Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (12 page)

M
y last patient left at three-forty-five. On any other day, I would have gone home early, but I was hoping Gil Howard would call. I did some paperwork for a while and tried to ignore the headache that lay right behind my eyes.

When the phone rang at four-thirty, I picked up the receiver quickly.

“Dr. Snow?” This man didn’t sound like Gil, even though I’d only spoken to him once.

“Yes.”

“I… I…” He hesitated.

“Can I help you? Who is this?”

“I’m sorry. My name is Elias Beecher.” He paused.

I didn’t recognize the name any more than the voice. “Can I help you?”

“I don’t know…” He paused once more.

I was used to people hesitating when they first called. Making the decision to see a therapist can be a difficult one.
As much as someone might know that he or she wants help, actually asking for it is something else.

“Can I help you?” I asked again.

“I’m not sure. This is awkward. Especially over the phone.”

He had a cultured voice, deep and resonant. A handsome voice. And at the same time, vulnerable. I liked him right off. Even his hesitancy. Most people I knew hid behind too many words, spoke too quickly.

“Well, we don’t need to talk about anything over the phone. We can make an appointment. We can talk when you come in.”

With the phone wedged between my ear and shoulder, I walked over to the bookshelves and poured myself a glass of water from the silver carafe. It was cold, and before I took a sip I held it up to my forehead. The headache I’d had for the past hour was getting worse, and I hoped the cool glass would offer some relief. I should just give in and take two aspirin. But even though the pills were benign, I had a difficult time taking them.

All these years later and I still would rather suffer pain than succumb to taking pills.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” Elias Beecher asked.

“No. Should I?”

“No, I guess not. I’m sorry. It was rude of me to assume that you would.” His consideration surprised me, reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think of whom. “For some reason I thought you’d know my name,” he said, but still didn’t explain.

I took the bottle of aspirin out of my top desk drawer and put it down in front of the phone. The white bottle. The blue label. It was harmless. It would make my head ache less. Yet, still I hesitated.

“I’m sorry, should I?” I asked.

“Yes. Well, she told me that she had come to you for help. And that you were helping. And I was so grateful. I should say that first. How very grateful I was that you were going to help her and that she was feeling that she might get her—our problems resolved. God, I love her. And that’s all I want.”

Was this the husband or the father of one of my patients? There was so much sadness in his voice. Nothing pulled at me like someone’s melancholy. I wanted to help him. Now. As soon as possible. And I was impressed that he was willing—and able—to talk openly to me even though we’d never met. It reinforced the vulnerability I’d heard in his voice. There are so many people closed off to their own emotions, but someone like Elias Beecher is a therapist’s dream. It is much easier to help someone when they aren’t fighting you. When they want to let you in.

“Mr. Beecher, I know that you are very upset. But I can’t even begin to figure out if I can help you or not unless I understand who and what you are talking about. Do you think you could start at the beginning? Who was talking to me? And why was she talking to me about you?”

He took a deep breath. “Dr. Snow, the woman I am engaged to is one of your patients. And she has been missing for almost a week. I’ve gone to the police. I’m a lawyer, I know how it works. She’s a missing person until she shows up dead, and only then will she be a priority. There were no threats on her life, no sign of foul play, no break-in at her apartment. If she was kidnapped, no one has made any contact with me for ransom. I just don’t have anything to give the police to entice them to take this more seriously. And to complicate it further, I know they think I might be responsible for her disappearance. The boyfriend or husband is always a suspect, isn’t he?”

Elias Beecher had been talking so quickly and with such
urgency I hadn’t had a chance to interrupt, but he’d finally stopped long enough to take a breath.

My hands were as cold as the water in my glass, and I clasped them together in my lap.

“Who is your fiancée, Mr. Beecher?” I had to hear him say it.

“Cleo Thane.”

I
reached out to my desk and put my hand around the plastic bottle of aspirin. Wasn’t Gil Howard Cleo’s boyfriend?

“Dr. Snow?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. And, yes, she did mention you but not by name. As far as you can tell, how long has she been missing, Mr. Beecher?”

“Six days. That’s what I told the police. They said they couldn’t do anything. Yet. I filed a missing-person report. But from the way they treated me, from the questions they asked me, I think all I accomplished was making myself a suspect.”

I popped the top of the bottle, but I didn’t shake any of the pills out. I didn’t want to distract him with the sound. I didn’t want to change the tenor of this conversation. I needed to listen hard and glean everything I could from what he said.

“A suspect? In her disappearance?” I asked. I knew they would. First and before anyone else, the police would look at
those who were closest to her. But I wanted to hear how he responded to my questions. His reactions were critical to helping me understand whether or not he was, indeed, a suspect.

He laughed. And like his voice, the sound was intimate and resonant. “I’ve been in love twice in my life,” he said. “The first time when I was in college. She left me for the one man I could never compete with. And now with Cleo. And this time she made me feel that no man could compete with me. The others are just clients.”

“Did the police ask you about Cleo’s business?”

“Yes. But I didn’t exactly tell them. What would I have said when they asked me how I felt about it? How would I explain it so they would understand that, yes, I mind what she does—of course, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t. But not enough to put her in harm’s way. Cleo is young. She’s lovely. And she’s magical—the way she’s untouched by it all somehow.”

I was nodding. I had felt this myself. I knew what he meant. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to interrupt him.

“I don’t know how else to explain it,” he continued. “Cleo is only acting with those men. She becomes someone else. With me, she has this light…this delight…in things. A perspective. I’m rambling. I’m sorry. None of this is pertinent. I should know better than to go on like this. The point is that she is missing and has been for six days and I have to find her and I want to know if you can help me.”

“I’ve been worried about her, too. I’ve been hoping she’d gone on a vacation or a business trip and just forgotten to let me know.”

He laughed. A different laugh. This one was…what? Harsher? More ironic. I was listening to him with an intensity that made my head pound even harder.

Who was he? What kind of man? Was he involved in Cleo’s disappearance?

It wasn’t unheard of for the guilty party to be the one who went to the police. It was in the news every day. A wife is missing. The husband reports it. Six weeks later, he’s arrested for her murder.

But nothing Cleo had said about Caesar—or Elias, now that I knew his real name—had suggested that he had been at a breaking point with her.

“Can I see you?” he asked. “Will you talk to me? Will you help me? Between the two of us, maybe we can figure out what happened.”

“I can try. I’m not sure how much I can tell you. Everything that Cleo talked to me about is confidential. But certainly, I’ll do what I can.”

“I know you will. From everything Cleo told me about you, I’m sure that you can help me. You are very important to her. She really respects you.”

I thanked him, feeling even worse than I had before I’d picked up the phone. We made an appointment for the next day, and as soon as I hung up, I grabbed hold of the bottle of aspirin again and held it as if the medicine inside would seep into my bloodstream through the plastic.

But it wouldn’t. In order to get any relief from the pain, I was going to have to shake out two pills, put them in my mouth and swallow them.

And once I did, I could try to figure out the new piece of the puzzle. Who was the man I’d called earlier that afternoon? The one I’d assumed was Cleo’s lover? Who was Gil Howard?

F
ive minutes later I was still sitting at my desk, staring at the bottle of pills, feeling the pain throb behind my eyes, knowing it was not going to go away by itself, when there was a knock on my door.

“Come in.”

It was Belinda, and behind her was a tall man whose face was in shadow.

“Dr. Snow, there is someone here to see you.” Her voice was tight.

“I don’t have any sessions scheduled and I was just getting ready to leave. Is someone giving you a hard time?”

In the background I heard a male voice. “I don’t have an appointment, but I’d appreciate you just giving me a few minutes.” He had an accent that I couldn’t place, except that I knew it was Southern. Then he stepped into the doorway. He was tall and lanky, wearing blue jeans, a white shirt and a dark jacket.

“I’m sorry to barge in, Dr. Snow.” He stepped over the threshold. “I’m Detective Noah Jordain. And yes, this is official business.”

“Is my daughter all right?” My heart jolted and started pounding, adrenaline released in a nanosecond. The pain in my head stabbed me between the eyes.

He was fast. He knew. “This isn’t about your family. I’m here to see you in your professional capacity.”

I’ll see you as soon I recover from this fucking heart attack you just gave me, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Instead, my response was polite and professional. “Come in.”

I wanted to put my head down on my desk and close my eyes. Instead, I did one quick round of square breathing. Shit. Why was my panic always so close to the surface? It was as if I was always waiting for the phone call, the knock on the door, the explosion. Expecting it. Anticipating the awful call that something was wrong, that Dulcie was in danger. In my head her safety was at risk every minute of every day. I fought it and I blocked it and I lived with it, but sometimes it morphed into the fear I’d had about my mother’s safety when I was a child. She hadn’t been safe and I hadn’t been able to save her.

I was no wimpette. I was no victim. Yet I suffered anxiety along with most of the rest of the world. To cope I’d learned exercises, did visualizations. Had worked on my issues in therapy. And most of the time I mastered my weakness. But if it caught me off guard the way it just had when this detective walked into my office and introduced himself, I lost the ability to control my feelings.

I gulped the air.

It didn’t matter that this man I’d never met before was standing there watching me trying to come up from under. He just waited and smiled at me with eyes that were surprisingly kind, and then walked across the floor toward my desk.

“Can I sit?” he asked, with his hand on the back of the chair facing me.

And as I nodded, I realized why he was here. Of course. It had been the leitmotiv of my whole day. This detective was here about Cleo. Something
had
happened to her. They’d found her.

The words were already forming in the back of my throat. Has something happened to Cleo Thane? Is it connected to the other prostitutes who were killed? Is she the most recent victim of the Magdalene Murderer? Is that why she missed her appointments and hasn’t been in touch?

After my call to Gil Howard and Elias Beecher’s plea, I was primed to hear the solution to the mystery. And who else would have it other than a detective? This detective.

He was watching me, and I wondered how much of what I was thinking he could glean from the expression on my face.

All I wanted to do was find out if Cleo was all right, but I couldn’t just come out and ask when I didn’t know for sure that she was the reason he was here. Besides, even if she was why he was here, I couldn’t reveal that Cleo had been coming to see me.

Not until I knew she was dead. If she was alive there was nothing I could say. I would have to wait to hear what the detective wanted before I could ask about a patient who had come to symbolize a tight ball of anxiety that I could not dissolve.

“I should let you catch your breath. Do you want me to get you some water?” He looked around and spotted the water carafe. I shook my head and picked up the glass already on my desk.

“I do apologize, Doctor. I hate that about what I do—show up unannounced and have people look at me like I’m the grim reaper. Just once, I want to introduce myself to someone and
have them throw their arms around me and hug me tight and say, Oh, I am so damn happy you are here.”

I smiled.

How easily he’d brought me around. Expertly, I’d have to say. The man had to have had some psychological training.

“I’m Detective Noah Jordain.”

“Hello. I’m Morgan Snow.”

In the past few years, I’d been asked to work on several cases with the NYPD. I’d appeared in court to give testimony dozens of times. I’d met dozens of policemen, some of whom fit the stereotype of a law-enforcement officer, and others who eschewed the role and just cared about doing their jobs the best they could.

Noah Jordain, on first impression, was one of the latter.

Some people inhabit their skin with comfort, others are never at ease. He was. His clothes—a blazer, jeans, a white shirt and tie—fit him. Elbows, knees, stomach that didn’t push at the seams, creases where they should be. Even from a distance, I was sure he smelled clean. Like lemons, I guessed.

But when he leaned in to shake my hand, I was surprised to find his scent was rosemary and mint. Not as expected, but just as sharp and invigorating. He looked as if he was in his late thirties—early forties at the most—but there was something aged and ragged in his voice. You could hear all that he had seen behind his words. And you could see all that he had heard in his eyes. Sorry blue eyes that analyzed as they searched. And they always searched.