Habit (23 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE / MONDAY, 8:52 AM

“Well hello there,” said a voice.

Brendan opened his eyes and saw the doctor.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I got hit by a truck.”

The doctor smiled. “Sounds about right. Well, you have a hip fracture. A hairline crack in the upper quarter of your femur. How is your pain?”

“My groin hurts.”

“That’s common. You’ve asked to be taken off the morphine.”

“Yes.”

The doctor frowned. He was perhaps forty, and prematurely balding. He wore glasses. “I really don’t recommend it. Your injuries are bound to create . . . a lot of discomfort.”

Brendan opened his mouth to say something, and then thought better of it. He changed what he was going to say. “What about the bleeding?”

The frown deepened into an almost paternal look of concern. “Are you aware of your peptic ulcers?”

“Ulcers?”

“You have a tear in the mucosa of your esophagus, and in the antrum, located in your stomach. Do you take aspirin or Motrin?”

“No.”

“Good. I have to ask you – do you have a history of stress, or drug and alcohol addiction?”

Brendan was silent.

“Mr. Healy?”

“I’m a recovering alcoholic. Stress comes with the job. I’m a detective.”

“I understand. Do you get frequent stomach aches or pains?” The doctor folded his hands in front him and looked down for a moment.

“Yeah, I get pains. Ulcers – that’s why I had blood in my mouth?”

The doctor looked up. “I believe so. You suffered quite an ordeal, from what I’ve been told. The shock to your system has really exacerbated your ulcers. It’s important that you keep your stress levels way down while you recover.”

“How long is it going to take? For my hip?”

“That depends on you.”

Brendan fought the urge to roll his eyes. He shifted his position in the bed, and felt the pain flare up around his thigh and groin. He tried not to let the doctor see, but it was futile.

“Just ballpark it, Doc.”

“I’m going to recommend that you’re on leave from your job for at least two months. Maybe longer. And that’s just for your hip. Ulcers take a long time to repair. The mucosa is sensitive in the lining of your esophageal tract and in the antrum. You don’t want it to spread to your duodenum.”

Brendan sighed. He noticed that the curtain had been pushed back. There was another bed in the room, empty. He could see through the doorway out into the hallway.

“Have I had any other visitors, besides the Sheriff?”

“No. Not that I’m aware of.”

“Okay.” Brendan lay back. He looked up at the ceiling. “Keep the morphine coming,” he said. “I don’t care.”

* * *

He was taken home two days later by Deputy Lawless. Lawless passed on information from the Sheriff that the IACP investigation had been suspended pending Brendan’s full recovery. Taber didn’t want to add stress to Brendan’s life of any kind.

Brendan laughed.

The deputy took the wheelchair and set it up in Brendan’s driveway and helped Brendan into it.

“Anything happening with the Heilshorn case?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or you’re not supposed to say.”

Lawless was silent. Then, “How are your injuries?”

“I have what they said was an intertrochanteric fracture.”

“Ouch.”

“Actually, it’s better than what they first thought. The X-Ray sort of got it wrong, but the MRI was more definitive. The type of fracture I got is in a place with good blood supply. I’ll be playing basketball again in no time.”

“You play?”

“It was a joke.”

“Oh.”

Brendan gave Lawless the key and the deputy opened the front door and then pushed Brendan inside.

Once in the house, Lawless seemed awkward. “Anything else I can do for you, Detective?”

“Actually, there is.”

Brendan rolled himself into the bedroom, having some difficulty fitting in through the narrow doors in the little house. He was able to reach under the bed and get the cash box he kept. He gave Lawless some money and a short list of things to get at the store.

Lawless considered the list, and for a moment Brendan though the deputy would refuse the request. But he didn’t. He was back half an hour later with the booze.

CHAPTER THIRTY / MONDAY, 7:33 PM

Night seemed to be coming quicker these days. Halfway through September, and it was already dark outside by seven o’clock. It seemed earlier than in years past. Brendan wondered if something was happening with daylight saving time that no one had told him about. Or with the earth, the cosmos; time was speeding up. He poured himself another drink of vodka and thought about it.

He booted up his laptop. He had already watched Danice’s videos several times each. They at once repulsed and aroused him. There was a whole glut of revolting videos on the Red Light website. He spent time, too much time, trying to get his mind around it. The pro videos he could more or less understand. The women involved still might be damaged in some way, but for the most part, they seemed in control. They were making bank. They oohed and aahed demonstratively and threw their hair back.

The amateur videos were a mixture of voyeurism and sheer perversion. Sometimes there was a video of a couple, having some fun with exhibitionism. In other cases, the women were clearly not enjoying themselves.

These were, in a word, horrific. What brought these women here? Were they under duress? Was it a desperate cry for attention? An urgent need for money? Or were they coerced?

One of the Danice videos was an “interview.” Brendan watched the beginning, the bit before the sex, a dozen times or more. She came into an office and sat on a couch. There were two cameras, one stationary and one handheld. Her hair was long and flowing, and she wore glasses in this video, as if she were applying for a secretarial position.

The interviewer asks her what her qualifications are. She’s great at collating, she says, and making copies. He asks her if she’s good at giving head. Yes, she says, she’s good at that too. Then he asks her about her physical qualifications. Would she please give a visual demonstration of what she would bring to the company. And she stands and begins to take off her clothes. The interviewer moves in with the handheld camera. He begins getting extreme close-ups of her attributes. This part Brendan only watched twice. When the interviewer comes around the desk and is visible in the stationary shot, his head and face are blotted out with a masking effect.

Danice’s other videos took place in a totally different context, the first of which was dated two years later. Brendan wondered if the first video actually served an ulterior purpose. If he was to believe Eddie Stemp and the story of the high-end escort service, then the “interview,” as playful as it was objectifying and demeaning, could have been part of an online catalog. But Brendan thought any “casting” video was more likely a sick ruse used to get young women to perform sex acts on the spot. Finally, Brendan wanted to learn more about how the videos were distributed, but there were nothing but dead ends.

Two videos had tags down below, advertising the websites which offered them. One was tagged “Adult Royale dot com;” a video in which Danice strutted around a fancy home wearing high heels before she was approached by a muscular young man. The other was the mock interview video, and the tag read “XList,” with a heraldic lion unfurling a long tongue as its emblem. Brendan had decided to visit that website first, and had scoured it for contact information. There wasn’t much more than a hard copy order form. He hadn’t looked it over thoroughly enough, however, and now at home, perpetually on the couch, he had more time to do so.

He found that there was an email address for problems with orders or shipment. He took a long pull of the Stoli vodka, emptying the glass. He then spent the next ten minutes concocting a fake email account. He named himself John Porter and set up a Gmail address in which his username was johnporter645.

He decided to just act as though he wasn’t aware of how to select and order a video, though the site certainly made it easy enough for any moron.

Dear XList,

I am trying to find a video featuring Danice. I can’t seem to locate one. Sorry, but I am not great with computers. Could you please help me?

Thanks, John Porter

He hit send and then flopped back on the couch. He realized that he needed to keep looking for these types of sites which sold any of the other videos, either in DVD shipment or as downloads, but for the moment, he couldn’t stomach it. All of the sites featured ads in the margins with looped graphics of people engaged in various acts. They covered the gamut of human perversion, but tended towards the absurd, the grotesque. There was animated porn, he had discovered, and every kind of fetish, known to him and not. He was tired of looking at it.

He exited out of the sites and poured himself another glass of vodka.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE / TUESDAY, 9:44 PM

“Nothing,” said Delaney.

“Nothing? And Heilshorn has his own private investigators?”

“Just like he said. You doing alright? You don’t sound too good.”

“I don’t know why. I slept most of yesterday.”

Brendan looked outside. It was indeed dark again. There was a light rain falling.

“I can’t believe we’re gonna lose this,” said Brendan.

“Lose it? We’re not going to lose anything. It hasn’t even been a week. These things can take time. They can take years.”

Brendan grunted. He was on his fourth vodka of the evening. He had eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich earlier that day. He couldn’t remember if he’d eaten anything else.

“Did you know Olivia Jane was Rebecca Heilshorn’s therapist?”

He heard Delaney breathing for a second. “You know, I really don’t appreciate you asking the Sheriff that. Those relationships are kept strictly confidential.”

“So I’ve been told. Have you been able to obtain her session notes?”

“Jesus, Healy. No. Don’t you understand? Time. These things take time.”

“Rebecca doesn’t have time.”

“Rebecca’s dead.”

“Exactly,” said Brendan. “Exactly. Time means nothing to her now.”

“Are you . . . Healy, are you drunk?”

“Far from it, my friend. You know, you can be a real hardcase, Delaney. A real asshole. But I like you. I don’t think you did anything wrong.”

“Fuck you, Healy.”

Brendan started to laugh.

“I’m doing you a favor even talking to you,” Delaney said gruffly. “Next time you want to know anything, you call the Sheriff. But remember, this is no longer your case. Not the house, not the people, not the porn. Out of your territory now.”

Brendan lolled on the couch. “Did you, ah, oil your broomstick with Olivia Jane?” He closed his eyes.

Delaney responded, sounding farther away, “Hey, Healy. Do me a favor. Look around. See anything?”

“No.”

“Exactly. That’s your territory right now.”

Delaney hung up.

Brendan looked at his phone and frowned when he saw the “Call Ended 6:03 mins” flashing. He threw the phone across the room where it knocked hard against the wall. He propped himself up and reached for the milk jug next to the couch. The wheelchair was so tough to get in and out of, and using the crutches made it impossible to piss standing up. Sitting was too painful, even with the meds. And the vodka made him have to whiz frequently. He just peed next to the couch.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO / THURSDAY, 10:14 AM

He realized the pee jugs were full. He also realized his house was disgusting.

Brendan’s head pounded. Lawless had brought him five bottles of vodka and a case of Miller High Life. He was halfway through the fourth bottle of vodka and so decided to switch to beer. He would need to come down a little in order to be able to go out and get more vodka. This time he would get a case of it.

He needed to stay drunk enough that the depression didn’t crush him, but sober enough to be able to drive. Plus, he had returned to the videos. For the three that showed the male involved clearly, he had written out a physical description of each. His handwriting was messy chicken-scratch. He needed to transcribe it into a proper document. He figured a little housework would help put him in the mood.

He started to get off the couch and realized things were worse than he’d first feared. The pain in his groin had been muted by the painkillers, but so, it seemed had a certain amount of feeling in his legs. It took him ten minutes just to get to the wheelchair. Then another ten to fumble around with the crutches and get his useless legs underneath his body. During the process, he felt a tickle in his throat and coughed into his fist. The blood that splattered on his hand was bright and terrifying.

It took a half an hour to get the pee jugs into the bathroom and flush them down the toilet.

He took a break and went to the fridge for the beer. Half of the case of Miller High Life was gone, and he didn’t remember drinking it. There were cans in the sink and on the kitchen counter. He had left food out, and the kitchen was rank.

He kept seeing flashes of the porn videos. It was as if they had hijacked his cerebral cortex. He thought about habits. He wondered if doing porn was a habit, like anything else. Cue, routine, reward. He wondered what Rebecca’s first cue had been. He wanted so badly to talk to her father, Alexander Heilshorn, Mr. Big Deal New York City Doctor.

An idea flickered in the back of his mind. A connection. But it was tough to bring to the surface. The meds and the booze and the lack of nutrition were conspiring to cloud his brain. Blood from his mouth was drying on his hand. He cracked a beer and guzzled it down. Nothing had ever tasted better. Not even ice chips.

* * *

He forgot, temporarily, about going out for the vodka and went to check his email. He saw he had finally gotten a response from XList, which turned out to be the only porn site which offered an email address. All the rest had been download-only, and no customer service.

He drank from his second can of beer and eagerly clicked to open the reply.

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for your interest in The XList Company! We’re proud to offer the highest quality in erotic entertainment. Our “Danice” excerpt can be found at the following link:

A complicated URL was provided.

For the full feature DVD to be shipped to your door for only 19.95, click here:

And a credit card button had been embedded in the email.

Thank you and happy viewing.

The XList Company

Brendan shuddered when he thought of the XList “Company.” He also thought of the people who genuinely considered erotic entertainment to be a service. Some would say it helped married couples keep their sex lives spicy. Others would point to the lonely men who needed release – they might even go so far as to say it helped to prevent sex crimes. Brendan had heard it all.

He considered the videos featuring Rebecca, aka Danice. They were all professionally done. She was not in the “amateur” section of Red Light. If she had started out doing tricks for senators and congressmen in Albany, someone in the escort service had introduced her to pornographers. She had then done the “casting interview,” and went on to perform in a handful of videos, but only a couple of years later. Had it taken that long for her to break into the business? Or had she hesitated, after doing the “interview,” and had second thoughts? Was there some motive, other than a zeal for exhibitionism, or a need for money, that had made her return to the trade after a hiatus?

In a flash of clarity, Brendan realized there was no need to transcribe his descriptions of the three men in the videos. He wasn’t a computer-whiz by any means, but he knew how to take a screen shot. He cued up each video to the best image of the man involved, paused it, and instructed his computer to take a “snapshot” of the entire screen. He cropped the images to get a headshot of each man, even the interview video where the man’s head was mostly blotted out. Then he got back to looking into the names of the websites who proffered the videos to Red Light. There was only the one other which declared itself: Adult Royale dot com. He visited the site.

Again he looked for the Danice video by using the in-site search tool. He found the video and used the buttons to act as if he were ordering it. They were download only – no shipping. There was no address for Adult Royale productions listed anywhere on the site. No customer service.

He did a separate Google search for Adult Royale. There were a number of hits, including one for the Adult Video Awards, or “AVAs.” At last he found a home page different from the one which offered the downloads. This listed an address in Culver City, California, but no phone number or email.

Brendan sat back from the laptop and rubbed his eyes. Was he barking up the wrong tree? What if the videos had nothing to do with Rebecca’s death? They could just be a part of her life that she had tried to leave behind, by moving to the country and starting again. She had full custody of her daughter, but her parents had kept the girl most of the time, at least while she was setting up house.

He imagined her: She has shunned the life of the erotic entertainer, a road she embarked on due to some as yet unknown catalyst while she was in college. Perhaps this was to spite her parents, but maybe for some other reason. She turns away from the industry and gets married to Eddie Stemp. They attempt to carve out a life together.

Did she meet Stemp after she’d already left the business?

Brendan’s eyes widened and he sat up on the couch.

Or did she meet Stemp
while
she was in the business?

Maybe Stemp and Rebecca got out together; he from politics, she from escorting. But he found God and she didn’t. And the daughter was not his blood. Was she the illegitimate child of someone she’d had relations with in the videos?

Or one of the men she’d slept with during her time as a high-end call girl?

He’d said he was a bodyguard after the military. A bodyguard for whom? Who had bodyguards? Rock stars and politicians.

There were no rock stars in Albany.

Brendan started to get himself off of the couch. He wrenched his body towards the crutches, ignoring the various alarms of pain going off in his hip, groin, and chest. He fumbled around until he got a crutch beneath himself.

Dear God – was Leah the daughter of some government official?

Well, that wouldn’t make sense if certain assumptions were correct, and that the timeline reflected her history accurately. If she had left the escort service and then joined up with the video-production, Leah would have to be almost ten years old. The child was too young to fit that scenario.

Unless Brendan was thinking too rigidly, too linearly. Life didn’t always happen that way, did it? People thought they quit something, but then they were back at it. Look at him, eight years of sobriety, and he was right back where he’d left off. Life moved in cycles, not timelines.

As if to echo this thinking, he bent at a painful angle and picked up the Miller can and drained its contents. He leaned on his crutch until he nearly toppled over. He dropped the empty can on the carpet. So much for cleaning up.

Rebecca might have never completely left the escort life. She could have kept up with it all along. Maybe she had moved to the west coast for a while – they had found no residences listed for her there, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t just stayed with someone for a while – but maybe she had never quit the escort game. Then again, maybe she had never gone to the West Coast. So what if one of the video “production companies” had a Culver City address. People could make the videos and send them in from all over. It was the age of outsourcing.

The “Company,” so to speak, out there making movies worldwide and sending them back to California where, for all Brendan knew, one guy sat with a credit card machine and the servers running. Brendan didn’t know much about filmmaking, but he knew that the technology had evolved dramatically over the past decade. A person could make a high-definition video with a Canon camera and a microphone.

Halfway to the kitchen for another beer, Brendan had a sobering thought: all of this stuff running through his head was built on unsubstantiated material. What were the facts? That a woman who looked just like the deceased Rebecca Heilshorn was in half a dozen porn videos under the name Danice. And that an ex-husband-turned-religious-zealot had hinted that she had been involved in some sort of organized prostitution in Albany, or thereabouts. These connections were pure conjecture.

But the little girl, Leah, she wasn’t conjecture. Neither was the lack of evidence for her biological father. For all intents and purposes, he was just a ghost.

And the man who had nearly run him over with a truck wasn’t a fantasy, either.

Who was he? That was, of course, what the whole thing boiled down to. Whatever Rebecca had gotten herself caught up in was incidental. Important, but incidental. The killer was the objective.

Brendan found himself putting on his coat. He had no idea how he was going to drive with his leg and hip in so much discomfort, but if he was going to make it through this, there was no stopping the drinking now.

He did one last thing first. He went back and opened up his fake John Porter email. He bent and gritted his teeth against the pain and typed on the laptop.

Five minutes later, and he had sent two emails. One was to Colinas, with attachments of the head shots he had created for each of the men in the videos.

The second was to XList. He didn’t expect a response, but he’d sent it anyway. It read:

Dear XList,

What happens if one of your actresses gets pregnant?

* * *

Somehow, Brendan survived the trip to the liquor store, and then one to a Walgreens where he bought another case of beer, some milk and some bread. He drew a few looks, and was not surprised. Dressed in sweat pants, unlaced sneakers, and a beige trench-coat, his hair unkempt and undoubtedly reeking of booze, he was the picture of a man off the rails. He didn’t care, though. He smiled at the checkout boy, who reminded him of the kid with the acne who’d worked for Kettering and who’d been in Rebecca’s house not long before she was killed, picking up Kettering’s tools and supplies. Jason Pert.

And she had called him to ask about hooking up a diaper sprayer.

The checkout kid was giving Brendan a wary eye, and Brendan realized the transaction was complete. He hobbled out of the store hanging on to the case of beer, bag of milk, and bread, with one arm. His grunting struggle elicited more looks, a mix of concern and thinly veiled disapproval.

Back at his Camry in the parking lot, he loaded the groceries next to the case of vodka. He looked glibly at the case of grain alcohol for a moment, blinking. He wondered if it would kill him. Then he shut the trunk on it.

He tried not to think of his wife and daughter as he drove back home. He needed to just focus on the road. Still, their memories seemed to come over him at the worst times. Their faces had faded some, too, and this made him angry.

Before he got home he pulled off the road, limped to the trunk of the car and removed a beer from the case. He returned to the driver’s seat and then drank as he drove.

His jaw was clenched so hard it was starting to hurt. Blood sat beneath his tongue.

* * *

Colinas had responded to Brendan’s email with the headshots.

“Thanks for these. I will run them. I will say they were an anonymous tip. You know I can’t share the results with you. Sorry. – R.C.”

Brendan was smiling when he started to read the email, and frowning by the end. He responded to Colinas. As he typed, a runnel of beer trickled down his stubbled jaw.

“Hey Colinas, how does it feel to have my job?”

He hit send before he had a chance to re-think. Brendan wanted to hurt him, this guy that had come in and taken over his role in the investigation. It wasn’t Brendan’s fault that Kevin Heilshorn had gone on a shooting spree which cost him his life. And the man in the truck had tried to run him over because Brendan was close. And everyone knew it. Colinas knew it. The Sheriff knew it. Delaney did. Even Olivia, she knew it. But they were all holding out on him. They had turned their backs.

Brendan flipped to the Red Lights site again. He started going through the videos. He began to cry at some point, and got himself back into the vodka. He hadn’t eaten anything for so long he couldn’t remember.