The Delilah Complex (21 page)

T
he long living room wall was covered with newspaper clippings. There must have been a good twenty-five stories cut out and taped up. Each one telling the story in a slightly different way.

Once in Italy, he had gone into a church. Was it in Siena? The whole back wall had been covered with slips of paper, different sizes and colors, each covered with handwriting. Every note had been a prayer. Some old and yellowed. Others with the ink still black and fresh. He had taken a picture of the wall of prayers.

This then was his wall of answered prayers. The men who had taunted him were getting what they deserved. One by one by one. The only thing he was sorry about was that, although they described the other photographs of the dead bodies, they weren’t showing them. The silly small shots of their bare feet, with the numbers, were disturbing and gruesome, for sure. Graphic, too. In fact, if he were doing a cover for a book about these serial murders, he’d use this image of the insignificant filthy feet, so vulnerable with the bold bright red numbers printed on them.

His glance traveled from the number 1 on Philip Maur’s
feet to the number 2 on Timothy Wheaton’s feet to the number 3 on Grant Firth’s feet. And now the number 4 on the bottom of Bruce Levin’s feet.

Number 5 would be up on the wall next. But he could be patient. Today was for luxuriating in Bruce Levin’s demise. He had been one of the worst of them. Laughing at his cock, flaunting his own erection. Stud. Fucking stupid stud.

He smiled.

Not anymore, he wasn’t.

Paul Lessor wished there were someone he could tell. Because it was so satisfying that he needed to share it.

They had laughed at him and now they were dying.

And no one had any idea why.

On the news and in the papers, reporters kept asking: What connects these men? Why these four? What is their bond to each other? And the longer they searched and the more they looked and the more bodies that showed up, the more baffled they became.

Paul knew. The thing that bound them together was the deepest darkest secret each of these men carried. Secrets they each had gone to great lengths to hide so that no one could find out about their nocturnal wanderings, their willingness to subjugate themselves to the powerful women who had them lie down or stand up and kiss them or lick them or fuck them or massage them or bathe them, or the one who had even been so bold as to ask him to wipe her pussy after she had gone to the bathroom.

No. None of these powerful men—who ran companies and made money and ordered other people around— wanted anyone to know that they belonged to a secret society where they were as powerless as ants under a gardener’s shoe. And so they had hidden their secret so
well that neither their families nor the police or the reporters could find the connection between them.

It was late. After two on Sunday night. He should go to sleep. He would pay the price for this tomorrow when he went to work. But he wasn’t tired yet.

He picked up the red magic marker on his desk and walked over to the wall of answered prayers and began to underline his favorite parts in the articles that had appeared in the weekend papers. And he wondered how much longer it would take until the secret leaked out. Until everyone who had laughed at him was being laughed at. That would be rich.

“I
t’s too bright in here. Can’t you shut off some of the lights?” Anne asked.

“I’d like that, too,” Ellen said.

The lights were not that bright. My desk lamp was on. The recessed lighting was at the same level it always was. I thought about the request, got up, and turned the rheostat down just enough to make a difference. Then I sat back down.

The group had assembled. Everyone was present except for Betsy, and I wasn’t surprised that she hadn’t shown up.

“Let’s get started. If—” I had to remind myself not to call her Betsy. “If Liz comes we’ll be able to fill her in.”

“I think we should wait for her. She’s the only one who isn’t here,” Davina said. “And this is the first time we’ve all been together since the last two articles appeared. This is the only place we can be together and talk about this.”

“I understand that you’d like everyone to be here. But she may not be coming. And there is a lot for us to talk about. Is it all right with everyone if we proceed?”

I got a few lukewarm nods. Only Shelby spoke. “I think you’re right, Dr. Snow. We really need to get started so we can talk about what’s happened.”

Over the last three weeks, the stress these women were feeling had become more profound. They were in shock. Disturbed. Confused. And flat-out frightened.

The conversation quickly turned to the four men who had been chosen and conjecture about why, out of the many dozens who were participants in the society, they were being targeted. No one could come up with a reasonable suggestion. It seemed random.

The group was also sincerely worried about several men who hadn’t been seen at the society in the past two weeks. Were any of them missing?

“Maybe they just aren’t coming to your evenings. Perhaps the news has scared them away. Have you tried to contact them?”

“Yes. But we can’t do any more than leave coded messages. And we haven’t heard back from them,” Shelby said.

“I’m surprised anyone is still coming,” Ginny said. “Why isn’t everyone staying away? Why aren’t I?”

“How do you feel about being there?” I asked.

“As if it’s more important than ever to show up…” She seemed embarrassed for a moment. “It makes me feel even more alive. Like we are saying ‘fuck you’ to whoever this madman is every time we get together.”

A few other women agreed.

“I think that is a very reasonable reaction. You want everything to go back to normal. It’s a way of defusing the reality of what’s happened.”

“When I’m at the society, I can pretend that nothing has changed,” Anne said.

“I don’t feel that way,” Davina said. “I don’t think I can do this anymore. It’s wrong. Like we are playing some kind of ghoulish sex game.”

Shelby shook her head. “This isn’t our fault, though. It’s not something that we did. We’re not responsible.” She spoke too loudly.

Anne started to cry. “I’m tired of being sad. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being sad. It was bad enough when it was just Philip. And, after him, Tim. But now…four men…this is horrible. I think we should do something.”

Shelby turned quickly to look at her. “I thought you and I already resolved that.”

“Maybe it would be helpful to tell the group what you resolved,” I suggested.

Anne turned directly to me. “I told Shelby I thought we should talk to the police.”

I was glad that someone had brought it up again. If no one had, I was going to try and figure out how to suggest it myself.

There was only one connection between these men. It was the society that these women belonged to and participated in. Yes, now the police knew that each victim had a mark on his right foot that connected him to the others, but that wasn’t much of a lead without knowing what the mark was.

“No.” Shelby spoke sharply. “It’s just impossible. What could we say? No one knows about us. The very last thing we can do is expose our membership. That would be disastrous. We’d never recover!” She was almost shrieking.

It was the first time since we’d started the group that she exhibited this level of emotion. And I was glad.

“It doesn’t matter if it destroys the society,” Anne said. She was angry now, too. “If it means that even one man’s life will be saved, I don’t see how we have any choice. I don’t even understand how it can be a conversation.”

“You can’t be serious,” Ginny said. “Are you willing to
have your husband find out? Your boss? Your kids? Your in-laws? Your friends? I’m not. I absolutely am not. Besides, what good will telling the police do? Aid them in warning all the men that they are targets? For God’s sake, there isn’t one man from the society who doesn’t know that by now.”

“Except it hasn’t helped,” Anne argued.

“This is not a discussion,” Shelby said. “We all took an oath. So did every man who joined us. We cannot tell anyone anything.”

“I think this is a discussion,” I said. “And an important one.”

Shelby turned on me. “You would. You talked to that reporter. Why did you do that? You told us that you would keep our secret with us. But you talked to the press.”

The attack was easier for everyone to focus on than the discussion of whether or not they should talk to the police. Ten sets of eyes—angry, hurt and accusatory—turned on me.

“No, Shelby. I didn’t go to the reporter. She came to me. And I didn’t discuss anything about the society with her. You can be sure of that. My comments were about what we can expect from a sexualized serial killer. Not about the men who have been killed or what might tie them together.”

“But you may still be talking to her. How can we know you aren’t?”

I wound up explaining privilege to them once again. I needed them to understand that it was up to one of them to go to the police and help them in figuring out who was behind these crimes. At the same time, they needed to trust me if I was going to help them work through their anger, shame and guilt over what had happened.

“The U.S. Supreme Court established the psychotherapist-patient privilege in the federal courts in its
Jaffee v. Redmond
decision in 1996. The psychiatric community had always operated on this premise but finally it went to the courts. For almost fifty years, lawyers and doctors had been trying to clearly establish that communication between patients and their psychotherapists was in need of a very high level of protection.”

They were listening. Intently. Only Shelby seemed to be ignoring what I was saying. She was looking out the window, staring into the tangled tree branches, lit by the streetlamp.

“There is another precedent—the Tarasoff case,” I continued, “which established just how far that privilege extended. In that court case, it was decided that psychiatrists do have an obligation to warn a third party when a patient has threatened that third party. But none of you has told me the name of the next person or persons at risk. And as far as I know, none of you knows. So I have no right to go to the police myself.”

“You are saying that as if you think we have the right to go,” Cara said.

“An obligation to go,” Anne said.

“No. No. That is just not going to happen,” Shelby yelled, her head swinging around to face the group again. “What are you going to tell them? What names are you even going to give them? We don’t know one another’s real names, for Christ’s sake. This is insane. We have a trust to uphold.”

“At what price?” Anne asked.

No one said anything.

“We don’t want you to talk to the press anymore,” Shelby said to me, obviously trying to change the subject.

“That’s not something that has anything to do with you, I’m sorry,” I said as kindly as I could.

“It does. Don’t you understand? If we hadn’t hired you, if we hadn’t paid you, you wouldn’t know anything about this case. You wouldn’t be getting your name in the paper. You wouldn’t be getting patients because of us.”

I am not made of ice. Pushed, I can get just as annoyed as anyone else. And yet, in this setting, understanding what I did about the stress these women were under—and Shelby in particular—I made an extra effort to control my own emotions so I could help them with theirs.

“Shelby, I didn’t talk to the press to get more patients. Why would you think that?”

“We’re giving you power,” she said.

In her world, this was a transaction and power was her currency. Several of the women in the room nodded their heads, agreeing, understanding what she said. The very reason the society had been created was to allow them to act out their desires to metaphorically—and perhaps literally, from what I had seen on the videotape—be on top.

“You see it as power, but I don’t. You hired me to help you cope with a disturbing situation. That doesn’t put me in a position of weakness any more than it puts you in a position of strength. This isn’t a battle between us.”

“And it won’t be as long as you don’t talk to the press.”

Davina had been listening intently, but saying very little. “Shelby, back off, will you? Can we just talk about what we might be able to do? How we feel about this? How to handle all this shit? I go to the office. I snap at people. I’m angry. Then I get sad. I want to cry but I’m afraid that, if I let myself cry, my friends or my family will ask me what’s wrong. What the fuck am I supposed to tell them? How do I short-circuit the grieving process so I can get back to my life?”

“You can’t. You—” I looked around and focused, one after the other, on each of the women. “None of you can short-circuit this process. That’s why it’s important to talk it out here. To feel free to let out whatever you want to.” My glance stopped at Ginny.

“I have something I want to let out,” she said. “I think I know who might be behind this.”

N
ina must have been waiting for the group to leave because she came to my office within five minutes of the last woman going. “Can we talk?” she asked.

I nodded. “But not now. I have to get home for Dulcie.”

“Do the two of you have plans for dinner?”

“No.”

“Why don’t I go home with you? We can walk. Talk on the way. Then the three of us can get a bite.”

She didn’t wait until we reached the street but started in as we descended the staircase from the second floor to the lobby. “We have to work this out,” she said. “It’s not good for you or me. And it’s not good for the institute.”

It had been several days since our argument, and that was a first for us. In all the years since my mother had died, Nina and I hadn’t ever had an argument that had lasted longer than a few hours.

“It’s even worse for the four men who are dead,” I said.

She opened the heavy door that led to the street. It was evening already, but like so many other days that fall, the weather was relatively warm. I was wearing a blazer with a sweater thrown over my shoulders and knotted around
my neck. Nina had on a camel-colored shawl, theatrically draped around her.

The stores were well lit, and as we passed boutique after boutique I saw the two of us mirrored in the glass. I was so used to seeing our reflections, side by side.

“Are you going to change your mind about how I’ve been handling the Scarlet Society?”

“It’s the police I have the problem with,” Nina said. “That and why, knowing how I felt, you brought the issue up in our weekly meeting.”

“I didn’t know I was being censored.”

“Can you stop acting like a chastised teenager and lay off the sarcastic tone?”

“Will that help? I’m still not going to agree with you about this. Things are only getting worse,” I said, and told her what had happened in the group.

That took us to Seventy-fourth Street, where we stopped and waited for the light to turn so we could cross. “We’ve fought before, but we’ve never been on such opposite sides of the argument. I want advice from someone who’s willing to help me explore my options, and you are rigidly holding to your own position.”

Her eyebrows came together and her eyes narrowed. “You are still doubting my judgment?”

“You taught me to look at every side of an argument when dealing with patients. To assume nothing. But you’re being stubborn about this.”

“Morgan, do you know the name of any person who is going to be targeted?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Do you know the name of anyone who is targeting members of this society?”

“I don’t. One of the women in the group thinks she might. But that isn’t the point.”

The light changed and we crossed together, still in step.

“It is. What you should be doing is working with these women to help them deal with their grief and counseling them about how they feel about their activities. And while you are doing that, you should be working on your paper about the changing level of sexually aggressive behavior among women who have assumed high levels of power.”

“Do you care that four men have been killed by some madman?”

“You’re insulting me, Morgan.”

“I can’t believe you are being so stubborn.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not as black and white as you are making it out to be. These men are being killed. The only thing they have in common is the Scarlet Society. One of the members of that society is a reporter who is breaking the stories, who shows manic tendencies and exhibits signs of stress and guilt. And who has hidden her profession from the other group members and hidden her knowledge of what ties the men together from the police and the
New York Times
. Add to that another member who told me tonight about some guy who was paranoid and possibly bipolar, who had left the group before the killings started, and who seemed to have a lot of anger toward several of the other male members. So that’s two possible suspects. And the police don’t know about either of them.”

“The police know the reporter. You told me they do. And I’m sure they think she’s a suspect.”

“Based on the fact that she’s breaking the stories. Yes, possibly. But they’d take that much more seriously if they also knew she’d had sex, for God’s sake, with every one
of those men, is feeling completely unattractive and is jealous of the younger women in the group.”

We’d stopped for another light. The wind blew and a crimson leaf fell off a tree and across Nina’s face. She brushed it away and it drifted to the pavement.

“We have a job to do, Morgan. That job does not include doing the work of the New York Police Department.”

“We are doctors. Our job includes saving people’s lives.”

“That’s very naive. We just do the best we can. We’re not superheroes.”

“I agree with you. That’s why we can’t make decisions like the one you are making. In other words, we have to remain silent at any cost?”

But the light had changed and Nina had started crossing the street. She hadn’t heard my question. Or she hadn’t known how to answer it.