Anatomy of Fear

29

Denton used the new cell phone for the first of two calls he would make before throwing it away.

“How’s it going, Joe?”

“I’ve been waiting for you to call me back is how it’s going. I was thinking I might have to call a reporter or something.”

“Take it easy, Joe. No need to do anything rash. I was busy. So what’s the problem?”

“No problem. I was just thinking I’d like to go to Honolulu earlier, say end of the month.”

The cheap phone was breaking up and Denton wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly. “Go where? Honolulu? Now?”

“Yeah. And I could use a little cash to get settled.”

“I just gave you the last condo payment.” You little fuck. But no, he would not lose his temper. There was no need. “Like how little?”

“Just a few thousand. I wouldn’t want to squeeze an old friend.”

“Real considerate of you, Joe.” He thought a moment. “I’ll bring it by. How’s tonight?”

“How come you’re suddenly in such a hurry?”

“Just want to make you happy, Joe. You going to be in?”

“Yeah, where else do I have to go?”

“It’ll be late.”

“Like I said, I have nowhere to go.”

Denton disconnected and made the other call. “Tonight,” he said, gave the particulars again, then tossed the phone into a trash bin. Aloha, Joe.

Denton took a deep breath and turned his thoughts to the fact that the media had gotten the story. It was a miracle they hadn’t gotten it sooner, but now he’d have to hold a press conference, do some damage control before they got the rest-a serial killer was bad enough, but race killings, the worst. The minute that got out, every bleeding-heart liberal would be clocking in with their opinion.

He opened the Post and glanced at the story. How the hell had they gotten wind of Rodriguez? He guessed if someone was sniffing around the story it would not be too difficult.

You read minds, Rodriguez?

Just faces.

So what’s my face telling you right now?

That you’re a successful and self-satisfied man.

Smug little bastard. So why did it make him uncomfortable? He never should have agreed to let Russo bring him in. No question she was sleeping with the guy. Maybe that’s what was pissing him off. But he was going to keep an eye on Rodriguez. On Russo too.

Manhattan FBI Headquarters was streamlined and quiet like a conservative law firm, except the employees were wearing JCPenney instead of Brooks Brothers.

Terri and I were following Agent Richardson. They had a suspect in custody.

We headed down an aisle, cubicles on either side, through a maze of hallways, and finally into a waiting room with a two-way mirror. Through the mirror we could see agents Collins, Archer, and the charismatic Dr. Schteir. Richardson told us to wait, but Terri followed him.

Next thing, there she was, on the other side of the glass with the feds.

I found the switch, flipped it on, and the actors behind the glass started speaking their lines.

“HQ wants Dr. Schteir to do the interrogation,” said Collins, the edges of her mouth tugged down with disappointment. “You can watch, Russo, but that’s all.”

“Sorry,” said Terri. “But Denton wants the NYPD represented. He specifically asked me to be in on this.” She sucked her lip and rubbed a hand across her eyes, two things people do when they’re lying.

Collins sighed so loudly, I could hear it through the speaker. “Okay, but stay out of Dr. Schteir’s way. We already have too many people in here.”

Schteir turned to Collins. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait outside too.”

Collins’s mouth opened and stayed open, but no words came out.

“Sorry,” said Schteir. “But I don’t want the suspect to be distracted, and I think two women are already enough. It would be really helpful to me if you watched the interrogation at a distance, to see if I’ve missed anything, okay?” She smiled and said, “Thanks,” before Collins could get her mouth and brain to work in tandem, the shock of being excluded obviously too much for her to take in.

Then Schteir turned to Archer and asked him to stay.

A second later Collins came out looking like someone who’d just been told her puppy had died.

I moved over to give her some room, but she ignored my gesture and remained standing, staring through the glass and the people behind it like a kid with her nose pressed against a candy counter.

Then the door at the back of the interrogation room opened.

The suspect’s hands were cuffed; ankles too. I leaned forward to get a good look at him. His features were bland and indistinct.

The guard pushed him into a seat and Schteir said, “Easy.” He gave her a look as the guard attached the ankle shackles to a metal ring in the floor.

“Why all the hardware?” I asked.

“He had a personal arsenal,” said Richardson. “According to the agents that brought him, there were more WMD than Saddam ever had. Looked as if he was preparing for World War III, in Queens, of all places.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Name’s Carl Karff. And his arsenal included the same kind of gun that killed the two victims. No matter what, we’ve got him on illegal weaponry and conspiracy to incite.”

“Onetime leader of the World Church of the Creator,” said Collins without turning around. “He’s not the grand pooh-bah anymore, but still a big cheese in the organization.”

“Spent three years up at Fishkill Correctional for assault,” said Richardson.

“Was this part of a general roundup of local white supremacists, or what?” I asked.

“Bureau ran a trace of the gun brand,” said Richardson. “Lots of names popped up, Karff’s among them. The bureau’s been watching him-and others like him-for a long time. He spends a lot of time in chat rooms, easy to hack into. And at one time he made his living as a commercial artist. Lots of markers made his name stand out.”

I looked through the glass as Archer took a seat opposite Karff. It was obvious why Schteir had chosen him to stay with her and it wasn’t because he was big; it was because he was black.

Karff made an attempt to fold his cuffed hands and I caught a glimpse of small blue swastikas tattooed on the inner sides of his wrists.

Terri was pacing, but she never took her eyes off Karff. Her face had hardened in a way I hadn’t seen before, lips drawn into a tight line, eyes lidded and squinting. She looked mean as hell.

Schteir was going through her notes, muttering things like, “Wow,” and “Oh, brother.”

I recalled a visiting lecturer to my Quantico course, a retired FBI agent experienced in the art of interrogation, saying, “Everyone has something to hide, something they are ashamed of-you just have to let your subject think that you know what it is.”

I guessed that’s what Schteir was doing now.

Archer read Karff his rights, and reminded him he could have a lawyer present.

“God is representing me,” he said.

Terri let out a short, disdainful laugh.

“Duane Holsten sends his regards,” said Schteir.

Karff turned to look at her, facial muscles neutralized, impossible to read. “I have never met Mr. Holsten.”

“But he’s a member of your church.”

“There are many members of the World Church of the Creator-perhaps you will meet them one day.” A smile passed over his lips. “As for Mr. Holsten, I have followed his case with some interest. I understand he recently filed an appeal.”

“It was declined,” said Schteir. “You wasted your money. We know the World Church has been raising money for his case. The FBI has been charting its activities for some time, and watching you as well, Mr. Karff, your comings and goings.” She opened a file and ran her finger down the page. “The name Swift ring any bells?”

A micro-expression of anxiety, eyelids and lips ticking, rattled his composed face, but didn’t last.

“That’s okay, Swift. Would you prefer I call you that?”

Karff didn’t answer, his facial muscles under control, mask back in place.

“So, your comings and goings,” said Schteir. “For starters, we know where you go when you get into your Ford station wagon late at night, after your daughter is tucked into bed and you have kissed your wife good night.”

Karff’s jaw tightened.

“But let’s wait with that. Tell me, Mr. Karff, are you a Christian?”

“Most Christians have abandoned God and their race.” He squinted at her name tag. “Schteir? Not a Christian name, is it?”

“It’s a Jewish name, Mr. Karff. Does that offend you?”

“Your people have been part of a plot to upgrade the blacks and pull down the white race.”

“And no doubt you and your fellow World Church members have a plan to deal with that.”

“A very simple one.” Karff raised his chin and the hint of more tattoos on either side of his neck poked out of his shirt collar.

“What’s that on his neck?” asked Richardson.

“Lightning-bolt tattoos,” I said. “Like the ones on Nazi soldiers’ uniforms.”

“The blacks will be shipped back to Africa where they belong,” said Karff. “The Jews driven from power, and as for the Christian traitors, they will be hanged in public squares.”

Anthropologists make the case that humanity has evolved, and if you’re talking about ape to upright man, I guess that’s true, but at the moment I didn’t think the species had evolved much at all.

Terri stopped pacing and leaned into Karff’s face. “Oh, someone will be hanging in those public squares, Carl, you can be sure of that.”

Karff pulled back, but Terri trailed him like a magnet.

Schteir let her stay there a minute, then tapped her arm. “Let the man breathe, detective.”

“For now,” said Terri, backing up.

Archer looked ready to pummel Karff, his hands knotted into fists, and Schteir made sure he noticed. She touched the agent’s fists, whispered, “Relax, you’ll get your turn.”

Without discussing it, they’d all assumed roles: Terri’s bad cop to Schteir’s good one; Archer the brute enforcer, just barely under control. I was itching to join the act, maybe play my sketch-artist card, do a drawing of the guy to add to his discomfort, and I suggested it to Collins.

“You kidding?” she said, without turning around.

I got the point. If she couldn’t be in there, no way she was letting me in.

“And you will enact your plan, how?” asked Schteir. “With the guns and knives you-and others like you-have amassed in basements and attics?”

“We will do what we have to do,” said Karff. “Heed my warning. The war is coming.” He looked over at Archer and said, “RAHOWA!”

“Ah, yes,” said Schteir, affecting ennui. “RaHoWa. Ra for Racial, Ho for Holy, Wa for War. Your group’s battle cry. You know…it sounds very much like the language used by a tribe in Papua, New Guinea. Fascinating people. I wonder if that’s where it comes from.”

“You think you’re so smart, like all of your kind.” Karff’s eyes had narrowed. “We’ll see how smart you are when the war comes, you Jew bitch-”

Archer grabbed hold of Karff’s arm. “Watch your mouth.”

Karff eyed Archer’s dark hand on his pale white flesh.

Schteir allowed the agent to do a little damage-Karff would be bruised by morning-then she laid her hand gently over Archer’s, and said, “I think that’s enough-for now.”

Archer gave the man’s arm another good squeeze before he let go.

“So, Mr. Karff, let’s get back to the present war, the small, sad little war you and your fellow World Church members are fighting, the one where you kill off one person at a time.” She slid crime scene pictures of the victims onto the table.

“Who are these mud people and race traitors supposed to be?”

“Come now, Mr. Karff, you can do better than that,” said Schteir.

“I have no idea what you want me to say.”

“Say whatever you want to say, Mr. Karff. After all, this is a free country, a country that allows you to espouse your religious and racial views without threat of punishment. So speak your mind. Go on. Tell me what you think of me, of Agent Archer here, of the people you refer to as the mud people and race traitors.” She slapped her hand down hard onto the photos and Karff flinched.

Terri snatched the photos up and one by one raised them to his face.

“These are people,” she said. “Do you even get that concept? I realize it might be difficult for an emotional cripple like you, but try.”

Karff stared straight ahead, freezing his expression.

Was this the face I had been trying to see? I wasn’t sure. There was something generic about it, the kind of man you might pass in the street without noticing.

Terri dropped the photos and planted her face into Karff’s, nostrils flared, eyes narrowed. “Your weapons have been confiscated, Carl. So what are you now, huh? Just a sad little man with Nazi tattoos that make you feel tough.” She laid her fingers onto one of his blue-inked swastikas. “You’re being watched, Carl, like the song says: “…every move you make.”’

Karff continued to stare, but his lids were flickering; she was getting to him.

“We’re seeing it. All of it, Carl. My friends here at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, hell, they’re just itching to publicize your anti-American activities. Not a popular subject these days, and getting less popular by the minute. We’re going to take you down, Carl. Way fucking down.”

I’d never seen Terri like this, and believed she could take him down.

The veins in Karff’s neck were standing out in high relief as he strained his head back like a turtle’s.

Schteir put her hand on Terri’s shoulder. I wasn’t sure it was the right move, but maybe she just wanted to run the show.

“What?” Terri barked.

“I think it’s time we showed Mr. Karff the photos we have of his late-night drives.” She maneuvered herself in front of Terri, who backed up and took a few deep breaths to regain her composure.

Schteir spread a new set of photos across the table. I couldn’t see them, but Karff could, his eyes twitching, frontalis muscles wrinkling his forehead, mentalis muscles quivering his chin. “Here we have you leaving your Queens home and getting into your station wagon at eleven-fourteen P.M.,” said Schteir. “You can see how the digital camera notes the time and date in the lower corner. Terrific invention, the digital camera, don’t you think? Not to mention the zoom lens.”

“I see the date,” said Karff. “And I also see these are six months old.”

“We have similar ones from one week earlier, and then a week or so before that. I suppose the photographer got bored taking the same pictures over and over.” She laid another photo in front of him. “Let’s see where your car ends up, shall we? Ah, here it is, on the other side of the river, in Manhattan, at eleven forty-seven P.M., on West Fourteenth and Greenwich Street. I wonder what you were doing there at close to midnight?”

She slid another picture out of the stack. “Here you are, on the corner, and there’s a really tall woman leaning into your driver’s-side window. A black woman. I’ve misjudged you, Mr. Karff, thinking you were a racist. It just goes to show you how wrong snap judgments can be.” Schteir peered at the photo. “No, wait a minute-that’s no woman!” She handed the picture to Terri.

“Oh, Carl, what a bad boy you are.” She snickered. “Would you look at that, Agent Archer.” Terri waved the photo. “Carl here gets off on she-males.”

Karff had turned pale.

“And what is happening here at eleven fifty-two P.M.?” Schteir had already turned to another photo. “It appears as if that same tall woman-excuse me, that tall black man dressed as a woman-has gotten into your car, and the two of you are…oh, my, look at this.” She raised the photo for Archer and Terri to see.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Terri. “Let’s put these pictures on Carl’s personal website-or even better, the World Church’s website. What do you think?”

“Great idea,” said Schteir, smiling.

“Those pictures are a fake,” said Karff.

“Well…Let’s just see what others make of them, shall we?” said Schteir.

“For starters,” said Terri. “How about…Carl’s wife?”

“You can’t do that.”

“Mr. Karff,” said Schteir. “I am the FBI. And I can do whatever I want.”

Karff’s lower lip was trembling. “I told you I don’t know those people.”

“Well, maybe you do and maybe you don’t,” said Schteir. “As we speak, our lab technicians are checking your weapons and we will soon know for sure whether or not they have been fired recently. If the bullets match, we will know if you knew these people. In the meantime, I’ll tell you what I want. I want names. Names and addresses of everyone who is connected to your church in this geographic section of the world. I want to know who you talk to and who talks to you. I want to know who has come to you for guidance, orders, repentance, or whatever the hell else you people talk about. You understand, Mr. Karff? I hope so, because I am one tough Jewish bitch who would like nothing better than to put your pathetic white ass in an Attica cell with murderers and rapists and let them know that you refer to them as mud people.”

Karff’s face hardened again, features pulled toward the center and tensed. “My Aryan brothers will protect me.”

I knew he was referring to the Aryan Brotherhood, The Brand, as they liked to call themselves, which had started back in the sixties in San Quentin, a way for the whites prisoners to protect themselves against the blacks and Latinos.

“Oh, I think we can find a place where the Aryan Brotherhood is outnumbered,” said Terri.

Schteir nodded. “So, what do think, Mr. Karff? It’s either you or someone you know who is responsible for these killings. And even if it isn’t you, we’re going to hold you-which we can do for a very long time-if even one of the forty-six guns recovered from your home is not licensed. And that’s just for starters. So, any of this getting through to you?” She turned to Archer. “I’d like a set of close-ups of this African American gentleman in the wig and hot pants and his statement as well. It’s in the large file on Mr. Karff. I believe the gentleman goes by the name of Veronique, who, by the way, Mr. Karff, will testify that you are the man in the Ford station wagon that she, excuse me-he-has been servicing for quite some time now.”

Karff raised his head, ice-blue eyes gazing at the ceiling. “Any day now the angels will sing and the trumpets will herald the end of days, and chains like these”-he yanked at his handcuffs and rattled the shackles at his ankles-“will fall from my body, and we will take up arms and all will be restored with the world.”

“Yeah,” said Terri, hissing the word. “While you rot in a prison cell.”

Schteir slid the victims’ photos back in front of Karff, but it was no good. He was gone, hiding behind rhetoric.

Terri took a step toward Karff, ready to go at him again, but Schteir stopped her.

Karff had neutralized his face, but his fingers were twitching.

It gave me an idea.

“Get him to draw,” I said.

“What?” said Collins.

“Have Karff draw something. Anything. So we can compare it to the sketches left at the scenes.”

“He’s not going to do it just because we ask him to.”

She had a point, but I could see she was considering it. She wanted to be in there, to contribute something. I just had to convince her.

“Look, just take his cuffs off, leave a pencil and paper on the table, and let him sit there for a while, alone. He was a commercial artist, right? People who draw, just do. They doodle all the time. It’s like a reflex.”

Collins didn’t say anything, but the next thing I knew she was on the other side of the glass, whispering to Dr. Schteir. A moment later they took the cuffs off Karff. Archer disappeared and came back with a big cup of coffee. Schteir gathered up the photographs and files, but made it look accidental when she left a few blank sheets of paper behind. She also left a black pen.

“Nice idea,” said Schteir when she came out. “But he’s probably too smart to fall for it.”

“Well, he’s not going to do some full-out drawing for us, but maybe a doodle.” I turned to Terri. “You did good in there.”

“Not good enough,” she said, directing her comment to Schteir. “You see how he reacted when Archer touched him or when I was in his face? He didn’t like it one bit-a black man and a woman invading his space. We could have done more with that if-”

“Detective.” Schteir spoke quietly but clearly. “You were a participant by our permission. Lest you forget this is a bureau interrogation. We do things a bit differently. You did…just fine. But we’ll take it from here.”

Terri pressed her lips together, hard, containing her rage.

“At least the coffee is going make him want to pee,” said Archer. “And I’m not letting him out of there for…a long time.”

“I think you showed great restraint,” I said to Archer.

“So far,” said Archer.

Then we all stared at Karff like a bug behind glass.

After a few minutes he picked up the pen and we leaned forward. He put it down and we sat back.

We watched for a few minutes and I filled the time chatting with Dr. Schteir, which seemed to annoy Terri, who had gone unusually quiet.

Fifteen, twenty minutes passed, then Schteir had to leave, and a moment later Collins did too. She took Archer with her.

“Lest,” Terri whispered to me. “Does anyone actually use the word lest?”

“Apparently,” I said.

When Karff didn’t do anything for another fifteen minutes, I started to think I’d miscalculated. Richardson starting talking about the Mets, how they were already off to a bad start. He asked me what it was like to be a sketch artist and I asked him what it was like to be a G man. We were filling the time. It was better than watching Karff pick his nose or yawn.

Then Karff picked up the pen and while looking at the ceiling he started doodling away on the paper.