Anatomy of Fear

59

Tim Wright was famous. And, I guess, so was I.

Some reporter had gotten the story as well as my sketch and splashed it across the paper. No one had yet asked me how I’d made the sketch, which was a good thing because I didn’t know how I was going to explain it.

The life and death of Tim Wright was the lead story of every local television station and headlined in the morning papers. Queens neighbors were interviewed, one who described Wright as “a quiet man who always kept his lawn neat and trim”; others expressed shock and dismay that they could have been living next door to such a monster.

They’d gotten to Wright’s mother, a sixty-something retired secretary, who cried on Fox News.

TV reporters ferreted out Wright’s wife, who was living with her sister in Yonkers. They caught her coming out of a small house, not unlike the one in Queens. She was a pretty woman, petite and blond. She hugged her young daughter to her side and tried to get into her side-dented Ford Focus wagon, but the reporters were on her like a pack of dogs. She said she had begun to fear for her life due to her husband’s “growing fanaticism” and had left him several months earlier, taking their daughter with her. “Was it my fault because I left him?” she said, the camera zooming in for a close-up of her face, brow wrinkled, and eyes so sad it was almost embarrassing to watch, though I was rapt.

Denton and Collins held a joint press conference that made it look like the feds and the locals had played well together, each of them taking credit in their own way. Denton made much of the fact that only Wright had exploded, not the church, that no one had been injured, that the NYPD had managed to save hundreds of lives when the police had cleared the street, the explosives having blackened the front of Saint Cecilia but that was all. Collins took it from there, noting that the bureau had uncovered, and were examining, hate organizations across the States.

Terri had not participated in the press conference, but it was her name in every news article as the cop who had caught the Sketch Artist.

I’d spent nearly six hours in Bellevue’s ER, having my nose reset and a three-inch gash on my chin stitched up, and Terri had been with me for most of it. Afterward, she told me to go home and sleep, but the calls wouldn’t stop.

In the space of a few hours I turned down offers to appear on the Today show and Charlie Rose, but when a curator from the Whitney Museum called to offer me an exhibition of my forensic sketches, I debated, said no, then called back and said maybe.

I finally disconnected the phone and the media must have decided they could carry on without me.

I thought it was over until Terri called to say there was something she had to tell me. I expected she was excited about everything that had happened and her part in it and wanted to celebrate. But the minute I set foot in her office, I knew that wasn’t it.

“I was just looking to get you some closure,” she said.

“About what?”

Terri started pacing. It brought me back to the first day I’d been in her office.

“What is it? What’s going on?”

She stopped fidgeting and sat down across from me. “I never meant this to happen. Not like this. But it’s okay now.”

“Didn’t mean what to happen? Jesus, Terri, tell me already.”

“I opened your father’s case, his murder book.”

“What? Why?”

“Like I said, I wanted to get you some closure. I thought if you knew what happened, you could-”

“You opened my father’s case?” I didn’t know what to say; I was still processing it, what she’d done, everything I knew about the case.

“When you told me about your father I could see how it was eating you up inside, the guilt and all, so I thought…I just wanted to help, but it backfired. It made the cops and feds more suspicious of you, but it’s okay now. I mean, now that you’re in the clear.”

“Made them more suspicious of me-how?”

“Well, they’re not. Not anymore.”

“Terri.” I locked eyes with her. “Just tell me what’s been going on.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Nate. I didn’t mean to cause you any shit. It was the furthest thing from-”

“Jesus, Terri, if you don’t tell me what this is all about-”

“Okay,” she said. “I called you because I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else, that the case had been reopened-by me-and what’s been discovered.” She put her hand up before I could ask another question. “What they found were three distinct samples of DNA taken from the murder weapon, the gun that killed your father.”

“Three?” I was trying to make sense of it, but the pictures I had always imagined about that night were flashing in my brain.

“It means there were two other people on the scene other than your father, two other people who deposited their DNA on the gun. One left saliva, the other a tissue sample, flesh caught in the firing pin. It must have pinched his hand when he pulled the trigger. They couldn’t test DNA back then, but the DOJ kept the samples on ice. Cold Case just had them tested, sent the results out to data banks, and scored a hit. Actually, two hits.”

When I didn’t say anything, she slid a report over to me. “Does the name Willie Pedriera mean anything to you?”

There was something familiar about the name, but I couldn’t place it.

“His DNA is one of the samples, the tissue sample. He’s serving life up in Green Haven for homicide. Don’t know how long that will be. According to Cold Case, he’s sick.”

“What about the other one?”

“It was a juvey case, sealed. That is, until Cold Case got the DOJ to open it about five minutes ago. Now they’ll arrest him.” She turned a paper around and I read the name.

It took me a minute to process the information and recover from the shock. When I did, I begged her to get Cold Case and anyone else to hold off.

Terri sucked on her bottom lip, thinking about it.

“Trust me one more time. Can you do that?”

She nodded.

“Thanks,” I said. “I need to be the one to do this.”

Ten minutes later I was in a cab heading down Broadway, a twenty-year-old memory coming back to me in a rush: My father finding the drugs and heading off in search of the dealer; and me, a scared kid who wasn’t thinking straight, calling Julio, telling him to warn the dealer, then to meet me uptown. For twenty years that was how I’d imagined it: The drug dealer had killed my father because I’d sent a warning. But now I was seeing it differently.