Anatomy of Fear (2 page)

“So, let’s start with something simple, okay? The shape of his face. Try to see it like a geometric shape—round, square—”

“Oval,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut, “with a pointy chin.”

“Fantastic,” I said, my pencil already moving on the paper, anatomical names—
mandible, maxilla, lacrimal
—automatically clicking off in my mind, words I’d learned in anatomy class that I might use with an ME but never with a subject. I started, as I always do, with a general template, a sort of guide for myself.

It wasn’t anything, but I knew there was an image there, waiting. I think of a sketch the way Michelangelo thought about a slab of marble—that the figure was inside and he just had to chip away at the rock to release it. I’m no Michelangelo, but I try to keep that concept in my head while I’m drawing, and without the tricks. I’ve tried them all—Smith & Wesson’s Identi-KIT, PHOTO-FIT,

MEMOPIX, even the hot new computer program FACES—but they’re not for me. To my mind, moving stock features around on a computer screen leaves something out. Soul, maybe. I
don’t know. But I get something from scratching a pencil on paper that works for me.

At Quantico, I studied all the greats in the field of forensic art, memorized the guidelines in the
Composite Art Manual,
and that, coupled with psychology courses and Ekman’s theories, have made me pretty good at reading faces and creating them.

Laurie had her eyes tightly shut, obviously concentrating on the face in her mind.

I needed her to describe it and have learned it’s better to come at it obliquely rather than asking a direct question.

“So what kinds of makeup do you use in class?”

“Oh, all kinds. Almay, because it’s hypoallergenic; MAC; Great Lash by Maybelline is the old standby mascara, but I like Lancôme’s Hypnose, even though it’s really expensive.”

I zeroed in on the mascara, moved her to eyeliner, then to her attacker’s eyes.

“They were in shadow, but…I think it was that he had a heavy brow, you know what I mean, like it came to a V.”

“His eyebrows, you mean? Like a unibrow?”

“More like his brow was just…thick and heavy. This is going to sound stupid, but—”

“Nothing is stupid.”

“Well, you know the way Leo, Leonardo DiCaprio, the way his brow comes to a V above his nose?”

I pictured the young movie idol, could see his face, and quickly got that aspect of it down on paper.

“That’s great,” I said.

I’d always been able to draw. When I was in junior high I designed personalized
tattoos for all my friends, one for myself too, which I glanced at now, regretting I’d ever done it. For weeks after, I’d worn long-sleeved shirts though it was a hot New York summer and I was sweltering. I was trying to hide it from my mother, but she eventually saw it and threw a fit.
Didn’t I know that tattooing was against our religion?
I asked her if I’d missed something, like when she got to be so Jewish?

“So, anything else about DiCaprio’s forehead?”

“Just the V, only cruder, and a lot meaner.”

I sketched in the heavy brow and dark eyes.

I asked Laurie to move down his face, to his nose, and got her to describe it.

“Thick,” she said. “Wide…and the nostrils were—what’s the word?—flaring?” She added a few details about the nose and eyes, then came back to the brow and the V, and soon her words slipped inside my head like strokes of paint, and I was really starting to see him too.

Laurie’s eyes suddenly flipped open.

“I’m not sure I—I keep thinking…why me? What did I do to deserve this?”

“You didn’t do anything.” I tried to sound convincing, though part of me was thinking, well, maybe you or your mother or your brother or your ancestors pissed off Iku, or someone hadn’t made the correct offering to Chango,
which annoyed the hell out of me because I could not believe how this stuff was ingrained in me.

“I—I don’t think I can do this.”

“Listen to me, Laurie.” I tried to hold her in my gaze. “You can do this. I know you can. This guy is scum, an animal, and we don’t want him to hurt anyone else, right? You
can
do this.”

There were tears running down her cheeks, so I took a gamble, reached out and touched her hand. She flinched, then tightened her grip.

I let her hold on to my hand but after a minute said, “I’m going to need that hand back.”

Laurie almost smiled, let go, and closed her eyes again.

“Any scars?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so.” She opened her eyes, and the tears started again.

“Stay with me, Laurie. Think of it this way: You conjure his image and give it to me. I record it on paper, and you can forget it. He’s gone, erased. It’s a shamanistic sort of thing. You know what I’m saying?”

“Like you’re a witch doctor?”

I had to smile at the label, something I’d heard tossed around incorrectly most of my life. “Yeah, I guess.

Sort of.”

Laurie closed her eyes and I closed mine, and for a moment I thought I could see the face in her mind. From time to time it happened, an inexplicable transference.

When I opened my eyes I went back to work.

Now Laurie started talking, really getting into it, emphasizing the pointy chin, the flared nose, and something new: full lips.

“Thick and pouty,” she said.

“That’s great. How old would you say?”

“Thirty? Maybe a little older.”

She continued to talk and I kept drawing. Twenty or thirty minutes passed.

“I’m going to need you to look at this.”

I waited a second before I turned it around.

That sound again, air sucked into her lungs, a stifled gasp.

I didn’t say anything, just waited, chewing on the back end of my pencil, a bad habit I couldn’t kick.

“It looks like him, but…the chin is wrong.”

Defense attorneys often argue that you cannot depend on a victim or eyewitness for identification, but plenty of people have damn good visual memories. Over the years I’d made hundreds of sketches from witnesses and victims, and more than half of them have resulted in an arrest and conviction, so I beg to differ with the suits.

Laurie was staring at the drawing and I saw something change in her eyes, a bit of excitement now mixing in with the dread, something I’d seen lots of times.

“There’s something else,” she said. “Something missing, but I don’t know what.”

“Hold on a sec.” I reached for my stack of cards: images I had collected over the seven years I’d been doing this job, from newspapers, books, and paintings, cut out and laminated, all sorts of
faces, all races, mostly men. I sorted through them, selected a group, and spread them onto the table. “Anything in these?”

Laurie ran her tongue over her sore lip and shook her head.

I tried another group. “What about these?”

“No, but…wait. That’s it! His chin! It wasn’t that it was pointy. It was that he had a, you know, a goatee, like that guy there, in that picture.”

I quickly sketched it in. “What about a mustache?”

“Yes. No. More like he hadn’t shaved in a while.” She looked up and glanced at my cheeks. “Like you—stubble, you know, only it was fuller on his chin, like I said, and pointy.”

I reworked the drawing for a minute, then turned it back for her to see.

Laurie let out a startled gasp.