The Venus Fix

by M. J. Rose

  “You can talk to me today the same way you talked to me last week, when I thought you were Bob. Nothing is different except your name. Has anything changed for you? Now that I know your name? Are any of your feelings any different?”

  “No. What I do is still repulsive, and I still can’t stop myself. No, I can say that more precisely. I still don’t want to stop myself. The only thing that I care about anymore is the feeling that comes over me when I sit down at the computer, when I bring the image of one of my girls up on the screen, when she’s looking right at me, and moving for me. Kira is gone then. My office is gone, too. The work I have waiting for me, the trials I have on my docket. Not in my consciousness. Shit. The decisions that I’ve made that may not be right, the ones that are definitely wrong, I don’t think about any of that. Not while I am sitting there in the dark, all by myself.”

  “Alan, what decisions are you talking about?”

  “Decisions?”

  I repeated his sentence.

  “We have all made decisions that, in retrospect, were not the right ones. We are human. We’re influenced by all sorts of things about people. Hasn’t that ever happened to you, Doctor? Haven’t you ever misjudged a patient?”

  Of course I had, but this wasn’t about me. And I wasn’t going to allow him to turn the question around.

  “What do these decisions you’re talking about have to do with what’s going on?”

  “I am not about to let some overzealous detective turn me into a laughingstock. Do you understand what would happen to me if it came out that I have this problem?”

  He hadn’t answered my question. “I understand, Alan, but what I’m asking is—”

  “You don’t know why I’m here this morning, do you?” he interrupted me.

  “You’re in therapy with me. You wanted a session so that—”

  He interrupted again. “No. Not today. I came this morning because I need to know that no matter what the police ask you about me, you plan on keeping silent.”

  There was something about the way he was staring at me and the intensity in his voice and his eyes boring into mine that made me afraid. If I hesitated, I was sure he would threaten me. What was going on?

  There was a knock on the door.

  The judge jerked back and stared at the door.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Terry Meziac.”

  Alan relaxed.

  “Come in,” I said.

  The door opened and the young man Alan sent to my office once a month to check for listening devices, who was the judge’s driver, and possibly, I thought, his bodyguard, entered the room. He didn’t say anything, but looked with questioning eyes at Alan, who checked his watch and then glanced up at me. “I have to go, Dr. Snow. But we have an agreement, don’t we?”

  “We always have. Nothing’s changed.”

  Fifty

  The fourth victim lived on 110th Street and Park Avenue, in a studio apartment in an old tenement building.

  “What took us so long to find her this time?” Jordain asked Perez as they climbed the first flight of stairs, trying not to pay too much attention to the stench or the filth.

  “Cutting isn’t the most popular scene and it was late. Fewer men were watching. Fewer men, fewer calls.”

  It took from two in the morning, when the first call was taken by a 911 operator in Miami, until 10:30 a.m., when the fifteenth call came through in Georgia, for New York to be alerted and start a trace on the woman’s IP address.

  “Every damn police department in the country knows about this. Even one call should have gotten the ball rolling. How does a 911 operator not get what she’s hearing when someone describes a woman on the Internet who looks like she’s dying? We might have saved her.”

  “It wasn’t as clear that she was sick this time, Noah. She’d finished cutting herself and put on a Band-Aid. Then she sat back down again in front of the camera. At first, she didn’t do much but play with the razor blade, teasing the guys who were still watching. This went on for ten, fifteen minutes according to the reports. The few guys who hung around weren’t sure that anything else was going to happen. But there was something sort of mesmerizing about her, one of the men said. That’s when she started to get sick.”

  Inside the third-floor apartment, Jordain looked out of the window that faced into another building. A woman in an old flowered housedress stared at them from her apartment.

  “Can I lower these blinds?” he called out to the forensic team working by the body.

  “Sure, boss.”

  The woman looked annoyed when she saw Jordain pulling the cord.

  He joined Perez by the body.

  Yasmine was an extremely thin, young, very pale woman whose long black hair spread out around her like a raven’s wings. Except for her legs, her skin was smooth and luminous.

  But her thighs were disfigured with welts, scars and cuts— some so fresh there was still a trail of dried blood, others so old they were only faint lines. Hieroglyphs of pain, telling a story that Jordain couldn’t translate into a language he understood. “I don’t get this. Not why she’d do it—I understand why people are cutters—but who the hell would find that a turn-on?” Perez asked.

  Jordain sighed. This was one of the toughest parts of the job. Seeing the brutality of perversity and trying, but always failing, to bring some sense to it. When he attempted to imagine the mind of the person who had perpetrated a crime like this, he saw a morass of writhing worms, twisting, feeding on themselves, sick and sickening.

  “We’ve got something,” one of the forensic cops said, and within seconds Perez and Jordain had crowded around the garbage pail where Officer Keller was working.

  In his rubber-gloved hand he held an ordinary Band-Aid box. Taped to it was a note on a small card, the kind that comes with a bouquet of flowers.

  “I want to help you heal” was printed on it. It looked as if it had been computer generated.

  “If we’re lucky, there’s something on this.”

  “If the perp is stupid, there’s something on it.” Perez shook his head. It was rare that the clue that broke a case was in the most logical place.

  In the car going back downtown, Jordain’s cell rang, and he spent the next five minutes caught in traffic, listening to the lieutenant warn him that he’d better break this case soon, and it better be with Leightman as the killer. The powers that be were not happy about the judge’s search and seizure. If it was warranted, they’d deal. If not, there was going to be hell to pay.

  Back at the station house, Jordain stopped at Butler’s desk.

  “This is for you.” He put Yasmine’s computer in the middle of all the paperwork. “You know what you are looking for, right?” he asked.

  “Same thing I looked for on the other two computers.”

  “God help us if you find it. God help us if you don’t.”

  As Jordain walked back to his office, he took a small vial of extra-strength aspirin out of his pocket and popped three. He got headaches when he didn’t sleep enough. Too bad. He’d live. That was the shame of it. On days like today, he almost didn’t care.

  Judge Leightman.

  That was what everyone was pissed about.

  Even though he’d followed all rules and regs and gotten a legit warrant, the powers that be were taking him to task for treating Leightman like an ordinary citizen instead of one of the most powerful judges in the city of New York.

  Even though the Web-cam women had e-mails that came from Leightman’s address entreating them to use the very items that had killed them, what Jordain had done was still unacceptable according to the top brass.

  Perez was standing by the cork wall in their office, pinning up lists and photos of items found at the scene.

  “We have to find out if someone has it out for the judge. Someone who would know he has a little porn problem. It’s hard to imagine the guy who sat there in his study with us last night did this, much less let this fourth poisoning
happen after he knew he was under suspicion.”

  “He could be a lot more psychotic than anyone realizes. And it could be that he couldn’t call it off.”

  “Possibly.”

  “We just better make sure nothing about this leaks before we know one way or the other. You and I, partner, are going to be paraded through the city streets, tarred and feathered, if this gets out and we’re wrong.”

  It came as no surprise to the two detectives when Butler stuck her head in their office a half hour later and told them there was e-mail from Alan Leightman on Yasmine’s computer.

  “Same kind of note that you found on ZaZa’s and Penny’s?” Perez asked.

  She nodded.

  “Same e-mail address for him?”

  She nodded again.

  “But the geeks still haven’t found any deleted e-mail to any of them anywhere on Leightman’s hard drive?” Jordain asked.

  “Nope. Lots of proof he’s visited their sites. But, no. No deleted e-mail.”

  “Damn it!” Jordain pounded his desk with his fist. He looked down at the yellow pad full of his notes. “You know what I don’t understand? What does it mean that so far all the women who have been targeted are living in New York? It’s not a coincidence. There are hundreds of girls at Global. And why Global? Do you think this is a vendetta against the people who own the company?”

  Perez shook his head. “Well, you’re asking good questions. If we could just get ahold of the people who run the company. You know, now that this has happened, we really need to rethink alerting the women at Global.”

  “How can we do that without the company’s help?”

  “We can have someone go to the site and send each girl e-mail directly. One at a time. I don’t see how we have any choice.”

  “Neither do I. Let me get clearance for that. Even if we start a panic—it’s that or tell the press.”

  “Listen, there’s something else. It makes it more complicated….” Butler said.

  Jordain uttered a small moan. “Just what I love. More complications.”

  “There is e-mail sent from Leightman’s computer to someone in his office that’s time-stamped within ninety seconds of the e-mail that ZaZa received from him.”

  She handed Jordain two printouts.

  “What does this mean?”

  “Just that he was online at that time. At home.”

  “Why can’t we find his fingerprints on the tube of lubricant? Would that be too much to ask for? And while we’re at it, how about a motive. We still don’t have a new forensic psychologist. I’m still waiting to borrow Dr. Schoenfeld for a few days.”

  “I’m sorry, boss,” Butler said.

  “Hell, what of all this is your fault?” Jordain looked at her for what seemed like the first time. Her eyes were hollow and haunted. She had some kind of personal history that had led her to work in SVU, but she’d never shared the whole story and he’d never pushed.

  “I want you to go home early today. Eat something good. Get some sleep.”

  “I will.”

  “But?”

  She smiled at him, and for a minute her face softened. “You’re really good at reading people, but do you ever think that not everyone wants to know you can tell what they’re thinking?”

  Perez laughed. The phone rang and he answered it. While he proceeded to carry on a conversation, Jordain and Butler continued talking.

  “Point taken,” Jordain said. “But you were thinking about something and it was bothering you, so what was it?”

  “What I just can’t stop thinking about is why these women? Is there an order to these poisonings? Why make them do this to themselves? Someone needs to watch, obviously, but why?”

  Jordain smiled and pushed the yellow pad across the desk so that Butler could see it. She read down the list of questions he’d scrawled. In similar words, each question she had just asked was among the questions he’d written down.

  “Now all you have to do, Officer Butler, is figure out the answers and you can have my job. I’d be proud to work for you.”

  She stood up. “Yeah, I bet. My guess is that you have never been proud to work for anyone. You like running the show too much.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, but he wasn’t thinking about work. He was thinking about Morgan just then. He wasn’t running the show there. She was setting the pace of the relationship and it was too slow. And just when he’d get ready to speed it up, a case would break, like this one. Now it was going to get confusing again. And they didn’t do well when that happened. There was no way around it, though. Jordain was going to ask her if he could see her that night.

  He needed to tell her about Alan Leightman.

  If nothing else, she could be in danger.

  Fifty-One

  My cooking class started at seven and I just made it. The building on Houston Street was lit up and glowing in the snow, which was still falling and had been falling, it now seemed, forever.

  Inside the Culinary Institute, I hung up my coat and rushed into the classroom.

  Until Dulcie had gotten the role of Mary Lennox, I never would have signed up for this, but since she was at the theater until ten-fifteen five nights a week, I had the time—and God knows I needed the help.

  “Tonight we are going to work with some basic sauces,” Sarah Neery, the chef and teacher, said once we were all assembled.

  As soon as she started talking about a basic roux, my mind started to wander. The truth was I was as much a disaster in the class as I was at home. After three weeks, I was slowly realizing that I really wasn’t interested in cooking. It was only eating that interested me.

  I whisked the melting butter as I poured in the flour. Whisked more. It was turning golden. That was good. Then the golden turned caramel. And then the caramel color darkened even more. I whisked faster. The mess had turned almost black. Great, I was burning it.

  “Morgan, you’re not supposed to let the roux go that dark. Why don’t you try again? This time stop when it turns a nice, warm light brown.”

  Light brown? Dark brown? How fast did it turn? Why was I doing this?

  Noah was waiting for me in his car in front of the school when the class was over.

  “I burned the butter,” I told him once I got inside the car. “And not once. I burned the butter twice. No, not the butter— I burned the roux.”

  He reached over and brushed snow off my cheeks and then kissed me softly on the lips. “You’re freezing.” He put his arms around me and kissed me again. For a few seconds, I let go of everything and lived inside his arms.

  “Not anymore,” I said when we finally broke apart.

  “So if you burned the roux you must be hungry. I haven’t eaten yet but I have some shrimp Creole in the refrigerator.”

  “Could we go out? Somewhere nearby?”

  He gave me a sidelong glance but didn’t ask me to explain why I didn’t want to go to his apartment. I wasn’t sure what I would have said. I only knew I needed to be in a neutral place. I was afraid that Alan Leightman’s name was going to come up. Afraid of how I was going to avoid talking about him if it did. At least in a restaurant, I could get up, go to the ladies’ room—there were distractions I could use.

  Five minutes later we were ensconced in a booth in a small, dark restaurant called Lucky Strike. Noah knew it was one of my favorites—a French bistro that served fries almost as good as what you could get in Paris.

  We both ordered dirty martinis, which arrived quickly, and Noah held his glass up to mine in a silent toast.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said after we’d each taken our first sip. “About Alan Leightman.”

  I didn’t say anything and hoped that my face wasn’t showing any reaction. “What?”

  “You’re good at this, Morgan, but you don’t have to pretend. I know he’s your patient. It’s not a question. I have to tell you about Leightman. You don’t have to say anything. Just listen. The man may be a killer. We don’t have enoug
h on him yet to arrest him, but we’re working on it, and in the meantime, I’m worried about you.”

  I fingered the stem of the glass. “I appreciate that, but I’m fine. I’m not in danger.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  I made a face at him. I’d been sure of my ability to judge people in the past and had not always been right. “I knew you were going to say that,” I said.

  “I’m becoming predictable?”

  “Only about this one thing.”

  “Well, I am worried about you. Do you understand how powerful he is? If you know something that could help us convict Alan Leightman—”

  “I can’t have this conversation with you. I can’t even sit here.”

  “Yes. You can. You can sit here and listen. You can help me save your life.”

  “That’s overly dramatic.”

  “No, Morgan. No. It’s not. And if you won’t take this seriously, I’m going to talk to Nina about it.”

  I laughed. “Going over my head? Like I’m a bad little girl? She’s the last person who would take your side.”

  “No, not like you are a bad little girl, but like you are a stubborn woman who isn’t being as cautious as she should be.”

  The tension swirled around our heads. In the time we’d known each other—in the past seven months—we had come to this place before, and we had not navigated it well.

  “I know. Professional ethics. I know. Our principles represent a line neither of us can cross. We admire each other for respecting the line until it gets in the way. Every damn time.” He was angry. At me. At us.

  I heard a small sigh escape my lips. “I had hoped we wouldn’t get here again.”

  “So did I.”

  The waiter arrived and we ordered without even having to look at the menu. French fries and mussels in white wine for both of us.

  After the waiter left, I took a deep breath. “Dulcie still hasn’t come home….”

  His eyes registered immediate worry and his reaction made me feel a wave of emotion that I wasn’t prepared for. “She’s decided I’m the devil incarnate. Mitch thinks this is about more than the audition, that it’s her way of punishing me for the divorce—”