Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (5 page)

Now that I knew, I was grateful every day that she was in my life. She’d given me support and helped me find my way. And for her, I was as close to a daughter as she’d ever have. For someone so maternal, so caring, Nina had never had children. And because of me, and my daughter, she said she never regretted it. We were her family, she said.

“Get your bag, we have a reservation,” she said.

“A reservation?”

Usually we walked during lunch. The point of going out together wasn’t necessarily to eat as much as it was for us to leave the institute. To spend time together. We walked Manhattan in every direction, often without any destination in mind: two pilgrims, not seeking a shrine, but the hour with each other. I’d grown up taking walks with Nina. She’d been my mother’s best friend—they’d met when they were both students at NYU and lived next door to each other in their Greenwich Village dorm.

After my mother died, when I was eight, Nina had stepped in, not trying to replace my mother, because she knew no one could do that, but to at least be there for me, to offer a hand, a hug and a heart. Even after my father remarried, Nina remained the most important woman in my life.

Grabbing my bag, I followed Nina into the hall. She stopped at the head of the staircase, put her arm around me and gave me a companionable hug. Her spicy, Oriental scent was familiar and, instead of smelling sexy, was reassuring in its constancy. Especially that day, I liked knowing that some things remained the same.

“It’s actually easier than I thought it would be,” I said as we separated from the hug.

“I’m glad.” Her voice told me she didn’t believe a word of what I was saying, but she was going to allow me the charade for at least a while.

Nina knew far better than I did what going through a divorce was like. She’d had three.

“Well, you don’t look like you’ve been weeping copiously in your office.”

“I haven’t had time.” And then I told her about my trip to identify Sheba Larcher’s body.

At the restaurant, Nina ordered us both glasses of champagne and I didn’t bother to protest. She always drank it, and after what I’d seen in the past hour, coming right on the heels of the call from my lawyer, I welcomed the aperitif.

She raised her glass. “I know you are still conflicted over the divorce, but I’m proud of how you handled it.”

Yes, the divorce could have dragged on a lot longer, it could have turned ugly and have hurt my daughter even more than it already had, but Mitch and I had worked hard so that hadn’t happened.

“There isn’t much I can do about what Dulcie is facing or
how hard it has been on her already. The least I could do was not make it any worse,” I said.

“You have done everything you could. You have a strong little girl and an ex-husband who’s a good friend. Nothing is going to get worse anymore. It’s going to start to get better now.”

I nodded.

“The joint custody will work. It’s been working since the separation. Dulcie needs to be with both of you. I’ve seen her, Morgan. I know she’s going to be fine. Every kid struggles with something. This will be what she struggles with. But the way you and Mitch have worked it out, she’ll have less strife over it than many kids do.”

Custody had been the one issue that I wanted to fight. During the separation, Dulcie spent two weekends and one entire week each month with Mitch at his apartment. She’d handled it well and Mitch wanted it to continue. I didn’t. I wanted to grab my daughter and keep her with me every day and every night. Not keep her from him, but keep her with me because when he picked her up and took her with him, away from me, something in me wrenched. I could barely breathe for the first few minutes she was gone. The separation from her was the most painful emotion I’d experienced as an adult. If you can love someone too much, I loved Dulcie too much.

And yet, I knew, when I was logical instead of emotional, that Mitch was entitled to his time with our daughter. It was
my
problem that I couldn’t bear to have her out of my sight.

“He is a good father,” I said to Nina, and sipped at the tulipshaped flute.

“He is a great father,” she corrected.

“He
is
a great father.”

“There wasn’t anything else you could do. This was not your failure. Not anyone’s failure,” Nina offered.

I nodded.

“No one tried harder than you did. But it just didn’t make sense to keep it going.”

“It did to me. I was perfectly content with our life. He’s my friend. We had Dulcie. It was enough.” I was going over the same ground, but Nina didn’t remind me of that or sigh with impatience or boredom.

“I know, sweetie.” She paused, drank from her glass and then went on. “For some people it works. For others it doesn’t.”

“I have had more than my share of clients who were in marriages where the people drifted apart. Where the husband felt the wife was too connected to her work. Where the sex got boring. And I’ve helped those couples to stay in those relationships or leave them, but I just never thought… I guess it’s just that I feel like such a failure, Nina.”

“You aren’t. The two of you didn’t bring out the best in each other—except where Dulcie is concerned.”

“He says that when he is with me, all he can feel is the dark side of me, the side connected to my patients’ problems, that I treat him too much like a patient with a problem to solve.” I had repeated this, thought about it, obsessed over it and discussed it with Nina before. And yet I still needed to say it again. “But I’m not dark all the time. I’m not, am I?”

She shook her head. “That Mitch connects to that one part of you is as much his issue as it is yours. Another man whose psychology is different from his would identify with all the other parts of you. You know that. You just have to give someone else a chance to show you that.”

I picked up the menu. I was sick of talking about it. I’d tried to solve it alone in therapy, and then in marriage counseling with Mitch. I hadn’t been able to. We hadn’t been able to. That was that.

Following my lead, Nina picked up her menu, too, and together we read through the two pages of offerings.

“I’ll have the niçoise salad,” she said when the waiter appeared.

“The warm goat cheese salad for me.”

The waiter left.

“You have that look in your eyes, Morgan.”

“What look?”

“The
I-should-have-done-better
look.”

“No, I have the
so-this-is-how-your-life-turns-out
look.”

We smiled ruefully at each other.

“For two women who spend their working lives helping people with their sexual problems, we can be pretty pathetic.”

We both laughed.

“Better luck next time,” she offered.

We clinked glasses. She drank from hers, but I just held mine.

“Do you want a next time?” I asked.

“Sometimes I do. Other times…I’m not sure.” She shook her head.

“I know.”

“But we will.”

“Do we have to? Life is really much easier to deal with if you cut romantic relationships out of the equation.”

She burst into laughter.

Our salads arrived and we dove into the beds of lettuce, attacking the leaves with a voracity that was almost predatory.

“
Freedom
is just another word for being alone,” she said.

“But being alone means not having to make allowances for anyone else’s screwups.”

“And not having to deal with anyone else’s screwups means never having to clean up after them.”

Nina knew a lot about that.

“Sex and love and marriage and attraction and fantasy, and
flirting and seduction, are all other people’s problems—at least for today.” I speared another lettuce leaf with the tines of my fork.

Nina put her lips around an olive and scraped off the meat with her teeth. “Passion is passé,” she said. Then, daintily, with her manicured nails, she put the pit on the side of her plate and just as delicately did not mention that tears were streaming down my cheeks.

I
t was the end of the day for most people, but not for Detective Noah Jordain and his partner, Mark Perez. Tana Butler, the thirty-something officer who was a whiz at noticing things that other people overlooked, had just arrived with her report, and the three of them had work to do. The evening was just beginning.

A fresh pot of coffee perked on a battered table in the corner and Jordain stood above it, waiting impatiently to pour himself a cup.

“The problem with a hotel room—” Tana was saying when Jordain interrupted.

“Don’t even bother telling us. You’ve got too much contamination to know what has to do with our perp and a hundred perfectly acceptable guests,” he said in the slow New Orleans way he had of speaking.

Tana Butler nodded.

“Is there anything you can isolate? Under her fingernails?
Toenails? In her mouth, for Christ’s sake?” Perez asked, almost shouting.

Anyone who worked with Jordain and Perez found out quickly that while they were completely efficient, they were extremes. Perez had a quick temper and wanted data even before the evidence was collected. Jordain was thorough. Overly analytical. Almost to a fault. Almost to the point of taking too much time.

The two of them—one laid-back, the other in-your-face— balanced each other out.

Tana flipped through her file. “No, Mark. Sorry. Of course, there are fibers under her nails—from the rug, from the nun’s habit, other detritus from the room. Nothing that helps. Soap residue. Matched the soap the hotel puts out. She took a shower or a bath in the room. Either before he got there or while he was there.”

Jordain paced. “So we know either she liked to be clean or he wanted her to be clean.”

“That’s a hell of a lot to learn. Boy, are we the lucky bastards or what?”

As he did when his partner’s sarcasm went too far, Jordain gave Perez a sidelong glance. Perez saw it, got up, grabbed a can of Diet Coke and popped the tab. He took a slug.

He was addicted to the beverage, but Jordain matched him can for cup of the chicory-laced coffee that he drank all day long.

“The rosary? The nun’s habit?” Jordain asked.

“We are working on it.”

“Not good enough, Tana,” Perez said. “You know that we need a lead while this is fresh. The first forty-eight hours—”

“What about the hotel tape?” Jordain interrupted his partner on purpose. Tana was a professional. She didn’t deserve a lecture just because they hadn’t turned up anything yet.

Perez took another sip of his soda.

“How are we doing on the hotel tapes?” Jordain asked.

Tana looked down at the report on the table. “It’s the same story. A crowded lobby of a midtown hotel. Hundreds of people coming and going. She checked in at five-thirty. Died at two in the morning. He could have come up to the room anytime before, say, midnight.” She shook her head. “Along with about a hundred other people. We’ve got tons of head shots—mostly from the back.”

“Why do these idiots put the cameras in such ridiculous places?” Perez asked.

“It’s worse than that, Detective. Like almost every other hotel, the system is ancient. The quality of the pictures is horrible.”

Jordain sighed and pushed his coffee mug away from him, then pulled it closer and took a long sip.

“Let’s not walk away from the tapes. I want blowups of every man who went up and down every one of those elevators. It might not help us now, but if this guy is a repeater, I want to be ready.”

“There is one thing,” Tana said.

Both men turned to face her. “It’s not much. It looks like the girl was given last rites.”

“Details?” Jordain asked. It was his most-oft-repeated response. Some younger cops, who didn’t know him well enough yet to respect him as much as most people did, called him Detective Details behind his back. Jordain knew about it. And it didn’t bother him in the least.

God, his father had taught him, is in the details. That’s where you solved a case.

“She had a smear of olive oil on her forehead and that’s—”

“We’re both good Catholic boys,” Perez said. “We know priests use olive oil. Blessed olive oil.”

Tana didn’t react to his sarcasm as she continued with her notes. “And she’d recently consumed a small amount of red wine.”

Jordain was up, pouring himself more coffee. “The sacraments? The archdiocese is not going to be happy about this. But we’re going to have to call them.”

“It’s a priest? A priest did this to her?” Perez asked, mostly muttering it to himself. “When I was a kid, there were no church scandals. The sacred was never mixed with the profane. Or if it was, it was so well hidden that no one ever found out. Now there are priests in the news all the time.” He walked to the window. “Do you think it’s a priest doing this shit?”

“I don’t know. It could be. But it could also be someone who was a priest,” Jordain said. “Or someone who wants us to think he is a priest,” he added.

“Okay, let’s get on it,” Perez said. “We’re looking for a male. Probably Roman Catholic. New York metro area. Usually they don’t stray too far from home.”

B
ecause it was raining when I left the office, I hailed a taxi and popped a peppermint into my mouth before I opened the door. I have a very sensitive sense of smell, and taxis often harbored too many stale scents. But with the candy in my mouth, most of them could be diffused.

I gave the driver the address of my apartment on the corner of Madison Avenue and Eightieth Street, and then opened my briefcase and pulled out the package Cleo had given me.

Inside the manila envelope was a manuscript printed out on three-hole paper with shiny brass brads holding the heavy load together.

The paper smelled clean and inky, a pristine copy. It must have been printed within the past twenty-four hours, because usually the smell of ink didn’t last any longer. There was another scent on the paper, too. But I wasn’t sure what it was. I shut my eyes and breathed it in. Menthol. Faint, but persistent.

For Love or Money
by Cleo Thane