The Venus Fix

by M. J. Rose

  “ZaZa, whose real name was Cindy Conners, has been working for Global Communications for the past two years. Same company Debra Kamel worked for. Conners was an actress. Easy work in between auditions, I guess. She never landed much—mostly extra work—but she took a lot of classes over the years. Tania’s an actress, too.”

  “That where they met?”

  “We don’t know yet, but one can assume.”

  Jordain watched the scenery whiz by. Leaving New Orleans was always bittersweet. Home had a pull all its own, even after he outgrew it.

  “Did the forensic team find anything at the apartment?”

  “Not yet. If anyone left behind one fiber, one hair, a single speck of dirt that had been stuck in the tread of a shoe, they’re going to find it.”

  “Sometimes I think you believe the cop shows you watch on television. Even if someone left a fiber behind, what will it mean to us unless the same person left the same fiber behind at Debra’s apartment and we find that one?”

  “The TV shows are modeled after us, not the other way around. Don’t get confused on me,” Perez interrupted.

  Jordain smiled and gulped lukewarm coffee from a foam cup. No matter, it was still his drug and would work its trick, regardless of its temperature.

  “And, no. We don’t have anything yet on Debra Kamel’s apartment. I know that was your next question.”

  “No, actually, I was going to ask you how Tania is.”

  “It’s still touch-and-go.”

  “Butler have any luck with the computers?”

  “Still at it.”

  “We’re going to find something on the computers.”

  “I hope so. But ZaZa’s laptop is pretty much shot to hell.”

  “We don’t have an option on this. We need to find something, and soon.” Jordain wasn’t surprised Perez didn’t ask why. They both knew.

  How many more girls were targeted?

  How many could they save?

  Damn. This case was getting under his skin. They all did. But there was something about this one that disgusted him. Maybe it was the spectacle of it. The horror of knowing that while these women gasped for their last breath, naked and vulnerable, they were on view before thousands and thousands of men who were sitting out in the wild blue yonder, all over the globe, watching them, jerking off to them, coming in their hands to them, without realizing that the girls were dying in front of their eyes.

  “If they’re going to die, they should at least be afforded some dignity.”

  Jordain hadn’t realized he’d said it out loud until he heard Perez’s sigh.

  Thirty-Four

  Bob stood up suddenly, said he had to go to the men’s room, and walked out of my office. When he’d been gone for five minutes, I called Allison and asked her if he’d left. It had happened before—a patient bolting when a session got too rough to handle.

  She hadn’t seen him, and he did return after another few minutes. Silently, he took his place on the couch. His eyes were shut. There was little expression on his face.

  “When was the first time you saw a naked woman?” It was a topic I’d wanted to broach for a long time.

  “A real woman?”

  “Whatever comes to mind.”

  “When I was twelve, I found magazines under my father’s bed. Luscious, full-color pictures that made me drool. Those beautiful women, looking at me, lying there naked for me, showing me what I wanted to see—the way they’d make me feel. Christ. That slow burn, the build. I’d hide out in my room and sneak looks at them. I’d leave dinners to go upstairs. Five minutes with the right magazine in one hand and my dick in the other, the sounds of the busy house beyond my door. Is that what you asked me?”

  “You’re doing great.”

  “My father never seemed to notice when I took his magazines.”

  “Do you think he did?”

  “I don’t know, but I wish I knew if he was like me.”

  “Would it make you feel differently about him?”

  “No. About myself.”

  “How?”

  “But those were just photographs. Nothing like the first real woman I saw naked.” It wasn’t the first time Bob had skipped over a direct question about his feelings, and I didn’t want to stop him to force the issue. “It was at an X-rated theater.” His lips twisted into a smile that was also a grimace. His fingers flexed. “One Friday afternoon when our school let out early, two of my friends took me. They’d been there before and had been telling me about it for weeks. I can still remember how much I wanted to go, even now. This was really doing something bad. It was breaking big rules, and I knew if I got caught I’d be in a shitload of trouble.

  “The theater was called the Playpen. It’s still there. All boarded up, but still standing. It had been one of the city’s really grand old movie palaces that had gone out of business. Turned into a smut palace.” His voice had lingered over the last two words almost lovingly. Then he frowned.

  I had seen this same kind of pleasure/guilt reaction from other patients. Like them, Bob found both release and a kind of exquisite hell in his addiction. It was a special kind of torture, his orgiastic needs overpowering his morality. The push/pull of his conflicting cravings.

  “What a mess it was inside. Grimy and stinking. The rug was worn down to threads. Isn’t it crazy that I can remember the rug? It was dark red.” He shook his head as if his own memory surprised him. I didn’t tell him that it wasn’t unusual for someone to remember minute details of his first sexual encounter.

  “The owners had broken up the old screening room and turned it into two smaller theaters—one where they showed the dirty movies, and the other was the live room. That’s where we went. Each of us had our own small booth. I pulled the ratty curtain closed behind me. And then all I could see was the stage.

  “She was sitting on a chair, dressed in a tight skirt and a tight sweater and high-heeled shoes. I was hard the minute I saw her. My buddies had told me that everyone pulled it out and jerked off during the show, but I couldn’t believe it was really okay to do that. I’d only done it at home, quickly, while the world was going on around me. Now I had time. And this woman wasn’t on a page of a magazine but staring straight into my eyes.”

  He licked his lips. His eyes remained shut. “Can I…do you want me to tell you what happened?”

  “Yes, if you want to.”

  “She started to strip for us. First her blouse. Then her bra. She had silver pasties covering her nipples. God. I can still see her. Those pasties made her even sexier than if she’d been totally bare. And then she walked over to each booth, one by one, and pressed up against the glass with her breasts. When she got to me, I put my hand out. The smooth feel of that cold glass and the sight of those glorious breasts. Oh, God.

  “I couldn’t believe how fast it was over. But then she took off her skirt. Underneath, she was wearing a lace garter belt and stockings. I got hard again. Instantly. That had never happened before. Maybe I’d never given myself a chance before. I was always rushed, afraid someone would knock on my bedroom door. But this was different. She was naked except for those pasties and that garter belt, pressing her body up against the glass. I stood and pressed my cock against the glass, too, and it was almost as if I was fucking her.” He sighed and breathed in deeply. Once. Twice.

  “As I said, the theater’s still there, at Forty-fourth and Eighth. A few years ago, someone bought it to turn it into some women’s shelter. Make a statement. There was a legal battle over it and it—” He stopped suddenly. He’d been about to say something and then caught himself. What had he been about to tell me?

  “Bob?”

  “I read about it. That’s what I was going to say. I read about it and saw a newscast about it and damn if I didn’t get a fucking hard-on just hearing the name of the theater said aloud.”

  Thirty-Five

  It had been a long day, and after my four o’clock patient left I got up and stretched. It was already dark outsid
e and the street lamps cast a warm pink glow that seeped into the office.

  The smell of chocolate made me turn around. It was intense. Bitter. Orange. Spicy. Sweet.

  “I made these last night and thought you and Dulcie would like some,” Blythe said from the doorway. She was dressed in a lavender sweater with a starched white collar and cuffs peeking out, slim black slacks and pointed cowboy boots. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her face was scrubbed clean.

  Some people have utterly transparent faces. You can look at them and know without any question how they are feeling. Blythe was like that. She really was pleased to be making this offering and it touched me.

  “That’s so sweet of you,” I said, not meaning to pun. She smiled. I took the plate from her and peeled back the tinfoil.

  “Do you want one?” I asked her as I tore off a corner of one of the thick, soft brownies.

  “I only have a few minutes. I have a patient coming,” she said, clearly nervous. Something was bothering her.

  “First one today?”

  “No, I have two on Mondays.”

  I chewed the chocolate treat. She watched, waiting to see my reaction.

  “These are delicious. Thank you. Dulcie will love them. So how did your first session go?”

  “Not great. I’m still feeling too much emotionally. I’m trying to separate myself from my patient, but it’s not working. At one point, I had to bite my cheek to stop myself from crying.”

  “We’ll keep working on it. We’ll solve it.”

  “Can you really listen to your patients without feeling anything?”

  “No. The point isn’t to stop your feelings but to use them to inform the therapy and steer you in the right direction with the patient. That’s healthy. What we have to work on is not reacting.”

  She nodded, but she still looked defeated. Being a good therapist mattered to her so much. “Sometimes I think I’ll never get there and that I’m crazy to try.”

  I wanted to reach out and touch her hand and give her some kind of comfort. It was ironic that what she struggled with—connecting too deeply to patients—was what I was struggling with, with her. What was it about Blythe that tugged at me and made me want to shelter her?

  What she had been willing to sacrifice to get to this point made me frightened for her. At first, I’d thought she had a self-esteem problem. Now that I understood she didn’t, I cared about her even more. And I wasn’t supposed to do that. Wasn’t that what I was telling her her own problem was?

  We are not supposed to care in a way that keeps us up at night, but some of us do, because we know that with effort there can be change. We’ve seen it. We’ve been part of it. Just a little bit of hope is all it takes, and you can’t give up even if it destroys you to keep waiting to see it again.

  Thirty-Six

  “Ben wa balls painted with toxins,” Perez said.

  “Leather outfits with topical poison applied to the inside of the garments,” Butler offered.

  “Good one. How about whips soaked in poison that would enter the bloodstream when the strap broke the skin?”

  Butler added it to her growing list of ways sex toys could be turned into deadly weapons. “You scare me,” she said. “Dildos outfitted with explosive devices.”

  “I scare you?” Perez quipped.

  Butler leaned back in her chair and looked out through the glass partition that pretended to be a wall. The station house was in high-activity mode, as if it was the middle of the day, but it was after eleven. She’d been working since eight that morning, after getting only five hours of sleep the night before, and was exhausted.

  Until early Sunday, the investigation had been focused on Debra Kamel, whose death they’d assumed was an isolated incident. Now they were not only trying to solve two murders, but they were also strategizing on how to prevent countless others.

  She looked up when Jordain walked into the office. He’d come back from New Orleans, been briefed, and then gone into a powwow with the lieutenant about what to tell the public.

  “We’re not going to release anything about the delivery systems of the poisons,” he said. “No one—not the mayor or the police commissioner—wants us to start a panic, and I don’t want us to tip our hand and lose any leads that might come our way.”

  “All three victims worked for the same porn site. Can’t we at least get word to the rest of the women who work there?” Butler asked. “God only knows how many of them already have some deadly sex toys in their hands now.”

  Jordain nodded. “Sure, we can do that. As soon as you figure out how to do it without a list of who the hell all those women are.”

  He was frustrated. Although he’d gotten court orders to get a list of employees and all the customer records from the porn company, the man they were dealing with at the Global Communications office in Singapore wasn’t accommodating them. They knew there was someone in the States running things, but they hadn’t cracked the code and found out who he was or where he was.

  “Any ETA on how long it’s going to take to cross-reference the two computers?”

  Perez nodded. “Another hour or two. Maybe more. Penny’s computer files are complete, but ZaZa’s are almost all corrupted.”

  “Let’s assume nothing turns up. Do either of you have any doubt the same person orchestrated both killings?” Jordain asked.

  Neither of them did.

  “No details out of place?”

  “There aren’t any details to be out of place. We still have squat,” Perez said.

  “Any chance it was a copycat?”

  Perez shook his head.

  “We’re sure no precise info about how Debra was poisoned has been leaked to the press? No one but us knows the poison was in the lubricant, right?” Jordain asked.

  “Right. And we’re assuming no one guessed about the delivery system and then put poison in the massage oil,” Perez agreed.

  “Okay. That means someone is targeting these women for a reason. Any ideas?” Jordain asked.

  Butler drained what was left of her soda, yawned and shut her eyes for a second. When she opened them, she looked at the clock. It was almost 11:30 p.m. Jordain didn’t even look tired, she thought. He was wide awake and ready to start brainstorming.

  Detective Details they called him, only half joking, because he was obsessed with minutiae. But as often as not, that was what solved cases. Not the big, broad strokes but the infinitely small details that no one else noticed. Jordain was a perceptive man—he made it all look so easy, so possible. He was tireless and determined, and most of all, he was just. He had a heart. He balanced compassion with rationality and never wavered.

  Perez was smart, too, but he wasn’t that different from everyone else. She respected him, but she didn’t look up to him. There hadn’t been many men in her life she looked up to. Perez was a good guy, but still just another guy. Jordain was the one you stuck it out for. If he said you were doing a good job, that mattered.

  She yawned once more.

  “Maybe you should go home, Butler. How long have you been here?” Jordain said.

  “It doesn’t matter. There’s a chance those women’s computers might give up a name tonight, and if you can wait for it, I can, too.”

  Tuesday

  Ten days remaining

  Thirty-Seven

  From the time Detective Jordain got the call from the hospital, it took him and Perez less than fifteen minutes to get there. Dr. Fred Klein met them on the seventh floor and briefed them. Tania was through the worst of it and was going to make a full recovery. They could talk to her for ten minutes.

  Jordain sat by her bed while she slept. She was pale, but her breathing was even. Five minutes went by. Another five minutes. When she finally opened her eyes, he saw they were large and the color of the ocean during a storm. Her lips, though cracked and almost bloodless, opened to say something, but only a very faint whisper came out. He wasn’t sure, but he thought she asked him who he was.r />
  Even in this sorry state, Jordain could tell how tempting she must have been to the men who watched her online, and before his mind went further in that direction, he said hello and introduced himself.

  “Do you know where you are?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I know…” She coughed. “Woke up before.” Her eyes searched the room and then blinked three times. He could read the panic. “My mother…?”

  “She’s downstairs with my partner, Detective Perez. She’ll be right back. I told her I’d stay with you. You know, she’s been here since Sunday morning when you came in. She hasn’t left.”

  Tania nodded and licked her lips.

  “Would you like some water?”

  She nodded again and he poured some from the plastic pitcher on her nightstand—the same pitcher that was in every hospital room he’d ever been in. How many times had he done this? Gone through the ritual of soothing the patient and waiting until he or she was comfortable enough so that he could ask his questions and disrupt the fragile recuperation process with the last thing the patient needed: prodding that forced him or her to relive the trauma.

  While Tania was drinking her water, Perez came in.

  Jordain introduced them, and Tania gave Perez a hello that sounded slightly stronger than the one she’d given Jordain. All the time, her eyes searched. “My mother?”

  “I convinced her to have a little breakfast. She’s having some oatmeal. She’ll be back in about fifteen minutes.”

  She nodded.

  “We’d like to ask you some questions,” Jordain started. “Not too many and not for too long. Is that all right?”

  “I guess so. But first will you tell me how ZaZa is? I asked the nurse but she doesn’t know who I mean.”

  Perez gave Jordain a quick look that said he didn’t want to be the one to tell her.

  Jordain nodded almost imperceptibly. Damn. Yes, he’d do it, but he had no idea how close the two women were. How was it going to hit her? He wished her mother had told her. Although, maybe even her mother didn’t know. If he told her, he might lose her for an hour, a few hours, a day, but he couldn’t lie to her.