Anatomy of Fear (3 page)
“It’s like him?”
“Yes,” she said. “But wait—he was wearing a hat!”
“What kind? A cap or—”
“Yes, a cap, a woolen one.”
We were really into it now, our minds connecting.
“It was…rough. It rubbed against—” She shook her head back and forth as if trying physically to dislodge the memory.
“Stay with me, Laurie.”
“Yes,” she said, “yes. The hat—it was one of those knit caps, you know, that you just pull on. It covered the top of his head, and—” Her eyes were tight slits of concentration. “It just covered the tops of his ears.”
I sketched it in and turned the pad around.
“Jesus,” she whispered, blinking, as if she wanted to look and not look at the same time. “It’s…him.”
“Is there anything else you can remember about his face, anything that I should change?”
She shook her head no, holding her breath.
I touched her hand again. “He’s on paper now, remember? Not in your head.”
She looked at me, good eye narrowed to match the bruised one. “He’ll always be in my head.”
“Try closing your eyes.”
“What’s the point?”
“Maybe he won’t be there.”
I could see she was scared to try.
“C’mon,” I said, without pushing too hard.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I still see him.”
“But he’s fading, right?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe he is.”
“And soon he’ll be gone.” I hoped my face was not betraying the lie. No way he’d ever leave her. Certain pictures remain etched on the brain. I knew that to be a fact, but I didn’t say it. I told her she’d done a great job, that she’d be okay.
When she left I stayed behind, got lost in the drawing for a while, added shading, blending areas with soft cardboard stumps or my fingertips, attempting to give the face more dimension and life, then I sat back and assessed it.
It wasn’t bad, not exactly art with a capital A. Not science, either. It was sort of like me: not quite a cop, not quite an artist, more like I was swimming around the periphery of each.
I took the sketch into a hallway, sprayed it with fixative so it wouldn’t smudge, and dropped it onto Detective Schmid’s desk.
Afterward, I stopped into the men’s room, washed the graphite off my hands, splashed my face with cold water, and felt a chill. It was one of those bad feelings you can’t explain until the bad thing happens and then you think:
Was that it?
T
he room, a windowless cell of his own design, is like his mind, focused to the point of obsession, shut down to everything and anything other than this moment, the only sound his pencil scratching against paper hard and fast, flecks of graphite catching in the fine blond hairs of his muscled forearms, until lines become forms and imagery takes shape—the bodies everywhere, strewn across the pavement like broken marionettes, arms and legs at impossible angles.
But how to depict cries and groans?
He stops to consider the question.
Shattered bodies, cracked sidewalks, exploding cars he can replicate. But cries? He doesn’t think so. Of course the sound track always comes later. True Dolby surround-sound. The real thing.
He stares at the drawing, pale blue eyes riveted.
No, he is getting ahead of himself. This one is for later.
He exchanges the drawing for a folder, puffs at imaginary specks of dust, begins to skim notes of timed entrances and exits until his visual memory is triggered and he sees the man coming out of the brownstone in split-second fragments.
Yes, this is what he is after, what he needs to do now.
He swipes his gloved fingers across a clean page in the sketch pad and sets to work.
One fragment. Then another.
But the picture is incomplete, the rest of it stuck in a synapse.
Damn.
He paces across the room, drops to the floor, does a quick set of push ups, and now, now, with his heart pumping fast and breath coming in one tiny explosion after another, he sees more of it, bits and pieces that he hurries to get down on paper before they are lost.
