Anatomy of Fear

43

Terri’s mouth was set tight, lips compressed.

“They cleaned up the Cordero sketch. That thing drawn on his arm that you suggested might be another white supremacist symbol-I had it enlarged.” She laid the paper down in front of me. “Look familiar?”

I stared at the image, trying to make sense of it, my hand involuntarily sliding up my shirtsleeve, covering my tattoo, which he’d copied and added to his drawing.

“Jesus. He must be stalking me!”

“Why would he do that?”

Terri’s face had the blank stare of someone who was trying hard to look neutral.

“Well, he must have read about me in the newspaper.

Stalking is his stock-in-trade, right? What he’s done with all his victims.” The idea of him close to me, watching me, sent a chill up my back. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?” It did, didn’t it?

Micro-expressions slid across Terri’s face like fast-moving clouds, but I was too tired to read them.

“Okay,” she finally said. “So he reads about you and stalks you. I guess I can see that.”

“You guess?”

“Hey, I blow up the unsub’s drawing and find your tattoo in it. It’s taking me a minute to digest this, all right?”

I saw her point.

“So why put your tattoo in the drawing?”

I tried to think it through, but I was exhausted, going on empty from no sleep. “To let me know how close he’s been? To…unnerve me? I don’t know, but it’s working.”

Terri just looked at me when all I wanted was to have her put her arms around me and tell me everything was okay. I guessed she liked her men tough and heroic and right now I felt anything but.

“When I got home from Boston I had a feeling someone had been in my place. I can’t explain it. My iPod was broken and-”

“Your iPod?”

“That’s not important. Well, it is, but-Look, you’ve trusted my feelings before, right? Well, I’m telling you now that I had a feeling he broke into my place, our unsub, the Sketch Artist. He was there. Before he killed Cordero.” It was as if I was listening to myself from a distance, judging my own words-and they didn’t exactly add up or make sense. How could I really know he’d been in my place? I couldn’t. But I knew what I felt.

“I’ll get Crime Scene to dust for prints, see if they can find anything.” Terri flipped open her cell.

“Oh-shit-wait. I cleaned up.”

“You what?”

“I cleaned up. The place was a mess. I wasn’t thinking.”

There it was, that same expression of doubt I’d seen on Collins’s face, orbicularis oris muscle puckering the lips, depressor glabellae lowering the brows.

“Don’t look at me like that, like you suspect me of something.”

“No one suspects you of anything.”

“No? I just spent a couple of hours with Agent Collins, who sure acted like I was a suspect.”

“It’s procedure.”

“That’s what she said.”

“And I’m sure she meant it. You’re not a suspect, not-” She stopped.

“Not yet? Is that what you were about to say?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth.” She laid her hand onto my shirtsleeve, slid it up to expose my tattoo. She glanced back at the sketch, my tattoo drawn onto the superintendent’s arm, her brows drawn together even more tightly. “The G is going to find this in the drawing-if they haven’t already.”

“But they don’t know it’s my tattoo.”

“No, but the minute they realize it’s not on the victim’s body, they’ll know it means something else. They’ll be sending the image out to every tattoo parlor in the country.”

“I got this tattoo twenty years ago and can’t see how-”

“And no one in the precinct, in the NYPD, has ever seen it?”

“Shit. I don’t know.”

Terri started pacing.

“Maybe he’s showing off for me, showing me how good he is, you know, one artist to another.”

“Maybe,” said Terri. “And if he was that close-he’ll be back.”

“The FBI should be putting a guard on me rather than suspecting me of something, grilling me.”

“They had to ask you those questions. So would I. It’s standard operating procedure.”

“Yeah, I know that. But if it’s standard, why do you look so worried?”

“I’m not. Not really.” She tried to smile, and failed. “Look, the vic, Cordero, was in your building and you found him. They have to look at you first. It’s proximity. It doesn’t mean anything. It’ll be okay, Nate.”

“Oh, shit, now I’m really worried. You’re calling me Nate.”

I thought that would make her laugh, but it didn’t. I glanced down at my tattoo. It had been a mistake twenty years ago, and here it was a mistake all over again. “Why would I put my own tattoo in the drawing? Why would I want to implicate myself?”

“Right,” she said, but her face said something different.

“What?”

“Well, you just said it when you were describing the unsub, that he was showing off. I mean…well, the G could apply that reasoning to you-that you were showing off, taunting the cops. They could say it was the next logical step, that you’re pushing the envelope. It’s not uncommon for psychos to play with the cops.”

“Could you stop making it sound so plausible?”

“It’s just the way it could look to them. But it won’t. Don’t worry. And I know you had nothing to do with this.” That same micro-expression flashed across her face: the shadow of a doubt.

If Terri didn’t believe me, who would? I tried to swallow, my throat dry. I could see the look of doubt on her face spreading like a virus to her men and to the feds. And what defense did I have? A feeling? A lousy feeling.

“It’ll be okay.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, I…” She tried to smile. “It’ll be okay.”

“Stop saying that.”

“What do you want me to say, Rodriguez?”

“Tell me that you’re on my side, that you believe me.”

“Of course I’m on your side.” Her face softened, and she touched my cheek. “They have nothing more than proximity.”

“So what do I do now?”

“Go home and get some sleep.”