The Anonymous Source Read Online Free

hallway. “Oh right, you told me already.”
    “Eric Santiago did not kill Professor Martin. I could get in a lot of trouble for telling you this.”
    “Then why are you telling me?” Alex asked.
    Silence.
    “Hello?”
    “Are you familiar with John 12:25?”
    Alex smiled. “Let’s assume I’m not.”
    “‘He who hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.’“
    Alex chuckled nervously. “That’s why you’re calling me?” He waited. “Hello?”
    The line was dead.

Chapter Three
    GIANT GRANITE COLUMNS supported the rounded ceilings of Courtroom Four and rows of wooden benches held more than two hundred spectators. Alex found a seat in the back and scanned the crowd as Santiago was led to his seat. His eyes landed on a woman in the front row. In her mid-thirties, she had curly brown hair so voluminous that it blocked his view of Santiago. When she turned toward Alex, he tried to catch her dark brown—almost black—eyes, which stood out against her light tan skin. She looked separate from the proceedings, out of place. And she seemed to look right through him.
    At 9:05 a.m., the judge gaveled the session to order as spectators packed the courtroom to its corners.
    Alex looked up at Assistant District Attorney Daniel Sharp, who was leaning on a wooden railing, talking with the other prosecutors. Sharp was forty years old but could pass for thirty, even with his bald head beaming under the fluorescent lights. Several times over the last year, Alex had watched him shatter a witness in one moment, then turn to address a jury with grace and kindness in the next. If he planned to run for mayor in a couple of years, Alex thought, this trial was sure to get him some attention.
    Sharp approached the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the simplest cases I’ve had the honor of prosecuting. At one o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Eve, 2001, Eric Santiago entered Washington Square Park from West Fourth Street. He walked the diagonal toward the fountain and stopped at the towering bronze statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi.” Sharp paused and looked at the floor gravely, then continued. “Santiago—”
    Alex tuned him out and studied the waves of the mystery woman’s hair. He knew most of the people in the courtroom that day—Santiago’s mother, Professor Martin’s daughter, a few NYU professors—but he couldn’t place the woman.
    Sharp raised his voice. “Fentanyl is designed as a slow-release drug. After receiving a concentrated dose orally, the professor would have felt nothing for three or four minutes. As his stomach heated the liquid fentanyl to 98 degrees, he probably experienced a few moments of relaxation, even well-being. Then, suddenly, his heart rate slowed, his blood pressure dropped, and his skin became clammy. Soon after, he fell to the ground, overcome by drowsiness. Seconds later, he was in coma. In another minute, he was dead.”
    Sharp paused and looked at the defendant with contempt. Santiago was slight and pale, his face scarred from untreated acne. His eyes didn’t move from the table in front of him.
    “After killing the professor,” Sharp continued, “Mr. Santiago strolled to Sixth Avenue where—theater workers will testify—he bought a ticket to the one-thirty a.m. showing of Erotic Advances . An hour later, he was back in his dorm room, where police found the spray bottle of fentanyl two days later.”
    Sharp paced in front of the jury box. “You will hear from the defense that Mr. Santiago had no motive. But we will show that Mr. Santiago did not only have a motive, he had the motive. Did he kill because he wanted better grades? No, he did not have any classes with the professor. Was it about a girl? No, they had no mutual acquaintances. Perhaps it was payback for some old slight? Again, no. Santiago’s actions sprang from the motive of a true killer—a simple love of death. He’s an icy, detached man who, as a child, burned insects in his