Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (21 page)

But not in the part about Judas.

In Cleo’s book, the money clip belonged to a man she called the Healer—that fifth man, whom Gil hadn’t recognized—and she had described seeing it every time he took it out of his pocket. That fifth man had handed her bills exactly the way Judas had just handed me bills, putting the money in my palm, then closing my fingers around it.

There wasn’t supposed to be a charge for this evening. Gil had explained that. “What is this?” I asked Judas.

“If I am going to give you my secrets, I need to make sure you have an incentive for keeping them.”

If only I could have told him how safe his secrets would be with me. But the question on my mind was, did he trust Cleo with them or was he worried that she was going to tell on him?

I shook my head. “You don’t have to.” I handed the money back to him.

“I want to. Please.” He pushed it back at me.

I didn’t want to make a fuss over the money and disrupt any confidence he was about to share, so I took the bills and put them in my bag. I would figure out what to do with them later.

“You were going to tell me what you liked,” I reminded him with what I hoped was an inviting smile. But what the hell was an inviting smile? How was I ever going to get through meeting four of these men? Or five, if Gil ever figured out who the Healer was.

Judas smiled. “What I like to do is go places. In public. Places where other people are.”

I nodded.

Cleo had listed a few of the places where he had taken her. Into his wife’s chambers once at night. Into the dressing room of a men’s department store in New York. Into an empty room off the stage at the opera the night of a huge fund-raiser while his wife was sitting in their season box. He had gotten Cleo a ticket and a date and had arranged to meet her there.

But I wanted to hear him tell
me
about it. See if, since Cleo had written about him, he had changed any, if he now needed to push his fantasy, to go closer to the edge of his boundaries.

“Where was the last place you took Cleo?”

The smile on his face wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t suffused with pleasure the way it had been a minute ago when
he was giving me money. What was I seeing? Was this a deeper darkness of someone who didn’t have any boundaries?

“I took her to the bank. To the vault. I gave her money. It gave me pleasure. I miss her.” His voice was suddenly thick. He lowered his eyes.

“We all miss her,” I said.

We did. And we were all worried about her. Very worried.

A
t six-thirty the night maid opened the door to room 1543 in the Pallard Hotel, and within twenty minutes Noah Jordain and his partner were speeding out of Manhattan to the large hotel in nearby Newark, New Jersey, both of them hoping that what they were about to find in that room was not another notch in the belt of the man they referred to as the Magdalene Murderer.

For Jordain, this series of crimes was worse than most, if in fact there could be such degrees of horror when you dealt with the depths of depravity. Not only were they more personally disturbing, but he’d never had such a cold case before. So far forensics hadn’t turned up any serious leads.

The M.E. said the murderer hit the women over the head with a blunt object that was slightly convex. After he knocked them out, he strangled them with latex-sheathed hands. They were the kind of gloves you could buy in any drugstore.

Conjecturing, the M.E. also said he didn’t think the women regained consciousness after they’d been knocked out.

At least there was that—they never knew what happened. So they never knew that once they were dead, the man defiled their bodies, dressed them as nuns and posed them in blasphemous tableaux.

Dozens of people had probably seen the murderer passing through the hotel on his way to his assignations. But to them, he was just one more man in the lobby, in the elevator, in the hall.

“We need to get someone to compare the surveillance tapes from all the different hotels and see if by chance the same face shows up more than once,” Jordain said to his partner as he drove across town.

“Oh, great,” was Perez’s sarcastic response.

It was not going to be easy. All they could do was assume the perp was dressed as a businessman so that he blended in and probably carried a small suitcase that held the nun’s clothing and accessories.

“I know.” Jordain nodded. “It’s not much, but he’s not making any mistakes, and so far the hotel rooms are just too damn full of crap. If he’d only picked more expensive hotels with better surveillance, or if some desk clerk had paid more attention to who’d checked in. Or if someone had had a bedspread washed in the last month…” Jordain let the sentence trail off in frustration. There was no point in going over all the scenarios that could make their job easier. So far, the three crime scenes had offered up such a mess of hair, fiber and prints that the lab had not isolated anything meaningful. Inevitably, the same scenario would be repeated at this newest location.

“He has to make a mistake sooner or later,” was the best Perez could offer.

“I want it sooner, damn it.”

“It sure doesn’t help that he’s killing women no one is watching out for.”

The light changed. Jordain nodded and pressed down on the accelerator.

It was a warm night. Breezy, full moon, not much traffic, the lights of the city sparkling as if it were a magical place full of hope, instead of the terrors that Jordain knew were there. For every light there was a darkness. For every window that blazed there was a man or woman who was capable of slipping from grace into garbage.

The church, his church, the same church that ordained men to spread God’s word and women to do God’s work, said that children were born innocent. But as good a Catholic as Jordain was, he no longer believed that. He had seen too much carnage. And he knew he was about to see more.

S
he was young.

Younger than any of the others. Not a line on her face. Not a shadow of age. Not a shadow of life, either.

“Eighteen?” Jordain asked the M.E.

“Maybe.”

They were all jaded, but Jordain still wanted to get down on his knees and cross himself and pray that in her hour of need an angel had come down and eased this woman’s way and she had not known what the monster had done to her.

All she had expected was to have to get naked and give the john a blow job, or spread her legs and pretend to enjoy it.

But this? No, she had not counted on this.

The young woman was lying on the bed. The first one they had found on a bed. And somehow that, too, made it worse. For the comfort the bed pretended to offer. For the pain she had to have felt there.

Like the victims before her, she had been dressed in a
nun’s habit pushed up to reveal the devil’s handiwork, which in this case included wrapping her naked body in barbed wire. One length of it encircled each leg. Another few yards girdled her torso and spiraled upward around her breasts. And the smallest piece was wrapped around her head. A crown of thorns.

She had been turned into a human pincushion. Everywhere the wire touched her skin, the sharp metal barbs had pierced her skin and she had bled.

The room smelled of the sickly sweet liquid that still oozed out of the hundreds of punctures and dripped down in rivulets, making rivers and streams of blood. It had flowed from her and saturated the white sheets beneath her. Jordain imagined the stain went deeper, past the sheets to the mattress. Did it go deeper still? From the mattress had her blood dripped on the floor and into the carpet and into the wood and then into the ceiling of the room below?

“We might have something here,” Perez said.

Jordain looked away from the rosary that hung from between the woman’s legs, his perp’s very distinguished signature.

“What is it?” Jordain asked when he saw Perez lean over and bag something that had been on the floor. “Is it something we can use? Did he slip up?”

“Hardware-store sticker. Must have come off the wire.”

“Maybe he didn’t notice it.”

“Maybe it got stuck to his shoe.”

“True Value.” Jordain moaned. “There must be what? Two thousand of those stores?”

It wasn’t his style to be negative. To let the frustration come to the surface. But this case was torture. Maybe Morgan Snow would turn up something. Maybe her ability to twist along into the tunnels of someone’s mind would illuminate just one thing that had eluded the rest of them.

He’d call her when they were done. Maybe she would have something to tell him.

“No, you’re right. It is something. It’s a big something. It’s got to be in the area. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut. There can’t be more than a few dozen stores.”

Jordain turned back and looked at the poor girl on the bed, because no matter how hard he tried to make her into a tough street hooker who should have known better, he couldn’t.

She was a kid. Someone’s daughter. Someone else’s sister.

He sighed and leaned against a wall and waited while the photographers finished up.

“You know what is going to happen?” Jordain was only forty years old, but he knew he sounded like someone who had already lived a whole lifetime. It was in every weary syllable and the lethargic cadence of his words.

Perez shrugged.

“We’ll find all the stores that carry this wire. We might even narrow it down to a few stores that have sold this exact length in one purchase. We might even be lucky enough to find the clerk who sold it. But when we look, there will be no credit card to check. You know it will be a cash purchase and, of course, the purchaser’s face won’t be memorable. Who would remember a man who had bought a few yards of barbed wire along with a few other things he’d thrown in there to make certain he was a forgettable customer?”

“Maybe he slipped up with that.” Perez didn’t even wait for Jordain to respond. “I know. Don’t even tell me how unlikely that is. We are dealing with someone who’s as smart as we are. If not smarter. At least so far.”

Jordain looked back at the young woman. Just stared at her for a few seconds. “We could still catch a break on where the nun’s habits come from.”

“How the fuck does a man buy nun’s habits and not be noticed? Even if he was a priest, he would be remembered.”

“Hobart doesn’t think he is a priest. Neither does Morgan. Although she thinks he might have once been a priest.”

“You know, I don’t hold out any hope for what the shrinks think. Mostly they guess. And it’s only after we find the perp that suddenly they claim they always said he was a whatever all along. How often does any of their bullshit make a difference? When was the last time we caught anyone from a profile?”

Jordain shrugged. “It’s a moot point. We don’t know anything. We don’t have anything.”

“We are gonna crack this on the habits,” Perez insisted.

“From your mouth…”

Perez gave him a half smile. The detective was used to Jordain’s appropriating his expressions by now. But it still made him grin to hear the Southern detective with the New Orleans patois use his grandmother’s favorite saying.

While the M.E. and his team worked the scene, the detectives filled out their reports. Then Perez’s cell phone rang.

“Anything?” Jordain asked when the call was over.

His partner shook his head. “Yes, no. They’ve worked their way through another half-dozen religious-supply stores and no luck with the habits yet.”

“But they’ve had that first outfit for two weeks. How long can it take to figure out where the thing was bought?”

“Because he cut the fucking labels out of the habits. And this particular model is the most basic and popular one made. You do not want to know what our guys now know about nuns’ clothes.”

“Well, they better find out a little bit more. The commissioner is getting anxious,” Jordain said. But the truth was, he
was the one getting more and more anxious, and his partner knew it.

“It would have been easier a few years ago to track down those costumes. But now that you can buy anything on the Internet…”

Jordain looked away as one member of the M.E. team extracted the bloody rosary from the girl’s vaginal cavity with a pair of tweezers.

“Hey, Perez. You just said something. Costumes. Has it occurred to anyone that these are not real habits at all but costumes? Has anyone…”

But he didn’t have to finish. Perez was already on the phone calling in the suggestion.

Jordain’s eyes returned to the cop who was holding out a new evidence bag for the M.E. tech. The rosary was still hanging in the air. One drop of blood, dark red like a precious stone, hung on the end of the cross, glinting in the light, shining. It held for a few seconds, then fell off and landed on the cop’s shoe.

Only Jordain had seen the spill. And it made him nauseous. Just then his cell phone rang, and he answered it with a sharp “Jordain.” It was one word he pronounced with the full, slow drawl of his hometown. Playing the word for all its music. He’d heard his dad do it for years, and he was barely aware he was doing it himself.

“Hey, boss, I wanted you to know. She’s leaving the club.”

“Alone?”

“Yup. Want me to follow her home?”

“No. Just follow her until you are sure no one else is.”

I
didn’t feel dirty. I didn’t need a bath when I got home. But I did want a drink and was opening a bottle of wine when the phone rang. After checking the caller ID first, I answered it.

“Hello, Detective.” I checked my watch as I talked to him. It was earlier than I’d thought. Only nine.

“I’m in the neighborhood.”

“Again? What excuse do you have this time?”

“No excuse. You are too smart. You’d see right through me. But I could wait till tomorrow if this is too inconvenient. I’ll call you at your office. Ask you if I can come up. You’ll remind me that Dr. Buttercup doesn’t want me there. Then I’ll ask you if you can come over to the station house. And we’ll spend ten minutes trying to find a gap in your schedule—”