Anatomy of Fear Read Free

one is for later.
    He exchanges the drawing for a folder, puffs at imaginary specks of dust, begins to skim notes of timed entrances and exits until his visual memory is triggered and he sees the man coming out of the brownstone in split-second fragments.
    Yes, this is what he is after, what he needs to do now.
    He swipes his gloved fingers across a clean page in the sketch pad and sets to work.
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
    One fragment. Then another.

    But the picture is incomplete, the rest of it stuck in a synapse.
     

     
    Damn.
    He paces across the room, drops to the floor, does a quick set of push ups, and now, now, with his heart pumping fast and breath coming in one tiny explosion after another, he sees more of it, bits and pieces that he hurries to get down on paper before they are lost.
     

     
     

     
     

     
    But still they remain fragments.
    Why can’t it ever be born in its entirety?
    Must he always get lost to find his way?He tries to locate the part of himself that knows this is simply how it is, that his mind works like some fucked-up computer gathering bits of data that will eventually coalesce.
     

     
    He takes a deep breath and flips to a clean page, draws and redraws, each time a bit more information added.
     

     
    Yes, that’s it, there it is.
    The one picture is finished; the relic no longer headless, he sets it aside. He is halfway there, one part of the process complete.
    But another image is already pressing against his frontal lobe demanding attention.
    Pencils sharpened quickly, electric impulses from his brain telegraphing tiny muscles in his hand to make specific and nonspecific strokes, another enigmatic drawing begins.
     

     

    But what is it?
    His cognitive power to recognize has not yet caught up to his hand.
    Trust it. You have been here before.
    The pencil starts up again like an extension of his hand, a simple repetitive mark-making machine, stroke after stroke until finally…there it is.
    He sits back, gloves stained with graphite, adrenaline pumping in his veins, and surveys his work.
    The drawings have made sense of it.
    Now he knows what to do and how he will do it.
     

     

3
    F or Christ’s sake, keep those people back.”
    Badge out in front of her, Terri Russo made her way past the uniforms who were trying to maintain order on the Brooklyn street. It was dark, but the combination of yellow street lamps and flashing red beacons bathed the crowd of fifty or sixty people, all angling for a better view, in an eerie orange glow.
    Damn it, thought Terri. Didn’t they know better? Perhaps the line between real life and entertainment had finally become so blurred, people just thought it was another reality show.
    She stopped a moment, her eyes on the crowd. He could be here .
    Her pivotal case had been one of those—a creep who just couldn’t help himself, had to be there, right under the uniforms’ and detectives’ collective noses, watching them clean up his ugly mess. She’d spotted him from a police sketch, followed him without stopping to think, without calling for backup, which some would call foolish—and did—particularly as she’d taken a bullet to her right shoulder. Worth it, if you asked Terri; it was the collar that had catapulted her into her current position, heading up an NYPD Homicide Resource Division out of Midtown North. Hell, she ought to thank the little creep.

    “What have we got?” she asked the Brooklyn detective, though she already knew. It was the reason she’d been called—the drawing pinned to the dead man, same as the guy who’d been stabbed in midtown Manhattan.
    Stabbed, she thought, not shot. That didn’t make sense.
    The Brooklyn detective’s eyes did a slow dance over Terri’s breasts beneath her tight jean jacket, then back up to her face, her dark hair pulled into a ponytail that made her look about eighteen, though she’d be thirty-one in a week.
    He handed her the dead man’s wallet. “African