My desire to believe was battling with my doubt and cynicism, and standing there covered in slimy water, crushed flowers over my heart, the room began to spin, pictures of saints coming in and out of focus, and I thought I might faint. The women took hold of my arms. My grandmother hummed an old lullaby she’d sing to me when I was a boy and Maria Guerrero mumbled some Spanish incantation, and I started to feel better, the dizziness abating, my mind clearing, stomach settling.
Maria Guerrero cleaned the egg off my chest with my white shirt. She rolled it into a ball and told me I had to dump it into a trash bin as soon as I left the store, that the shirt had absorbed the evil spirits, and I must now cast them off. Then she prepared a jar of water with crushed herbs and colored it with a blue dye and told me that over the next week I was to pour portions of it over my hands and it would keep me safe and pure.
When she was quiet I asked a question. “This man who you saw, the one who wants to do me harm, how do I find him?”
Maria Guerrero opened my sketch pad and looked at my drawings.
“Tienes un talento,” she said. “You can see things other people tell you and you can see this man.” She reached out with her fingertips and gently closed my eyes.
When she did, he was there. But just for a second. Like the burning man I’d seen with Denton, but much faster.
“He was there,” I said. “But he’s vanished.”
Maria Guerrero took one of my pencils and swirled it over the votive candles. Then she handed it to me and I started to draw.
Time became elastic, impossible to gauge. I just kept working, the image coming to me.
When I looked at my drawings, I had done it. He was there. On the page.
I was amazed, speechless, staring at this face I had drawn: the tightly knit brows, the taut scowling mouth, all the facial anatomy conspiring to create a classic face of anger to the point of fury and hatred.
“You have seen this man,” said Maria Guerrero. It wasn’t a question and she was right-I had seen him.
“But where?” I had no idea.
“Eleggua will open the road,” she said. “Es tuyo. Tú lo tienes.”
He is yours now. You have him.
What I always said to victims but never fully believed until this moment.
“You will no longer see him in your mind,” she said.
“But how will I find him?” I asked.
“In your own way,” she said.
Outside, I tossed my stained white shirt into a garbage can and felt another wave of unexpected relief. I walked my grandmother home, jacket buttoned up against the cold and to hide the fact that I was shirtless. I kept trying to remember where I had seen the man I had just drawn.
“Para empezar,” my grandmother said. “You are trying too hard. Deja que suceda.”
I knew she was right, but I couldn’t stop.
At the entrance to her apartment building she told me she was proud of me and loved me, that she would pray to Jesus for me. She was going to change clothes now and go to church. Then she kissed my cheek and made the sign of the cross.
50
He stands in the shadow of an abandoned building slathered with city notices, watches a kid balancing a blaring boom box pass by, bobbing to the salsa music.
And there they are.
His optic nerve snaps pictures of the man and the old lady with him. He watches them hug and kiss. The man leaves, the old lady begins to climb the stairs. As he takes another mental picture, the old lady turns and sees him, dark eyes narrowing, and something about the way she looks at him causes him to shudder.
He slinks back into the shadows and waits for the door to close behind her. Then he takes another picture. This is just what he needed.
He thanks God for the idea that has just come to him.
51
When I got home I was flying, adrenaline pumping. I had completed the drawing. It was astonishing. A miracle.
But now what?
I had to show the sketch to Terri, have her run it through every possible mug shot on file and computer. But I did not want to go to the station. I called her cell, got voice mail, and told her to call me.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture the face I had drawn, but could not. What Maria Guerrero had said was true: Now that I’d put him on paper I could no longer see him in my mind. I had the drawing; now all I had to do was figure out who he was and where I had seen him. But how?
I heard Maria Guerrero’s voice. In your own way.
Of course.
I sat down at my work table, flipped to a clean page in my pad, and started drawing.
What was it? I couldn’t place it and it didn’t tell me anything. But there was something about it on the edge of my psyche.
I stared at it, but was trying too hard.
I called Terri’s cell, left another message, then tried her office.
A man answered, O’Connell, I was pretty sure. I hesitated, didn’t know if I could trust him, but took a chance.
“O’Connell?”
“Rocky?”
“Yeah.”
“Listen, there’s trouble here,” he said. “But I can’t talk.”
“Trouble with what?”
“The G has something.”
“DNA?”
“I don’t know. Just that they want to see you,” he whispered.
I froze a moment, not sure what to say, then, “Where’s Russo?”
“With Denton. I can’t talk.”
I hung up, my hand shaking. They must have gotten the DNA results from the pencil. And now they’d come looking for mine. But this was too fast, wasn’t it? Maybe I was wrong. But what else could it be? And what was going on with Terri and Denton? Whatever it was, I’d know soon enough.
I looked back at the sketches I’d made and it happened. One of those brain flashes. I saw it, the lettering on the door, though I couldn’t make sense of it till I got it down on paper.
Of course. This had to be where I had seen him.
I called the precinct and asked for Detective Schmid in Special Victims.
She answered on the third ring.
I tried to sound casual. “Hi, it’s Nate Rodriguez. Remember me?”
“Sure, the sketch artist. You did a good job for me. And you know we caught that guy, the rapist.”
“Yeah, I heard that.” Two good signs; she was not acting like anything was wrong, and she remembered she owed me.
“So what can I do for you?”
“Public Information is down the hall from you, right?”
“Yes, what about it?”
“That day I did the sketch for you I was there-”
“Why were you in DPI?”
“I wasn’t. Not exactly. It was when I was dropping off the sketch.” I wasn’t sure what to say or how to say it. “I need to find someone in that office.”
“Who?”
I described him.
“Has to be Tim Wright. He’s the only man in that office. But you won’t be asking him any questions.”
“Why not?”
“He’s been canned.”
“When?”
“Just. I don’t know the details,” said Schmid. “From what I hear he’d been missing lots of days, just not showing up, so they fired him. Why’d you want to talk to him?”