Jonathan Santlofer - Anatomy of Fear

“By the way, I owe you a thank-you,” she said. “I should have called about that sketch you made for my department, but I got busy, you know how it is.”

“Sure,” I said.

“It was an amazing resemblance. I knew the guy right away. How do you do it-I mean, capture that kind of likeness?”

“What can I say? I’m a trained professional.”

“No, seriously.”

“I don’t know. It’s something I could always do, draw from memory. I used to practice as a kid, do portraits of my friends when they weren’t around; athletes and movie stars too.” Something about her question made me start back on a cuticle.

“Right, but those are faces you’d be familiar with, that you’d seen. I mean, how can you draw someone you’ve never seen?”

“It’s mostly the training, but…sometimes, when I make a connection, things just come to me, and I see them.”

“Like what things?”

I glanced at my cuticle. It was bleeding. I shoved my hand into my pocket. “I don’t know, not exactly. It’s some sort of…transference.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Like between a shrink and a patient-you know, the Freudian thing? But maybe that’s the wrong word. If you ask one of the geeks who use computer programs, the ones that move noses and lips around instead of pencil on paper, I don’t know what they’d say, but I’m guessing they’d think it was more science than intuition.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“I guess I’m just a dinosaur, but I like my pencils and paper, and I like the time it takes to get acquainted with a subject, to hear what they’re saying, to look at them.” I looked at Terri Russo, her good bone structure, smooth skin across her frontal eminence, the beautifully arched brows over her supraorbital, the nice sharp angle of her mandible, and smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. Sometimes I forget I’m not working.”

“But you are working.” She raised her brow for a second. “So you can draw just about anything.”

“Is this a test?”

“You don’t have to get defensive, Rodriguez.”

“Nate.”

“Okay. Nate. It was just a question.”

“Yeah, I guess I can draw just about anything.”

“See,” she said. “That wasn’t so hard. I was asking because we haven’t yet come up with a witness to either of these murders, but if we do, you’d obviously be the man to call.”

I nodded.

“Right.” She glanced up, the muscles around her mouth pinching her lips. She was deciding whether or not to ask a question. “And…what if we never get a witness?”

“Excuse me?”

“I was just wondering if you might be able to make a sketch.”

“You mean without a witness?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not a psychic or a witch doctor.”

“No, of course not.” She scanned my face a moment, and once again I could see her weighing a question. “But what about the transference thing?”

“Well, yes, but I need someone to have it with.”

“Right,” she said. “Of course.”

The images have begun to appear, just a few repeated fragments, but enough to record.

A new sheet of paper, a few more fragments drawn, but still they refuse to coalesce.

Relax.

A long deep breath, eyes closed, trying to imagine what he will do and how they will die. But still the images resist, fragments doing a jitterbug in and around his optic nerve, not quite ready to make the journey from brain to eye to paper.

He pushes away from the table with a hissing sigh, gazes at the pictures he has affixed to his walls for inspiration, and the fragments in his mind start up again.

The puzzle pieces have begun to take on meaning, each one adding to the whole: a stroke, a shape, an abstract blob, coming together to tell him what he needs to know. He sets one against another, fleshing out the picture, time passing, more and more fragments committed to paper, the image finally harvested.

He sits back, eyes closed, and pictures the event: collecting his gear, changing his clothes, riding the subway, stalking his prey.

Terri Russo turned toward the commotion, two cops dragging a guy into the booking room.

“Get the fuck off me, assholes!”

“Who’s the asshole, huh?” said one of the cops, face bright red. He elbowed the cuffed man in the ribs while the other cop slammed him into a metal chair and cuffed him to it-a good thing, as the guy was bucking like one of those kiddy rides they used to have in front of dime stores and supermarkets.

Detective Jenny Schmid of Sex Crimes made her way across the room to greet the detectives and their prey.

“This the piece of shit?” she asked.

The red-faced cop said, “No question. We got a call, a break-in, and look who we find.” He handed Schmid a paper with a picture on it.

“You read him his rights?” asked Schmid, leaning over the guy, who was huffing like a horse after a run, his nostrils flaring. She held the picture up.

Terri glanced from the police sketch in the detective’s hand to the guy cuffed to the chair.

Schmid dangled the sketch in front of the perp’s face. “Looks like you fucking posed for this.”

The other cops in the room stopped writing up reports and turned toward the show, practically twitching in their chairs, waiting for an excuse to take a pot-shot at the perp. And they might have if some office type in khakis and a button-down shirt hadn’t come in with a big carton of folders, which he plopped onto a desk so he could get a good look too.

Schmid peered at him over the top of her glasses. “And you are?”

“Office of Public Info,” he said. “Just delivering some stuff for Detective Towers.”

“Well, deliver it,” she said. “And go.”

The guy lifted the box, but leaned over to peek at the drawing at the same time. “Wow,” he said. “That’s really good.”

“Thanks so much for your expert opinion,” said Schmid, who aimed a finger at the door.

The guy narrowed his eyes at her, then sighed and left, balancing the carton in one hand like a waiter with a tray.

Terri cleared her throat.

Schmid acknowledged her with a slight turn of her head and another look of annoyance.

“That sketch,” Terri asked. “Who made it?”

Schmid sighed as if Terri had asked her to donate a kidney, but handed it over before going back to her suspect.

Terri flipped it over, noted the date, time, name of the witness, and the sketch artist, Nathan Rodriguez. She looked back and forth between the sketch and its living embodiment cuffed to the chair, the resemblance dead-on. Rodriguez had a gift, no question.

How did he do it? She could not imagine. But then, all Rodriguez had needed was one look at her unsub’s drawings to know they were made by the same man, one who was right-handed-and the lab had confirmed it. The sketches had come from the same kind of sketch pad, the glue that had held them in place still detectable along the edge of each. It was something, a connection, though nothing a DA could take to court. If they were lucky they might find something on the drawings other than the vics’ blood, though so far there was nothing.