Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (7 page)

Afterward we stopped at her favorite place for dinner—the overpriced food shop and restaurant, E.A.T., at Eighty-first and Madison. She chose the same comfort food that her father would have picked: macaroni and cheese and a Coke.

I had my second salad of the day, hating every piece of verdant green. Dulcie was chattering about the classes she was signed up for at drama school when my cell phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hi.” It was my now ex-husband. “I just got your message. How is she?”

“Fine.” I looked over at her and mouthed,
It’s your father
, and her face brightened. “It really is just a simple burn. We’re having dinner. She’s talking about drama school, nothing’s changed.” I smiled at Dulcie, who was listening intently to my conversation. She reached out her hand. I saw the bandage and winced. “Do you want to talk to her?” I asked him.

“First tell me if you are okay. I know how you panic about her.”

The problem with still being friends with the man I used to be married to was that he wanted to know how I was, too.

“Like I said, it’s really only a minor burn. Here’s Dulcie.”

I handed my daughter the phone, and while she told her father the whole story, from the moment of impact with the soup, I tried to figure out why Cleo’s book was as much on my mind as anything else. A distraction? Something to dwell on other than the randomness of fate and the horror that I had to go on sending my daughter off to school every day not knowing when something else would happen to her?

“And then the doctor came and he looked at it,” Dulcie was saying, still only halfway through the story. She was making it dramatic, stringing it out and turning it into performance art for one-half of her best audience.

I was surprised that Cleo’s book had affected me as much as it had. I listened to people talking about sex all day, about their issues with their bodies and brains, and how they functioned or didn’t function. What was different about this woman and what she was saying?

As I watched my daughter, I realized my own arm
throbbed. Ever since my child had been a baby, I’d experienced the same pain she did. I knew that it was psychosomatic and that if I worked on it, I most probably could stop it from happening. But I didn’t mind. She was my girl. I would have preferred to take all of her pain than to stop feeling it.

I motioned to Dulcie to wrap it up.

S
aturday night Detective Noah Jordain had played piano till almost 12:00 a.m. in the same restaurant in Greenwich Village he had first found when he moved to New York City four years before.

He’d been homesick for New Orleans that night. And that led to him thinking about his father: a good cop whose name had been sullied and who’d died before he could clear it. Whoever had set up André Jordain, a thirty-year veteran of the New Orleans Police Department, might have thought he had gotten away with it, but Noah was still working on the case.

André and his partner, Pat Nagley, had busted a cocaine ring. It was cut-and-dried. Or so everyone thought. Until the defense attorney got the evidence thrown out of court by proving that André and Pat had been on the take, accepting payoffs from the dealer for five years until finally turning on the dealer when he refused to increase the payoffs.

There was a string of evidence presented that, on the surface, damned the two New Orleans detectives. But Noah knew, just as his mother and his brothers and sisters knew, it had all been fabricated. His father had upheld the law every day of his life. He’d been a devout Catholic and faithful husband. Yes, he drank too much sometimes, he could let his temper get the better of him, and he was a big flirt. But a bad cop? No way. The documents and evidence had to have been manufactured after the fact.

There was no question of collusion, and there was some connection between the drug dealer and someone higher up with more power than André Jordain. One day Noah would find out who’d been involved and clear his father’s name. He owed him that.

A year after the indictment, his father had died. A few months after that, Noah had broken up with his live-in girlfriend. His mother had three other sons and two daughters and six grandchildren around her. That left him free.

Noah had come to New York to get away from a police department that was as corrupt as often as it upheld the law, and so that he might see things more clearly from a distance. No, that was bullshit. At least he could be honest with himself. He had come to Manhattan to work the case from the New York angle, since there was evidence that the drug ring was tied to someone in the NYPD. And he’d also left home because he hated walking down the streets and smelling the river and doing all the things that made him remember.

The restaurant that had become his regular haunt was two blocks away from Noah’s apartment. Caroline’s had a long mahogany bar, a fireplace in the dining area and a beat-up old upright Steinway in the front that no one had touched since the previous owner had died twenty years before. After a few months of getting to know the current owner, having drinks or dinner there at least three times a week, occasionally bringing
a date—never the same woman twice—Noah asked if he could play.

His soulful jazz was like New York. Moody and energetic, dark, then bright. He played the way they played in the twenties and it fit the restaurant. Caroline’s had had a musical history; it had been a popular jazz club and speakeasy during prohibition, catering to a crowd that sat and sipped their illegal gin, listening to music just like Noah’s.

Now he had a regular gig. Friday and Saturday nights. On Sundays he slept off the homesickness and the nightmares that followed the purging music. Usually he slept late. Till at least noon. His one sin of the week. Well, maybe not his one sin, but the one he felt the guiltiest about because he’d been brought up to be in church on Sunday mornings. Not in bed.

It had been four years since he’d walked into any house of God. The day of his father’s funeral. It wasn’t a loss of faith so much as a break of faith. A jagged cut that bled and bled and wouldn’t heal, and until it did, he’d rather sleep.

But that Sunday morning the phone call had woken him up at 9:00 a.m. It was the second Sunday in a row that he’d been woken this way.

“Were you sleeping?” Mark Perez asked.

“Umm.”

“Having a nightmare?”

“No.”

“Wrong answer,” his partner said.

“Oh, no,” Jordain said, anticipating the next sentence.

“Looks like we might have a serial killer, after all. You were right.”

“Damn, this is one time I wish to God I’d been wrong.”

“You have no idea.” Perez then gave Jordain the address of the hotel where the woman’s body had been found fifteen minutes earlier.

A
s he walked through the bedroom of the hotel suite, Noah took it all in: the unmade bed, sheets pulled back, pillows indented. Nothing violent. Nothing alarming about the scene. The rest of the room was relatively undisturbed. A bottle of mineral water was next to the bed. A glass was partially filled with clear liquid.

The television was set to an all-day news station, and a familiar reporter was talking about a suicide bomber in Israel who had blown himself up, along with seventeen others, in a supermarket. It happened so often, Noah realized, that you became inured to it, and you could walk by the TV and not stop to listen.

Not right, Noah thought, and for a few seconds, he did stop and then said a silent prayer for the people who had died at the hands of an overzealous lunatic.

And then he walked on, toward the world of another madman, the sound of the newscaster fading into the background.

Her back was to the bathroom door, and she was on her knees in front of a makeshift shrine. A plastic Jesus on a cross nestled in the niche of the soap dish. It was a crappy plastic religious artifact. Not like the heavy and sacred gold cross in the cathedral at home that the priest touched with reverence and that gleamed in the soft lights of the church.

This one glared.

Like the woman who had preceded her, she was wearing a nun’s habit. That much was obvious, even though it was pulled up and exposed her bare ass as she prayed at the tub, her head bowed.

Noah didn’t rush. She was past saving.

The perfect pale skin of her back was streaked with the dark red of dried blood. The marks were not random smears but crosses. Finger-painted crosses all over her back, her buttocks, the backs of her thighs and the soles of her poor feet.

Of all the horrors, it was the sight of her feet that made Noah sad. The wrinkled soles were small. There was something so fucking innocent about the woman’s feet. He wished he could wet a towel and wash them off, clean them of the offending finger-painting of a devil.

Something was moving between her legs
.

No. That wasn’t possible. He focused. Even before he consciously figured it out, memory informed him of what it was going to be. He should have been prepared, because it had been there at the first bloodbath.

Like a reptile, like a living thing, the rosary dangled between her legs, half stuffed into her vaginal cavity, half exposed, and dripping with the poor whore’s blood.

It was the constant trickle that caused the holy prayer beads to sway to some rhythm that Noah did not recognize from anything he had ever played.

No one would have listened.

Down each bead of the rosary, down over the medallion
of the Virgin Mary, down over the Christ figure on the cross, drops of blood fell to the floor, where they pooled on the white tiles.

Like Mrs. Rodriguez, the maid in the hotel on Fifty-sixth Street, Noah subconsciously intoned a prayer:
Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name
.

Taking a few steps forward, he stood as close to the dead woman’s body as he could without contaminating the crime scene and looked down into the oversize bathtub. Its gleaming silver taps reflected her face, with its closed eyes, back at him.

On the bottom of the tub were ten fifty-dollar bills, soaked in blood, laid out in the shape of a cross.

The photographer had arrived and Noah stepped out of the bathroom to give him room to do his job. Noah and his partner talked to the uniformed cop who had arrived first on the scene, asking him questions and listening to his detailed answers.

“She checked in last night at 10:00 p.m.”

“Not dressed like a nun, I’m guessing,” said Noah.

“The desk clerk who was on duty isn’t here. But I’ve got his name and home phone number. Do you want it?”

“We’re done,” the photographer said, coming out of the bathroom. “She’s all yours.”

Tibor Mercer, the M.E., took over then, making a preliminary examination before moving the woman. He was a middle-aged, overweight man with curly red hair and had been with the department for his entire career. After being an expert witness in an important televised trial, he had become one of the most trusted M.E.s in the country, appearing on crime shows and being quoted in newspapers. But even with all his experience, he had never become hardened by his job, which earned him the respect of many of the people who worked with him. Including Noah Jordain.

Finally Mercer pulled her away from her porcelain prie-dieu.

“How long do you think she’s been dead?” Noah asked.

“Probably died shortly after midnight.”

Noah watched the man do his job. A few minutes passed.

“Look at this.”

Noah knew Mercer well enough to not like the sound of his voice. “What?”

“See for yourself.”

The M.E. held the prostitute’s mouth open with his plastic-sheathed fingers. Noah peered in and saw a communion wafer.

No. That wasn’t what it was, damn it.

On the corpse’s tongue, the same shape as a wafer blessed by a priest, was a perfect, carefully placed, pristine and unused condom, still coiled and flat. A circle of pale, translucent latex.

As if in the hour of her death, she was taking communion.

After all, it was Sunday morning.

A
fter I dropped Dulcie at drama school on Monday, I started to walk uptown to my office. On the corner was a trio of kiosks holding the morning papers. While I waited for the light to change, I scanned the headlines on the
New York Times
, but it was the three words on the front page of the
New York Post
that screamed out at me.

Second Holy Horror.

And then in smaller letters: Magdalene Murderer Strikes Again. Hooker Slain in Nun’s Habit.

I put two quarters in the slot, pulled the handle, and the smell of the ink wafted up from inside the metal cage.

I read the article, missing the first green light and the next. According to the reporter, the murder was almost identical to the first crime, which had occurred a week before.

This woman had also been found in a midtown hotel frequented by business people and tourists. Rooms went for two hundred dollars. She, too, had paid for the room with cash. No
one had seen who she was with. There were no discarded clothes found in the room, and the desk clerk claimed that he had most certainly not seen a woman in a nun’s habit signing in.

Her name was Cara De Beer. Twenty-two. From Austin, Texas. Had been working in New York since she’d left high school at seventeen. She had two priors.

In as lurid language as the reporter could use, he described the nun’s habit, the pools of blood left on the bathroom floor—he had gotten to the room after the body had been taken away—and he quoted one of the cops as saying that “a rosary had been inserted into one of her body cavities.”

But the police wouldn’t elaborate. Just as they had not said any more about the first woman who had been found the week before. The rosary might have been in the hooker’s mouth, her ear or any other opening.

I reread the woman’s name and her stats. I didn’t know this one. She wasn’t one of the women I’d ever treated in prison. Moving on to the next paragraph: “Someone is obviously targeting prostitutes,” said Detective Noah Jordain of the Special Victims Unit. “And we urge every sex worker to be careful. If anyone has any information, please come forward. We need to catch this man.”