Jonathan Santlofer - Anatomy of Fear

Tim 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.

The 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.

Tim 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.

Ithought 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.”