Anatomy of Fear

17

Terri had to head back to Midtown North for another meeting with the feds but dropped me at the NYU campus.

I spent what felt like a worthless half hour with the roommate of the murdered college kid, Dan Rice. He and Rice had gone to a bar for a couple of beers before Rice went to get the car he kept in a midtown garage. He was planning to drive out and see his parents, but never made it. The roommate didn’t see anything. No man in a long coat or ski mask. The only thing I learned, which I hadn’t known before, was that Rice was from a wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut, family, but I didn’t think that was enough reason to kill him. He suggested I speak to Rice’s girlfriend.

“Was she with him?” I asked.

“No, but maybe she could tell you something.”

I told the kid he’d make a good cop and he smiled.

I cut across the campus, showed my badge to a guard in the dormitory, and took the elevator to the third floor. I was still thinking about Harrison Stone, the man shot in Brooklyn, when Beverly Majors opened the door.

She was a beauty, but that wasn’t the important part. The important part was that she was black. Harrison Stone’s wife was white. The same was true for Acosta, a Latino.

Interracial couples? Had the PD put it together too?

I asked Beverly Majors how long she had known Rice and she said about year.

“Did you mostly stay in or go out?”

“We just liked to hang out.” She shrugged, trying to act cool, but she had started to chew her lip and blink a lot; what people do when they’re trying not to cry. “I’d meet him downstairs in Washington Square.” She pointed out the window. “See that bench? We had lunch there like once a week. Sometimes, when we had time, we’d go up to Central Park and take a long walk.”

Washington Square. Central Park. Places to be seen.

But why had the killer gone for Rice and not her?

I couldn’t figure that out.

I asked her if it was all right if I sketched her and she shrugged again. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful. I just felt a need to draw her.

“I don’t look that good,” she said when I stopped.

“Sure you do.”

“You going to do anything with it?”

“You want it?”

She shrugged again, but I could see she did, so I tore it out of the pad and handed it to her. I didn’t think I needed it. I had just needed the process.

The process. Drawing.

The way to capture a subject.

It made me think about the unsub, the fact that he drew his victims before he killed them. Was it his way of capturing them?

Beverly Majors said “Thanks” and offered up a wan smile. She had stopped chewing her lip and seemed a little more relaxed. Maybe I had established some sort of rapport with her.

I brought her back to the night Rice had been killed and asked her to try and picture it.

She took a deep breath. “It was raining. I remember because I’d worn suede shoes and they got ruined. Oh, God, that sounds awful. I don’t care about the shoes. It’s just something I remember. I stepped into one of those greasy puddles, you know, in the curb, when gasoline or something mixes with the water?” She swallowed and I could see she was fighting tears.

I asked her to close her eyes and think about the crowd that had assembled once the cops were there.

“Did you notice anyone? Someone who stood out, someone you might have seen earlier in the evening, or anytime before?”

“I don’t think I ever looked at the crowd. I was just staring down into the puddles. I didn’t want to see what was going on.” A tear cut down her cheek.

“I know this is hard, but-”

“It’s okay. I, I don’t even know how I feel. I mean…I can’t locate my emotions. Does that sound weird?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know if Dan and I even had a future, but now…” She took another breath. “Dan was from a rich family and I grew up in a project. I can’t imagine what his parents would have thought if their only son brought home a black girl-and Dan never did. Bring me home, I mean.”

She was so charming and beautiful, it was hard to imagine anyone not falling for her, but I’d witnessed enough to know that prejudice lay just below the top layer of almost everyone’s skin, regardless of their color. Some hid it better than others, and some tried to overcome it. But it was pretty much here to stay and I guessed Beverly Majors knew that as well as I did.

I asked her a few questions that she couldn’t answer, but seeing her had told me something important.

I went downstairs and sat on the bench she’d pointed out from her dorm window. It was near the north end of the square, just a few feet from the arch and out in the open. Anyone could have seen them. Obviously someone had.

I called Russo right away and told her. The minute I did she said, “Interracial couples! Jesus! That’s what I’ve been trying to get at. The racial angle. I knew it had to be there.”