Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (13 page)

He squinted, stared, looked from me to the windows, behind me, to the right, to the left, back to me, to my face, then my hands, then he looked right into my eyes. Dared me to look away. A police trick—did he even know he was doing it? I dared him to look away first. A therapist’s trick. We were
evenly matched. Involuntarily I smiled just a little at the thought. He held out his hand and I shook it, aware of it being large, pleasantly dry, but not too rough. I could tell that he had enormous strength in his fingers but that he was aware of it and was being careful.

“
Dr
. Snow, right?”

I nodded. “Now. Do you want to sit down or are you going to stand over me and talk down to me?”

“Whoa. I know I upset and scared you. But that much sarcasm? I don’t talk down to women. Especially pretty ones who have more degrees than I do.”

With a smile, he sat opposite me at the desk, leaned back and gave me some more time. He was so completely at ease, and so few people were in my office that it was a pleasure to watch him.

How people acted when they first met you and then came into your space told you something about them. Especially this space. Some people needed to give themselves time, were nervous or intimidated; others had too much bravado, needed to own the area even though it wasn’t theirs. He didn’t do any of those things. His actions were not informed by any neurosis. At least not yet.

I offered him coffee and he accepted.

I was glad for a few minutes of busy work to observe him and get a beat on him.

My curiosity was like the pain in my head, insistent and determined. And as much as I wanted to just ask him to tell me why he was here and find out what was going on, I would be better served this way. Knowledge, even subtle knowledge and intuitive information, was a weapon. And since I was sure he had his gun in a holster under his arm or strapped around his ankle, it seemed only fair for me to have some ammunition of my own.

“Milk? Sugar?” I asked as I poured the still-steaming Italian
roast from the thermos into one of the four mugs that Dulcie had made for me in school. The one I picked for him read:
Was Freud Wearing a Slip?

I turned for his answer.

“Light and sweet.”

I knew he hadn’t meant there to be anything even slightly lascivious about his answer. I knew he was being straightforward—I could see it in his face. And I almost laughed at the way his eyes widened slightly when he realized his words had sounded suggestive.

And then, the tall, strong detective blushed. And something kicked awake in me. But it wasn’t anything I could even think about. Not there and not then.

I was used to being only one kind of person in this room—a doctor listening to my patients through a filter of learning, weighing every word uttered. I had never been a woman sitting in that office, and I couldn’t remember ever hearing a line that I responded to. Of course over the years, a few of my male patients and even one or two of my female patients had been flirtatious with me, but my reaction had always been clinical.

This was different.

And it was stupid, I thought as I stirred the cream-colored brew and handed it to him, careful not to touch his hand by accident. This was ridiculous.

He was inspecting the mug.

“Cute.”

“My daughter’s handiwork.”

“Clever kid.”

“Much too clever.”

“How old is she?”

“Twelve. Going on four sometimes. Twenty other times.”

“You’re lucky.”

I smiled. “I know.” I looked down at my own mug. It read:
Jungry? Or Thirsty?
I showed it to him and he laughed deeply.

“So. How can I help you, Detective?”

Now I was afraid I was blushing. Everything sounded like a ridiculous line. Why? What was going on? This was serious. An NYPD detective was sitting in my office on official business and I kept hearing innuendos.

In the middle of this awful day, a day I’d spent worried about Cleo, a day punctuated by talking to two men who were both disconsolate over her disappearance, I suddenly realized that probably for the first time in quite a few years, I’d met a man whom I was actually attracted to. He wasn’t a friend like Simon, whom I was trying out the thought on. This was a man I’d never met before and I was curious about him.

There was nothing special about him. Well, he had nice hair. Salt-and-pepper, which fell in soft waves across his broad forehead and down his neck. But his eyes were sort of small. And his nose might be a little bit too big. Except all put together, he was striking. Handsome, even. And he had great hands.

Shit. What was I doing noticing the man’s hands?

He saw that I was staring at his hands and his eyes sort of crinkled and his lips spread into a grin, and I felt his whole stupid smile in the pit of my stomach and my head pounded more.

I picked up the bottle of pills and finally, after hours of suffering with the damn headache, shook two out. But still I didn’t take them. Holding them in the palm of my hand, I looked down at them. Two tiny pills that scared me and reassured me at the same time.

He just watched. Took it all in. Sipped his coffee, then said, “You might as well take them. I’m afraid this is going to be a complicated conversation.”

I nodded, surprised that he had almost read my mind. “You already know that?”

Now he nodded. “We have reason to believe that one of
your patients is missing. And I’m hoping you might be able to help us figure out why.” He was watching me the way I watched my patients, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

“What patient?” I knew, but I wasn’t going to let on that I did.

“Cleo Thane.”

I could not allow any reaction. Not yet. I had to protect her until I found out that I no longer could. “Detective, you know there is nothing I can tell you about any of my patients. I can’t even confirm or deny that someone is seeing me.”

“She is. Her fiancé already confirmed it. He’s the one who reported her missing. There’s not much we can do about a missing person other than put out a report and wait. Unless it’s a child. Or there has been a threat. Or there is proof it was a kidnapping. Or there’s something to suggest foul play. We went to her apartment, but there is no sign of any foul play. Nothing to suggest that anything has happened to her. One of her suitcases is gone, according to her boyfriend. And some of her clothes. On the surface there is nothing even slightly suspect about that.

“But with what has been going on with the Magdalene murders, I don’t want to assume anything. We know who your client is and what she does for a living, and since there is some maniac out there who’s brutally—”

“If there is nothing suspect about her apartment, why do you think there is a connection?” Could he hear the panic in my voice?

“How ’bout we trade. An answer for an answer.”

I nodded. “But you first. Do you think this is connected? Do you think she is still alive?”

“That’s two questions, but I’ll answer them. We don’t know anything about her disappearance at this point. For all we know she went away for reasons of her own and just didn’t tell anyone what they were. And, yes, we think she’s
alive. Again, we have no reason or information to think otherwise.

“Now, my turn,” he said. “Have you heard from Ms. Thane?”

“No.”

“Is she a patient?”

“Yes. She is a patient.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Last Wednesday.”

“How many appointments has she missed?”

“Two.”

“Had she ever missed appointments before?”

“No.”

“And she didn’t call you to cancel?”

“No.”

“Is that unusual?” he asked.

I nodded.

He took a long drink of his coffee. Down the hall a door opened and shut, and I was aware of the sound and then the ensuing silence. Even after he put down his mug, he didn’t speak right away. As if he was figuring out what to say or how to say it.

“I need you to help me,” he said.

It was such a personal plea that it took me by surprise. The official tone was gone and there was real pain in his voice. How could he do his job and still have room to connect with that much feeling? I knew what he faced, and I couldn’t have done it.

“I’m not sure that I can help.”

“You can. It’s more a question of
if
you will.”

“There isn’t anything I can tell you. Everything Cleo told me is confidential. Privileged and private information.”

“Dr. Snow—”

“Morgan, please.”

“Morgan, you have a terrific reputation. You’ve got fans in the department. My forensic psychiatrist says you are one of the best in your field.” He took a breath and then blew the air out of his mouth. “Will you help us?”

“As long as she is alive there isn’t anything I can—”

He held up his hand. His fingers really were impossibly long, and graceful. I imagined them holding a gun. It was an incongruous image.

“Here’s where we are. We don’t know where Cleo Thane is. We don’t know if she’s in trouble or not. But we have a man out there who has brutally murdered and defiled two prostitutes, and we don’t want Cleo Thane to be the third. Right now, I’d just be happy to find out where she is so I can rule her out. We’ve been to her apartment with her fiancé and it doesn’t look like anything is missing. But we don’t have her appointment book or her PalmPilot or her beeper or whatever it is she uses. We don’t have her cell phone. We only know that she hasn’t used it in the last six days.”

“But what can I do?”

“You can tell us what you know about her. Was anyone bothering her? Was she planning on leaving the city? Was she dissatisfied with her business? Did she have any clients who—from what she told you—might be psychotic? And what about the fiancé? Was she really happy with him? Did they have problems? Does he have any issues we should know about?” I could tell from the way he was leaning forward, from the way he had placed his hands on my desk, how badly he wanted the answers.

I shrugged. “I can’t tell you any of those things. I’m sorry, I really am. But Cleo is my patient and everything that she has told me has been told to me in complete confidence. As long as she might be alive, I have to protect that confidence.”

“Even if it means putting her in jeopardy?”

I opened my hands, fingers splayed, as if I was holding the answers and had let them all slip out. But all that dropped to the floor were two round white painkillers.

T
he next day was bright and sunny and hot, and Nina and I took a walk into Central Park at lunchtime. We entered through the zoo entrance and as soon as we left the traffic and the exhaust of Fifth Avenue, I took a deep breath, inhaling the fresher air. If you live in the suburbs you don’t understand how important a park becomes to city dwellers. Especially in the summer. Most of us know every inch of it, the way you know your own backyard.

“What’s wrong?” Nina asked.

“Am I that transparent?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“You are just that good, right?” We both laughed. It was an old joke. She could see through me just as she had been able to see through my mother, no matter how dense the thicket of lies.

“Dulcie okay?” she asked.

“She’s at drama school. I’ve never seen her happier. She hasn’t argued with me about anything for days.”

“Okay, so it’s not Dulcie. Are you going to tell me or are you going to make me pull it out of you?”

“It’s a patient.”

She raised her eyebrows. “So someone’s gotten to you?”

I laughed sarcastically.

Since graduate school I’d endured the joke that my last name should have been Ice, not Snow. Of all the traps in being a shrink, I rarely, if ever, got too close to my patients. I hardly ever stepped over the boundaries. Almost never had countertransference issues, even though they were common with therapists and were, in fact, often a good way to stay in touch with your patients as long as you were aware of what was happening.

We’d reached the dead center of the park, where a huge abandoned amphitheater stood like a comforting parenthesis mark.

The ear, I had called this structure as a child.

I’d learned to ride my bike and use my roller skates on the esplanade just beyond this spot. And I brought my boyfriends here when I was in high school to make out in the shadows of the shell.

I filled Nina in on my concern over Cleo’s disappearance and my phone calls with Gil Howard and Elias Beecher. I explained who they both were, having more information now after talking to Gil a second time that morning.

“Elias is Cleo’s boyfriend. A white-glove lawyer. I’ve talked to him once. Not sure yet what I think of him. I’ve talked to Gil twice. He’s her business partner. They’ve been working together for five years. And I think they’ve also been lovers. He implied they still are lovers. In any case, he doesn’t know about Elias.”

“Do you think either of them have anything to do with her disappearance?”

“Gut reaction is no. They are both distraught. Going on instinct, their fears and distress appear heartfelt. But we both know that if either of them is a psychopath, they’d be able to fool me. The business partner could be upset about the book, knowing that if she does publish it, clients could very well stop coming to the club. It would be a terrible scandal.”

“And the boyfriend?”

“The police think he’s a suspect. Just because he is her boyfriend. And he knows that. He told me that right off the bat. But I don’t think he’s involved.”

“Why?”

I went into detail about Cleo’s sexual dysfunction. “She told me he’s been patient with her. Willing to work with her.”

“Or that’s how she wants to see it. You don’t really know. He could be insanely jealous of the other men she’s been with. How does he feel about the book?”

“I don’t know if he’s read it. She just finished the first draft. But she told me he was worried about the idea of it.”

“He could have gotten his hands on it and flipped out when he actually read about what she’s done with these men. It’s one thing knowing it in the abstract but another having read the details.”