either one of them.

  Julio started talking about a lawsuit he was working on, and got all excited; Julio, the big real estate lawyer, it still surprised me.

  “Hey, remember when we used to say you’d be a musician and I’d do your CD covers?”

  “That was a long time ago,” said Julio.

  “You mean you wouldn’t swap your career for Marc Anthony’s?”

  “¡Nipa-tanto! Not even for that gorgeous wife of his, JLo.” He looked at his wife. “Who’s got nothing on Jess. And for your information, I love my job.” He smiled, zygomatic major muscles flexing his cheeks to the corners of his lips, muscles tightening around the eyes that accompanied a genuine smile, which was impossible to fake. It was true: He loved his job and loved his wife.