Anatomy of Fear

5

The call from Detective Terri Russo had been a surprise. There was something she wanted to show me. A drawing, I guessed. Or one she wanted me to make. She hadn’t been clear, but what else could it be? I crossed a path between the maze of buildings that made up Manhattan’s Police Plaza, rubbed a hand across my chin, and thought maybe I should have shaved.

The sky was a bright cobalt blue that only New York City gets in winter, but I was sick of the cold and looking forward to the spring that you never believe will come in March. I dug my hands deeper into the pockets of my old leather jacket. It wasn’t really warm enough, but I didn’t own an overcoat and had been wearing the jacket for so many years it felt like a second skin.

I glanced up past the buildings that made up Police Plaza to the place where the World Trade Center had stood. On the day of the attack I had been down here working on a sketch with a witness to a bank robbery when we heard the first plane hit. We came outside and saw the flames and smoke, and like so many others who had come out on the street thought it had been some horrible freak accident. But when the second plane hit twenty minutes later, there was no mistaking it. From where we stood, I could see the bodies leaping and falling. It was so unreal I thought I had to be dreaming, it had to be a nightmare, that Jesus or Chango had gone insane, that I was in hell.

About a week after the attack I read a piece in the New York Times by a psychiatrist who said denial was a necessary part of human existence and I took refuge in that, and understood what he meant because I’d practiced it from a fairly early age and had, apparently, become very good at it.

So now I focused on a handful of crocuses that had bravely pushed up through a light dusting of snow in the center of the walkway, and took them as a hopeful sign that spring would come and that all was right with the world, that Inle had gone to work healing, as my grandmother would say. I wanted to believe that someone was thinking about healing, but even now, more than five years after the towers had come down, I could not stop worrying about landmarks exploding, poison gas in the subway, or an avian flu pandemic. I started chewing a cuticle, a habit I developed after I’d quit smoking for the third time.

I thought about my first and only meeting with Detective Russo over a year ago, as I emptied my pockets to go through the metal detector. Good-looking but tough, at least that’s how she’d seemed when I’d handed over the police sketch I’d done for her, which had led to her capturing a perp, which in turn led to her promotion, or so I’d heard. She never told me. It wasn’t like I was expecting a gift-wrapped thank-you, but a call wouldn’t have killed her.

The door was ajar and Russo was pacing back and forth. I caught a few glimpses of her tight jeans and black tee. She was letting her hair down, combing her fingers through it, and it reminded me of a pastel by Degas, one of the artist’s Bathers. She was cinching her hair into a ponytail when I tugged the door open.

Detective Terri Russo was even better looking than I remembered, high forehead, straight nose, her full lips reminiscent of the actress Angelina Jolie.

“Sorry to drag you all the way downtown.” Her voice deeper than I remembered, tinted with an outer-borough accent I couldn’t quite place, maybe Brooklyn or Queens. “But the lab isn’t finished with these.” She indicated some sketches laid out on the desk that had already caught my attention. “Homicide Analysis has looked them over and Forensics too, but there are more tests and full workups to come.” She was talking in a rush, obviously worked up. “I asked you here because I need a good set of eyes on these. Maybe you can see something in them neither the lab nor the technicians can.”

I waited, but she didn’t add any details. “So what do you think?” “They’re not bad.”

“I wasn’t looking for a review. I want to know if you think they were made by the same person.”

“Well, that’s not what you asked, and I’m not a mind reader.”

“Really? I’d heard just the opposite. You’ve got a reputation.” A small grin passed over her lips, but didn’t set up camp. “So, is it?”

“The same artist?”

“Yes.” She was rapping her fingernails against the edge of the desk.

“Okay if I take them out of the bags?”

She nodded and handed me a pair of gloves. I put them on, slid the drawings out, and came in for a closer look.

“The mark-making technique looks the same in both drawings, one just a bit looser than the other,” I said. “Drawing is like handwriting.” I took another minute going from one sketch to the other, while Detective Russo kept up the annoying fingernail tapping.

“You could take something for that,” I said.

“For what?”

“Your nerves.”

Russo’s upper lip registered just a bit of disgust at my comment, so I guessed she didn’t think it was funny. I said I was sorry and went on to tell her a bit more about the pencil strokes I was looking at, pointing out how they both used the same sort of angled stroke.

Russo was leaning in close, her perfume, something fresh and herbal, filling the air between us.

“My guess is that it is the same guy, and that he’s right-handed.” I knew this because I was right-handed and laid my strokes down in a similar way, but did not tell her because it was a bit creepy to think I had anything in common with whoever had made these drawings.

“Lab says they’re made with graphite.”

“Aka pencil. And a fairly soft one. Could be a standard number-two pencil, though probably softer, a three or four.” I gave her a little tutorial on pencils, hard versus soft, taking them out of my pencil box and displaying them as I did, ending with my personal favorite, the Ebony.

“Looks like a beaver chewed it,” she said.

“Bad habit,” I said, resisting an impulse to make a crude beaver joke, which I knew would not be appreciated.

“What else can you tell me about the drawings?”

I looked again. “I’d say he’s making them fast, and with a certain amount of assurance. He might have had some training, maybe art school, some drawing or design classes.”

Russo was listening intently, brows knit, a slight squint, like she was cataloging the information, maybe cataloging me too.

“The lab will no doubt be seeing if the paper is the same. And while they’re at it maybe you’ll get lucky and the guy will turn out to be a secretor and have left you a little DNA from sweaty palms.”

“Sounds like you’ve been hanging around the NYPD too long.”

“I went through the academy.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but I chose forensic art over the street.”

“Didn’t want to get your hands dirty?”

“Just the opposite.” I tugged off the gloves and displayed my hands, the graphite and charcoal always there, no matter how many times I washed them, under the nail beds, and my slightly chewed cuticles.

“I didn’t mean that as an insult,” she said. “Unfortunately, prelims say there are no fluids-other than the two vics’ blood-on either drawing.” She looked directly at me. “Anything you can tell me about the unsub from the drawings themselves?”

She’d switched into cop lingo, vic for victim, unsub for unknown subject. On some level she had started treating me like a cop. I took it as a good sign.

“You mean like, does he hate his mother or torture animals?”

“Not quite, but-”

“I get your drift. Analyze the artist through his art.”

“Something like that.”

“Hope nobody ever does that about me.”

“Why? What would they find?”

“I don’t know…that I have an obsession with rapists and murderers because that’s all I ever draw?”

She arched a brow. “So what about this guy?”

I told her I wasn’t a psychiatrist, but from the look of the drawings I’d guess whoever made them was neat, compulsive, and very definite, the latter because I couldn’t detect any erasing. “It’s just my initial read, and it’s possible someone could make totally tight-ass drawings and be a mess in real life.” I knew that for a fact: My own drawings were even tighter than this guy’s and if anyone saw the mess in my apartment they’d never guess I could make them. “You might want to send them to Quantico for a psyche profile.”

“We’ve got it under control,” she said, but I could see she was bullshitting when she said it because the exact opposite flashed across her face.

People don’t realize our faces are controlled by a totally separate, involuntary system of muscle movements that reveal what we’re really feeling. They listen to what’s being said when they want the truth. Me, I watch what’s happening on the face.

Like right now, Russo was practicing what’s called neutralizing, trying to freeze her face. But there was something going on around her mouth, the first place to look for facial leakage, her orbicularis oris muscle being used for what is commonly referred to as lip sucking, a dead giveaway for anxiety. My guess was Terri Russo was worried that if she didn’t get something soon, the G, which is how the cops referred to the FBI, would be taking over the case.

“So why do you think this guy makes drawings of his vics?” she asked.

“Don’t know. The only thing that drawing his victims proves is that he’s stalked them, right? He’d have to, to be able to draw them.”

“Yes, but my question is why make them in the first place?”

“Could be his signature? Maybe he wants everyone to know it’s his work?”

Russo angled another look at me. Maybe she was thinking I was smarter than she’d expected, not just a drop-out cop with a flair for drawing who’d forgotten to shave.

“You should have been a shrink, Rodriguez.”

I told her that the shrink stuff had been part of my college and forensic art training, but didn’t bother to tell her that my mother was a psychiatric social worker and I’d grown up around it too. “No way,” I said. “I couldn’t take people complaining all day.”

She glanced from me to the drawings, then back at me. There was something going on in her mind. I could see it from the dozens of fleeting micro-expressions that were passing over her face, none of them staying quite long enough for me to read.

“By the way, I owe you a thank-you,” she said. “I should have called about that sketch you made for my department, but I got busy, you know how it is.”

“Sure,” I said.

“It was an amazing resemblance. I knew the guy right away. How do you do it-I mean, capture that kind of likeness?”

“What can I say? I’m a trained professional.”

“No, seriously.”

“I don’t know. It’s something I could always do, draw from memory. I used to practice as a kid, do portraits of my friends when they weren’t around; athletes and movie stars too.” Something about her question made me start back on a cuticle.

“Right, but those are faces you’d be familiar with, that you’d seen. I mean, how can you draw someone you’ve never seen?”

“It’s mostly the training, but…sometimes, when I make a connection, things just come to me, and I see them.”

“Like what things?”

I glanced at my cuticle. It was bleeding. I shoved my hand into my pocket. “I don’t know, not exactly. It’s some sort of…transference.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Like between a shrink and a patient-you know, the Freudian thing? But maybe that’s the wrong word. If you ask one of the geeks who use computer programs, the ones that move noses and lips around instead of pencil on paper, I don’t know what they’d say, but I’m guessing they’d think it was more science than intuition.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“I guess I’m just a dinosaur, but I like my pencils and paper, and I like the time it takes to get acquainted with a subject, to hear what they’re saying, to look at them.” I looked at Terri Russo, her good bone structure, smooth skin across her frontal eminence, the beautifully arched brows over her supraorbital, the nice sharp angle of her mandible, and smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. Sometimes I forget I’m not working.”

“But you are working.” She raised her brow for a second. “So you can draw just about anything.”

“Is this a test?”

“You don’t have to get defensive, Rodriguez.”

“Nate.”

“Okay. Nate. It was just a question.”

“Yeah, I guess I can draw just about anything.”

“See,” she said. “That wasn’t so hard. I was asking because we haven’t yet come up with a witness to either of these murders, but if we do, you’d obviously be the man to call.”

I nodded.

“Right.” She glanced up, the muscles around her mouth pinching her lips. She was deciding whether or not to ask a question. “And…what if we never get a witness?”

“Excuse me?”

“I was just wondering if you might be able to make a sketch.”

“You mean without a witness?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not a psychic or a witch doctor.”

“No, of course not.” She scanned my face a moment, and once again I could see her weighing a question. “But what about the transference thing?”

“Well, yes, but I need someone to have it with.”

“Right,” she said. “Of course.”