Anatomy of Fear (16 page)

“It’s easy enough to check on that, Mr. Reed.” Terri needed to hear him say it, and I knew what was coming when she reached into her tote. She brought out a CS photo of the victim—a close-up of the young woman’s destroyed face—and held it in front of Reed.

“Jesus Christ!” Reed gasped and looked away. “Why the hell are you showing me that?”

“Mr. Reed.” Terri kept the photo right in front of him. “I need to know about your relationship to the victim. I need to know it now or I will assume you are hiding something.”

“No way. You have it all wrong. You don’t know what you’re
saying.” He caught his breath and there were tears in his eyes. “Carolyn and I—we were—she was living with me.”

“So you were a couple.”

“It just sort of…happened, you know, after she came here.”

Terri lowered the photo. “Go on.”

Reed cadged a peek at my drawing and frowned. “I was so afraid she’d slipped up, gone back on drugs. Why she’d disappeared, I mean. I never thought…”

“Why didn’t you say you were a couple in the first place?”

“This is a city job, and with me being in charge, and…Carolyn was a lot younger.”

I took Reed to be about forty. Carolyn Spivack had been nineteen.

“So you kept your relationship a secret,” I said. “Here, at the center, I mean?”

“Well, we didn’t advertise, and folks here, they got their own stuff to deal with.”

“But you could have been seen together.”

“Well, sure.”

“Where? I mean, outside of the shelter.”

“We liked to take long walks, along the Hudson mostly. We’d just head west and follow the footpath either downtown or up. Didn’t matter. We talked a lot, about why she’d left home. She was trying to come to terms with her journey, you know, running away from home, the drugs, and what had happened to her.”

A perfect opportunity to be seen, I thought, the footpath along the river always crowded with walkers, runners, and tourists.

“That’s where she was found,” Terri said. “Down by the river. Just where the two of you would take your walks. Quite a coincidence, Mr. Reed.”

“It was where we liked to walk. That’s all.”

I watched Reed’s face closely to see if he was controlling his expression,
modulating
it, as Ekman calls it.
Acting,
as I call it. But he didn’t seem to be. His words and expressions were in sync.

“You have any idea what she was doing there?” Terri asked.

Reed pinched the ridge of his nose. “She used to go there to talk to the kids who sold themselves along the waterfront, offer to help them get clean. She didn’t want them to suffer like she had.”

“She was dressed like a hooker,” said Terri.

“Oh, please, my niece, who’s seven, wears tank tops and short shorts. She wants to look like Beyoncé.” He shook his head.

I stopped sketching, was about to close my pad, but Reed asked to see it.

“What are you going to do with it?”

Terri waited, holding the moment. “We’ll just…keep it on file.”

We hung around till Nicky showed up. He turned out to be a pale skinny kid with blue-black hair and gold hoops through his lower lip. He wasn’t big and didn’t look strong, and his face registered genuine shock and sadness when he heard about Carolyn. He told us he’d spent a couple of years prostituting himself after his father threw him out of the house because he was gay.

I asked him, and Reed too, if they’d seen anyone hanging around the shelter who looked suspicious. Nicky laughed and said everyone around the shelter looked suspicious.

I showed them my sketches of the man in the long coat and ski mask and they drew a blank.

“So what’s this all about?” asked Reed. “Was Carolyn’s murder part of something bigger?”

Terri said no a bit too fast, then told them they’d have to give official statements, and that was it; we were out of there.

A
nother interracial couple,” said Terri as we got into her Crown Victoria. “And by the way, sketching Reed was a good idea, got him talking.”

“Power of the pencil,” I said.

“I’ve got to bring the team up to speed,” said Terri. “And yes, the G too, in case you’re worried.”

“Hey, it’s not
my
job I was worried about.”

“Thanks for caring, Rodriguez.”

“I do care. And what happened to Rocky?”

She pushed her hair back behind her ear, which was loose today. “Didn’t sit right with me. I kept seeing Sylvester Stallone.” She edged the car out into the traffic, and got serious. “I know I have to work with the bureau. And it’s fine. Well, it’s not fine, but it’s the way it is. I just don’t like giving it away. I’ve worked too hard for this. If I have to play with the G, then I’m going to make them see I can be just as good as they are.”

“Who said you weren’t?”

“No one is as good as they are. Just ask them.”

I’d been to Quantico, and I thought they
were
good, but I’d been around the police longer and knew they were good too. “Does it have to be a game of who is better?”

“Believe it,” she said. “Maybe it’s about proving myself, and undoing some old damage.

Old damage.
Something I knew all about.

“Agent Collins seems very determined.”

“I know all about determined women, believe me.”

I believed her.

“And it’s not like I’m trying to fuck her over. I just want a chance to play in the same arena, not get pushed out, you know?”

We came to a light. She stopped and turned toward me. “There’s going to be another briefing, Nate, and I’d like you to be there to talk about the unsub’s drawings.”

Ah, I was Nate again
. I was listening.

“They need to hear they are definitely made by the same hand.”

“But you already told them that and the lab’s confirmed the paper, right?”

“But you’re the expert. I’d like them to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth so it’s undeniable. Maybe we can cut through some of the crap. And it will be good for Denton to see how valuable you are.”

Now I got it. What she meant was that it would be good for Denton to see how valuable
she
was, how smart she’d been to bring me in. But I didn’t mind proving my worth.

22

O
ver the past seven years I’d sat with hundreds of witnesses and victims making sketches, and I usually felt calm. But as I stood in front of a darkened briefing room, my hands were sweating. I had laid fresh copies of the sketches into four overhead projectors, the pictures now enlarged and cast onto the front wall.

“I’ve had the computer lab clean these up, remove all bloodstains and dirt so you can really see them,” I said. “And this may be the first time you’re seeing them all together.” I went from one sketch to another, pointing out similarities, how the drawings had been built up with a repeated side stroke that indicated the man was right-handed, his loose but sure handling of the images, the quality of the graphite—all of it adding up to my consensus that they were all drawn by the same person.

I was recounting this to Chief of Department Perry Denton, Chief of Operations Mickey Rauder, Special Agent Monica Collins, her two field officers, Archer and Richardson, a stenographer sent over from FBI Manhattan, division heads from the precincts working on the homicides, and of course Terri Russo and her team.

In the middle of it I noticed something I had missed before in the drawing of Carolyn Spivack, but didn’t stop to point it out. I just wanted to finish. Public speaking was not my thing.

When I sat down, Denton took over. He was a handsome guy, but a little too slick in his designer suit and shiny tassel loafers. His major emphasis was keeping the lid on the serial-killer aspect for as long as possible. The murders, though still getting attention, had fallen off page one, the drawings that connected them still unknown to the press. Denton reported that the PR Department had let it slip that Carolyn Spivack was a druggie and a hooker so her story didn’t get much play in the media, which must have made her parents really happy.

“Once the link is made in the press, we’ll have every crazy in the city calling in to use up their free Verizon minutes,” said Denton, “and we don’t have the manpower to log in all the calls.” He glanced at Terri, and I saw her stiffen, though I didn’t know why.

After that, both Denton and Collins attempted to make it clear
it was their organization helping the other. Collins mentioned she was in constant communication with her Quantico superiors, and Denton brought up the fact that he spoke to the mayor several times a day. But there was something other than crime-fighting politics going on, if I was reading the body language correctly. Granted, faces were my specialty, but if Agent Collins had hiked her skirt up any higher or gotten her legs any closer, Denton could have performed cunnilingus on her by simply sticking his tongue out, which, personally, I’d have found a lot more entertaining.

Denton ceded the floor to Mickey Rauder, who addressed the division heads about individual strategy. Rauder was an older guy, face like a basset hound, amiable, and on a first-name basis with everyone, asking one department head how his wife’s operation had gone, congratulating another on his kid’s college scholarship. He seemed like the real deal, and he wrapped things up quickly.

I was glad the meeting was finally over, but it wasn’t for Terri. She insisted I go up and meet Denton. I think she wanted to show me off like I was a new blouse or something.

“I told you Rodriguez could add something,” she said to him.

“Yes,” said Denton, wearing an artificial smile, zygomatic major muscles stuck in neutral. “Nice job, Rodriguez. More proof we are looking for one man—just what we need, huh?” He forced a laugh. “But glad to have you on board.”

I said, “Thanks,” eager to get going, but Terri wasn’t.

“And he’s started a sketch,” she said.

“Really?” said Denton. “I’d like to see that, but how is it possible?”

“Rodriguez has a gift. He can see inside people’s heads.”

“No shit,” said Denton.

“Not really,” I said. “I just do my job.”

“He’s being modest.”

Terri was throwing me in Denton’s face and I was starting to get an idea why.

Denton looped his thumbs into his pant pockets and rocked back on his heels. “So what is it, Rodriguez, you read minds or something?”

“No, sir. Just faces.”

“Really? So what’s my face telling you right now?”

A couple of micro-expressions flashed over Denton’s features, ending with the telltale asymmetry of someone who has something to hide: a smile in direct contrast to a fixed glare, upper eyelids raised against a lowered brow, which almost always suggests the first phase of suppressed anger.

That you’re pissed about something
—
Me? Terri?
—
but trying to conceal it.

But I couldn’t say that, so I just returned his artificial smile.

Denton leaned into Terri in a way that made me think he was marking his property—
this gal is mine, sort of thing.
“Well?” he said.

“I would say that your expression is one of a successful and self-satisfied man.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, sir.”

We stared at each other a moment, then Denton turned away from me and asked Terri to follow. I watched the door close behind them, then flipped on the overhead projectors to look at the drawing of Carolyn Spivack.