He knew that there wasn’t much connection between his cock and his brain. Hadn’t that been proved to him hundreds of times? But this was even more insane. This time it wasn’t just that his brain wasn’t engaged, it was that his brain should have been fighting this obscene seduction. His brain should be preventing the erection. And it couldn’t.
The tongue flicked out and licked him. Like a very aggressive cat. One long lick. A short one. A long one.
How could he let this happen? The inertia was hard to fight. Despite wanting to stop what was happening, the feeling in his groin was pleasure. It was the feeling in his stomach that he couldn’t stand. The anxiety that wasn’t abating even with the expert combination blow job and hand job he was getting.
Abruptly, it stopped.
Right in the middle of the massage. It ended with a laugh. Low and deep and crude. No words needed to be spoken in order for him to translate that laugh. It mocked him and his penis. It reduced him to the most basic animal, denounced his brain and his talent.
“That’s all you get.”
He shivered.
So that was it. Cut my hair, suck my dick, photograph me, and after that, when you are good and ready, you’ll kill me. He felt nausea rise in his throat and hoped he would throw up and choke on it. At least then he could cheat this monster out of the pleasure of killing him—because surely that was the ultimate high here. Sex games, mutilation and finally murder.
The nausea rose again, came up higher, and after that receded, leaving an acid burn down the back of his throat.
Please, he begged some God he didn’t know. Wasted thoughts. Whoever the fuck God was, he wasn’t in here listening.
Please, make it quick. Make it quick. And painless.
That was when he heard the popping noise—the last noise, he thought, he would ever hear again.
Forty-One
My visit to Nicky and Daphne that Thursday started off badly.
The two of them were sitting on opposite sides of the room, not looking at each other and not looking at me.
Sometimes you really can smell emotions. I’ve always thought that the body emits scent to warn other members of a group—the way that wild animals do.
In that pretty sunroom, filled with the benign still lifes of fruit and flowers Daphne had painted before she’d discovered her talent for the male nude, I smelled fear, anger and lust.
It was an effort to get them to tell me what had happened before I got there.
“Why don’t you want to talk about it?” I asked Daphne first.
“Because no matter what I tell you, Nicky is going to twist it.”
“How about you let me worry about that.”
She got up and walked to a hanging basket that held an oversized fern. I watched her pinch off a dead, withered frond. “Daphne?”
She turned, playing with the feathery and brittle leaf.
“I think it would be a good idea if you stayed seated. I know this is your house and that it seems normal to you to get up and move around, but it would be beneficial if, during our sessions, you remained seated. Just as if you and Nicky were in my office in the city.”
Without saying anything, she sat down in the same spot on the end of the settee. She didn’t look at Nicky. He didn’t look at her.
“Daphne, you were going to tell me what happened before I got here.”
She sighed. “Nicky tried to get me to have sex with him.”
“Tried?” Nicky blurted out. Then he looked at me. “She came to the door ready for me. She ordered me to go upstairs with her. She knows that I respond to that kind of talk.”
“You see?” Daphne said. “He’s twisting it.”
“Daphne. What happened when Nicky came to the door? How did you feel?”
“I was happy to see him. I love him. I want him here.” She was shredding the fern into small fragments, letting them drop onto the pristine floor.
“Okay. So he came inside. You felt good about him being here. What happened then? Did you kiss him hello?”
“Of course I did. He’s still my husband.”
“She opened her lips. It wasn’t a simple kiss. She’s not telling you that.”
I shifted in my seat so that I was facing Nicky now. “It might be better if you let Daphne tell me what happened first. Without interrupting her. After she’s finished, you can tell me what you think happened. Do you see there’s a benefit to working that way?”
“Yes. I do want to work this out. But she’s playing games with me and—”
“Nicky?”
He stopped talking, took a deep breath, blew the air out of his mouth and settled back on the couch, prepared finally to let Daphne tell her version of the story.
The two stories they told were, not surprisingly, very different. Daphne’s version was that Nicky made it clear as soon as he got there that if she wanted him to make love to her, he would be happy to accommodate her. She’d agreed and taken him upstairs. They had embraced. Begun to undress. He’d taken off his shirt. That’s when she saw the scratches on his back.
“I asked him if he’d been to the society in the past few weeks. He lied and said no. At least, at first he did. He just wanted to have sex. He didn’t care about the rules. About the promises. About how I felt about it.”
When it was Nicky’s turn, he said that Daphne had not asked him if he’d been to the society outright. She’d tricked him into telling her a lie of omission. And that was not the same thing as outright lying.
“What do you mean, a lie of omission?”
“She didn’t ask me if I’d been to the society. She asked me if I loved her. I told her I did. Then she asked me if I really deserved to be let back into her bed. She didn’t tell me that she’d seen the scratches. She set me up.”
“He is taking his life in his hands every day that he goes back there,” Daphne interrupted. “I know it and he knows it. But he’s got some crazy death wish.”
By the time the session was over, I’d managed to get them to stop reacting to each other’s accusations and to allow each other to express anger. If they didn’t at least do that, I explained, they’d continue to respond with knee-jerk reactions and their resentments would just keep growing.
“Before I go, Daphne, instead of using the old language, tell Nicky how you feel.”
“I’m scared for him,” Daphne said.
Nicky looked at her, smiled, and told her that mattered to him a lot. “I’m careful. Nothing is going to happen to me,” he said.
“Do you really think that Philip wasn’t careful?” Tears were running down her cheeks. “Or Tim?”
Putting her head in her hands, Daphne wept.
Nicky got up, went to her and took her in his arms. He held her and let her cry and rubbed her back and smoothed her hair.
I wished that I could do more and do it faster. Not for the first time as a therapist, and not for the last, I wished that I had more to work with than words and insight. I wanted a magic wand that I could wave over this couple so that they could act on the positive feelings they had for each other instead of tormenting themselves with desires and needs that were only keeping them apart.
Forty-Two
Despite having promised Dulcie that I wouldn’t go to Boston for the opening of The Secret Garden, I couldn’t stay home. I’d rented a car and left the city Saturday morning.
The fall leaves were blazing as I drove up the Merritt Parkway through Connecticut. The sky was cloudless and a pure cerulean blue, and the sun filtering through the trees made the countryside shimmer. But it was hard to let go of everything I was thinking and just enjoy the foliage or the day.
I hadn’t planned on going.
After she left with Mitch at six-thirty that morning, I went into the den, pulled out the wooden table that held a chunk of rose quartz that I had been chiseling for the past six months, put on my goggles and went to work chipping away at the stone.
It was only a hobby but usually it soothed me. Once, I’d
hoped I had talent. That was before I found out what real talent was. I’d been introduced to sculpting when my father had remarried. Krista is a successful sculptor who shows once a year at a prestigious gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. Her work mesmerized me when I first met her, and taking my interest as a way to bond with me, she’d offered to teach me. I was only twelve, but I loved everything about the stone and the process and the tools. I was fascinated with the idea that the job of the sculptor—as Krista had described it—was to find the shapes hidden inside the rocks, waiting to be unearthed.
When I’m faced with a situation that makes me seek out the comfort of a mother figure, I first think of the woman who passed away in a drunken stupor when I was eight, who I had tried to save every day until she finally gave in to her weakness, or I thought of Nina, who had stepped in that same day, wrapped me up in her strong arms and never let me go.
Yet the bond between my stepmother and me was real, too, born of the stone and sustained by my love of the hobby I’d never given up.
That morning, excavating the sleeping form of a young child from a block of rose quartz didn’t keep my mind occupied. I put down the mallet and chisel, called for a rental car, packed a bag and started to figure out what to say to Dulcie when I got to Boston.
About an hour and a half out of Manhattan, I pulled off the highway in Westport, Connecticut, and drove into town to get something to eat. It was twelve-thirty. The show wasn’t until eight that night. Boston was only another three hours away. I had plenty of time.
Sitting in the local Starbucks, with a latte and a piece of pumpkin-walnut bread, I went over my decision again. By going up to Boston I was breaking my word to my daughter. But how could I stay away? This was her first professional performance. She was so nervous. I was so concerned. Even if I stood in the back and never told her I was there, I had to go.
How upset would Dulcie be if she saw me there?
I was on a seesaw. Torn between turning back and going forward. Neither direction seemed the right one, and then my cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Dr. Snow? It’s Pam.”
Pam was the operator who worked the phone service for the institute on weekends and evenings and called when there was any kind of off-hour emergency with a patient. “Hi, Pam.” My voice was already tight while I waited for her news.
“You just got a phone call. From a patient of yours. She only gave me her first name—Liz. She said it’s an emergency and it’s really critical that she talk to you.”
Forty-Three
An emergency request for an appointment from a patient who was somehow connected to the deaths of three men was as good an excuse as I could think of to get into the car and head back to New York.
I could be a responsible doctor and keep my promise to my daughter. While I knew the wrenching pain I felt backing the car out of the lot and heading south instead of north would stay with me, at least I wouldn’t have to see the look of disappointment in Dulcie’s eyes when she saw me at the play that night.
Since she had her blond wig on, the woman who was waiting for me was Liz. I was glad. I preferred for us to stick with a member of the group I knew, as opposed to the reporter I had never met.
She sat down on the couch; I took my seat. “What’s wrong?” There was no reason to waste any time.
It was midafternoon and the sunshine filtered through the leaves outside my windows and made a pattern on the rug that shifted and changed each time the wind blew. Liz sat staring at it. Not saying anything. With her was a manila envelope that she clutched to her chest, desperately, the way I had once clutched my daughter to my own chest when she was sick with fever and I waited, panicked, in our doctor’s office to find out what was wrong with her.
“Now there is a fourth man …” she said.
“When did you find out?”
“Early this morning.”
“Have you told the police?”
She nodded and then frowned. “Why were you at the police station the other night?”
“Why is that relevant?”
“Because I need to know I can trust you. That you aren’t telling them about the group.”
“I’m not.”
“So why were you there?”
“Liz, why did you want to see me today? What is the emergency?”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“I don’t know how to convince you other than to tell you that I take privilege very seriously.”
“You are implying that I don’t.”
I hadn’t said anything that should have made her say that. “Is there a reason that I should question your ethics?”
Her laugh was not jovial or kind, but rather slightly hysterical and panicked. “Of course there is. You are the only person who knows that I am not only the reporter who is getting these monstrous packages, but that I belong to the same sex club as the men who are being murdered.”
“That’s something that is bothering you?”
She stood up. Now the knuckles that held the package to her chest were white.
“Please sit down,” I said.
She didn’t. “Is it something that is bothering me? Are you crazy? Of course it is. I haven’t slept for days. I am breaking rules at the paper. I am breaking my word to the Scarlet Society. And both you and the police think that I’m the one who is killing these men.”
“Please sit down.” I was using the softest voice that I could. She was in crisis. Her whole body was trembling and she was slightly out of breath. Before we could have any kind of conversation, I had to calm her down. “I can help you if you’ll just sit down so we can talk through what’s bothering you.”
She continued to stand, staring at me for ten, twenty, then thirty seconds, the only change the quickness of her breath and the look in her eyes, which deepened and became more troubled.
If she was in any way responsible, she was dangerous. And as one of the only people who knew about her complicity, I might be in danger. Was this woman capable of killing three—no, she had just told me four—men?
This was not the first time that I worried about my own safety with my patients, but usually I wasn’t alone at the institute on a Saturday afternoon. Usually, there were people in the hall and if I screamed someone would come running. But no one was outside and I had nothing at hand to subdue her with if she became violent.
I stood, took one step toward her, and another.
She didn’t move.
I took another step. We were within a foot of each other. I was looking in her face, but I could see her hands in my field of vision and they were still clutching the envelope. If she moved either hand to reach for something, anything else—a weapon?—I’d know and I’d have a split second to disengage her. I’d studied self-defense. I’d taken my daughter to classes, too. It was just smart to learn what to do. I could take Liz without any trouble as long as I kept my composure. As long as I kept my eyes on her hands.
“Why don’t you sit down, Liz?”
“Betsy!” She yelled.
It was so sudden I almost overreacted, but I am trained to deal with someone in the midst of a psychotic break. Was that what this was? Years of work had prepared me for it. What was surprising was how few times I had witnessed it, considering the number of patients I dealt with.
“My Fucking Name Is Betsy!”
“Betsy. Betsy, I want you to sit down.” I took her arm firmly in my hand and gently forced her down. She allowed me to seat her, and, that done, I pried her fingers apart and took the envelope out of her hands.
The minute I had it in my grasp, her whole body relaxed and her face crumpled into despair. The fury was dispelled. At least for the moment.
“I killed those men,” she said. And then buried her face in her hands.
Forty-Four
Detectives Jordain and Perez were sitting in an unmarked navy-blue sedan across the street from the Butterfield Institute. The morning had started with a call from their offi
cer who was working the mail shift at the New York Times. Betsy Young had gotten a fourth correspondence from Delilah.
The man in the photographs had been reported missing five days earlier. Bruce Levin was a celebrity real estate developer whose name was almost as well known as the people he brokered luxury apartments for. It helped that he had been married to a top model, with whom he’d fathered a pair of twins. The divorce had been in all the tabloids because of the exorbitant demands his wife was making and the claims she made about how much she spent on her children.
Like the other three packages, this one included a lock of Levin’s hair in a small plastic bag and three photographs, all taken from the same angles as the previous shots. There were the same ligature marks around his wrists and ankles.
And as they expected it would be, the number 4 was painted in red on the soles of both of his feet.
What was different was the reporter’s demeanor when she arrived at the precinct house. She’d written up her article and had brought it with her to the station house.
Previously, she’d been very professional, slightly nervous, clearly disturbed, but in control. Even to the point of being angry at Jordain and Perez for holding the articles too long—according to her—for not letting her reveal everything that was in the packages, and for insisting the Times not print all the photographs.
Betsy Young’s star at the paper had risen in the weeks since she broke the story about Philip Maur, and with it, her attitude had become more strident.
Except that morning she had been subdued and completely shaken. Once the meeting was over, Perez offered to have a car take her back to the Times, which she agreed to. She was clearly too upset to think through why he was offering: that it would be even easier to tail her if she were in a cop car.
9 More Killer Thrillers Page 196