The Venus Fix Read online

  When he came, exploding into his own hand, the clip was still running. He hit the stop button quickly. He hadn’t even gotten through sixty seconds of it.

  Wednesday

  Sixteen days remaining

  Sixteen

  Bob was early for his second appointment of the week, but Allison kept him waiting as per my instructions. When she finally let him in, he just stood glaring at me.

  “It’s worse. Everything is worse,” he barked.

  “I think you should sit down.”

  “What difference does it make? Sitting? Lying? It won’t change anything. My wife doesn’t talk to me anymore, and when I’m out, she’s in my office snooping around. I found papers on my desk out of order, a framed photograph broken on the floor.”

  “What was it a photograph of?”

  He looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues. “Of her. On some trip.”

  “What trip?”

  He thought for a moment. Frowned. “Our honeymoon.”

  I nodded.

  “Have you talked to her about being in your office?”

  “I’ve tried. But she just shakes her head and leaves whatever room we’re in.”

  He walked to the French doors that led to my tiny balcony and stood there with his back to me. Beyond him, the solid gray sky was unrelenting. Bob opened one of the doors and a fresh blast of freezing air, mixed with some snow, flew in.

  “Bob, can you close the door?” I got up, ready to rush over, ready for anything, but Bob shut it himself and started to talk to me.

  “There is a story in the newspaper this morning about a young woman who was found dead in her apartment. She’d been there for days before anyone found her.”

  He turned and faced me.

  I nodded. He was talking about the case Noah had been brought in on. Noah had called me the night before and told me about it, though not much detail; he was still at work and was only taking a short break to fill me in.

  “The young woman…” Bob hesitated. “There was a picture of her…”

  In silence, he returned to the couch, sat down, clasped his hands together and leaned forward. The lines in his forehead looked as if a sculptor had deepened them over the weekend.

  “According to the newspaper, her name was Debra. I knew her as Penny. Do you understand?”

  Bob had a habit of doing this to me, trying to get me to do the hard work for him. “No, I’m not sure I do.”

  “She was someone I watched, Dr. Snow. On her Web cam. I can’t even count how many times I saw her. And now…” He was speaking softly, and I had to lean forward to catch every word.

  “There were people watching her on the night she died, the article said. Men who actually saw her getting sick online—” He broke off again. Shook his head. Closed his eyes.

  “Were you watching her?”

  Thirty seconds went by. Forty. Sixty. Then: “There were people actually sitting there, online, watching her, not even realizing that she was dying.” Bob didn’t sound upset so much as astonished.

  “What bothers you about that?”

  He shook his head.

  “Have you ever seen your wife ill like that?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did you do for her?”

  “I took her to the doctor. I gave her medicine. Food. Whatever.”

  “How did you know what she needed?”

  “What do you mean? It’s what anyone who’s sick would need. What I would need.”

  “How does it feel when you’re sick and your wife brings you what you need?”

  “I don’t get sick.”

  “Never? No flu? No cold?”

  “Sure, but that’s not serious.”

  “Okay, but still. Tell me. How did it make you feel, the last time you were under the weather and your wife brought you soup, or tissues?”

  “I wouldn’t let her stay home from work to wait on me. I’m a grown man.”

  “What about at night, when she came home?”

  He thought about this.

  “Didn’t she bring you anything? Not even a glass of water? Cough medicine?”

  “She has enough to do. I don’t need her ministering to me like some hausfrau. I’m not needy like that.”

  “But it’s part of a relationship. Part of being intimate.”

  He shook his head. “It’s unnecessary. I’m fine on my own.”

  “That must be lonely.”

  He looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Not to need her, not to be able to lean on her.”

  Because of his tinted glasses, I didn’t realize that his eyes had filled with tears until he reached up and wiped one away. Embarrassed, he cleared his throat, as if he hadn’t had an emotional reaction at all. “Of course I can lean on her.”

  We both knew he was lying. To himself as much as to me.

  And then, as if it was too much for him to bear, as if the lie chased him away, Bob stood up, and walked out of my office. Without a word of explanation. With so many questions still unanswered.

  Seventeen

  That afternoon when Officer Butler got back to the station house, she read the note on her keyboard and immediately did as it asked: she proceeded directly to Jordain and Perez’s shared office. When she got there, they were both on the phone.

  Perez motioned for her to sit. After a few seconds, Butler realized they were on a conference call, talking to someone about the candidate search going on for a forensic psychologist to replace Fred Randall, who’d retired to teach at the police academy.

  While they discussed their reasons for rejecting the latest candidate, Butler inspected the scarred wooden table where she sat. Nothing in the room was in worse shape than the table, but Jordain refused to have it replaced. “It gives the room some character,” he always said when anyone complained.

  She liked that about him. As demanding as he was to work for, he had an artistic streak that she admired. She admired him as a detective, too, but there weren’t many officers who played the piano, cooked Cajun feasts, and cared about things like character in a table.

  Her boyfriend teased her that she had a crush on him, but it wasn’t true. Jordain was too dark. He didn’t joke around enough for her to like him that way. But as a boss, he was fine.

  “Okay, let’s hear what you have,” Jordain said in a voice that was calming, as if he knew that she needed a little encouragement.

  She opened a file and began her report. “Of course, suicide seems unlikely, but to rule it out—no one in her family, or any of her friends, thought she was depressed. They’d all seen her recently and often. She had a lot of good girlfriends, was close to her widowed mom and her younger sister, and her teachers had very good things to say about her.”

  “Teachers?” Jordain interrupted. “You went back that far?”

  “No. She was still a student. An art student, getting her masters at Pratt, in Brooklyn. Only one of her friends knew about the Web-cam work. Said she had plans to stop in another few months, when she’d paid off the last of her loans.” Butler watched Perez jot down a few words on a yellow pad with a tooth-marked pencil. It was the only kind of writing instrument he ever used, and the only paper he ever wrote on.

  “Were those her paintings?” Jordain asked.

  Butler thought there was a deeper level of sadness in his eyes since he’d found out what she studied. “Yes.”

  “They weren’t that bad.”

  Butler nodded, not surprised he’d noticed the details.

  “Her mom said Debra had sold two of her paintings recently, and that a Chelsea gallery was interested in taking her on. She said she was sure that by mid-summer Debra would be supporting herself from her art.”

  “Her mother knew about the Web cam?”

  Butler looked straight into Jordain’s eyes. “No, it was bad enough telling her that her daughter was dead…” She shook her head.

  Jordain gave Butler a minute. He knew she was a professional and would get thr
ough this. It happened to them all. Every once in a while someone just got to you. It could be a little thing—a locket hanging around an elderly woman’s neck with a faded baby picture inside. The connection could help the cases, made you work harder, even when you didn’t think you could work any harder.

  “Nothing to suggest that the Web-cam work was depressing her?” Perez asked.

  Butler shook her head. “The friend who knew about it said there were no signs of that. If anything, quite the opposite. Since Debra was getting ready to quit, she had been happier than she had been in a long time.”

  “What about a guy? There’s usually a guy. At least that’s what women tell me all the time. It’s all our fault.” Perez laughed.

  “There was a guy. Until about six months ago. She broke up with him. He was freeloading, but Maxi—that’s Debra’s friend—said she was fine about the breakup. She’d dated some since then, but no one special. Her painting seems to have been more important to her than just about anything else.”

  “Sounds good,” Perez muttered, and then jotted down some more notes. “But that doesn’t mean it is. It wouldn’t be the first time someone said she was a friend and knew the inside scoop when she really didn’t know squat. So I wouldn’t rule out suicide yet.”

  “That’s a pretty complicated way to kill yourself,” Butler said.

  “Not if you wanted to make a statement. Not if the very job you were doing was making you hate yourself,” Perez responded. “You’d do it so that everyone out there in cyberland could watch you slather lubricant on your dildo and play with it, then die a disgusting death online.”

  “But she wasn’t depressed,” Butler argued.

  “Enough guessing. Let’s talk details. Was there any atropine in the apartment? Any recent visits to a hospital? Prescriptions on record for any eyedrops?” Jordain asked.

  Butler shook her head.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nope.”

  “I think it’s unlikely an artist would choose to die that way,” Jordain said. “In front of a camera? Recording a hideous death? A visual person wouldn’t have wanted to be seen that way.”

  Butler nodded.

  “So that leaves us with an accident or a murder. What about the lubricant? Any way the factory could have screwed up the formula?” Jordain asked.

  “No. It’s just a simple water-soluble glycerine-based product. The factory doesn’t use atropine. At all. Ever,” Perez answered.

  “So what do we have? A lunatic who is tampering with products? Does that mean we can expect more of these in the next few days?”

  “How ’bout it, Butler? You sure there’s no one in her life who wanted her killed?” Perez asked.

  She shook her head. “I’ll keep looking, talking to people. I’ve only been on this for two days, but she looks like what she was…a sweet kid who wanted to be a painter.”

  “And who just happened to make her living doing Internet porn,” Perez finished.

  “That doesn’t mean she wasn’t a sweet kid who wanted to be a painter.” Butler’s voice was slightly tense. “She just wasn’t that complicated. Jeez. She was twenty-three. A smart kid from a normal neighborhood on Staten Island. No drugs. No abortions. No big problems with her parents. She had good friends whom she’d known for a long time. Even the boyfriend. Nothing stellar, but clean.”

  “Okay then,” Jordain said as he scribbled something down.

  “What do I hear in your voice?” Perez asked.

  “We’re going to need to get a court order.”

  “For what?” Butler asked.

  “I know it could be product-tampering and that Debra just happened to buy the wrong tube of jelly, but there are thousands…tens of thousands…hell, maybe there are hundreds of thousands of men who have been watching her and drooling over her the past four years. I think we’re going to have to investigate her online swains. Her e-mail address is right on her site. Anyone could have contacted her. I don’t want this to be true because it’s going to turn the next couple of days into a full-time nightmare, but that’s where we go from here.”

  Perez was nodding. Butler rubbed her forehead, as if she was getting a headache.

  “We’re going to need to read her e-mail, listen to her phone messages, go over her phone records, and then cross-check everything with the porn company’s records. They’re not going to like showing them to us. But I’m betting that one of her admirers sent Debra that lubricant and asked her to use it for him. On camera. So he could watch.”

  Eighteen

  On my way home that night, I stopped at E.A.T, the too-chic takeout/bakery/restaurant around the corner from our apartment, and picked up some tomato-basil soup and a seven-grain roll. It was more expensive than it should have been, but I was tired, and the last thing I wanted to do was cook.

  Upstairs, I turned on the news, sat down on the couch in the living room and ate my dinner.

  After the first two political stories, the anchor spent three minutes on the case Noah had told me about on Monday night: the young woman in Chelsea who had died on Saturday night while doing a Web cast. After that, he segued into a sidebar about Internet pornography, including information about how popular it was among teenagers.

  I ate the last bite of the roll and finished the last spoonful of the soup. I was home, off duty, I had to leave the office and stop thinking. After changing into jeans and a sweatshirt, I turned off the TV, turned on the CD player and retreated to my tiny sculpture studio—really just a table and a cabinet for my tools in the corner of the den. My work is amateurish, but it’s how I disappear. The sounds of the mallet drown out the patients’ voices inside my head. Carving was the only thing I’d ever found that made me forget about the people who laid their confusions and their sorrows at my feet.

  I swiveled the piece around and inspected it from all sides. The pale blue marble I’d been roughing out for the past few weeks was finally starting to take shape. One more night or two and the wing I had envisioned bursting out of this stone would be clearly visible.

  Using the mallet, I tapped the wooden base of the chisel, and the blade dislodged the first infinitesimally small sliver of stone. Another tap. Another chip flew. Another tap. Another chip. There was solace in being in control of the shape in a way I could control nothing else. Even if I was barely competent, each piece served its purpose. I worked for almost two hours before I left to pick up Dulcie from the theater.

  When I walked into her dressing room at ten-fifteen that night, Dulcie hadn’t yet started to take off her makeup, and was just removing the wig she wore to play Mary Lennox.

  She smiled and stopped long enough to let me give her a kiss.

  “How was the play tonight?”

  “It was good.”

  “Yeah? Anything new?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Out with it.”

  A knock on the door interrupted us. Did she look relieved?

  “Yes?” I called out.

  “It’s Raul, can I come in?” Raul Seeger was the play’s director.

  “Sure.”

  Dulcie watched him in the mirror. When she saw that I was looking at her, she turned away.

  When she’d first started rehearsals, she’d developed a crush on Raul, but I’d thought she was over that. Now I wasn’t so sure. I stole another surreptitious look at her: She was wiping off her eye makeup. Very slowly. Too slowly.

  “Morgan, there was a scout here tonight,” Raul said. “He was very impressed with Dulcie’s performance.”

  I looked back at my daughter. Now she kept her eyes straight ahead as she continued to clean her face with the thick cold cream.

  Even from where I stood, across the room, I could smell the oily scent of the makeup remover. My olfactory sense is overly developed so that smells other people hardly notice can make me nauseous or give me intense pleasure. I keep rolls of peppermints in all my bags and pockets, so if a smell becomes overwhelming, I can pop one into my mouth and the aroma will
neutralize everything else. I once helped save a patient’s life by recognizing an obscure scent. Every once in a while, a whiff of a fragrance can throw me deep into the past. For a few seconds, I wasn’t in Dulcie’s dressing room anymore but was a seven-year-old lying in my mother’s bed, late at night, way past my bedtime, watching her taking off her makeup.

  She always let me sleep with her during the year that we lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side, where she was hiding from my father. I’d wake up when she came into the bedroom to get undressed, and I’d watch her from under half-closed eyes.

  Unless she came home with a man.

  Those nights she’d come and get me, wrap me up in blankets, and tuck me in on the living room couch, with an old black-and-white movie to lull me back to sleep and to keep any stray sounds from reaching my ears.

  “A scout for what?”

  “His name is Hank Riser. He’s doing a television series loosely based on the play and is looking for his lead.”

  I glanced back at Dulcie for the third or fourth time in less than five minutes. Now her attention was openly on Raul, and she was nodding ever so slightly.

  “He wants to fly Dulcie out to L.A. at the end of the month to test for the pilot. As much as I don’t want to lose her, I don’t want to stand in her way, either. This is a great opportunity, Morgan.” He held out the scout’s card.

  I didn’t take it.

  “We went through this two months ago. Dulcie’s working too hard on this play to add anything to her plate.”

  “This isn’t adding TV. She’d have to quit the play. They’ve got a commitment for thirteen episodes. It would be full-time.”

  I shook my head. “No. I’m not sure I like that idea.”

  My understatement was lost on Raul. It even surprised me that I was capable of sounding so rational and calm about something that set off an emotional avalanche inside me. My pulse started to race and my jaw muscles tightened. I didn’t bother to look at Dulcie again, no longer sure how I’d react to her. She’d known what was coming. She’d known how I’d respond. We’d been through this over something much simpler. If I’d said no to three weeks of TV work, why would I agree to thirteen weeks of it?