Anatomy of Fear

by Jonathan Santlofer

  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.

  I played with the projector’s lens to enlarge it as much as possible.

  What is it?

  I slipped the picture out of the projector and remembered where I had seen it. But it didn’t make any sense.

  Out in the hall Denton was nowhere in sight. Chief of Operations Mickey Rauder was talking to Terri, and he signaled me over.

  “Nice work,” he said. “Your old man would have been proud.”

  The sentence stopped me cold, though I could see he was waiting for me to respond. “You knew my father?”

  “Yes, we were in the same division, Narcotics, way back when.” He squinted at me. “You look like him.”

  Did I? I had never allowed myself to think so.

  “Juan Rodriguez was a good man.”

  I nodded, unable to locate my voice.

  “Guess I’m one of the few cops who decided to stay way past when most cops retire, but it paid off. Here I am chief of operations. Some days I can hardly believe it, but if you stay in long enough you never know.”

  I managed to say, “Uh-huh,” looked past the man’s basset-hound wrinkles to see he was younger than I’d originally thought, mid-fifties, like my father would have been.

  “I think your old man would have stayed too.” He squinted at me again. “Can’t get over how much you look like him.”

  I nodded again, hoping he would just stop talking.

  But he wouldn’t quit. “I was thinking back there in the briefing room how your father would bring your drawings into the station and hang ’em up. He was so damn proud of you.”

  Mickey Rauder waited for me to say something, but when I didn’t he slapped me on the back, said he hoped to see me around, to keep up the good work, and left me standing there with tears burning behind my lids and my heart in my throat.

  You okay?” Terri asked.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “Good. There are a few things I want to go over with you.”

  “Later,” I said, and took off.

  I headed out of the precinct with a picture of my father so strong in my mind that he could have been walking right beside me.

  23

  I shuttled crosstown from Times Square to Grand Central, then and waited on the subway platform for the number 6 train. It seemed to be taking forever. I kept looking down the tunnel, impatient, highlights of Mickey Rauder’s conversation reverberating in my head.

  You look like your old man…He was so damn proud of you…

  When the train finally pulled into the station I was so lost in reflection, it startled me.

  I gripped an overhead bar and stared at an ad for whiter, brighter, teeth without seeing it, the drawing of Carolyn Spivack shimmering in my brain.

  What I was thinking did not seem possible, but I was going to check it out.

  My grandmother was waiting at her front door as I came out of the fifth-floor stairwell. I was puffing for breath.

  “The elevator, está roto?”

  I shook my head, took a few deep breaths. “No, I, uh, just wanted the exercise.”

  She gave me a look. “¿Qué te pasa?”

  “Nada, uela. Everything’s fine.”

  “Estás mintiendo. I see it in your eyes.”

  My grandmother read faces better than I did.

  “I just need to see something.” I leaned down to kiss her cheek.

  She laid her hand on my arm. “¿Cuál es el problema?”

  “There’s no trouble, uela. I just need to get my drawing pad.”

  She planted her hands firmly on her hips. “You don’t have another at home?”

  “I just want to see something, is that okay with you, officer?”

  “Oye, chacho.” She waved a hand. “You are such a mentiroso.”

  She headed to the small hallway closet where I kept my pad and pencils, but I beat her to it, grabbed my pad, and hugged it to my chest. I wanted to look in private.

  She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes.

  “You will have something to eat.” It was not a question.

  I went into the livin
g room and sat down on the couch. My hands were shaking as I opened the pad to the last drawing I had made, the one of my grandmother’s vision.

  I took out the copy of the sketch found at Carolyn Spivack’s crime scene and an enlargement of the symbol on her belt that I’d made after I’d seen it projected on the briefing room wall.

  I had not been wrong. But how was it possible? It had to be some totally weird coincidence—the same symbol in the CS drawing and in my grandmother’s vision.

  My grandmother called out from the kitchen: “¿Quieres algo de tomar, cerveza?”

  I knew she just wanted to see what I was up to, but I said yes.

  A minute later she was handing me a Corona.

  She leaned over the couch. “What is so importante about this drawing pad?”

  I had already closed it and hidden the copies of the crime scene drawings.

  “I just wanted to check something.”

  “¿Qué?”

  “Since when are you a detective?”

  “Siempre.”

  “Always is right.” I had to smile. “Okay.” I opened the pad.

  She looked at the drawing and crossed herself. “I told you, the ashe in that room is no good.”

  “Yeah, I remember that. But what does the symbol mean?”

  “Yo no sé. It just appeared to me.” She sat down beside me. “¿Por qué?”

  I could never hide my feelings from her. I wasn’t sure I wanted to put too much stock in her visions, but this was undeniable.

  I was suddenly thinking back to the day before my father died. I’d been up on the roof of the building, Julio and I smoking a joint, listening to salsa music coming from open windows. When we came back into the apartment, there were lit candles everywhere and glasses filled with water at the bóveda. When I asked my grandmother why, she had waved me off.

  I didn’t want to stir up old grief, but had to ask. “The day before papi died you lit candles and filled the bóveda glasses. Why?”

  “Hace mucho tiempo.”

  “Sí, it’s a long time ago, uela, but I need to know.”

  “Why you want to know now?”

  I looked at her and waited.

  She took a deep breath. “I had a vision,” she said. “The night before…before it happen.” She described the vision, and I saw it.

  It was all I needed to bring me back to that night twenty years ago.

  I had begged Julio to come home with me, even kidded him. “Yo, mira, you’re supposed to be my bodyguard, mi pana, right? But he wouldn’t do it.

  When I got out of the subway at Twenty-third and Eighth, the streets were deserted; no music in the air, no hydrants spraying diamonds into the gutter. Just a drunk collapsed in front of a deli, and steam rising off the pavement.

  I headed up the two short blocks to Penn South. There were only a few windows lit, and I didn’t have to count the floors to know that it was my apartment, my parents waiting up for me. My mother had been at work when the shit had gone down between me and my father. By now, she had to know.

  I chewed a piece of Dentyne to mask the booze and dope.

  The apartment complex was quiet, the lobby empty. When I got off the elevator I could see light under the apartment door.

  I knew I was in for it. I took a couple of deep breaths and opened the door.

  There were two men standing there, detectives who worked with my father. The minute my mother saw me she started crying.

  At first I thought the cops had come looking for me, but that wasn’t it. She asked them to tell me. She couldn’t speak.

  Your father’s been shot, said one of the cops.

  Looks like a drug bust gone bad, said the other.

  Must have happened spontaneously, something going down that he tried to stop. The cop laid his hand on my shoulder and said my father was a brave man.

  I had to ask. And they told me.

  Two shots in the chest. One in the head.

  But only I knew what had happened—that it had been my fault.

  I never told my mother. How do you tell your mother that you killed your father, her husband?

  I forced the memory out of my head and listened to my grandmother.

  She said that after she had the vision she’d sought out the gods. She should have warned him, but knew that her son, a nonbeliever, would have scoffed at the warning.

  “Still,” she said, “I should have tried. Es un arrepentimiento.” There were tears in her dark eyes.

  I wanted to tell her that it had been my fault, not hers, but couldn’t find the words.

  She patted my hand and started talking about the egun, the dead, and how they interact with the living. We all have a specific number of days on earth, she told me, and those who are killed before that allotted time hang around as ghosts until their time is up, until their souls, their ori, can rest.

  I wondered if my father’s ori was looking for me.

  She tapped my drawing and her face grew dark. “There is something in that room, algo malo.” She looked up at me. “And now you are here to see it again. Por qué?”

  “It’s nothing, uela, like I said.”

  “Nato, por favor, do not lie to your abuela.”

  “It has to do with a case at the police station, that’s all. It doesn’t concern me, not personally.”

  My grandmother’s face showed me I was wrong. “You must stay away from this case, Nato. Es muy peligroso para tí.”

  “Sí, it is dangerous, uela, but not for me.”

  She shook her head. “I see you, Nato, in that room.”

  Now I was listening. “What else do you see?”

  She leaned back into the couch and closed her eyes. “I see you in that room with a man.”

  “What sort of man?”

  “No lo veo. It has been too long since I had the vision, but I still…feel him. Entiendes?”

  I told her I understood, and to relax, and her shoulders sloped a little, the muscles in her face eased. After a minute she said, “Las llamas, the flames, remember? In the room?”

  I turned back to the sketch I had made.

  “What about the man?” I asked.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “I see a dark face. Un hombre en máscara.”

  A man in a mask. I shivered.

  “There are—¿cómo se dice?—holes for his eyes and nose, his mouth too.” She was pointing out the features on her face with her eyes closed. “I can see the eyes, light eyes, con una mirada fria.”

  I found the sketch I’d made and asked her to look at it.

  “Madre mía.” She crossed herself and mumbled something under her breath about Chango.

  “Is there anything else?” I asked, feeling like I was in some paranormal thriller like The

  Omen, things I had always claimed I did not believe in but were now impossible to deny.

  “The eyes,” she said, describing them while I made another drawing.

  I showed her what I’d drawn.

  She took a deep breath and crossed herself again. “Sí, those are the eyes.”

  But how could my grandmother, up in Spanish Harlem, have any idea about the man we were hunting?

  She suddenly grasped my wrist. “Nato, ten cuidado.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course. I’m a careful guy, a born coward, a cobarde.” I tacked on a fake smile.

  “Don’t be a wise man,” she said, meaning a wise guy, which made me smile, and she shook a finger at me. “Do not make fun, chacho. I have seen you in that room. I do not know what it means, but…” She got up and crossed the room to the bóveda.

  I looked back at the symbol my grandmother had described, which I had drawn from her vision, the almost identical symbol on Carolyn Spivack’s belt, and it gave me another chill.

  My grandmother scooped up seashells from the bóveda. She was humming to herself while she moved the shells from hand to hand, “Ten Cuidado con el Corazón…” That favorite song of hers, a love song that came with a warning: Be careful. />
  24

  I folded myself into a hard-backed chair opposite Terri’s desk. I’d done some research and needed to tell her, but there was a question stuck in my mind since she’d pushed me into Denton’s face.

  “So what’s up between you and Denton?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It seemed to me that there was some history between you two.”

  Terri’s eyes flashed. “I have no history with that man.”

  That was essentially a declaration that she did have a history with “that man.” I remembered a lecturer at Quantico saying that people became impersonal when they wanted to distance themselves from something and it’s usually because they are hiding something or lying. It was like Bill Clinton saying, “I did not have sex with that woman.” I remembered hearing that and thinking, Oh, Bill, you so did. Which, by the way, was fine by me. If the president of the United States can’t get a blow job, who can? Though, perhaps he should not have gotten it in the Oval Office, from his intern.

  “So you’ve got no history with that man. Fine.”

  She tried to neutralize her face while maintaining eye contact. People tend to think if they make eye contact you will believe them.

  Terri let out a held breath. “Oh, fuck, what the hell do I care if you know I once had a five-minute fling with that son of a bitch? So what? It was before he was chief. Ancient history.”

  “Oh, ancient history. Sorry, I guess you thought I was asking about modern history.”

  “Screw you, Rodriguez.”

  “I was kidding. What are you getting so pissed off about?”

  “You were not kidding. And I’m pissed because you’re condemning me for something that was a mistake and meant nothing, and is over, and by the way, is none of your fucking business.”

  I put up my hands. “Sorry. And I’m not condemning you.”