Anatomy of Fear Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t get something soon, the G, which is how the cops referred to the FBI, would be taking over the case.
    “So why do you think this guy makes drawings of his vics?” she asked.
    “Don’t know. The only thing that drawing his victims proves is that he’s stalked them, right? He’d have to, to be able to draw them.”
    “Yes, but my question is why make them in the first place?”
    “Could be his signature? Maybe he wants everyone to know it’s his work?”
    Russo angled another look at me. Maybe she was thinking I was smarter than she’d expected, not just a drop-out cop with a flair for drawing who’d forgotten to shave.
    “You should have been a shrink, Rodriguez.”
    I told her that the shrink stuff had been part of my college and forensic art training, but didn’t bother to tell her that my mother was a psychiatric social worker and I’d grown up around it too. “No way,” I said. “I couldn’t take people complaining all day.”
    She glanced from me to the drawings, then back at me. Therewas something going on in her mind. I could see it from the dozens of fleeting micro-expressions that were passing over her face, none of them staying quite long enough for me to read.
    “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, andI 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.”