Blonde Ice

by R. G. Belsky

  Dowling nodded. “Yes, that’s the way many of those adult education classes work. We only provide the space and a few other logistics for the class. The instructor is in charge of everything else. There’s no college credit involved, so we don’t have to uphold any particular academic standards the way we would with regular courses. Have you spoken to Dr. Lyon about this?”

  “She won’t reveal the names of the people in her class.”

  “An academic freedom issue?”

  “She actually used the doctor-patient confidentiality reason.”

  Dowling sighed. “I’m not really sure that would stand up in an academic situation like this.”

  “I was hoping you might be able to get her to change her mind.”

  “I can try. But I’m not sure how much good I will do. Like I said, it’s not technically a patient-doctor relationship in a classroom. But Dr. Lyon’s not really a part of the college and doesn’t answer directly to me. Normally, I would say I could be persuasive enough to get her to do that based on her relationship with us here at the school. Presumably, she wants to maintain that good ­relationship—and I could threaten to not allow her to conduct classes here anymore. But I’m not sure that will work with Dr. Lyon. I met her at a reception not long ago and I must say that she came across to me as a very strong-willed woman. When she talks about the importance of doctor-patient confidentiality with you, I am sure she feels very strongly about the issue. I’m not confident that she’s going to change her mind for anyone. Even me.”

  “I understand that,” I smiled. “But let’s give it a try, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  She started to pick up a phone. “I’ll have to get her number from the Adult Education Department. It’ll probably take a little while for Nicole to do that for me. Do you want to wait? Or can I contact you later after I’ve talked to Dr. Lyon?”

  “Actually I found her number on the Web,” I said. “You can just look it up there.”

  She clicked on a computer by her desk. I walked around her desk, looked at the computer screen, and then gave her the URL for the website where I had gotten the information and phone number for Dr. Lyon.

  Dowling punched it into the computer, waited for the website to load, and then began to read the data on it.

  Suddenly she looked confused.

  “This can’t be right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must have given me the wrong Web address.”

  I looked over her shoulder at the website on the screen.

  The name Dr. Kate Lyon was at the top, along with a picture of Lyon and a few lines of bio on her education and professional credentials. The bio said she had practiced in Philadelphia for a number of years and then moved to New York City, where she set up an office on Central Park West.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “Then this must be a different Kate Lyon, not the one who taught here.”

  “No, I spoke to Dr. Lyon when I called the number on this site. She said she taught the class here, she just refused to give me any details about the people who attended it.”

  Dowling stared at the picture of Kate Lyon at the top of the page.

  “Mr. Malloy, I told you I met Dr. Lyon at a reception,” she said. “Talked to her for several minutes. And this is not the Kate Lyon I met. It doesn’t look anything at all like her.”

  “What did the Kate Lyon you met look like?”

  “She was a very attractive blonde woman.”

  Part V

  DEADLIER THAN THE MALE

  CHAPTER 39

  I WAS there when police descended on the block of Central Park West where the office of Dr. Kate Lyon was located.

  There was an army of cops—heavily armed, decked out in riot gear, with sharpshooters on the roof. Flashing red lights from police cars and emergency vehicles lit up the block. The cops smashed down the door and stormed into Lyon’s office. The only problem was there was no Kate Lyon inside. Just like Melissa Ross a few weeks earlier, she was gone.

  Dr. Kate Lyon—or whoever she really was—must have somehow figured out the cops were onto her.

  Once the building was clear, I went inside with Wohlers. Lyon’s office consisted of several rooms. A waiting area. A private office for the doctor. And a larger area—informal-looking, almost like a living room—where she apparently met with her patients. There were degrees on the walls in her office, similar to the way most doctors’ offices were decorated. They said that Kate Lyon had graduated from Temple University Medical School in Philadelphia, with a specialty in psychiatric guidance for women, and practiced in that city for a number of years.

  “What do you think?” I asked Wohlers as he studied the certificates on the wall. “Fakes?”

  “I bet they’re real.”

  “You figure the killer really is this Dr. Lyon?”

  He shook his head no. “I think the real Dr. Lyon is probably at the bottom of a lake or something somewhere, just like Melissa Ross was.”

  There were no pictures of the woman who called herself Dr. Kate Lyon anywhere in the office. Besides the diplomas, there were just some paintings and decorations on the wall that looked as if they had come from a Holiday Inn. It was a blank, nondescript office. No clues about its occupant.

  Other residents in the building said she had moved in several months earlier. They had seen clients going in and out of the office to see her. All of them seemed to be women. Dr. Lyon herself was rarely seen. And, when she was, no one had any major interplay with her. She kept to herself. Maybe trying to not draw any attention to herself. Which made sense. Except for one thing. She was so damned good-looking.

  “I tried to talk to her,” a dentist with an office on the ground floor told me when I did a series of interviews with people in the building. “I used to see her coming and going sometimes from the window of my office near the front entrance. I tried to keep an eye out for her. She was a real looker. I figured if I started up a conversation with her, maybe I could ask her out or something. Maybe something could happen between us.”

  “So what did happen?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “You never talked to her?”

  “Oh, I talked to her. Once. After that, I never tried again. In fact, I made sure to stay away from her.”

  “Why?”

  “I asked her if she wanted to have a drink sometime. Suggested it would be fun to get to know her better. Hell, I was hitting on her, sure. But I’ve hit on plenty of women before. Never got a reaction like this one before.”

  “She said no?”

  He nodded. “It wasn’t just her turning me down. It was the way she said it. And the way she looked at me. The anger. The hatred. I could feel it practically burning into me from her stare. Scared the hell out of me, I gotta say. It wasn’t simply that she wasn’t interested. It was more like . . . well, like she wanted to kill me.”

  It was in Dr. Kate Lyon’s private office that Wohlers and the cops finally struck pay dirt.

  There were files there on her patients. All of them were women. Most of the cases were similar. Abusive husbands. Harassment and claims of discrimination at work. Women’s empowerment was the topic of many of the patient profiles—the same way it was in the class that Lyon taught at the college.

  The name on one of the files was Melissa Ross.

  Things started to get a bit sticky for me at this point. I’d been sending tweets, texts, and emails back to the office on everything I’d found out so far. But now Wohlers was having second thoughts about me being there when they opened up the Melissa Ross file. I pointed out to him that the only reason he knew about Kate Lyon was me. And that I’d gone directly to him with the information instead of reporting it to someone else in the department or just going ahead and printing it first. I told him he owed me this exclusive. The whole exclusive. He made another halfhearted effort to argue about it, but eventually let me stay.

  According to the file, Melissa Ross had been seeing the
woman who called herself Kate Lyon for regular sessions. She talked extensively about all the problems she’d had with men in her life. Her abusive adoptive father. The men she had dated. Her marriage to Joe Delvecchio—and how it fell apart because she couldn’t trust him any more than she’d ever been able to trust any of the men in her life. The problems with male coworkers and superiors on the police force, which culminated in her attack on the commanding officer of her unit and her subsequent dismissal from the NYPD.

  She talked in the sessions about the satisfaction she got from starting her own private investigation agency which exposed cheating husbands and boyfriends for what they really were to the women who had trusted them.

  “The patient has a deep-seated need to hurt men,” Lyon wrote at the bottom of one of the session files. “To make them pay for the injustices and the indignities that she believes she has suffered from men in her own life. She has transferred her own anger at the specific men in her life who have hurt her to an overriding rage against all men—and this has consumed her to the point where it is the only thing that now matters to her and the only thing that gives her satisfaction. Her investigative agency is her true therapy. Even more than me. And yet the more revenge she gains by exposing the cheating and lies of the men she is investigating, the more her own hatred and distrust of men grows.”

  The entries were all very professional-sounding like that. There was very little emotion in them. Just a fact-filled account of the activities taking place during the psychiatric sessions with the patient and a medical evaluation of the causes and possible treatments for her. And all of the things Melissa Ross was telling Dr. Lyon so far were the kinds of things you’d expect her to be talking about to a professional therapist—the abusive adoptive father, the ex-husband, the problems with her superiors at work, etc.

  I wondered if the writing had been done by the real Dr. Kate Lyon—or by the woman who we now believed had taken over her identity.

  But then, after searching through most of the files, Wohlers found something that jumped right off of the page.

  “Melissa Ross told me today that she had begun looking for information about her birth parents,” the entry said. “More specifically, she wants to know about her birth father. She felt that all of the men so far in her life had been abusive and harmful to her. Except for him. Because she didn’t even know who he was. But she needs to find out why he abandoned her and gave her up for adoption. She believes that if she can find out the answer to that, maybe she can figure out the answers for other things in her life too. She seems quite determined about this. She has thrown all of her investigative skills—the things she has used in the past to help other women—into this mission. I wonder what the outcome will be for her if she does not find out the information she is looking for, or if it somehow is not what she wants to hear.”

  Melissa Ross was looking for information about her birth mother and birth father. She was a private investigator. So presumably at some point she was able to find out about her mother’s death at Munson Lake. Maybe she even found out about her mother’s brief relationship with Wylie, the same way I had.

  But what did that have to do with Wylie now or the murders or anything else?

  At some point after that in the Lyon files, the Melissa Ross entries stopped. Maybe she had stopped coming to the doctor’s office after that. Maybe their relationship had gone from being professional to something beyond. Or maybe the blonde woman simply stopped adding the details of the visits into the files because something was going on between the two of them.

  The last entry we found was the only one that had the hint of anything personal—anything beyond the normal doctor-patient relationship.

  “Melissa Ross has invited me for a drink outside the office,” the entry read. “I generally make it a policy not to have any interaction with my patients outside the office. I will make an exception this time. Melissa is too interesting a patient to ignore. She wants me to help her, and I think I can. More importantly, I think she can help me. . . .”

  It was somewhere around this time that someone in Lyon’s class began to partner with Melissa to investigate the husbands of women in the class. Obviously, this was the connection. Lyon, or whoever she really was, steered the women to Ross. Maybe to help Ross’s business. Maybe to help Lyon accomplish her own goals, whatever those might be. Maybe Lyon did it for personal reasons. Or maybe it was a combination of all of the above.

  So what happened then?

  Did the two of them become kindred spirits out to avenge the wrongs that men had done to them and to other women? Was there a sexual element involved? Did they have some kind of a lesbian relationship? Did Melissa Ross somehow betray that relationship when she slept with the first victim, Walter Issacs?

  I’d always been bothered by the fact that Issacs’s was the only murder in which the victim seemingly had sex before his own death. Maybe that made the real blonde killer jealous. Or maybe Melissa had just gotten cold feet, when people actually started dying, and tried to back out of the bizarre relationship, whatever that relationship was. So she wound up dead too.

  Sure, there were a lot of unanswered questions. But it was a sensational story, and I had it first. The News was all over the Internet with the story, and media outlets everywhere were picking it up from us. Meanwhile, Live from New York was ready to do a live remote with me at Lyon’s office. And I’d be the lead story on the front page the next day.

  Yep, all in all, it was a pretty good day for me.

  All I had to do now was find out where the woman who called herself Dr. Kate Lyon really was.

  And, of course, who she was.

  CHAPTER 40

  JACKIE Dowling told me that the fund-raising event at the college where she had been introduced to Dr. Kate Lyon had happened a few months earlier.

  “It was to promote our adult education program,” Dowling said when I went back to the college to do follow-up interviews. “That’s why all the instructors were required to attend.”

  “So Lyon might not have shown up otherwise?”

  “I don’t remember her coming to any other events.”

  “But she had to come to this one to keep her position as an adjunct professor or whatever in the adult education program?”

  Dowling nodded.

  “What did she seem like to you?” I asked.

  “Very beautiful. I mean really beautiful. I felt like an ugly duckling standing next to her. Men didn’t seem to notice me or any other woman when she was around.”

  “And she talked to you at some point that night?”

  “Nothing memorable. It was all very professional. We talked a bit about the college, her class. She was very passionate about the class, I remember that. Talked about how most women needed to be empowered to realize how much they could accomplish. She said women didn’t realize how strong they were, the kind of impact they could really make. She said she had been that way once, but no more. And now she was trying to help other women. It was very convincing, although I’ve heard variations of it before.”

  “Anything else you remember?”

  “Just this weird thing she said at the end. She asked me if I was married. I said yes. To the same man for twenty-five years. I told her how great my husband was, and she seemed . . . well, she seemed almost disappointed by that. Like I was somehow invalidating her theory about the ways men hold women back or something. Finally, she just looked at me strangely and said: ‘Hold on to him then. A good man is hard to find.’ ”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all. I mean we only talked for a few minutes. There were a lot of people at the event that night.”

  “Could I question some of them? Also any other people here who might have had contact with her?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  * * *

  Everyone I talked to at the college told me pretty much the same story. The woman that they knew as Dr. Kate Lyon had kept a very low profile. She showed up t
o conduct her evening class, but that was about the only time anyone ever saw her. Except for the night at that fund-raising event.

  The description of her was always the same. Blonde. Drop-dead gorgeous. Friendly enough to women during the few exchanges anyone had with her, but not to men. If there was a way for a super-sexy blonde like her to make herself virtually invisible, this woman seemed to have somehow accomplished that.

  I thought again about the fund-raising party. The only event she had attended. The one time she was exposed to the people at the college. Maybe she’d made a mistake that night and let her guard down in a way that could give me a clue to her real identity.

  “What exactly are you looking for?” one faculty member asked me.

  “I’m just hoping I can find someone who had a meaningful contact with her. I’m trying to get some kind of picture of her and interviewing people who’ve actually been in contact with her might help me to compile that picture.”

  “Well, if you’re looking for a picture, you should ask the photographer.”

  “What photographer?”

  “There was a photographer at the event. Most of the events here that Dowling attends are covered by a photographer. It helps fund-raising efforts to publish the pictures in the alumni newsletter—so potential donors can see all the exciting activities going on at their old college. The alumni people always have a photographer on call.”

  I got Dowling to take me to the office of the school’s alumni newsletter.

  “I should’ve thought of that myself,” Dowling said.

  “That’s why I always talk to as many people as possible on a story,” I told her. “You never know what you’re going to find out.”

  “You’re very good at your job, Mr. Malloy. Any way I could convince you to teach a course on being a reporter here next semester?”

  I shook my head no. “Those who can do, those who can’t teach,” I said. “And those who can’t do either teach journalism.”