Anatomy of Fear

by Jonathan Santlofer

  Terri had called and asked me to meet her here. I showed my temporary badge to a uniform at the entrance to the tent. A CS tech handed me gloves, mask, and disposable bootees.

  Inside, Crime Scene was combing every inch of ground like ants at a picnic. The terrain looked as if a minor earthquake had struck, slabs of concrete from the original pier upended by the construction. There was a smell of newly uncovered dirt spiked with something rotten. Behind my mask I was trying not to breathe. The same CS tech who’d given me the paraphernalia at the entrance offered up a Vicks. I lifted my mask and rubbed it below my nose.

  I spotted Terri and the ME huddled with her men and some cops I didn’t know across the tent peering over a concrete slab about eight feet long and three feet wide. It was doing a Titanic impersonation, jutting out of the ground at an acute angle.

  At first it looked as if the girl were alive, though I knew it couldn’t be possible from the condition of her body. But her face seemed to be moving, eyes blinking. I looked close, immediately sorry. It was maggots. Crawling in and around her eye sockets.

  I closed my eyes too late, the image already imprinting on my retina.

  “Body must have rolled under the rock after the attack,” said one of the detectives.

  “Or the slab was used to hide her,” said another.

  “It kept her nice and cool,” said the ME. “That, and being so close to the river.”

  “How long has she been here?” Terri asked.

  The ME leaned in, kissing distance from the corpse. “I’d guess weeks, maybe even a month or two. Hard to say, the way the body’s been sheltered. It’s all ice under the concrete, like she was in cold storage.” He plucked up a squiggling maggot with a pair of tweezers and dropped it in a bag. “Lab will tell you more once these babies are tested.”

  The photographer’s strobe flashed, illuminating the girl’s hair like a halo.

  The ME lifted her mini with a pencil. “Doesn’t appear to be a sexual attack. Underwear’s intact, and there’s no bruising on the inner thighs.” He moved to the torn fabric of her tank top. “Can’t tell how many stab wounds until we get her back and hose her down.” He indicated slight bruising on her inner arm. “And she’s a user.”

  “Probably a pros,” said Perez. “In this neck of the woods.”

  “Any ID?” Perez asked CS.

  “Nada. Just some cash, which her attacker didn’t bother to take.”

  Terri caught my eye and nodded toward a makeshift evidence table. I knew what she wanted me to see.

  “It was beside the body, half under her,” she said. “And you hear what the ME said? Could be weeks, maybe a month; it’s an old kill.”

  “Yeah, I heard. And this sort of wrecks your moral-standards theory.”

  Her eyes, above the mask, looked puzzled for a moment.

  “You know, the part about him not killing girls.”

  Monica Collins arrived at the scene just as the NYPD Crime Scene van pulled out. She had her shield out in front of her, field agents flanking her like sentinels, and enough attitude to fill the tent.

  “Why wasn’t I informed about this?” She snapped on a pair of gloves.

  One of the detectives from the local Fifth Precinct who had never met her must have missed her FBI shield because he said, “Sorry, but I don’t got your number. Is it listed?”

  Collins asked for his name and badge number.

  Terri stepped in. “No one knew if this is related to the case yet, Agent Collins.”

  Collins wheeled around. “What part of ‘full cooperation’ do you not understand, Detective Russo?”

  “No one wanted to waste your time if it wasn’t related.”

  Collins didn’t respond. She headed toward the concrete slab that hid the body. She hadn’t put on her mask yet and I was sure she’d be sorry.

  Everyone stopped to watch as she reeled back from the corpse, hand across her nose and mouth.

  “Hope she chokes,” O’Connell whispered.

  Collins tried to look cool though her face was a bit green. “Where’s the drawing?”

  “Lab took it for testing,” said Terri.

  “Already?”

  “They’re efficient.”

  Collins’s eyes narrowed above the mask she had finally gotten in place. “Did the sketch look like the others?”

  “Not my area of expertise,” said Terri. “Plus, it was a mess. Torn up and stained. Hard to tell if it had anything to do with the vic. Could be a coincidence that it was found near the body. Might have blown onto her or been dug up by the construction.”

  I wasn’t sure if Terri was trying intentionally to piss off the agent or not. Everything she said was true, but Collins was steaming. She looked past Terri and caught my eye. “You,” she said. “Sketch artist. Did it look like the vic?”

  “You saw the vic’s face, Agent Collins. Nothing much left to compare it to.” I was pretty proud of my answer and could see by the slight smile in Terri’s eyes that she was too.

  Collins’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I’ll be speaking with Quantico officials, bringing them up to speed on these events.” She looked over at Terri, then turned and left.

  “You’re going to have to play ball with them eventually,” I said to Terri.

  “Gee, thanks for telling me that, Rodriguez.” She turned to her men. “You hear that, guys? Rodriguez here says we are going to have to play ball with G.”

  I put up my hands in defense. It just seemed to me that she was asking for trouble, and maybe I had been too.

  “Hey, I know,” said Perez. “Why don’t you draw a picture of ‘Lewinsky’ and we can frame it for her, like a gift.”

  “I’d make a drawing of you, Perez, but I draw faces, not assholes.”

  Perez’s arm snapped back, ready to let me have it, but O’Connell grabbed him. “Easy there, Pretzel. Rocky here didn’t mean no harm, did you, Rocky?”

  Rocky?

  “It was a joke,” I said to Perez.

  “Pendejo,” said Perez.

  I was ready to call him a fool too, plus a few other choice names, but Terri told everyone to relax. Then she looked up at me, a smile ticking at the corners of her lips. “Rocky?” she said. “Hmmm…don’t know about that.”

  21

  Terri had half the department going through Missing Persons and within a few hours they’d come up with three viable candidates for the Hudson Pier Jane Doe. After that, it didn’t take long to match the dental records to a nineteen-year-old runaway named Carolyn Spivack, who had priors for possession and prostitution.

  An hour later we were in the basement of a housing project on West Twentieth: dung-colored walls, cracked linoleum tiles, flickering fluorescent lights. It was a teen shelter for runaways, unwed mothers, and junkies, and the last-known address for Carolyn Spivack. Terri had asked me along in case there was a drawing to be made.

  We knew what we were looking for, but didn’t expect to find it so quickly.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Maurice Reed, the guy who ran the shelter. “Carolyn had totally straightened herself out.” He eased himself into a hard-backed chair. “She just wanted to help others who had been in her position. She’d been working here for eight months. She was…a beautiful human being.”

  It was Reed who had reported her missing, his name on the missing persons report, though that did not clear him of suspicion. It was a well-known fact that killers often reported their crimes, particularly when they were close to the victim.

  “Do her parents know?” he asked.

  “Her parents are on their way from Cincinnati to claim the body,” said Terri.

  Reed blinked a few times, and swallowed. It looked to me as if he was fighting tears.

  “How did Carolyn come to the shelter?” Terri asked.

  “Like most. She sort of just washed up, you know, broke and broken, at our door.” He sighed. “Nicky brought her in.”

  “Nicky?”

  “A former street hustler, bu
t he’s cool now. He’ll be here in a little while if you want to talk to him.”

  Terri didn’t soft-pedal her next question: “There were track marks on her arm. You know about that?”

  “They had to be old ones. Carolyn was clean. I’m sure of it. She was here every day. I managed to get her on staff with a small salary I wheedled out of social services. She had to go for drug testing every week. I’m telling you, she was clean.” He exhaled a deep sigh. “Carolyn was great with people, particularly the girls who’d gone through the same stuff she had.”

  A dozen micro-expressions—all of them sad—passed across the man’s face.

  “You know where she lived?” Terri asked.

  “I wouldn’t know that.”

  “You said she was here every day,” said Terri. “And she never told you where she lived?”

  Reed’s facial muscles went from sad to scared, mouth open, eyes wary, and I started to sketch him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s just…what I do. I’m a sketch artist.”

  “Wait a minute. You don’t think I could have—”

  “No one said anything about you being a suspect, Mr. Reed. It’s what Rodriguez does to keep his hands busy.”

  It worked. Reed got nervous.

  “Now that I think about it,” he said. “She must have been at the Alfred Court, over on Sixteenth, between Eighth and Ninth. It’s the last of its kind, a rooming house. Pretty funky, but it serves its purpose.”

  “You sound like you know it pretty well, Mr. Reed.”

  “Well, we put some of the runaways up there; the state pays for it.”

  “You ever been inside Carolyn’s room?”

  Reed’s eyelids flickered and he looked away. “No.”

  He was lying. But I’d pretty much surmised what was going on the minute we’d stepped into the shelter and met Reed, and I was sure Terri had too. It fit the profile. What we had been looking for that had made Carolyn Spivack a target. I roughed in a bit more of his face, though he kept looking down or turning away.

  “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.

  Another 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.”
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  “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

  Over 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.