Anatomy of Fear (18 page)
She shook her head. “I see
you,
Nato, in that room.”
Now I was listening. “What else do you see?”
She leaned back into the couch and closed her eyes. “I see you in that room with a man.”
“What sort of man?”
“
No lo veo.
It has been too long since I had the vision, but I still…feel him.
Entiendes?
”
I told her I understood, and to relax, and her shoulders sloped
a little, the muscles in her face eased. After a minute she said, “
Las llamas,
the flames, remember? In the room?”
I turned back to the sketch I had made.
“What about the man?” I asked.
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I see a dark face.
Un hombre en máscara.
”
A man in a mask.
I shivered.
“There are—
¿cómo se dice?
—holes for his eyes and nose, his mouth too.” She was pointing out the features on her face with her eyes closed. “I can see the eyes, light eyes,
con una mirada fria.”
I found the sketch I’d made and asked her to look at it.
“Madre mía.”
She crossed herself and mumbled something under her breath about Chango.
“Is there anything else?” I asked, feeling like I was in some paranormal thriller like
The
Omen,
things I had always claimed I did not believe in but were now impossible to deny.
“The eyes,” she said, describing them while I made another drawing.
I showed her what I’d drawn.
She took a deep breath and crossed herself again. “
Sí,
those are the eyes.”
But how could my grandmother, up in Spanish Harlem, have any idea about the man we were hunting?
She suddenly grasped my wrist.
“Nato, ten cuidado.”
“Sure,” I said. “Of course. I’m a careful guy, a born coward, a
cobarde.
” I tacked on a fake smile.
“Don’t be a wise man,” she said, meaning a wise guy, which made me smile, and she shook a finger at me. “Do not make fun,
chacho.
I have seen you in that room. I do not know what it means, but…” She got up and crossed the room to the
bóveda.
I looked back at the symbol my grandmother had described, which I had drawn from her vision, the almost identical symbol on Carolyn Spivack’s belt, and it gave me another chill.
My grandmother scooped up seashells from the
bóveda.
She was humming to herself while she moved the shells from hand to hand,
“Ten Cuidado con el Corazón…”
That favorite song of hers, a love song that came with a warning:
Be careful.
I
folded myself into a hard-backed chair opposite Terri’s desk. I’d done some research and needed to tell her, but there was a question stuck in my mind since she’d pushed me into Denton’s face.
“So what’s up between you and Denton?”
“What do you mean?”
“It seemed to me that there was some history between you two.”
Terri’s eyes flashed. “I have no history with that man.”
That was essentially a declaration that she
did
have a history with “that man.” I remembered a lecturer at Quantico saying that people became impersonal when they wanted to distance themselves from something and it’s usually because they are hiding something or lying. It was like Bill Clinton saying, “I did not have sex with
that woman.
” I remembered hearing that and thinking,
Oh, Bill, you so did
. Which, by the way, was fine by me. If the president of the United States can’t get a blow job, who can? Though, perhaps he should not have gotten it in the Oval Office, from his intern.
“So you’ve got no history with
that man.
Fine.”
She tried to neutralize her face while maintaining eye contact.
People tend to think if they make eye contact you will believe them.
Terri let out a held breath. “Oh, fuck, what the hell do I care if you know I once had a five-minute fling with that son of a bitch? So what? It was before he was chief. Ancient history.”
“Oh,
ancient
history. Sorry, I guess you thought I was asking about modern history.”
“Screw you, Rodriguez.”
“I was kidding. What are you getting so pissed off about?”
“You were not kidding. And I’m pissed because you’re condemning me for something that was a mistake and meant nothing, and is over, and by the way, is none of your fucking business.”
I put up my hands. “Sorry. And I’m not condemning you.”
“I see it in your smug little face, Rodriguez. And why the hell do I care—why the hell do
you
care—who I’ve slept with?”
“I don’t.”
“Fuck you don’t.”
I thought about that: Why
did
I care who she slept with?
“Have I answered your question sufficiently, Rodriguez?”
“Sorry,” I said again, and laid the images I’d brought with me out in front of her, which I knew would change the subject.
“What am I looking at?”
“It’s from the drawing of Carolyn Spivack. I made an enlargement of what was drawn on her belt.” I didn’t bother to tell her how I’d come to recognize it from my grandmother’s vision because I didn’t want her to think I was crazy.
“Okay. But what is it?”
“I did a little research, Googled everything from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Rosetta Stone until I finally found it.”
“And?”
“That’s the cover of
The White Man’s Bible.
It’s like the white supremacists’ handbook.”
“Is it in any of the other drawings?”
“Not that I could find.” I slid a stack of pages over to her. “I pulled these excerpts off the Internet.
The White Man’s Bible
preaches violence against blacks, Jews, and race traitors—which is anyone who defends them.”
“Or marries them, or hangs out with them, that it?”
“Bull’s-eye. Boyfriends like Daniel Rice and girlfriends like Carolyn Spivack.”
“Race traitors,” said Terri, shaking her head. “Has a really nasty ring to it. But it makes sense of why the unsub sometimes chooses the white partners.”
“To show us that they’re just as guilty. Maybe guiltier, in his eyes. I wonder what that makes me, a Jew and Latino—a doubleheader, right?”
“Don’t kid about that.”
“Who says I’m kidding?” I picked at my cuticles.
“I’ve got to get this to Hate Crimes. Maybe they can identify a specific group that reads this crap.”
“My take is they
all
read it.”
Terri sucked on her lower lip while I made a mess of my fingernails.
“There has to be something Hate Crimes can tell us: the local groups, maybe a few addresses.”
“These days they stay in touch through the Internet. It’s a lot safer. Which means it’s not just local. Check this out.” I handed her another sheet of my online research, a list. “There’s a whole lot of them out there—the KKK, Christian Identity, Youth Scene, Aryan Nation, Soldiers of War, World Church of the Creator, which is your basic ecumenical come-one come-all assemblage for Neo-Nazi skinheads and white supremacists. Some statistics say there are as few as twenty thousand in the U.S., but the analysts who keep track of these groups…” I shook my head. “They put the number at about half a million—and growing.”
“Jesus,” she said.
“Don’t know what they’d make of him these days, probably wouldn’t go for the long hair and preaching love for thy fellow man.”
“So we’re looking for a fanatic.” Terri rapped her fingernails along the edge of her desk. “I hate to say it, but clearly the G can add to this. I’m sure they have reams of info on these groups and files on all the leaders. I’ve got to show them. It totally confirms what we thought about the hate crime angle.”
“And tells us something about the man who added the symbol to his drawing.”
“Like?”
“Like on some level he wants people to know it’s him. He was telling us something intentionally, right? I’d say he’s bragging.”
I could see Terri considering that. She stopped rapping her nails and touched my hand. “This is good work, Rodriguez. Thanks.” She let her hand rest on mine a moment, then she gathered all the papers together and stood up.
“I’m going to see Monteverdi and Bransky in Hate Crimes. And don’t worry, after that, I’ll go visit my new best friend, Agent Monica Collins.”
P
erry Denton smoothed his hair back the way men who are aware of their appearance always do and headed into the Bronx tenement. The first-floor stairwell was lit by a dim red bulb, the one on the second floor burned out. He gripped the railing with a gloved hand as he made his way up to three, thinking this was the last time he’d be visiting Joe Vallie in this hellhole.
Vallie was sitting at the table in his kitchenette, an alcove off the living room with a stove, a half-size fridge, and a naked light-bulb that made the pockmarks on his face look like craters.
Denton didn’t feel one bit sorry for him. He’d brought this upon himself, no matter what he thought. It wasn’t his fault that Vallie had lost his job and pension, even if Vallie thought it was.
“You’re late.”
“You’re lucky I got here.”
“No,
you’re
lucky you got here,” said Vallie. “Such a busy man.”
Denton ignored the sarcasm. “This is the last of it, Joe.” He placed the stack of bills onto the table. “I can’t keep doing this.”
“Sure you can, Perry. Way I see it, you’re sitting on top of the world.” He slurped some coffee out of a cracked mug. There was a pot on the stove, but he didn’t offer any to Denton.
Pitiful mess,
thought Denton. But he was way past feeling sorry for Joe Vallie. It made him sick to think that his ex-partner would do this to him. And enough was enough. “This is the last time, Joe, I mean it.”
“I heard you the first time.” He fingered the wad. “But I got expenses, you know that.”