Jonathan Santlofer - Anatomy of Fear

The photographer’s strobe flashed, illuminating the girl’s hair like a halo.

The ME lifted her mini with a pencil. “Doesn’t appear to be a sexual attack. Underwear’s intact, and there’s no bruising on the inner thighs.” He moved to the torn fabric of her tank top. “Can’t tell how many stab wounds until we get her back and hose her down.” He indicated slight bruising on her inner arm. “And she’s a user.”

“Probably a pros,” said Perez. “In this neck of the woods.”

“Any ID?” Perez asked CS.

“Nada. Just some cash, which her attacker didn’t bother to take.”

Terri caught my eye and nodded toward a makeshift evidence table. I knew what she wanted me to see.

“It was beside the body, half under her,” she said. “And you hear what the ME said? Could be weeks, maybe a month; it’s an old kill.”

“Yeah, I heard. And this sort of wrecks your moral-standards theory.”

Her eyes, above the mask, looked puzzled for a moment.

“You know, the part about him not killing girls.”

Monica Collins arrived at the scene just as the NYPD Crime Scene van pulled out. She had her shield out in front of her, field agents flanking her like sentinels, and enough attitude to fill the tent.

“Why wasn’t I informed about this?” She snapped on a pair of gloves.

One of the detectives from the local Fifth Precinct who had never met her must have missed her FBI shield because he said, “Sorry, but I don’t got your number. Is it listed?”

Collins asked for his name and badge number.

Terri stepped in. “No one knew if this is related to the case yet, Agent Collins.”

Collins wheeled around. “What part of ‘full cooperation’ do you not understand, Detective Russo?”

“No one wanted to waste your time if it wasn’t related.”

Collins didn’t respond. She headed toward the concrete slab that hid the body. She hadn’t put on her mask yet and I was sure she’d be sorry.

Everyone stopped to watch as she reeled back from the corpse, hand across her nose and mouth.

“Hope she chokes,” O’Connell whispered.

Collins tried to look cool though her face was a bit green. “Where’s the drawing?”

“Lab took it for testing,” said Terri.

“Already?”

“They’re efficient.”

Collins’s eyes narrowed above the mask she had finally gotten in place. “Did the sketch look like the others?”

“Not my area of expertise,” said Terri. “Plus, it was a mess. Torn up and stained. Hard to tell if it had anything to do with the vic. Could be a coincidence that it was found near the body. Might have blown onto her or been dug up by the construction.”

I wasn’t sure if Terri was trying intentionally to piss off the agent or not. Everything she said was true, but Collins was steaming. She looked past Terri and caught my eye. “You,” she said. “Sketch artist. Did it look like the vic?”

“You saw the vic’s face, Agent Collins. Nothing much left to compare it to.” I was pretty proud of my answer and could see by the slight smile in Terri’s eyes that she was too.

Collins’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I’ll be speaking with Quantico officials, bringing them up to speed on these events.” She looked over at Terri, then turned and left.

“You’re going to have to play ball with them eventually,” I said to Terri.

“Gee, thanks for telling me that, Rodriguez.” She turned to her men. “You hear that, guys? Rodriguez here says we are going to have to play ball with G.”

I put up my hands in defense. It just seemed to me that she was asking for trouble, and maybe I had been too.

“Hey, I know,” said Perez. “Why don’t you draw a picture of ‘Lewinsky’ and we can frame it for her, like a gift.”

“I’d make a drawing of you, Perez, but I draw faces, not assholes. ”

Perez’s arm snapped back, ready to let me have it, but O’Connell grabbed him. “Easy there, Pretzel. Rocky here didn’t mean no harm, did you, Rocky?”

Rocky?

“It was a joke,” I said to Perez.

“Pendejo,” said Perez.

I was ready to call him a fool too, plus a few other choice names, but Terri told everyone to relax. Then she looked up at me, a smile ticking at the corners of her lips. “Rocky?” she said. “Hmmm…don’t know about that.”

Terri had half the department going through Missing Persons and within a few hours they’d come up with three viable candidates for the Hudson Pier Jane Doe. After that, it didn’t take long to match the dental records to a nineteen-year-old runaway named Carolyn Spivack, who had priors for possession and prostitution.

An hour later we were in the basement of a housing project on West Twentieth: dung-colored walls, cracked linoleum tiles, flickering fluorescent lights. It was a teen shelter for runaways, unwed mothers, and junkies, and the last-known address for Carolyn Spivack. Terri had asked me along in case there was a drawing to be made.

We knew what we were looking for, but didn’t expect to find it so quickly.

“I can’t believe it,” said Maurice Reed, the guy who ran the shelter. “Carolyn had totally straightened herself out.” He eased himself into a hard-backed chair. “She just wanted to help others who had been in her position. She’d been working here for eight months. She was…a beautiful human being.”

It was Reed who had reported her missing, his name on the missing persons report, though that did not clear him of suspicion. It was a well-known fact that killers often reported their crimes, particularly when they were close to the victim.

“Do her parents know?” he asked.

“Her parents are on their way from Cincinnati to claim the body,” said Terri.

Reed blinked a few times, and swallowed. It looked to me as if he was fighting tears.

“How did Carolyn come to the shelter?” Terri asked.

“Like most. She sort of just washed up, you know, broke and broken, at our door.” He sighed. “Nicky brought her in.”

“Nicky?”

“A former street hustler, but he’s cool now. He’ll be here in a little while if you want to talk to him.”

Terri didn’t soft-pedal her next question: “There were track marks on her arm. You know about that?”

“They had to be old ones. Carolyn was clean. I’m sure of it. She was here every day. I managed to get her on staff with a small salary I wheedled out of social services. She had to go for drug testing every week. I’m telling you, she was clean.” He exhaled a deep sigh. “Carolyn was great with people, particularly the girls who’d gone through the same stuff she had.”

A dozen micro-expressions-all of them sad-passed across the man’s face.

“You know where she lived?” Terri asked.

“I wouldn’t know that.”

“You said she was here every day,” said Terri. “And she never told you where she lived?”

Reed’s facial muscles went from sad to scared, mouth open, eyes wary, and I started to sketch him.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s just…what I do. I’m a sketch artist.”

“Wait a minute. You don’t think I could have-”

“No one said anything about you being a suspect, Mr. Reed. It’s what Rodriguez does to keep his hands busy.”

It worked. Reed got nervous.

“Now that I think about it,” he said. “She must have been at the Alfred Court, over on Sixteenth, between Eighth and Ninth. It’s the last of its kind, a rooming house. Pretty funky, but it serves its purpose.”