Anatomy of Fear (40 page)

When they were all on the floor, Wright marched over them
and Terri watched his boots pass in front of her eyes. For a second she thought—
I can do this, I can grab him, knock him to the floor, and subdue him
—but she couldn’t chance it.

When she dared lift her head, he was halfway up the stairs. He glanced back and shouted, “RAHOWA!” then disappeared.

Terri gave the signal and the two SWAT team cops charged after him. She got the old woman to her feet, then turned to O’Connell and Perez. “Get her out of here. Now.”

“My grandson—”

“He’ll be fine,” said Terri.

“What about you?” asked Perez.

“I’ve got to find Rodriguez.”

“I’ll go with you,” he said. “O’Connell, you take the woman.”

They didn’t have to look long. Seconds later Nate staggered out of the room, blood on his face, his shirt.

“My grandmother—”

“She’s fine. O’Connell just took her out back. Your face—”

“Tell me about it later,” said Nate. “Let’s go.”

T
he SWAT team was stalking Wright down the main aisle of the now empty church as Terri and I caught up to them.

Wright had turned to face the men, while inching backward slowly and deliberately. I didn’t know if they were going to try to shoot him before he had a chance to blow himself up. It was a huge risk and impossible to call.

I was several yards away but close enough to see something had shifted in Wright’s face, the muscles starting to relax, and it frightened me more than his anger.

“Don’t crowd him!” I shouted to the SWAT team. They were closer to Wright than I was, rifles aimed.

I turned to Terri and whispered, “I think he’s getting ready to blow.”

She acknowledged me with a slight nod.

The main sanctuary of the church seemed bigger than it had only moments before, the emptiness oppressive, clanging heat pipes playing a discordant dirge, light from the clerestory windows picking out worn tiled floors and pockmarked wood, everything in surreal detail.

Terri laid her gun down on a pew and raised her hands as she walked into the main aisle, totally exposed. “Tim,” she said softly. “You know me, Terri Russo, from the station. I can help you get out of here alive. Let me do that. Just put the detonator down.” She took a few steps toward him and he seemed to be listening, his hand slightly lowered. Then one of the SWAT team, a young guy, sweat on his brow, lower lip trembling, raised his rifle just a fraction of an inch, and Wright stiffened, thumb quivering on the detonator as he backed out the church door.

58

T
im Wright held the detonator above his head, inched his way down the church steps, and onto the sidewalk. He was an easy target, but no one was going to take the chance; the explosives on his chest looked like they could take the church and half the crowd with him.

The Bomb Squad stood by while uniforms moved everyone down the block. The SWAT team got into firing position.

Collins had arrived with her agents and was conferring with a couple of the chiefs.

I was on the steps with Terri and Perez, and while Wright held everyone rapt I combed the crowd for my grandmother. When I saw O’Connell leading her into a patrol car, the big cop with his arm around her tiny frame, my eyes welled up. She looked so small and frail, this powerful woman who had saved my life and meant so much to me; the idea that I could have lost her unendurable.

“Tim Wright.” Agent Collins’s voice, amplified by a mega-phone, crackled through the tension. “Don’t do this.”

Wright turned in her direction, then away, muttering something about heaven and God, and taking his place, and it sounded
bad to me. His facial muscles had gone placid, jaw eased, brows evened out, anger replaced by resignation and calm.

“He’s going to do it,” I said to Terri.

She looked at the SWAT team commander and nodded so slightly there was almost no movement at all, but he caught it and relayed it to his men.

Collins called out again, “Wright. Don’t do this. There’s still time. What can I offer you to—”

I saw Wright’s thumb twitch on the detonator, and I guess the SWAT team leader saw it too, because he yelled, “Fire!” and the crowd started screaming and running and the ensuing barrage of gunfire was lost in the blast of explosives as Tim Wright went up in a fireball of flames and smoke.

T
he blast knocked me backward, Terri along with me, my body hurtling against stone as if I’d been lifted and thrown; then noise and darkness, colors exploding behind my eyes, maybe in front of them too, but I’m pretty sure I had my eyes squeezed shut. I felt Terri’s body hit mine, and I wrapped my arms around her, and then time slowed in a way that’s hard to explain. There was the noise, of course, a blast that became a roar, carried in the wind along with the ashes and dust and blood, and when it settled there was a moment when it was so still, as if someone had thrown the
OFF
switch and everything just stopped, at least that’s what it felt like; maybe it was simply the aftershock, my ears gone deaf, nerve endings numb.

I managed to get to my feet and helped Terri up as the blackened air around us began to clear.

The space where Tim Wright had been was hard to gauge. It appeared as if parts of the street, here and there, were on fire, thick
gray smoke spiraling away from small smoldering masses, and I did not want to think what was burning.

“You okay?” Terri asked.

I nodded and asked her the same. “And my grandmother—?” I asked.

“With O’Connell.”

“Right,” I said, and remembered him putting her into a car just before the blast, which was when—hours, minutes ago?

And then the switch was thrown back to
ON,
the quiet erupting into an ear-splitting aria of sirens and screams, and people rushing about; Bomb Squad and SWAT team, Crime Scene and EMT everywhere, and the street pulsating under my feet.

Terri looked into my eyes, then touched my arm and went to join her men.

I stared at the dark clouds of smoke, coiling and swirling into the air like venomous snakes, could see the church was still standing and that no one other than Wright had been hurt, and I thanked God and Chango, and thought:
If only it could be this easy, one explosion to eradicate hate.

Then Terri came back with Perez.

“Jesus, Rodriguez, you okay?” he asked. “You look like shit.”

I touched my face and my fingers came away red.

“You’re going to need stitches,” said Terri, her face partially blackened but unmarked. We managed to exchange something that approximated a smile before I was lifted into an EMT van and got an ice pack against my jaw. A moment later I was floating on the sounds of sirens.

59

T
im 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 sam
ples 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.”

T
en 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.