Jonathan Santlofer - Anatomy of Fear

It took me by surprise. I hadn’t thought about it. But when I did, I said yes, as long as I didn’t have to give up my forensic artwork.

“Oh, no. That’s a big part of why I’m asking you,” said Rauder. “Bill Guthrie, in the fortieth, up in the Bronx, has a real strange case. A fire. Looks like arson. A man burned to death in a tenement. Fire department put out the blaze, but the guy was a goner, burned beyond recognition. No ID on him. No nothing.”

The minute he said it- a man burned to death -I thought of my vision, the drawing I’d just made, and shuddered. “And the landlord can’t identify him?” I asked.

“No, it’s some slumlord real estate operation. They don’t know him. Say he paid cash every month. But here’s the strange part. The only thing that survived was a five-thousand-dollar Rolex watch on the guy’s wrist. Half the gold melted, but the lab could still ID it. Odd, isn’t it? I mean, here’s some guy living in some crap hole and he’s wearing a watch like that.”

“So it wasn’t a robbery-arson or whoever killed him would have taken the watch?”

“Right.” Rauder winked at me. “Plus, the ME pulled two slugs out of what was left of his body. The arson was to cover a murder. The guy’s teeth were kicked in so there’s no way to check dentals. Guthrie’s guessing it was a murder for hire. Somebody had this guy snuffed and I’d like to know who-and why.” Rauder’s eyes narrowed. “So here’s my question: You ever do one of those facial reconstructions?”

“You mean build a face based on a skeleton?”

“That’s it.”

One time, at Quantico, an instructor brought us to a morgue to draw a corpse who’d had half the flesh on his face torn off in a car crash. We were supposed to reconstruct it based on the bone structure. Later, we were shown a picture of what he had looked like and my drawing was dead-on. No pun intended. After that, we had to do the whole thing over, in clay and plaster.

“Yeah,” I said. “I made one. It’s been a long time, but it was part of my training. I guess I wouldn’t mind getting my hands in some clay and trying again.”

“Great. They’ve got the remains at the morgue, and you can nose around a little with some of Guthrie’s men, like you did for Russo. It’s always good to have a new pair of eyes on a case that’s going cold too fast. And you won’t get any resentment from Guthrie’s men. They’re happy to have anyone that’s willing to come up to the Bronx. Plus you proved your worth.” He smiled.

I thought again about the first time I’d had the vision of the burning man, and I didn’t know why, but I started to feel something weird about the case, and about Denton.

“Chief Denton have any interest in this case?”

Rauder’s brows knit. “Why do you ask that?”

“No reason. I just wondered.”

“Maybe what Russo says about you is true, kid, that you’re a bit of a psychic.”

“Me? No…not really.”

“No? Because Chief Denton did take an interest in the case, which is odd. I mean, the chief doesn’t take much interest unless it’s a big story. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying anything about the chief. It’s not his job. But this morning we’re having a meeting, one of our regular ones where the chiefs report to me and I report to Denton, and when I tell him about the burning man in the Bronx he starts asking a whole lot of questions. Even asks to see the case file, the CS pics, autopsy report. Odd, because, like I said, the chief doesn’t usually get involved, or care. But I figure if the chief cares about this case so much I’d better make sure Guthrie gets some help. This kind of John Doe usually ends up cold, but maybe not this time-and maybe not with your help.”

I didn’t say what immediately came to mind-that Rauder might have gotten Denton’s reaction backward-because I wasn’t sure I was right, but I told him I’d help.

“Thanks,” he said. “Your dad would have been real proud of you.”

I didn’t want him to get started on my father, but it was too late.

“You know what I remember most about your dad? His locker. What a sight that was. Most of the guys had the usual pin-up girls and crap, but not him. The inside of his locker door was a shrine to your artwork. Every other day he was taping a new picture in there. He’d bring me or one of the guys over and say, ‘Look at what my boy did.’ It sounds like he was showing off, but frankly Juan Rodriguez didn’t give a rat’s ass what me or anyone else thought when it came to you. It was just what he thought. And I can tell you there was no one, no one on this earth more proud of what you could do with a pencil than your dad. He was proud of you then and he’d be proud of you now.”

I swallowed, tried to blink away the threat of tears, and said I’d get over to the morgue and start that reconstruction right away. Then I got the hell out of Mickey Rauder’s office as fast as I could.

Ihadn’t spoken to Terri since she’d told me about opening my father’s Cold Case because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. My emotions were mixed, but I knew I wanted to see her.

We met at a bar near her place and she looked really pretty, though I could see she was tense-furrowed brow, mouth tight.

We didn’t kiss hello and we were way past shaking hands, so it was awkward, a nod, a quick “Hi,” then we ordered drinks and sat at a small table by the bar not talking. After the waiter delivered our beers, Terri started the conversation with an apology. “It was a mistake to open your father’s case, and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I hope you believed what I said, that I was trying to get you some closure.”

“Are you sure that’s what you were trying to do?” The question had come from my subconscious, nothing I’d planned to ask.

Terri took her time before she answered.

“You know, I honestly can’t say. Maybe at the time I was kidding myself. Maybe…I just wanted to find out more about you. It’s possible. But I’ll tell you what I feel now.” She looked into my eyes. “Whatever suspicions I had about you, any motives I may have had for bringing you on the case, that’s in the past. It’s not about that anymore. You broke the case for me, and I’m grateful, but I’m talking about something else, something that happened just before that, when I stopped wondering and I started…” She shrugged and went for her beer.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

“You too, what ?”

I didn’t want to say what I thought she’d been about to say: that she had decided to trust me and had started to care, because then I’d have to say it too, so I went back to my father’s case. “I know what you were trying to do, and it’s okay. It got me some answers I never would have gotten.”

“So you’re okay? You’re not mad at me?”

“No.”

“So how come you look it?”

“I’m not angry,” I said. “It’s just that I was thinking about what happened between me and my father. It was the worst thing that ever happened, and…I have to live with that. But it’s the past and I can’t change it. There are some things you don’t get over because you’re not supposed to.”

Terri nodded, and touched my hand. After a moment, she asked, “How’s your friend doing?”

“Julio? He’s good.” I thought about the long night we’d had, me and Julio, talking and talking, and even letting our machismo down, and crying a little too. At first it had stung, that he hadn’t been able to tell me, but now I understood. There were things one didn’t ever want to say. I had never told my mother what had happened, and after a night of debating whether or not I’d get on a plane to Virginia Beach and confess, I realized that was about my need, not hers. It would open an old wound and only add to her pain. She didn’t need it, and it wouldn’t change anything.