Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (27 page)

I
never went to the museum without thinking of orangeade and tuna fish sandwiches on white bread—the lunch the museum provided for us on our grade-school trips. The same lunch that Dulcie would describe after one of her school trips there.

Noah and I sat on a wooden bench outside the glassenclosed butterfly house—a temperature-controlled environment where hundreds of butterflies were hatched and lived out their three-week lives gorging on plants and flitting around unaware that they were on exhibit.

“We’re trying to get a jump on him and figure out where he’s headed next. He gave the first woman stigmata, the second communion, the third the crown of thorns. This one was baptized. The M.E. said she’d been soaking in a tub of hot water for hours. And she was drenched in oil. There were five crystal cruets of it, smashed into shards that he spread over the bed. She was lying on top of them.”

“A bed of glass?”

“Yes.” Noah looked exhausted and his voice was hoarse. The stress of the case was obviously wearing on him.

“What is he doing?” I asked, not expecting any answer and not getting one right away.

Through the glass, I watched a monarch land on an orchid and sit there, still and folded up, just waiting.

“He’s punishing them for something. For failing him somehow,” Noah said.

“Maybe…” I hesitated.

“What do you think he’s doing?”

“I don’t know. But I think it’s more complicated than that. He’s trying out all these different methods. He’s working on something.”

“What?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know. I wished I did. But I couldn’t even make an educated guess. “Want to go in?” I nodded toward the exhibit.

The glass-enclosed gallery was hot and humid and smelled strongly of earth. The thirty-foot-long conservatory was designed to resemble a tropical jungle with hundreds of palms, orchids, ferns and other plants and trees—the ideal environment for butterflies.

Something flew by me and landed on a frond. Electricgreen wings, orange shapes outlined in black. Powdery mosaics of color.

By staring at the creature, we were also facing the glass wall, and our reflections looked back at us.

Noah was much taller than me, and I was surprised to see that instead of looking at the butterflies, he was looking at me. Turning, I faced him. The shadows under his eyes made him look sad. And the haunted look in his eyes was impossible to ignore.

I was more comfortable with him now that he was in pain
than I had been before. I could help him now if he wanted me to. I knew how to do that. I was at home in that role. The therapist who gives but never asks for anything back.

“This one is really getting to you, isn’t it?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Want to talk about it?”

“No. Not one bit. But I probably should.”

Except he didn’t. We stood there for a few more seconds, him looking down at me, me looking up at him. And then I reached out and touched his hand. I didn’t know I was going to do it and it surprised me that I did. It wasn’t my style to reach out to people.

Almost as soon as I touched his hand, he took mine and held it as if he had been expecting my move. It was an awkward moment—not for him, but for me—and I wasn’t sure what to do. Hell, I couldn’t even figure out what I wanted to do. Before I could think about it, still holding my hand, he pulled me forward, deeper into the tiny tangle of vegetation. As he walked, he told me what had happened. “It was about eight years ago. In New Orleans. We didn’t get to her in time.”

“Was she a prostitute, too?”

He nodded. “She had been helping us finger a drug pusher. And it was the last thing she was going to do. She had saved enough money to finally get off the street and had gotten a job. And then we screwed up. When we found her, she’d been sliced up.”

I could feel the shiver in his hand and I just held on. “Did you get help?”

“You mean therapy?”

“Yes.”

“For a few weeks. I’m not one of those guys who’s too proud to get help. But…” He shrugged. “It wasn’t a psychological problem. We’d fucked up and a sweet, funny, determined
girl got killed. Therapy can’t solve crimes. It can’t resurrect the dead.”

Inside a four-foot-square Plexiglas box were four-dozen cocoons hanging off four rows of plastic tubing. An artificial tree of sorts where the pupae incubated. One was opening as I watched. Through the cracked caramel-colored papery outer casing, a pair of orange wings were just visible and about to break free. From this mud-colored pod to a vibrant flying creature.

I extricated my hand from Noah’s. “Maybe his main goal isn’t to kill them,” I said, turning the idea over in my mind.

“Keep going.”

“You’re thinking that his intent is to murder them, that that’s his goal. But what if that’s just the conclusion of these sessions? What if there is something else going on in that room? Some other kind of ritual?”

Noah was nodding, following me, waiting. “A ritual? Is it sexual?”

“Well, by choosing prostitutes, by definition he is dealing with these women sexually. But that doesn’t mean the encounter is motivated by a sexual need.”

“So dressing them up as nuns isn’t just a fetishized fantasy?”

“It could be, but that’s too easy.”

“Okay, what’s not easy?”

I shook my head. My hands opened by my sides. All that mattered was helping Noah figure this out before anything happened to another woman.

Too often the cliché has been proved. Serial killers speed up. The second killing had been a week after the first. The fourth was only two days after the third.

“How can this guy get in and out of these hotels without someone noticing?” I asked.

“Big hotels. Ordinary-looking guy.”

“How does he convince the women to dress up in nuns’ habits? This case has been all over the news. I know the first woman wouldn’t have understood what was happening. But these others? Once he pulls out the outfit, why don’t they just run?”

“They might not have any choice by the time he gets them dressed. He might have a gun or a knife on them. He might even be dressing them himself after he knocks them unconscious.”

“Knocks them unconscious? How?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to get into the details if I don’t have to. We’re trying to keep some of them secret in case he contacts us.”

“I think he is probably smart. Educated. Obviously clever.”

Noah nodded. “And fairly well-heeled to be able to leave behind all that cash.”

“What kind of money are you talking about?”

“The rooms are about two hundred dollars for a night. He leaves behind another five to seven hundred dollars in bills. That’s almost one thousand dollars a night.”

A yellow-and-black butterfly, similar to one I had in a specimen box in my office, landed on a large pink flower near Noah’s shoulder.

It flapped its wings, revealing reds, oranges and yellows. The colors as deep and determined as if they’d been applied with oil paints.

“He’s educated in Catholic liturgy,” he added. “He knows mass rituals. And he has access to the supplies.”

“And there haven’t been any robberies at churches in the last few months… Don’t even answer. Of course there haven’t been. You’d already know that by now. What about the Internet? Can you buy all those things online?”

He nodded and patted his pocket. “I have a printout of the sales receipts for the last two months from the dozen religious-supply
houses that don’t require churches to have house accounts. I was going over them while I was waiting for you.”

“You mean there are religious-supply houses that anyone can order from? I can call them up or go online and order chalices and priests’ vestments and communion wafers?”

“Well, you can’t order the supplies and send them to your apartment in New York, but as long as you give the address of a church, then yes, you could. Anyone could.”

“So as long as it will be delivered to a parish or convent?”

He nodded.

“Do you think you have a priest on your hands?”

“We’re not ruling that out.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. A priest might be furious with hookers for being sinners, for tempting him, for flaunting their sexuality. But I have a hard time imagining a man who is still a priest combining his disgust for the women with disgust for his calling.”

“You lost me,” he said.

“I hope not.”

Noah smiled. That wide, easy smile. What had I said? What had he heard? I was embarrassed. I had meant it literally, hadn’t I? I hoped he was following my reasoning. But there was that damn innuendo. And I knew too much about the unconscious mind not to realize it. Except I had no time to stop and think about myself. Not yet, anyway.

“In the process of killing the women, he is defiling the sacraments,” I said.

“For a nice Jewish girl from New York City, you know a lot about Catholic priests.”

He knew more about me than I had told him. I was surprised that I wasn’t more surprised.

“I was married to a nice Catholic man.”

He nodded. “You’re divorced, aren’t you?”

A plain brown moth flew by us. It was bigger than the butterflies
and shared nothing of their brilliance except when you looked closely at the designs on its wings, which were intricate. You barely noticed these creatures in the garden, but here, they were lovely.

“Yes. He’s not much of a Catholic anymore. But he was when I married him.”

“How long ago was that?”

“A little more than fourteen years ago.”

“What happened?”

I shrugged. “Nothing very dramatic. Usual stuff. Are you married?”

He shook his head. “Almost. We lived together for a while. A long while. She didn’t want to move to New York.”

I arched my eyebrows. “That isn’t much of a reason to leave someone you love.”

“No. That was the excuse. The truth was she couldn’t take the police work. She tried. But she got swallowed up by the darkness I’d bring home with me every night and I was too tired to figure out what to do about it.”

I wanted to tell him how similar that was to what had happened with me and Mitch, but I didn’t know how to say it in a way that wouldn’t sound as if I was just trying to find a common ground between us. So, in true therapist fashion, I remained silent.

He focused on my eyes for a long moment and I felt it, deep inside of me.

W
e walked out into the sunshine and stood on the wide stone steps of the museum, both of us blinking and readjusting to the noise and the light. At the bottom of the staircase, where we should have broken off and gone our separate ways, Noah took my arm in an old-fashioned gesture and we walked toward the street.

“Come with me. Coffee, a drink, something. We’re up against nothing but dead ends and I need more of your fresh thinking. If we don’t get a break in this case…” He didn’t finish his thought. He didn’t have to.

I nodded. My concentration was on my arm where he was holding me. How was I supposed to know what kind of touch this was? Swinging between the tired embraces of my now ex and the few wildly overt connections with the men I’d met in the Diablo Cigar Bar, I just didn’t know how to judge this, and that left me feeling amazingly young and stupid.

“Why are you smiling so oddly?” he asked.

“I didn’t know I was.” Now I really felt foolish.

“Well, you are.”

“I’m just not walking on a street I know. And that’s an unusual feeling for someone who has been walking these streets her whole life.”

“I hope you aren’t identifying a little too closely with this case.”

I had to stop and think for a minute, and then realizing the unintentional pun, laughed. “That is in terribly bad taste.”

“I know. I’m overtired. I’m angry. Punch-drunk.”

We reached the destination that Noah had picked out and went inside.

Café des Artistes is a well-known landmark in New York. A lovely restaurant graced with a mural of luscious nude women from the early 1900s.

“You know, I’ve never been here, either,” I offered as we walked to a table in the bar area. It was just five o’clock and the crowds hadn’t arrived yet.

“You’ve lived here your whole life and I’m showing you new sights?”

I nodded.

As soon as we sat down, Noah got up. “I’m sorry, I need to call in. If everyone is running around the same maze and there’s no reason for me to go back, I can have a real drink, instead of coffee. Order what you’d like. I’ll be right back.”

I couldn’t read his face when he returned five minutes later.

“So is it the hard stuff or the soft?” I asked him.

“The hard stuff. They think they have a lead on the nun’s habits, and the guys working the videotape think they have a match on a man seen at two of the hotels. Blurry, a shot from the side. But it’s something. Everyone knows what to do and no one needs me looking over his shoulder. I told
Perez to get out of there, too. We’ve both been working eighteen-hour days all week. Neither of us will be any good tomorrow if we just sit there another night, searching for a ghost on our computers.”

The waiter arrived and I ordered a dirty martini. Noah said he’d have the same thing, then sat back in his chair and almost relaxed. It was his fingers that stayed alert, at the ready. For what? I wondered.

“So you are a girl after my own heart,” he said, his New Orleans accent making
heart
sound longer and musical. I liked listening to him, experienced the odd sensation that his words were reaching out and touching my skin, as if he were stroking me with those drawn-out syllables.

Who was I here?

In session with a patient, I was probing and fearless, but flirting was virgin territory for me.

The drinks came and Noah raised his elegant martini glass to mine in a silent toast. The liquid was icy and sharp and just a little salty.

I told him about the umbrella and the man on the street, and he asked me a few questions to see if he could spark any other memory from me about what the man looked like or how he acted. But I didn’t remember anything else that was helpful. “At the time it occurred to me that he might be following her…the way a moth will fly to a flame. Just because he was so attracted to her. Every man she passed on the street watched her.”