Robin Burcell - Face of a Killer

That seemed to relax her. “I was with my boyfriend. We were in a bar-I’m not going to be in trouble for that, am I?”

“No, Tara. You’re not in trouble. We’re only interested in who hurt you. Tell me what you were doing, maybe an hour before you were attacked.”

“We-we were drinking. I, um, had a fake ID,” she added quietly, and Sydney knew she was blaming herself for the events. If only she hadn’t done this. If only she hadn’t done that.

“Go on,” Sydney said, trying not to think of her own past.

“The bar was closing, and I had to use the bathroom, and he was there, hiding inside it, and he grabbed me.” She didn’t speak for several seconds, and just when Sydney thought she might have given up, she said, “He tried to rape me, and I told him my boyfriend, Eric, was there and would come after me, and he said-he said he hoped he did, because he’d kill him.” She looked up at the ceiling, tears streaming down the sides of her face. “I was so scared. Eric was-he was waiting in the bar when all this was happening. And then the man bit me. My breast. He said it was his mark. He had my mouth covered, but I tried not to scream. I didn’t want Eric to hear. I-I didn’t want him to be killed…” And then she started sobbing, and Sydney let her, not wanting to upset the fragile balance of tumultuous emotions.

When her crying subsided, and her breathing became more even, Sydney asked, “Did you see his face? There in the bathroom?”

Tara nodded. “But I can’t describe it. I don’t ever want to see it again.”

“Tara. I know this is hard for you.”

“How can you know?”

She blazed right past that question with “Trust me when I say that you have it in your power to help us catch this person and stop him from hurting anyone else. But we can’t do it without your help.”

“I can’t-”

“How old was he?” Sydney cut in, not giving her a chance to think about what she was doing.

“Um, late twenties, early thirties.”

“What race?”

“He was white.”

“You’re doing good, Tara. How tall?”

“A few inches taller than me. I’m five-six.”

“Weight?”

“Just regular.”

“Was there anything about him that stuck out in your mind? Anything about him that reminded you of someone or something?”

She nodded, and seemed to shiver. “He smelled like fire. Like smoke from a fire.” Then, placing her finger along her right cheek, she said, “And there was something on his face. A scar, a wrinkle. I don’t want to remember. I want to forget what he looks like. Please. ..”

Sydney stared at her sketch pad, the tiny descriptive notes she’d jotted in the corner, trying to ignore the stirrings of things she never wanted to remember at the mention of this man’s scar. And now she didn’t want to look at Tara, didn’t want to see the pain in her eyes, didn’t want to tell her that, though they’d suffered completely different crimes, even after twenty years, there were some things you never forget…

She shook it off, took a breath. “We’re just going to do a simple sketch. Real basic at first.” Sydney took her pencil, held it to the paper. “Now how would you describe the shape of his face?”

“Oval.”

And so it began. While Dixon stood by the window, trying to remain unobtrusive and watch for wayward vandals in the parking lot, Sydney drew the shape, showed it to Tara, and Tara nodded. Again and again, Sydney drawing, Tara nodding, or shaking her head no, a back-and-forth dance, meeting of the minds, wider, shorter, higher, less, more. What started out as a simple sketch slowly, feature by feature, began to take shape. Two hours and several short breaks later, the sketch nearly complete-all but the shading of the shadows and planes-she showed it to Tara one more time and asked, “If you could make one change on this, what would it be?”

Tara bit her lip, studied the drawing. “The nose… I think it’s too pointed. And I don’t think the scar was that long… if there even was one.”

She rounded the nose tip, then stopped, her eraser poised over the scar. She stared at the drawing, the scar on the cheek, her stomach twisting. This wasn’t something she was supposed to remember. Not after twenty years…

“Syd? You okay?” Dixon moved from the window, walked toward her.

She closed her eyes, took a breath, then shortened the scar, lightened it to where it looked more like a wrinkle or mark- who knows what it could have been-then held up the drawing, saw her victim’s face crumple, tears streaming down her cheeks as she said, “Yes. That’s him. That’s the man who raped me.”

And as it usually did at this point in the process, it struck her, the difference between her father’s case and Tara’s, the difference in all the cases for all the drawings she’d done over the years.

There was no guarantee that her work would result in an arrest. In her father’s case, an arrest had been made almost immediately. It had allowed her to live these past twenty years with the firm belief that justice prevails, and she couldn’t imagine the pain of living otherwise, never knowing if the man who had committed that crime was out there still. What if that Good Samaritan hadn’t copied that license number, called it in to the police? What if her father’s killer had never been caught?

She supposed it was this last thought that made her look twice at the drawing she’d just finished. Perhaps she was being too empathetic. Trying too hard to see the suspect as Tara saw him. She stood, handed the drawing to Dixon, surprised her hands were steady. “I, um, need a minute. Ladies’ room.” Sydney walked out, not waiting for a response, her gaze taking in the long gray hallway, looking for a sign indicating the restroom. She found it, stepped in, closed the door, trying to figure out just why this drawing had affected her so, and she eyed her pale face in the mirror, the darkening circles beneath her eyes. Her heart was beating as if she’d been running, her hands were sweaty, her stomach nauseous. She knew the reason, told herself there was no other explanation for such a reaction. That milestone. Twenty years. Here Sydney was, doing a drawing of a rapist, not even the same type of crime. And all this time, she wanted it to be him. The face she must have blocked from her conscious mind for twenty years. The man who’d killed her father.

But it wasn’t. That man was sitting in a jail cell and he was never getting out.

The night air was refreshing, washed clean. A few stars peeked through the breaks in the clouds, and the cars around them glistened with droplets beneath the parking lot lights, as Sydney and Dixon navigated the puddles to his car. They walked around the vehicle, giving it a good look, making sure nothing had happened since they’d chased off the would-be car burglar, and for a short time she actually thought that maybe Dixon hadn’t noticed her reaction to that drawing. The moment he unlocked the car, gave her that look, she knew otherwise.

“Something going on that I should know about?”

There was no way Sydney was going to tell him what the anniversary of her father’s murder was doing to her head, so she gave a slight shrug. “It’s nothing. Really.”

His gaze held hers for several seconds before he replied, “Whatever that nothing is, make it gone by the time you get back to work.”

One could only hope, Sydney thought, giving him a smile of reassurance. Conversation over. He drove her home in silence, and as they neared her street, in the midst of the neighborhood called Inner Sunset, wisps of fog started to thicken. When Sydney transferred to the San Francisco field office the only thing she remembered about the city was that the traffic sucked. Hence Sydney contacted a real estate agent, put her life in the woman’s hands, telling her she’d take anyplace as long as she didn’t have to deal with the commute. When the agent came up with a rental in a large house that had been divided into two apartments above the landlord’s home “just three miles from the Pacific Ocean,” and “very near Golden Gate Park,” never mind the clincher, a real garage, Sydney figured it was perfect. What she didn’t realize was that the neighborhood suffered from some of the worst weather in the entire Bay Area all year round. It could be sunny three blocks over, but not in the Inner Sunset. Some days Sydney never saw the sun. Some nights Sydney wasn’t sure the stars were in the sky. She happened to live right smack in the middle of the fog zone.