The Venus Fix Read online

  “Blythe, it’s not going to help to punish yourself.”

  “Punish?”

  I nodded at her hands. She looked down. “I didn’t even know I was doing that.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I feel so helpless. I’ll be fine and then something will happen, just out of the blue, and I’ll feel like I’m in its grip all over again. I’ll want to go back online.”

  “What happened this time?”

  “A really well-known feminist e-mailed me. Someone I’ve looked up to my whole life. She’s writing a book about women who become sex workers in order to put themselves through school—how they cope with it, what it does to their social lives, how it changes or doesn’t affect their self-esteem. She wants to interview me for the book.”

  “How did she find you? I thought you weren’t doing Webcam performances anymore.”

  “I haven’t for five, six months. Apparently she saw me back then. My profile said I was a student. She’d kept my e-mail address, she said. The site gave out addresses that were forwarded to our personal e-mail. Anyway, she gave me her phone number and asked me to call.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  Blythe clasped her hands together again, this time even more tightly. “I’m not sure. There are all kinds of reasons I want to do it. And all sorts of reasons I don’t. Just…just talking about talking about it…going back into that mind-set just a little while…” She shook her head and her blond curls fell in her face. She didn’t push them away. Why not? Her hair was clearly in her eyes. It should have bothered her.

  “Blythe, when you were online, how did it feel to know that all those men were looking at you?”

  “I wore a mask.” She clasped and then unclasped her hands again.

  “A mask? Why? Didn’t you want them to see you?”

  She lowered her head.

  “Blythe?”

  “I didn’t want to be recognized. There probably wasn’t much chance of that, but sometimes there are coincidences. Can you imagine if one of my professors…or another student—” She broke off and sat there looking down at her hands.

  Blythe reminded me of the pre-Raphaelite painting on the cover of a book I had read about adolescent girls. The painter depicted Hamlet’s poor drowned Ophelia in a river, her hands by her sides, her hair floating around her shoulders; the only color in her pale face was her still-red lips.

  “Do you still have the mask?”

  She nodded.

  “Have you worn it since you stopped going online?”

  “Not until last night. I took it out after I spoke to her. Took it out and put it on and looked in the mirror for a long time and tried to see myself the way all those men must have seen me. After a few seconds, it was like I was looking at a stranger. As if I’d separated from myself.”

  She curled her fingers into tight fists and frowned.

  “What are you thinking? You look upset.”

  Anger twisted her mouth.

  “What is it?”

  “What’s wrong with how I look?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You said I look upset. What does that mean? How does my face look?” Blythe’s anger excited me. We were getting somewhere.

  “You seem to be upset about something. I can see it on your face.” I repeated the words that I thought had sparked her reaction.

  She shook her head. “What’s wrong with your face? What’s wrong with your eyes? Why do you look different?” She was saying it all in a fake singsong voice and was clearly in distress.

  “Blythe, what are you thinking about?”

  Another moment of silence. She bit her bottom lip, held it between her teeth for a moment, then finally took a breath and made her confession. “When I was born, I had cataracts on my eyes. Did I tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “It’s pretty rare, but it happens. I had three surgeries before I was ten years old. I had to wear glasses. Normally glasses aren’t the worst thing. A few other kids had glasses. But regular ones. Mine were the thickest, most horrible glasses you ever saw. But that wasn’t all. It was my eyes. They looked weird.” She took a long pause. “It was awful. You know how kids are. If there had been another girl with a worse affliction, she would have been the one they picked on. But it was a small class and I was the only one with any kind of physical deformity. So I became the outcast. The one who was never invited to the popular girls’ parties. Always the last one picked for teams.” Her eyes teared up.

  I’d never seen her cry before and was surprised how much younger she suddenly seemed. Something inside of me lurched.

  “When I was fourteen I got corrective contacts,” Blythe continued. “You need to really see my eyes. To understand.”

  I wasn’t expecting what happened next. I thought she was going to describe it to me, but instead she lowered her head and plucked the contact lens out of her right eye.

  Then she looked up at me.

  Her left eye, the one with the lens still covering it, was green, intense and lovely, but the iris of her right eye was twice as large as normal and the black wasn’t a pure circle but seeped into the outer ring of green, spoiling it. She focused on me but her eye didn’t appear to be seeing me at all. I couldn’t find her, couldn’t connect to her.

  Yes, it was noticeable. I wouldn’t have gone so far as to describe it as a deformity, but to a young girl it must have seemed like one.

  Blythe didn’t let me look at her naked eye for long. She popped the painted lens back as if it was painful to let me see her. It hid the flaw.

  “Everything changed once I got these corrective lenses. For the first time, when I looked in the mirror I saw someone I recognized, and she was suddenly pretty, Dr. Snow. Boys noticed me. No one teased me anymore. One day I was a freak, the next I was as normal as everyone else.”

  She settled back on the couch. “After all those years of being ashamed of how I looked, I can’t even describe what it was like not to have anyone stare at me anymore.”

  “Is there a connection between that and you going online? Inviting men to look at you?”

  “Isn’t that obvious?”

  “Yes, but I need you to articulate it.”

  “My exhibitionism is a fuck-you to everyone who ever looked at me crooked. It was proof to me that I wasn’t a freak anymore. Each time I went online and stood there in front of my computer and stared into the camera as if it was a lover’s eyes, I was testing reality, saying to myself, it’s true, I’m good enough to look at.”

  She used both hands to pull her hair up off her neck, twist it up, and then let go of it again.

  “But you wore a mask.”

  “It’s just like that.” Blythe pointed to the glass box that sat on my bookshelf. Inside was an iridescent blue butterfly, seemingly suspended in midair—one of the many butterfly artifacts I had. I’d been collecting them for years. Even the small terrace off my office was planted with bushes and flowers to attract butterflies in the summer.

  “My butterfly comes from Venice and is made of silk with a string that ties around the back.” She put her hands up to her face, her fingers splayed so that her eyes peeked through. “It comes down to my mouth. There are two holes in the wings. The only thing you can see of me, through the mask, is my eyes.”

  Twelve

  Detective Perez walked into the office he shared with Noah Jordain to find his partner just starting to make a fresh pot of what everyone else in the department referred to as “Jordain’s mud,” but which Perez had come to enjoy.

  The office was standard fare, badly in need of a new coat of paint and a lot of new furniture, but the window looked out onto the street rather than a back alley or a brick wall like the rest of them.

  “You are not going to believe this,” Perez said as he sat down, put a wrinkled piece of paper on his desk and tried to smooth it out.

  “Try me, anyway,” Jordain said as he added a scoop of chicory to the freshly ground coffee.

&n
bsp; “Debra Kamel was poisoned,” Perez stated matter-of-factly.

  “Okay.” The second syllable was elongated by his southern accent. “We thought that was a possibility. What’s the surprise? The kind of poison? Does Gordon think it was self-administered?”

  “The poison is called atropine,” Perez read. “It’s one of a family of anticholinergic drugs—often referred to as the belladonna alkaloids…easily absorbed from mucous membranes, skin, intestinal tract or lungs.” He looked up. “But in this case we’re talking the membranes. These drugs can be toxic, Gordon said, even in an otherwise safe dose. For instance, an individual who is having his eyes dilated at the ophthalmologist’s could end up in the cardiac unit. It’s happened.”

  “Eyes dilated? You’ve lost me. What does this have to do with her eyes?”

  “It doesn’t, I’m just giving you some background. That’s one of the basic uses of atropine. It also causes heart attacks. Oh, and get this—belladonna was historically used as a sexual stimulant.”

  “You threw that in for what, a little irony?”

  “You might think so, but I was thinking that if someone else did this to her maybe it was someone who had a bad sense of humor and used these alkaloids on her specifically because they’ve been known as stimulants going way back in time.”

  “Okay. So is that what happened to her? The toxic reaction was cardiac arrest?”

  “You know that’s cooked, don’t you?” Perez nodded at the coffee.

  “Forgot about it, I was so engrossed by your story.” Jordain turned, poured out two cups and handed one to his partner.

  Perez took a sip, then continued.

  “Basically what happened probably started with symptoms like dry mouth, high fever…” He consulted the sheet of paper again. “Blurred vision, dilated pupils, vasodilation, rapid heartbeat, excitement, dizziness, delirium, confusion, hallucination, then death resulting from circulatory and respiratory failure.”

  “How long?”

  Perez read on. “Onset of action is rapid from fifteen minutes to two hours, with death in one hour to one day, depending on lots of factors—route of exposure, dose, sensitivity, health.”

  “If we go by what time the first call was logged in Sarasota, Florida, to what time Gordon thinks she died, we’re looking at between two-and-a-half and three hours max from onset. So what dosage are we talking about?”

  “The fatal dose of atropine for that time period is—” Perez scanned the sheet of paper “—fifteen milligrams, which is five drops of concentrated extract.”

  Jordain was surprised to find his cup of coffee was already empty. He got up and refilled it. “And I suppose this stuff is shockingly easy to come by?”

  “You aren’t going to believe how easy.”

  “Try me.”

  “It’s used in dozens of medicines. Anti-Parkinson drugs, gastrointestinal antispasmodics, urinary tract antispasmodics, ophthalmology, colic, motion sickness, dry secretions, pre- and post-op. It treats bradycardia and is the antidote to organophosphate insecticides. Atropine is also the antidote for cholinergic nerve gases. One interesting note is that, in the Gulf War, much more toxicity was reported from inappropriate use of the atropine syringes found in soldiers’ emergency kits than from actual nerve-gas attack.” He paused, looked up from the piece of paper and shook his head. “But get this. The easiest way to get the damn stuff is from prescription eyedrops. Anyone working in any hospital can grab a handful of vials and slip them into a pocket or purse. No one would notice them missing. A typical stock bin holds about two hundred and fifty vials, and it’s not even considered dangerous. It treats inflammation and is a basic in any eye exam.”

  Jordain started to ask his next question when the phone rang. He let it go until the third ring, then grabbed it, said his name, listened, said a brief yes, and then hung up. “Follow-up on the Bullard case. Nothing that can’t wait. I was about to ask if there are other places as easy to get it as a hospital.”

  “Yup.” He checked the sheet. “Army supply units would have it. Any doctor might prescribe it. The prescription eye drops would most likely go by the brand name Homatropine or Isopto Atropine, which of course you could get from an online pharmaceutical site. Know what else? You can buy the stuff from any shop or Web site selling Wiccan supplies. They use it to introduce hallucinations. Butler checked and found three atropine injectors for sale at eBay.”

  “Paper trail,” Jordain muttered.

  “There’s an even easier way to get it. You can grow it yourself. Or take a field trip with a little pocket knife to one of the dozens of medical gardens attached to so many museums and schools. Quite a few have a poison garden and—”

  “Damn it, Perez, I got it. You can get the stuff anywhere and everywhere. I can get the stuff. Butler can get it. It’s a no-brainer. It’s probably even growing in Central Park.”

  “Probably.”

  “Great, so, we know the what. Do we know anything about the how? Do you know the details?”

  “That’s the part you aren’t going to believe.”

  Jordain’s expression went from serious to impatient, tinged with slight annoyance.

  “The poison entered her system through mucous membranes. Specifically through the membranes in her vaginal wall.” He paused.

  Jordain made a hurry-up motion with this hand.

  “The atropine was mixed into the lubricant she slathered on her dildo.”

  Thirteen

  I opened the door to the English lab at five twenty-five to find three members of the group sitting there in the shadows. Hugh was scrolling through a PDA. Barry seemed to be sleeping with his head on his arms, which were folded on the desktop. Amanda also had her eyes closed, but she had headphones on and from the sway of her shoulders she was clearly engrossed in the music she was listening to.

  The original group consisted of eight boys who ranged in age from fifteen to eighteen. They’d been meeting with me late every Tuesday afternoon since early November after the Park East School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Six weeks later, the principal had recommended four girls join the group. Each of them, with the exception of Amanda, had been sexually involved either with one of the boys in the group or with one of their friends. The three of them were adapting well. They were even helping the boys to open up a little.

  But Amanda sat in each session not participating—fidgeting, anxious, waiting for something, ready to jump up and bolt at any second. Since she was the only teenager who had asked to join the group her actions and silence worried me.

  I switched on the light and walked into the classroom.

  Hugh looked up, Barry continued sleeping. Amanda started and opened her eyes.

  “You might want to wake Barry up,” I said to Hugh as I took off my coat. “Then the three of you can help me put the chairs in a circle.”

  Amanda looked down at her finger. There was a small, fresh cut on her left thumb, an angry half moon of dark, dried blood. She was touching it lightly with the forefinger of her right hand. The shape was familiar to me—it was the shape a chisel made when it slipped on the wood or marble you were sculpting.

  “You shouldn’t move chairs with that. Does it hurt?” I asked her.

  “It did.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “In art class.”

  It was the most she’d said in three weeks.

  “Sculpture?”

  She seemed slightly surprised.

  “Do you like art class?” I asked.

  She shrugged, the kind of shrug that meant yes, not no.

  “I’d like to see your work. I’m something of an amateur sculptor.”

  “I don’t show my stuff to people. Ever.”

  Too much emotion in the sentence, but I was thrilled to have heard it. “Sometimes I do. Because if I keep it secret, it gets too important.”

  She was staring at me.

  While the boys formed the circle, the rest of the group straggled in. Timothy, who was one of
the brightest but also most disturbed kids, walked in talking on his cell phone. When he saw me, he ended the call.

  Amanda’s eyes followed him across the room. She seemed to settle down a little now that he was here. When he glanced over and saw her, he gave her an almost imperceptible smile. They had a bond, but what kind of bond I didn’t yet understand.

  I asked Timothy to help with the last few chairs, and he grudgingly threw his coat and knapsack on the floor and went to work. Jeremy came in with Charlie. Both clean-cut and well groomed, they always arrived and left together. More than anyone else, they participated in these sessions, and I kept hoping they’d influence the rest of the kids, who were there in body only.

  A few seconds later Jodi arrived, a Goth with a long black coat that swept up the dirt on the floor. Every week she came in elaborate clothes and makeup. Ellen and Merry came in right behind her. Jodi’s opposites, these two smiled, were poised and were always dressed in clothes that would have seemed ridiculously expensive on grown women.

  Altogether they were a cross-section: a Goth, a brain, two preppies, a retro hippie, an art student, a musician, two fashionistas. But they did share an interest that was seriously affecting their lives: the boys were severely addicted to Internet porn, and fearless when it came to ignoring the rules against going to X-rated sites while in school. None of them had been caught in the act, but there had been enough evidence of their travels to put them in jeopardy. Therapy with me was the only thing keeping them from expulsion.

  The girls had been affected by the boys’ addiction. Their self-esteem had been brutalized, and they had been flagrantly acting out, hoping to get the boys to pay more attention to them. Their parents and teachers were worried.

  And then there was Amanda.

  We started that Tuesday night only five minutes late, which was better than usual. Right away it was clear that everyone was jittery, especially Timothy, who literally couldn’t sit still. Hugh kept casting glances at him as if making sure he was all right. Amanda kept looking over at him, too, but as if she knew he wasn’t okay. Jeremy was tapping his foot on the floor in a precise rhythm and Charlie was biting his nails.