The Delilah Complex (10 page)

T
he call came the next day at exactly 6:47 p.m. She obviously had been to therapy or knew enough about therapists to know that patients always left at forty-five minutes past the hour. She identified herself as Betsy Young and said she was a reporter for the
New York Times
. I recognized her name from her byline on the story about the event that had brought the Scarlet Society to me.

“How can I help you, Ms. Young?”

“I was wondering if you could answer a few questions.” Her voice was low and intimate and just slightly familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“In reference to what?”

“The Philip Maur murder. Did you see the photograph that ran in the paper when we broke the story?”

Could it be a coincidence that the
New York Times
was calling me—the therapist working with the Scarlet Society—for comment? Of course not, but who had leaked my involvement?

Shelby Rush had sent out a memo to everyone connected with the society, introducing me and the Butterfield Institute, and suggesting that anyone in need of grief counseling could
contact me. Was it possible that a member of the society had sent that memo to this reporter and that was why she was calling?

Of course. Anything was possible, but I could hardly ask Ms. Young without possibly breaking confidence.

“I did see the photograph and read the story, but I don’t know why you are calling me for comment.”

“Based on photographs that we received but didn’t run in the story, there are suggestions this was a sex crime and—”

“You’d have to talk to the police about that, Ms. Young.”

“I have. They, too, believe it’s a sexual crime based on those details. Can I tell you the indicators?”

“I really don’t think I’m in a position to—”

She interrupted me, launching into a description of Maur’s body. “The corpse had bruises around his wrists and ankles as well as bruising on his testicles. In addition, another shot completely emphasized the man’s genitals. Do you think that is important?”

“I can’t comment. I haven’t see the photos.”

“If I had a set sent over to you, would you study them?”

“No, I’m sorry—I don’t think so.”

“Detective Jordain suggested I get a second opinion.”

“From me?” Hearing his name unnerved me. I had to force myself to focus on what the reporter was saying, not on what had happened four months earlier.

“You worked with the detective on the Magdalene Murders, didn’t you?” she asked.

“I can’t discuss those cases.”

I didn’t want to think about the murders or the detective who’d handled them. Especially not while I was talking to a reporter on the phone. Dealing with her required all my concentration; I couldn’t afford any missteps. “Ms.
Young, did the detective suggest you call me? I don’t think you told me that.”

I heard her let out an annoyed breath. “It was reported that you had worked with the only survivor of the murders. There were even rumors that you saved her life and helped lead the police to the killer. And since you are a sex therapist and this new case suggests some sexual abuse of some kind, I thought you’d be a great place to start. So, Doctor, can I ask you two questions?”

“You can ask but I can’t promise that I’ll answer.”

“In the article that ran in the
Times
, did you notice that Mr. Maur had the number 1 written on the soles of his feet?”

“Yes, I saw that.”

“Would that suggest, from a therapist’s point of view, that there are going to be more victims? A number 2, 3 and so on?”

“Yes. But not from a therapist’s point of view—from common sense the numbers suggest that.”

“And can I quote you on that?”

“If you want to, I suppose that you can.”

“Thank you. Now, can you give me an idea of what kind of sex play might be involved if there is bruising on a man’s wrists, ankles and testicles?”

“Black-and-blue discoloration often indicates S & M. Restraints can heighten both the sense of control and submission in sex play. But you know, there could be other reasons for Mr. Maur to have been restrained that would have nothing to do with S & M.”

“Thank you, Dr. Snow,” she said, and hung up, leaving me sitting by the phone. My thoughts zigzagged from Betsy Young and her motivations to Noah Jordain, and as soon as that happened, I stood up suddenly and pushed back my chair.

I needed to talk to Simon Weiss, I decided. About a patient I wanted to refer to him. I knew he’d be in his office; I’d just seen him walk by. It was important. To get away from my desk, my papers, my phone. To stop my thinking from going where it was headed. To do anything to keep my mind off the detective and the time I’d spent with him.

It didn’t occur to me to wonder why Betsy Young was doing another story on Philip Maur. But I’d be finding out soon enough.

T
he next night, I left the institute at eight-thirty, after my last session. The night air wasn’t cold and my black leather jacket was enough to keep me warm. I looked at the people walking on the avenue, on their way home or out to dinner. I window-shopped the boutiques that offered up designer goods more expensive than I could afford. There was a tempting pair of tall black boots in one store, a simple but elegant navy silk suit in another. No matter how much I ever made at the institute, these items would still be obscenely expensive.

I took my time that night because Dulcie’s father had picked her up from the studio and I was on my own. She’d be staying with him for the next four days. Usually it was a week every month plus every other weekend, but he had a shoot that was taking him out of town when she was due to stay with him next, so we’d rearranged the schedule.

I’d worked harder at an amicable breakup with Mitch than I had at anything I’d ever done, never forgetting that awful year when my mother had left my father and the two of us had lived in the small, pathetic apartment in a walkup on the Lower East Side until she died, leaving me to
think I hadn’t been smart enough to save her. But I’d tried. That whole year.

My mother was often sick. And when she was, I did for her what she did for me when I was sick: I told her stories—the only ones I knew by heart. I sat by her side on the lumpy couch in the living room that she used for a bed, held her hand, fed her saltines and ginger ale, and recounted each episode of her TV show, playing all the parts myself. And when I ran out of the real ones, I made up new ones.

I always ended by delivering my mother’s co-star’s final line. “And what happened next?”

“They all lived happily never after,” my mother would say in a faraway voice.

No matter how bad off she was, she always remembered her sign-off. I have a recurring dream where she finally changes the line to: “They all lived happily ever after.”

But that was just a dream. She didn’t. And by the time I was old enough to understand that my mother hadn’t been ill most of those nights, but drunk, and that my words probably hadn’t even made sense to her, it was too late. I already knew I’d failed her. I hadn’t been able to save her.

I was on Madison Avenue and Seventieth Street when my cell phone rang. I kept walking as I pulled it out of my bag. If it weren’t for Dulcie and my concern for her well-being, I doubted I’d ever answer the damn thing. It’s wrong that we can never escape from people who want to reach us.

Instead of a name on the LED display, the screen read “private caller,” and because there was a chance—albeit a slight one—that the call was about Dulcie, I answered it.

“Hello?”

I had reached the corner just as the light turned red, and as I waited I heard a man’s voice say my name.

“Morgan.”

It was as if he was trying it out, letting it slide from a thought into a word, as if he had not heard it or said it in a long time and was unsure that he was pronouncing it right, as if it were the name of a foreign spice in a store that has many things you have never heard of.

I looked around for somewhere to go. To get away from the voice, because I really didn’t want to hear it, but there was nowhere to go. There never is when the problem is inside your own head. “Hello, Noah.”

At the other end of the phone, I heard the detective take a breath. Suddenly, I was picturing his face, close up, the way it had looked the one night we’d spent together, months before. How could a man I had not talked to for months cause my hand—the one holding the phone—to tremble? He was just a police detective from New Orleans. Except he played exquisite jazz on the piano, cooked like a five-star chef, made love like some crazy kind of dream come true, and intuited more about me than I wanted anyone to know.

“How are you?” Noah asked.

The sound of his voice reminded me of his fingers stroking my face. Of his arms holding me. How his lips felt. I stopped the deluge of impressions and forced myself to talk. “I’m okay. Overworked.”

“If you are admitting it, even a little bit, it must be extreme.”

I laughed. Had we only known each other for a few weeks?
Stop thinking
, I said to myself silently.
Find out what he wants, then get off the phone
. “So, how can I help you, Noah?” I asked, cringing. Why when I spoke to him did I always wind up sounding like I was flirting?

I was impatient for him to state his reason for calling
so I could get rid of him as fast as possible. I was instantly exhausted.

“I was wondering if you have some time to meet up with me. Either at my office, yours, or if you happen to be as hungry as I am, for dinner.”

“I meant to call you back,” I blurted out, not realizing it was a non sequitur.

“No, you didn’t,” he said.

I couldn’t argue and so I said nothing.

“Morgan?”

“Yes?”

“Where are you? Let’s grab some dinner.”

I’d stopped walking and was leaning against the red stone wall of St. James Church. The night sky had turned from electric cobalt-blue to a blue-black velvet, and I had the feeling that if Noah kept talking, I’d keep standing there until stars came out and not even notice that any time had passed.

“I’m here.” No, that didn’t make sense. “I’m on the street, actually, Seventy-first. I just left the office.” Not good, I thought. I didn’t sound like I was in control.

“So, where can you meet me? I need to talk to you. I need to ask you in what way you are involved with Timothy Wheaton’s death.”

T
wenty minutes later the maître d’ showed me to a round table for two in the back corner of Nicola’s, an Italian restaurant that had been a staple for people who lived on the Upper East Side for the past thirty years. I’d had dinner there with my father and Krista at least once a month since I was a child. It was a noisy, friendly, unpretentious restaurant decorated with the autographed book jackets, album covers and photographs of their better-known patrons.

I’d suggested it because it was the least romantic restaurant I could think of in the minute I had on the phone.

Noah had somehow gotten there first and, equally amazing, considering the size of the crowd waiting at the bar, secured one of the few quiet tables. It occurred to me not to ask him how he’d done it—I didn’t want to appear impressed.

As I took the last steps to the table, he looked up from a stack of papers he was reading. His eyes locked on mine. And held. It was a look that went right through me the way a blast of heat does on a winter night.

The waiter pulled out my seat.

“It’s awfully nice to see you,” Noah said in that slow
drawl that made each word sound much more exotic than it was. I could see that he’d ordered a bottle of red wine because a glass, already poured, was waiting for me.

“You, too.” I could hear how clipped my own voice sounded. As cold as that winter night. He either ignored it or didn’t notice.

“Have some wine.” He gestured to the glass. “Have some garlic bread.” He held out the basket. “I bet you didn’t eat today. Except for maybe a container of yogurt. Or half a bagel.”

I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he was right.

“How’s Dulcie doing? How’s the play?” he asked. “It must be opening soon.”

I sipped the wine. Then drank again before answering. “It’s opening in January. And she’s working hard. Too hard, as far as I’m concerned, but she loves it. They’re going to Boston in two weeks for a preview.”

“Is she as nervous about it as you are?”

I’d met him in June and seen him only a half-dozen times, most of them professionally as he tracked down a serial killer, and yet he knew exactly how I was feeling. I hated that about him.

Part of my job with my patients was to keep my emotions in check—not to let anyone guess what my reaction was to what they were saying—and I was good enough at it that not even my ex-husband, whom I’d been with for sixteen years, could figure out what was going on behind the unremarkable expressions I kept plastered on my face.

But Noah knew.

“She is scared. But excited, too. It’s an enormous role. She’s in all but two scenes. She has three solos and six more numbers that she performs with other members of
the cast.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what I want to happen. If she does well I’m afraid she’s going to want to stick with it, and I hate the idea of the theater—or worse, film—eating up her childhood.” I took another sip of the wine, which was so smooth it felt like velvet in my mouth. “And I’m equally afraid that if she doesn’t do well it will hurt her terribly. She’s at such a vulnerable age. Not yet grown up, but not really a little girl anymore.”

He listened intently, reading my face, my expressions— paying attention to what I was saying and what I wasn’t. That’s what he did. He listened to me. It was how he’d seduced me, by asking me questions no one had ever asked me: about how I felt listening to patients all day long, about what it was like taking in all their pain and confusion and processing it. And for a while, I had luxuriated in his questions. Talked and talked. Frantically. Wildly. Like a butterfly that had been caught in a net for hours and then suddenly let go.

Afterward, I knew if I ever allowed myself to see him again, I wouldn’t be able to hold back anything, and that was such a disquieting, foreign feeling.

It was like getting a box of rich, dark chocolate truffles, and rather than putting them away and having one every once in a while, savoring them, I had thrown the whole box away, because I didn’t trust myself to go slowly. And I had not regretted it.

Or so I thought. Until tonight in Nicola’s.

We looked like all the other couples around us. Men and women who’d had separate days, coming together at night to go over what had happened to them and figure out how to deal with it.

Except we weren’t a couple.

He was a detective in New York’s elite Special Victims
Unit who wanted information from me. I was a sex therapist who was not at liberty to discuss anything that transpired in my office.

What made the conversation even more complicated was that I didn’t even know what I had to keep silent about.

The waiter arrived and Noah ordered shrimp scampi, a side order of linguini and escarole with garlic and olive oil—all without taking his eyes off me. When my turn came, I ordered veal piccata. As soon we were alone again, Noah opened his briefcase, pulled out a fax and handed it to me without saying anything.

It was a news story. One and a half pages long. I read the headline.

      Picture of Death

And then I read the subhead.

      Missing New Yorker Timothy Wheaton Feared Second Victim

The byline credited Betsy Young—the reporter who had called me earlier that evening.

I looked up. “What is this?”

“It’s a story the
Times
is running tomorrow.”

“Why do you have it?”

“I’ll explain all that after you read it.”

      Yesterday afternoon, the New York Times received a package that included three photographs of bestselling author Les Wheaton’s son, Timothy Wheaton, senior vice president at the MLM advertising
agency. Wheaton, thirty-nine, was reported missing over the weekend when Linda Ravitch, his wife, said he failed to come home after a business meeting.

I reached for the wine. Took a sip. Looked up from the paper, found Noah’s eyes, then continued reading the article, which went on to explain that the police had examined the photographs and were withholding comment at the present time. Wheaton’s body, like Philip Maur’s, had not been found.

      Detective Noah Jordain of New York’s SVU said that the department is investigating the case as a related incident and is currently speaking to several suspects.

“Is that true? You have suspects?” I asked, interrupting my reading.

Noah shook his head sadly. His strong jaw was set in defiance. I’d seen him look like that during the worst days of the Magdalene Murders. “We don’t have any idea what’s going on.” He motioned to the paper. The next paragraph caught me by surprise, despite my expectation that it would be there.

      Dr. Morgan Snow, a sex therapist who works at the Butterfield Institute and who was instrumental in solving the recent Magdalene Murders, said that there are signals in photographs the paper has chosen not to run that these might be crimes of a sexual nature. In one, an unseen photographer shot directly between the victim’s legs. There is
black-and-blue bruising on the victim’s wrists, ankles and testicles. This, said Dr. Snow, strongly suggests a sexual component to the crimes.

               “Black-and-blue discoloration often indicates S & M. Restraints can heighten both the sense of control and submission in sex play,” said Snow.

I turned to the next page of the fax. There was no copy. I was staring at a grainy photograph, about three inches square, of the soles of a man’s feet. It was almost identical to the photo of Philip Maur’s feet that had previously appeared in the paper.

The difference was that instead of the number 1 on each sole, now it was the number 2.

I put the papers down. Noah reached across the table, took them and put them back in the folder that looked as if it was filled with other photographs, and even in a restaurant with hundreds of food smells wafting in the air, I identified the specific sharp scents of the chemical emulsions used in photography.

“Now can you understand why I wanted to talk to you? You’re quoted. You’ve talked to the reporter who is covering this story. Why?”

“She called me.”

“And you saw her.”

“No.”

He didn’t say anything, but his neon-blue eyes flashed at me.

“What is going on?” I asked him. “Why am I here? Because I talked to a reporter?”

He took a drink, then broke off a piece of garlic bread and chomped on it. Noah loved food, loved to eat it, to
cook it, and to plan on what to have and where to have it. In the brief time I’d known him, he’d once taken the contents of my pathetically unstocked refrigerator and prepared a meal that was as good as anything I’d ever had in a restaurant.

“I’m going to tell you what we know and after that ask you a few questions. I trust you’ll answer them.” His drawl made each word sound musical, even those that were brutal, ugly or demanding.

“To the best of my ability.”

“Okay. In the past two weeks Betsy Young, the reporter you talked to, has received two unmarked packages. The first contained photos of Philip Maur’s body. The second contained photos of Timothy Wheaton’s body. In both cases, the family or friends of the victims contacted us with missing-persons reports a few days before Young received the photos. Everything we have past those missing-persons reports, we’ve gotten from Young. And that stinks.”

“Why do you think the killer is sending a reporter evidence of his crimes instead of you?”

Before he could answer, the waiter arrived with our food and Noah stopped talking until all the plates were placed on the table. I could smell the buttery garlic sauce and the scent of the sea.

Picking up his fork, he speared one of his shrimp but, before he put it in his mouth, stopped to ask, “Aren’t you going to eat? It’s hot, Morgan.” He motioned to my plate.

I’d been waiting to hear what he was going to tell me about the murders, but I picked up my knife and fork, cut a piece of the veal and put it in my mouth. It was delicious and so tender I barely needed the knife. While I chewed, I watched Noah. The way he ate reminded me suddenly of the way he’d made love to me that one time. He’d devoted
himself to the experience. He’d relished it. Remembering it so vividly, I shuddered, and hoped Noah hadn’t noticed.

“Because the killer wants to make sure, without a doubt, without any possibility, that the news of these killings appears in the newspaper. What do you think?”

“I think that’s a logical conclusion,” I said, forcing myself to concentrate.

“How is your veal?”

“Delicious.”

“Good. So are the shrimp. Do you want one?” Without waiting for my answer, he speared a pink curl and held it out to me. I tried to take the fork but he didn’t let go of it: he wanted to feed me. I could have resisted but instead pulled the offering off with my teeth. The garlic and butter delighted my tastebuds.

“Morgan, what other reasons do you think, from a psychological point of view, that the kidnapper could have for sending the shots to Young?”

“He could have an attitude about the police and could be punishing you. Wanting to embarrass you.”

He nodded. “Anything else?”

“Not that comes to me this second. Can I see the photographs you have in that folder? Are all the other shots there?”

“Not all of them, no.”

“Can I see what you have?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer that but instead asked, “Morgan, what do you know about Timothy Wheaton?”

“Nothing.”

“Why are you quoted in the article?”

“I told you. The reporter called me.”

“Why you? Out of every therapist in New York City, why you?”

“Because of you.”

His eyebrows arched.

“She said she called me because you were handling this case and you’d handled the Magdalene Murders and I’d been involved in them, so it made sense to her to call me on this.”

“Did you believe her?”

He was looking at me. Eyes holding mine again. More questions in them than he was asking out loud.

“I didn’t have any reason not to.”

While we ate and drank we continued speculating about why else Betsy Young might have called me and why someone would reveal his crimes to the paper instead of to the police. It occurred to me that Noah suspected Betsy Young of committing the crimes, but when I asked him about that, he danced around the question without really answering it directly.

“I don’t think a woman’s behind this.”

“Because women traditionally are not serial killers?”

“Women commit crimes of passion, sure, but cold-blooded, planned-out, multiple killings like this? No, that’s usually men’s work.”

After we were finished, we both ordered espresso. The waiter was walking away when Noah called him back and added one zabaglione to the order.

When it arrived, he made me taste it, feeding me the strawberries drenched with the thick, sweet sauce from his spoon. I tried to ignore the intimate way he once again offered me the food. And I tried not to pay attention to the way he was looking at my lips as I took the sugary concoction, or the pressure as he pulled the spoon out of my mouth.

He would have let anyone taste his dessert, I told myself. It was not an invitation. Not a suggestion of anything.

Except I knew it was. And that frightened me because Noah was stronger than I was. And his strengths made me realize my own weaknesses. I didn’t want to be reminded of them. Not by him. Or by anyone.