The Delilah Complex (3 page)

T
he usual two-inch stack of mail was waiting for her when Betsy Young sat down at her desk in the newsroom at the
New York Times
. She threw her worn brown suede jacket on the back of her chair, popped the top on her can of diet soda, took a long drink and started going through the letters.

She was tall, and her wiry body fit her high-energy personality, but at forty-six she was fighting the years. Her streaked hair was cropped to hang in a flattering curl, hiding her slackening jaw line, and her blue-tinted glasses concealed some of the tired lines around her eyes. There were younger people in the newsroom, but there were also reporters and editors older than she was. These were mostly men.

She left off perusing the mail to watch a breaking news report on the TV monitor next to her desk. A newscaster announced the jury had returned a verdict in a murder case that had been in the headlines for weeks.

“The jury has come back with a vote of guilty for Mary Woods, who, for the last six weeks, has been on trial for the murder of her brother, Daniel Woods. Women are less likely to be convicted of murder…”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Betsy responded, to no one in particular.

Robby, a twenty-something crime reporter new to the
Times
from Florida, whose desk was next to Betsy’s, looked over at her. She caught his eye and they laughed. He was still looking at her ten seconds later when she slit open the large manila envelope that had been next in the pile of mail. She was used to young reporters watching her, knew they admired her Pulitzers and wanted to soak up whatever they could by observing her. She thought about telling them that much of it wasn’t talent but the sheer luck of having been in the right place at the right time, except she didn’t really believe that. If luck was involved, it was because she made her own.

She didn’t know what it was about her reaction to what she pulled out of the envelope that made him get up out of his chair, walk to her desk and peer over her shoulder. Normally she’d be observant enough to know if a man was sniffing her perfume.

But this time, she didn’t. The eight-by-ten-inch glossy made her forget everything.

The corpse was lying on a simple metal gurney, his skin so white it was almost pale green. A halo effect of shimmering light forced her attention to the man’s black pubic hair and shrunken penis.

Your eyes couldn’t help being drawn there, she thought. And not just because of the lighting. The shot had been designed to emphasize the man’s genitals. You were viewing the cadaver from between his legs, staring up past his crotch so that the perspective was skewed. The man’s head was diminished. His sexual organs exaggerated.

“Oh, God,” Robby whispered.

“There is a famous painting of Christ that shows him
from exactly this perspective—his feet to the viewer, the rest of him foreshortened. It was painted by Mantegna.” Betsy held the photograph at arm’s length and squinted at it.

Gingerly, she laid the photo on her desk and picked up the next one.

This photograph had been taken from a more traditional angle, from overhead, looking straight down. The man’s penis was still dead center so her eye went there first, but everything else in this picture was in proportion and she could see the man’s drawn face.

He appeared to be about thirty-five and in excellent physical condition. His naked form showed muscle and sinew but no fat. His hands were crossed on his bare chest, his eyes were closed. He might have been asleep if not for the pallor and pose.

The third shot focused on the soles of the cadaver’s feet, each with the number 1 handwritten in bright red marker.

“I’ve seen awful things but these are just…” Robby shook his head. Although he was a prolific writer he couldn’t find the right words for how these photographs shocked him.

“I know. There’s something about the finality and pathos of a corpse—even in a flat photograph—that you don’t ever get used to.”

Robby looked down at the envelope the photos had come in. Betsy saw him making sure it was addressed to her, and she smiled. She knew if it hadn’t been, he thought he’d have some shot at the story.

But it had been.

“The best you can hope for is that this will be so big that I’ll need some help,” Betsy told him. “Maybe there will be sidebars—”

“Except you’re so tireless, you’ll probably do them all yourself,” he said sadly.

Behind her back, they called her “the pug,” not because she was unattractive but because she was tenacious. In her dozen years at the
Times
, she’d won two Pulitzers, even if the last one had been more than five years ago.

“Do you think this guy looks familiar?” Betsy finally asked.

Robby stared at the man’s face. “Yes. But not enough to place him.”

Betsy examined the photo with a magnifying glass.

“So, are you going to go to the police?” Robby asked.

“Of course…but not this very minute.”

“Won’t you be an accessory if you got this and they didn’t—”

“Robby, I said I was going to go to the police. But first I am going to do some reporting. Just enough to get a handle on this. Just enough so that no one can take it away from me.”

They both looked back at the photographs on her desk. In death, the man’s features were slack, but his nose was prominent and the mustache that graced his upper lip was still glossy and lush.

“He really does look familiar,” Betsy mused. And then she snapped her fingers. “Got it,” she said, her voice eerily gleeful. “Philip Maur. Chief operating officer of Grimly and Maur. The Wall Street firm. He’s been missing for a week. We ran his picture last Tuesday.”

She picked up the empty envelope, examined the label, then turned it over and investigated the seal. Suddenly, she stuck her hand back inside.

Betsy pulled out an ordinary household sandwich bag containing a two-inch-long, dark substance.

Two seconds went by. Three.

She let out a short breath and dropped the bag on her desk.

“Oh, my God, it’s his hair, isn’t it?” Robby asked in horror.

Betsy nodded.

D
etective Noah Jordain sat at the counter in a Japanese restaurant with his partner, Mark Perez. Both had plates of sushi in front of them. Jordain dipped a piece of
uni
into the soy sauce and then smeared it with wasabi.

“How can you eat so much of that without burning your sinuses?”

“You are a wimp,” Jordain said in his slow New Orleans drawl, and Perez laughed. Since they’d been working together, Jordain had introduced his partner to all kinds of exotic food.

Jordain loved to cook and to explore New York’s endless supply of ethnic cuisines. A Renaissance man, he not only cooked, but played piano, wrote jazz, collected antiques and managed not to get ribbed for any of it by a single cop in the department.

There was just one reason.

In police work, God was in the details.

They all knew it.

Jordain lived it.

And they respected him for it.

Jordain’s cell phone rang. Pulling it out, he looked at
it as if it were an insect, put it down next to his green tea, speared another piece of sushi, dipped and smeared it, popped it in his mouth and chewed. The phone rang a second time.

Perez, who was as reactive as Jordain was laid-back, glared at his partner. In the two years they’d been together, Perez hadn’t gained any of Jordain’s patience.

“You want me to get that?”

Jordain swallowed, smiled, shook his head and slowly reached for the cell, answering it on the fourth ring.

As he listened, he ran his hand through his thick silvery hair. And then he did it twice again. Perez noticed and became alert. He’d learned to tell how bad the news was by how many times Jordain brushed the wavy hair off his forehead.

“Okay, give me a number,” Jordain said as he reached for his notebook. He wrote the number down and read it back. Jordain was dyslexic. It hardly affected him now that he was an adult, but he was bad at retaining numbers in his head, and sometimes he reversed them when he wrote them down. Reading them back alleviated that problem.

The learning disability had been embarrassing in grade school, made reading tougher for him than for most kids, and kept him from excelling at spelling bees, but otherwise he hardly ever thought about it. However, it had made him listen harder and be more observant. He noticed sights and heard nuances other people missed. Even other detectives missed. Even the best ones.

“Well, this is one sorry mess,” Jordain said as he snapped the phone shut.

“What?”

“Looks like a missing-persons case just erupted into a murder investigation, with a dash of fetish thrown in for good measure.”

“Who called it in?”

“That might just be the best part.”

Jordain took the last piece of sushi from his plate, dipped it in the soy sauce, spread the wasabi on it, looked at it and finally put it back down in the middle of his plate. He laid the chopsticks beside the fish. “Betsy Young.”

“The crime reporter at the
Times?
”

“We know and love any other Betsy Young?”

“What does she have?”

“Death-scene photos of the victim. Came in her mail this morning.”

“And the fetish?”

“Little twist that’s a new one for me. The photos came with a lock of the victim’s hair. And there’s one other thing.” Jordain took a long drink of his green tea, which by now was cold.

“Which was?”

“The body has the number 1 written on the soles of his feet.”

“Number 1?”

Jordain nodded. “Yeah, and you know what I’m worried about?”

“You bet. If there’s a number 1, there’s bound to be a number 2.”

“Y
ou can ask her anything you want, but this is our story,” Harry Hastings said. “I want that to be clear. We want to keep our lead and ensure exclusivity. So in exchange for cooperating with you, we want first dibs on anything you find.” He pulled a cigarette from the crumpled pack. Even though the
Times
was a smoke-free workplace, sometimes he broke the rules. No one had ever complained. Especially not when they were in his office.

“Is that clear?” he asked the two detectives.

Jordain eyed the stocky man. Even though they were ostensibly on the same side, the
Times
editor was on the offensive. Jordain wouldn’t respond. He’d leave that to Perez. They were in good-cop/bad-cop mode.

“Crystal,” Perez said with a little more attitude than he felt.

The two detectives were seated at the round table in the middle of the managing editor’s office. Opposite them, Betsy Young drank from a can of diet soda. So far she hadn’t said a word. Her boss was done laying out the ground rules, which neither detective had any intention of adhering to.

“Why you?” Jordain asked Betsy. He’d worked with her twice before, and while he never expected a reporter to make his job easier, Betsy had been so desperate to get her story that she’d come close to compromising both cases.

“I don’t know what you mean, Detective,” she said. Although she was technically answering Jordain, she was looking at Perez.

Jordain knew exactly what the reporter was doing but ignored it. He didn’t care what kind of game she was going to play. He and Perez would handle her, but inwardly he sighed—why couldn’t it ever be easy?

“Why, of all the reporters at the
Times…
why, of all the reporters in the city at any paper, do you think you are the one whose name was on that envelope?” Perez asked, taking over.

She smiled wryly. “Why not me? I’ve covered some of the most important crime stories in the city.”

Jordain cut in. “Do you know, or have you ever known, Philip Maur? Had any dealing with his firm? Anyone at his firm? Did you write the story about him being missing?”

He was watching her eyes, but again she was avoiding his and looking instead at the photograph. Behind his desk, Hastings bristled but didn’t say whatever he was thinking. Jordain knew that the managing editor had been around long enough to know that, while not pleasant, this line of questioning was par for the course. The police had to find out if the reporter was in any way involved.

“Betsy, please. The more you resist the less time you get to work on the story. Do you have any connection to Maur?”

“No,” she said curtly.

After a half-dozen more questions that led nowhere, Jordain looked at Hastings. “We’re going to need to see the story before you run it.”

“We’re not going to run our stories by you, Detective.”

“I think that you’re going to have to. We need to keep some details out of the paper. Leverage, you understand. Why don’t you just make this easy? We have a murder to solve, Hastings. You don’t really want to hinder our investigation, do you?”

Hastings weighed this. He hated to give in but was also anxious to get Betsy back to work. She had a story to file. “Why don’t we decide here and now what you want us to keep out of the story.”

Betsy was gripping a pencil so tightly that her knuckles were white. “I really don’t like the idea of withholding any part of this story, Harry.”

“Neither do I. Let’s hear them out, though. Detective, what do you want us to keep out of the story?”

Jordain and Perez examined the photographs.

“You can run this one,” Jordain pushed the shot of the cadaver’s foot forward. “But not these.”

His gaze moved to the plastic bag with the hair clippings.

“And let’s keep out any mention of the hair—” Perez started.

“No.” It was out of Betsy’s mouth before the detective had even finished his sentence. “No. The photos make sense—besides, we can’t run the nude shots. But the hair is too important. Why did the killer send the cuttings? What does it mean? Is it symbolic of something? It’s disturbing and perverse.”

Jordain stood up. Perez followed his lead, and they gathered up all the materials, putting each item into an evidence bag. When the two of them were done, Jordain directed his comments to Hastings.

“I don’t want this to be a battle. I’m asking you not to force me to throw the department’s weight around.”

Hastings lit a cigarette, inhaled and blew out the smoke. “We don’t want that, either, Detective.”

“Fine. I’m glad to hear it. So I won’t be reading anything in the paper about this lock of hair?”

“No. You won’t. And, in exchange, we expect to hear any information that you have before any other papers.”

Jordain frowned at him. He wasn’t going to bargain. And he wasn’t going to give in. He didn’t have to offer the paper anything and he was tired of the adversarial attitude. He’d encountered it in New Orleans and now here. “I am not going to make promises. We’ll do our best to keep you informed. That’s as far as I’ll go. There are fingerprints all over the photos.” He looked at Betsy. “Are your fingerprints on file?”

She nodded and tried to stare him down. It didn’t work.

He and Perez were done. They started for the door, but Perez stopped and looked back at Hastings. “Because of the number 1 on the victim’s feet, there’s a strong possibility there is going to be a second victim. We’re going to send someone over to talk to your mail room guys about how to sort through the mail for the next week or so. And you, too, Betsy.”

Jordain and Perez walked out of the newsroom without talking. They were quiet on the elevator. You never know who’s listening. You keep silent until you are alone, out of earshot. Especially when you’re in the offices of the
New York Times
.

“Let’s do a background check on Ms. Young,” Jordain said once they were back on the street. “This might be nothing, but I want to make sure it’s nothing.”

Perez agreed. “Assuming it is, why would someone want the newspaper to have this before the police?”

“To make sure it’s in the papers in all its glory. To prevent
us from keeping any of it out of the public eye. To take control. To keep control. Take your pick.”

“What’s your pick?” Perez asked.

“All of the above,” Jordain said.