The Venus Fix (31 page)

“We’re here, Mom. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Hope your wrist feels okay.” And then before I had a chance to wish her a good night, she clicked off.

I walked into the apartment and played my messages before I even took off my coat. I was expecting calls from Blythe and Nina. There was only one call and it was from Noah, asking me to call him back. I wanted to but I didn’t trust myself to talk to him yet.

With nothing to do but wait for Nina to call, I went to the corner of the den where I kept my sculpture. I desperately wanted to chip away at the stone, become lost in the rhythm of the mallet hitting the chisel. But you can’t sculpt with only one good hand.

I rotated the piece on its base.

The form escaping was rough and amateurish. That I had less talent than desire for this art form had bothered me once, but not anymore. It had been either accept my limitations or give up the one thing that helped me escape the voices in my head: my patients’ fantasies, fetishes, pains, perversions, deep losses and thwarted hopes.

I clicked on the television.

Finally, at twelve-twenty, Nina called.

She’d been at a concert at Lincoln Center and then out to a late supper. I listened to see if she sounded tired. I didn’t want to tax her, even though I desperately needed to talk to her. Relieved to hear the energy in her voice, I told her what had happened that afternoon with Amanda and about the CD she’d given me and what was on it.

“Simone?” Nina asked when I finished. “Do you know Simone’s last name?”

“Alexander,” I said. “I think that’s what she told me. Why?”

“Do you have the CD with you?”

“Yes. I didn’t want to leave it in the office.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Nina, it’s after twelve-thirty.”

“I have to see it for myself, Morgan. I have to be sure. You don’t know whose daughter she is, do you?”

I didn’t.

N
ina didn’t waste any time when she walked into my apartment. She didn’t stop to take off her coat or drop her bag in the foyer. She tracked snow in on her boots as she walked across the tile floor and into the den, where she sat down in front of my computer.

“Put it on, please,” she said.

I pressed the play button and she leaned forward, still in her coat, still holding her bag.

Simone came on the screen in her red butterfly mask and I heard a soft “oh” escape from my mentor’s lips. I turned away from the screen and looked at her.

Nina’s forehead was pulled tight with tension.

“What is it?”

Nina didn’t respond. She was riveted to the screen, watching the action on the computer. After the second segment she turned to me. “You can shut it off, Morgan. I don’t need to see any more.” Her voice cracked.

I knelt down so that I was on her level and put my good arm around her. We did not embrace often—kisses on the cheek, a hand on an arm, but Nina and I were not physical
women. Not touchers. I smelled her spicy perfume and felt her body tremble. “Simone Alexander is Stella Dobson’s daughter, Morgan. She died of an accidental overdose last June.”

“Based on what Amanda told me, I don’t think it was accidental. I think Simone killed herself.”

And then I remembered something that couldn’t be a coincidence at all. Something both Nina and I had known for weeks, but that hadn’t meant anything until now.

Stella Dobson was interviewing Blythe for a book she was working on. A book about women and pornography.

“Blythe—” I started.

Nina had already thought of it. “There has to be a connection. Blythe is in danger and so is Stella. We have to get to them.”

I didn’t want to question Nina’s assumption about Stella Dobson. She was a feminist heroine who still mattered in a postfeminist world.

“How do you know that Stella isn’t the one who—”

She shook her head. “You’re getting carried away. Stella’s a brilliant, driven woman who has devoted her whole life to helping women. What we have to do, Morgan, is
warn
her.”

W
hile I made coffee, trying to focus on the ratio of grounds to water, Nina called Stella. It was, by then, almost two in the morning and Stella wasn’t answering the phone. That wasn’t a surprise. Many people let their machines pick up in the middle of the night. My own phone had rung twice since ten-forty-five that night, and while I’d checked the caller ID both times—Noah—I hadn’t answered either call.

Nina left a message, asking her old friend to please call whenever she got the message. She left her cell number, even though she told me when she got off the phone that Stella already had it.

I poured the coffee. “We need to talk to the police,” I said.

“We can’t. You can’t. You know you can’t.”

I sighed. When it came to the police, Nina took the fine line and then doubled and tripled it, so that it wasn’t that fine at all, but was thick and much harder to cross. We’d been through this before.

I didn’t want to have an old argument with her again. Not that night. Not at two in the morning. “Nina, three women have died. A fourth almost died. How can you justify my keeping silent?”

She waved me off. “Amanda is your patient. You can’t call Noah.”

“We have to do something.”

“As long as you leave Amanda—and the CD—out of it.”

“If I don’t give them the CD, they won’t have anything to go on.” My throat hurt, my nose was running. It was late and I was exhausted. But I couldn’t give up. There had to be some way to do the right thing without crossing that damn line. “What if we can get Stella to go to the police and tell them about what Amanda and her daughter did?”

“That we can do. When we see her, when we tell her what’s happening, we’ll advise her to call the police. To tell them about the CD, about Simone, about the Web-cam girls Simone and Amanda copied. All right? Will that work? Isn’t that better?”

It was a compromise. One that I thought I could live with.

Friday
The final day

N
oah Jordain had slept like crap. He’d first called Morgan at ten-forty-five and when she didn’t pick up he’d had a patrol car in her neighborhood check with her doorman to make sure she was upstairs and safe. When they reported back that the doorman had buzzed her and she was okay, he knew what the unanswered call meant. As a very conscientious therapist, she always checked her messages. So that meant she was avoiding him. But why?

That question had kept him awake long into the night. He really was tired of her disappearing on him. Of how her work kept getting in their way. Fine, if she didn’t trust him, he’d accept that. He’d walk away from her. He could take the hint.

A half hour after waking up, he was at the gym, where he worked out for as long as he could stand it, then he took a subway uptown. It was three blocks from the train stop to the station house. He trudged through the snow, kicking at it.

Anyone watching would have thought that he was, like millions of other New Yorkers, sick of the relentless storms, tired of wearing boots and climbing over snowdrifts. But that wasn’t it. He was annoyed that Morgan was avoiding his calls,
and, beyond the personal disappointment he felt, the way she was acting reinforced his own conviction that Alan Leightman was lying about being the killer.

Damn. What did Morgan know about her patient that she wasn’t telling him? Damn her ethics. He needed the information she had.

At the office, Jordain listened to his messages and searched his e-mail at the same time. There were all kinds of reasons a woman might not answer her phone or return his calls. But he knew Morgan, and there was only one reason. She was avoiding him because she had found out something she wasn’t at liberty to tell him, and she was not going to give herself the chance to slip.

At that moment he was sure that he never wanted to see her again.

He picked up the yellow pad with his notes on the Webcam killings and read through them all again. There had to be something there. Something he’d missed. One tiny piece of information that would make a difference.

All the poisons—the one used in the lubricant, the one applied to the Band-Aids and the one mixed into the massage oil—were too easily obtained to be traceable. The Atropine in the lubricant was in eyedrops available in every hospital and by prescription, used by millions of patients. The nicotine on the bandages could have been brewed from a few ordinary cigarettes, or from plants. And the cyanide in the massage oil was used by dozens of professionals, including jewelers and gardeners. The tampered products themselves were all major drugstore brands.

There was nothing there.

All of the items used by the Web-cam girls had been found in their apartments, but the police hadn’t been able to find any boxes or envelopes, which might have yielded important information.
They must have gotten the gifts weeks or days before and thrown it all out.

Tania, the only one of the girls who’d survived, didn’t know anything about the oil ZaZa had used. Yes, a fan had sent it as a gift, but she hadn’t asked any specifics. It wasn’t the first time that ZaZa had been sent gifts. Many of the girls had post office boxes—in fact, Global Communications recommended it. Clients liked to send presents and photos. It was good business to encourage them. Besides, it wasn’t unheard of for women to receive expensive jewelry from the men who’d fallen in lust with them online.

Butler stood in his doorway. “Hey, boss, you busy?”

“What’s up?”

“I just got a call. The computer in Leightman’s office at NYU is clean. No e-mail to any of the victims’ e-mail addresses.”

“What the hell? I thought Fisher said—”

She continued: “But we have found the computer the email came from. It’s in the NYU library.”

“So Leightman used the computer in the library?”

“Either that or someone who found out his password was in the library using his e-mail address.”

D
earest,

Happy birthday.

Ironic isn’t it? To even use the word
happy?
But truly, soon we will be happy because we’ll be together and then we’ll know some form of happiness, or if not that, then relief—maybe peace, at least peace.

Soon all just punishments will have been meted out and everyone will have been held accountable for the damage that they have done. There isn’t anything left that matters to me but this: that you, my sweetest heart, have been avenged.

I can close my eyes and I can see us, not at the end, not when I lost you, but before that.

There was one day at the beach, four, maybe five summers ago. It was hot and you were lying in the sun, soaking it up, and I was swimming, and when I got out of the water I stood over you and flicked drops of cold water on your legs and your stomach and your arms, and you laughed.

In my mind, in this memory, you are squinting in the
bright sunlight, and you put your hand up to shield your eyes, and the drops of seawater flying through the air catch the light and shine like broken crystals as they fall onto your skin. Liquid light like your laugh.

I knelt down beside you and leaned over and kissed you, and you laughed again, telling me that my hair was tickling you, but you raised your arms and wrapped them around me, anyway.

It has been my punishment that I cannot remember every time I held you or you reached for me and there must have been thousands. How could I forget any of them? And damn to hell the people who made it so I would have to try to remember them at all. Just damn them to hell.

The bitch witches who thrust and wink and whisper and suck the men deeper, deeper, deeper. They fly through the black ether and weave through the Web, weaving their own web, black night twisted women. I’m helping them get to hell this way. I tried other ways for years and I didn’t get anywhere, but then I had something to lose. You. Now that you are lost to me, it doesn’t matter anymore.

No, it matters. The truth is it will be a relief to finish and to stop missing you. To give in to the hole in my chest that hurts as badly as if it had been made with a scalpel instead of your absence. Sliced right through, cut open, dripping everything that I tried to do, every bit of good I tried to accomplish, every change I tried to expedite. All discredited, all a giant cosmic joke.

You wrote that it wasn’t you I loved, but some idea of you. How could you ever think that? I would kill to show how much I loved you.

Now I have to shower and dress and then pick up your birthday cake, the one you loved the best. A yellow cake
with strawberries and whipped cream. Not with one candle for each year, but with only one candle for the year that I have lived without you.

This I do for you.

N
ina came into my office after both of our ten o’clock patients had left.

“Have you heard from Blythe?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No.” I shrugged. “I’m not going to assume that means anything. She’s twenty-five years old. There are a million reasons that she might not have checked her machine since last night. But I called her again this morning and left a new message.”

“I heard from Stella. She just called. She’d be happy to see me. Well, us. But I didn’t mention you over the phone. I’m not sure how to handle that.”

“When?”

“One-thirty.”

“Where?”

“Eighth Avenue. Forty-fourth Street.”

“That’s near Dulcie’s theater.”

Nina nodded. “Stella’s part owner of a building there. I guess it’s been renovated. That’s what she always said they were going to do with it. Tear it down and turn it into offices.”

“I’
m so glad you came.”