Anatomy of Fear (30 page)

“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—”

“I know that,” she said. “But you’re the one who found the body.”

Homicide 101: He who finds the body is always the first suspect.

“Wait. I found the body, so you think
I
killed him? Give me a fucking break. I’ve been working the case, you know that. You can’t possibly think I had anything to do with the guy being killed.”

Collins just sat there.

“Look, I found the guy, yeah, and was stupid enough to track
his blood across the floor on my shoes, really stupid, but like I said, I wasn’t thinking. But I didn’t do anything to Cordero.”

“Okay,” said Collins.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, you weren’t thinking.”

“And I didn’t kill him either.”

“Okay,” she said again, in the same noncommittal tone.

Did she believe me? I searched her face for evidence, but she’d frozen her features.

I was beginning to feel like a character in a Kafka story. “I had nothing to do with Cordero getting killed. You know that, right?”

She didn’t say anything, not even okay, and then I saw it, the tic of suspicion, her eyes narrowing ever so slightly.

“How many times do I have to say it? I’ve been working this case. That’s why I wanted—
needed
—to see the drawing!” I could hear the shrillness in my voice. I wanted to stay calm, but couldn’t.

“I heard you.”

I didn’t want to utter the classic line, but had to. “Should I be calling a lawyer?”

“If you want to call a lawyer, fine, but I’m just asking questions for the record—and the camera.” She sat back and laced her fingers together. “You’re an awfully paranoid guy, Rodriguez.”

Was I?
God knows I’d walked around feeling guilty for twenty years. Maybe it was finally starting to show. I kept telling myself to relax, but my mind was spinning. Should I call a lawyer, or would that confirm I had something to hide? I could call Julio. He was a real estate lawyer, but he’d know a good criminal lawyer.
A criminal lawyer. Did I actually need one? Was this really happening?

Collins unlaced her fingers and sat forward. “It’s just a few more questions. After that, you can go home.” Her voice was calm.
She sounded perfectly reasonable. But I knew what I’d seen in her face. Words lie. Faces do not.

But I nodded, hoping she was telling the truth. Maybe I was being paranoid. I was so tired I couldn’t reason it out.

“So why do you think Cordero turned the heat off?”

“I don’t know. I suppose because the owners tell him to save on heat when he can.”

“And he’s done this before?”

“Yes. You should be asking the building owners why Cordero turned the heat off, not me.”

“We will,” she said. “Okay, just a few more things. We’ve got to make sure we don’t miss anything. You don’t want to go through this again, do you?”

I didn’t bother to say the obvious. And we did go through it again. And again.

T
he air outside felt colder and brittle, but maybe it was just me. I made it halfway down the street and had to stop. I could barely breathe, my head aching and light, my body like sludge.

Could they possibly suspect me? It was absurd. I was being paranoid, like Collins said. If they really suspected me of anything they’d have arrested me, right? And here I was, on the street, a free man.

But I couldn’t shake it. I had seen it in her face: doubt.

I’d seen something else too, something I had not yet processed, but was too tired to figure out what it was.

I headed toward the subway but hailed a cab instead. I couldn’t take another step.

I sagged into the seat and tried to relax. I told myself everything would be okay, that I was getting carried away. I was first on
the scene and they had to question me. It was their job. It was my bad luck, a coincidence that I’d found Cordero’s body.

What was it they’d taught us at the academy about coincidence? That there’s no such thing.

I shivered though the taxi was hot.

There was something else in that rule that was nagging at me, some other coincidence that wasn’t a coincidence, but I couldn’t see it, not with my head pounding and exhaustion so bad my muscles were twitching.

I got out my cell to call Terri and found two messages from her. She needed me to come to the station right away. It was urgent.

43

T
erri’s mouth was set tight, lips compressed.

“They cleaned up the Cordero sketch. That thing drawn on his arm that you suggested might be another white supremacist symbol—I had it enlarged.” She laid the paper down in front of me. “Look familiar?”

I stared at the image, trying to make sense of it, my hand involuntarily sliding up my shirtsleeve, covering my tattoo, which he’d copied and added to his drawing.

“Jesus. He must be stalking me!”

“Why would he do that?”

Terri’s face had the blank stare of someone who was trying hard to look neutral.

“Well, he must have read about me in the newspaper.

Stalking is his stock-in-trade,
right? What he’s done with all his victims.” The idea of him close to me, watching me, sent a chill up my back. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
It did, didn’t it?

Micro-expressions slid across Terri’s face like fast-moving clouds, but I was too tired to read them.

“Okay,” she finally said. “So he reads about you and stalks you. I guess I can see that.”

“You
guess
?”

“Hey, I blow up the unsub’s drawing and find your tattoo in it. It’s taking me a minute to digest this, all right?”

I saw her point.

“So why put your tattoo in the drawing?”

I tried to think it through, but I was exhausted, going on empty from no sleep. “To let me know how close he’s been? To…unnerve me? I don’t know, but it’s working.”

Terri just looked at me when all I wanted was to have her put her arms around me and tell me everything was okay. I guessed she liked her men tough and heroic and right now I felt anything but.

“When I got home from Boston I had a feeling someone had been in my place. I can’t explain it. My iPod was broken and—”

“Your iPod?”

“That’s not important. Well, it is, but—Look, you’ve trusted my feelings before, right? Well, I’m telling you now that I had a feeling he broke into my place, our unsub, the Sketch Artist. He was there. Before he killed Cordero.” It was as if I was listening to myself from a distance, judging my own words—and they didn’t exactly add up or make sense. How could I really know he’d been in my place? I couldn’t. But I knew what I felt.

“I’ll get Crime Scene to dust for prints, see if they can find anything.” Terri flipped open her cell.

“Oh—shit—wait. I cleaned up.”

“You what?”

“I cleaned up. The place was a mess. I wasn’t thinking.”

There it was, that same expression of doubt I’d seen on Collins’s face, orbicularis oris muscle puckering the lips, depressor glabellae lowering the brows.

“Don’t look at me like that, like you suspect me of something.”

“No one suspects you of anything.”

“No? I just spent a couple of hours with Agent Collins, who sure acted like I was a suspect.”

“It’s procedure.”

“That’s what she said.”

“And I’m sure she meant it. You’re not a suspect, not—” She stopped.

“Not
yet
? Is that what you were about to say?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth.” She laid her hand onto my shirtsleeve, slid it up to expose my tattoo. She glanced back at the sketch, my tattoo drawn onto the superintendent’s arm, her brows drawn together even more tightly. “The G is going to find this in the drawing—if they haven’t already.”

“But they don’t know it’s
my
tattoo.”

“No, but the minute they realize it’s not on the victim’s body, they’ll know it means something else. They’ll be sending the image out to every tattoo parlor in the country.”

“I got this tattoo twenty years ago and can’t see how—”

“And no one in the precinct, in the NYPD, has ever seen it?”

“Shit. I don’t know.”

Terri started pacing.

“Maybe he’s showing off for me, showing me how good he is, you know, one artist to another.”

“Maybe,” said Terri. “And if he was that close—he’ll be back.”

“The FBI should be putting a guard on me rather than suspecting me of something, grilling me.”

“They had to ask you those questions. So would I. It’s standard operating procedure.”

“Yeah, I know that. But if it’s standard, why do you look so worried?”

“I’m not. Not really.” She tried to smile, and failed. “Look, the vic, Cordero, was in your building and you found him. They have to look at you first. It’s proximity. It doesn’t mean anything. It’ll be okay, Nate.”

“Oh, shit, now I’m really worried. You’re calling me Nate.”

I thought that would make her laugh, but it didn’t. I glanced down at my tattoo. It had been a mistake twenty years ago, and here it was a mistake all over again. “Why would I put my own tattoo in the drawing? Why would I want to implicate myself?”

“Right,” she said, but her face said something different.

“What?”

“Well, you just said it when you were describing the unsub, that he was showing off. I mean…well, the G could apply that reasoning to you—that
you
were showing off, taunting the cops. They could say it was the next logical step, that you’re pushing the envelope. It’s not uncommon for psychos to play with the cops.”

“Could you stop making it sound so plausible?”

“It’s just the way it could look to them. But it won’t. Don’t worry. And I know you had nothing to do with this.” That same micro-expression flashed across her face: the shadow of a doubt.

If Terri didn’t believe me, who would? I tried to swallow, my throat dry. I could see the look of doubt on her face spreading like a virus to her men and to the feds. And what defense did I have? A feeling? A lousy feeling.

“It’ll be okay.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, I…” She tried to smile. “It’ll be okay.”

“Stop saying that.”

“What do you want me to say, Rodriguez?”

“Tell me that you’re on my side, that you believe me.”

“Of course I’m on your side.” Her face softened, and she touched my cheek. “They have nothing more than proximity.”

“So what do I do now?”

“Go home and get some sleep.”

44

I
fell into bed, body aching, mind in overdrive. If only I hadn’t gone down to complain about the heat I would never have found the body.

If only…if only…if only…

I played it over and over like a song stuck on repeat. I tossed and turned, fluffed the pillow up, punched it down. I kept hearing Collins’s questions and my answers, which now sounded lame. But they were the only answers I had. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, tried to picture clouds, sky, seascapes, but kept seeing my tattoo drawn into the sketch.

He had been following me. And he’d been in my apartment. I’d felt it. But that wasn’t enough. I needed proof. And there was none.

I thought Terri believed me, but if it came down to protecting her job or protecting me, which would she do?

I kicked off the blankets, went to the window, and stared down at Thirty-ninth Street. Could he be out there now? Watching? Waiting?

I flopped back into bed, but my eyes wouldn’t close. It was the middle of the day and I’d never been good at naps no matter how
tired I was. I stared at the ceiling and asked myself why I had not called the station the instant I’d seen Cordero lying in a pool of blood.