Anatomy of Fear (37 page)
We found it just off the kitchen.
I nodded silently at Terri and she nodded back. I tried the door. It opened into a staircase that disappeared into darkness.
There was a light switch on the wall, but I didn’t dare turn it on.
The presence was stronger here.
Could he be down there, waiting for us?
I locked eyes with Terri, steadied my gun, took the first step. Then another. It felt like a long descent.
At the bottom there was the slight smell of mold and the chill of dampness, and it took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dark.
The basement was unfinished, concrete-slab floor, half the room taken up by an oil burner and hot water heater. And another door.
I leaned my ear against it and listened, looked back at Terri, her eyes wide in the dark, and wondered if she was thinking what I was: that if Tim Wright was anything like Carl Karff, he could have an arsenal behind this door and be ready to take us out.
I moved in front of her and tried the doorknob. It wouldn’t budge. I ran my hand down the wood. It felt crude and cheap, the kind of prefab door you buy in a lumberyard and put up yourself. I dropped back and leveled a solid kick. The door cracked and splintered off its hinges, and I kept moving, propelled by the force of my own kick, stumbling forward into darkness, blind. And I felt it, that
algo malo
my
abuela
had spoken of.
There is a man in that room with you, Nato.
I managed to stay on my feet and when nothing happened I knew that I was okay, that he wasn’t here, though somehow I knew I had found him.
Terri reached out to me, her shadowy form taking on detail. I fumbled along a wall and found the light switch.
I saw the presence I’d been feeling: this shrine to hate.
I recognized the swastikas, Nazi lightning bolts, insignia of the World Church of the Creator; the ones I didn’t know were just more proof that a whole lot of people didn’t like me. It was ugly stuff, chilling, but there was no time to process it.
The work table was neat: pencils lined up, drawings and folders in stacks. Pinned above it, newspaper articles about the Sketch Artist. It was true, he was proud of his work.
I’d found my proof and didn’t have to say it.
“Is there a clue here to what he’s planning next?” asked Terri.
I looked down at the stacks of drawings. I didn’t know. There were too many.
Terri plucked gloves out of her pocket and we put them on.
“We have to take them back to the station.”
“Wait. Give me a minute.” I needed to think like him. “What was it I said about him based on his drawings—that he was neat
and compulsive, right? And his work table confirms it.
Everything’s in its place.
So I’m guessing the top drawings would be the most recent ones, whatever he’s planning next.”
“But what is it exactly?”
Terri tapped one of the drawings that topped a stack.
“A building? I’m not sure.” That’s when it hit me. It looked like my grandmother’s last vision.
The other stacks had similar drawings on top, all variations of this same image, fairly abstract, but it was coming together for me.
But where?
I wondered.
And when?
I swiped the top drawings off each stack and Terri gasped when we saw what was under them.
“My God, what is he planning, World War III?”
“It looks it,” I said. “The question is, where?”
I was trying to stay calm, to think like him, to be organized and obsessive.
Everything we needed to know was here, somewhere. I went through the stacks; more images of explosions and mayhem. I opened a folder and found a sketch similar to the one of the black man, Harrison Stone, who’d been shot in Brooklyn.
“This looks like a practice sketch, like he must have drawn this vic over and over till he got it right.”
There was a page of notes in the file too, dates and times, a stalker’s journal.
I started riffling through other folders, opening one after another. More sketches with times and dates.
“They’re all here,” said Terri. “All his vics.”
“It’s like he’s some sort of perverse perfectionist, drawing and redrawing his prey till he gets whatever it is he’s after.”
We kept looking, hoping to find something that related to those abstracted explosion drawings, but there was nothing.
We scanned the room—the walls covered with posters, the table, the floor—and that’s when we found it: one more drawing, crumpled in a small trash can tucked under the table.
I smoothed it out on the table. It took only a few seconds for the image to register and set my body trembling.
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
I explained it, stuttering, my fear kicking in, then we raced up the stairs and out the front door. It no longer mattered who saw us.
The Mercedes engine kicked over and I burned rubber down Twenty-third Avenue. I had one hand on the steering wheel, the other gripping my cell, hitting redial over and over. There was no answer. I pressed my foot to the accelerator and prayed I was not too late. I prayed to Jesus and Chango and every saint and
orisha
I could think of.
I prayed and prayed.
I
was attempting to weave the Mercedes through a snarl of traffic we’d just hit on the FDR.
“Done,” said Terri, snapping her cell shut. “NYPD has an APB out on Wright, Queens PD is sending a CS team to comb through his house, and I called the local PD and told them where to meet us.”
“Did they say when they could get there?”
“They’ll get there soon. It’ll be okay.”
I wanted to believe her, but couldn’t stop worrying. I lay on my horn, but there was nowhere to go. “How about calling to get us an escort with a siren?”
“They’d have to fight this traffic to find us, and we’re not far, are we?”
I noted the signs, the exit coming up. No, we weren’t far, but every minute felt like an hour. I swerved the Mercedes onto the shoulder, reached the exit, and took the ramp a lot faster than the suggested thirty miles per hour.
“I’ve got to call Collins,” said Terri. “It kills me to do it, but I’m not going to give the G cause to say I kept them out of this.”
“While you’re at it, remember to have them call the dogs off
me.
”
T
erri made her call, then sat back and stared out the window. She had not yet told Rodriguez about Cold Case opening his father’s old murder book. Opening a Pandora’s box was more like it. She had never imagined it would cause him more trouble, give the PD and feds further reason to suspect him. She had thought she was doing him a favor, hoping to get him some closure when she went to Tutsel and Perkowski, but it hadn’t worked out that way.
She turned and looked at his profile, the square cut of his jaw set tighter than usual, the determined, almost frenzied, look in his eyes.
She’d been right about him. He’d broken the case for her.
And it was all going to be all right, wasn’t it?
B
e quiet.”
He slaps the tape across her mouth, sick of her whimpering, unmoved by the tears on her face. “And don’t look at me!”
He cannot bear her stare, something about it unnerving. He would kill her right now if she were not so important.
He hears the footsteps above, the place filling up, empties his gym bag, and sets to work.
T
here were two local uniforms hanging outside the apartment door, a big redheaded guy, the other black, both looked as if they were fresh out of the academy.
“You’ve just been
standing
here?” I was practically shrieking, ready to tear their heads off, fumbling to get the key in the lock.
“We just got here,” said the redhead. “I knocked, but there was no answer.”
“You call this fucking backup?” I said to Terri.
She steadied my hand on the lock, said, “Take it easy,” and I almost took her head off too.
