The Delilah Complex

by MJ Rose

  Ignoring me, he put it on the stove, turned on the burner and proceeded to fill the French press with some freshly ground espresso beans that he’d also brought with him.

  “You might as well just sit down and relax, because I haven’t had any coffee yet and I’m not leaving until I do. You know that about me.”

  His arrogance infuriated me. He laughed. The New Orleans accent even affected his laugh. The peals were long and drawn out, like his words, like his legs, like his fingers. I turned away. I did not want to look at him anymore. I did not want to feel my insides bubbling up again.

  I didn’t succeed.

  Meanwhile, Noah took a pastry box out of the bag he’d brought with him, opened it and put the contents on a plate.

  The raspberries glistened in their flaky tart crust.

  “You can’t throw me out. I brought your favorite dessert.”

  “You can’t know that. How do you know that?”

  “You told me. Did you forget?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  The kettle started to sing and Noah returned to the stove to finish making the coffee.

  “Take these,” he said, handing me the plate and two forks. He brought the French press and two mugs.

  As he arranged everything on the table, he said, “You don’t have to tell me anything, Morgan. But you have to listen to me. There’s nothing stopping me from giving you information about this case.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” The glistening raspberries were impossible to resist.

  “Humor me.”

  My fork slipped in between two berries, through the custard, and crunched into the crust.

  “No. Explain.”

  “Because I think you’re involved. I believe that Betsy Young is your patient and I am afraid that, by treating her, you could put yourself in danger. And that if or when that happens, you won’t come to me for help because of your professional integrity. Which, by the way, I think is very sexy no matter how infuriating it is. If I keep you informed, you will at least be able to protect yourself. And if, at some point, this case reaches a stage that’s dangerous enough that you won’t have to keep your information confidential, you might come to me.”

  I lifted the fork to my mouth. The smooth and crunchy textures battled for prominence. The combined but distinct flavors of buttery crust, tart berries and sweet cream were a perfect excuse for me not to say anything.

  Regardless of the words, no matter the conversation, Noah and I were spinning. We fluttered around each other like butterflies preparing to mate. They dance, they flirt, they advance and retreat. Some species, when they finally do perform coitus, stay locked together for as many as a dozen hours.

  “One day,” Noah said in a voice so low I had to lean forward to hear him, “you’ll stop fighting me.”

  “You’re so sure.” I had tried for a tone of voice that would suggest irritation.

  “And you’re happy that I am.”

  Obviously, I’d failed. I didn’t answer. I wasn’t ready to. And this time, Noah didn’t push.

  Once we were finished, we left the table and moved into the living area. Noah took the chair near the window, making clear his intention to continue the serious part of the conversation.

  “We don’t have anything. Perez and I are flying blind. Shit, we can’t even find the damn bodies, Morgan. It’s a crisis situation the likes of which neither of us has ever dealt with. I need something. A connection between the men. A suggestion in one of the shots to indicate where the hell those bodies are. Just one reason that the killer wants the stories to break in the paper first.”

  “I noticed something odd in the photos in your office.”

  He nodded.

  I continued, speaking slowly, thinking out exactly how to phrase my sentences. I didn’t question why I had finally decided to speak. Did not allow myself to doubt my decision. I was not betraying any confidence. I had not been told what I was going to tell him by any of my patients.

  “The bottom of the men’s feet are dirty.”

  He nodded.

  “There are dozens of particles, scratches, rough spots, and there are the red numbers. But there was also a…mole…or a piece of dirt on Philip Maur’s right foot, just where the number started. And there was something similar on Timothy Wheaton’s right foot. Almost in the exact same place. At first, I just thought it was more dirt. But how could both men have a speck of dirt in precisely the same place?”

  “That’s something either Perez or I should have noticed.”

  “I could be wrong.”

  He got up. Urgent now.

  I was barely able to breathe. Over and over in my mind I repeated what I’d just said, satisfying myself that I hadn’t broken any confidence, just pointed out something I’d noticed. Besides, I didn’t know what the mark was. I hadn’t asked the women in my group. There would have been no way to explain that I’d seen the photographs that close up, for one thing. It was only my guess that a group like the Scarlet Society would engage in some kind of ritualistic behavior and brand their men.

  He walked to the front door. I followed. “I’ve been living with those photographs. I’ve looked at them a hundred times.” He sounded as if he had betrayed himself. He grabbed his raincoat off the hook in the hallway and shrugged into it. Once more, he hesitated before walking back to me.

  “I didn’t want to have to leave tonight,” he said as he bent down and softly, as if he were a butterfly alighting on my lips, kissed me.

  My center didn’t hold. I felt weightless and lost for a moment. And then, just when the feelings would have become too intense, he pulled away, smiled at me with an expression that I would think about for days, and walked out.

  Thirty-Eight

  After Noah left, I retrieved the tape that Shelby Rush had given me and watched it once more. This time I was not curious about the rituals of the group; I was searching for Liz. Was she Betsy Young? Both names were nicknames for Elizabeth. It was possible that either the blond hair she sported in the therapy sessions or the brown hair I’d seen at the police station was a wig. Many of the women who belonged to the Scarlet Society disguised themselves, and that wasn’t illegal. They had a right to their privacy and to keep their sexual predilections a secret.

  That a woman in the group had gone to the police didn’t bother me. In fact, I’d asked the group the day before to consider doing just that.

  What I was having a hard time understanding was that a woman who’d taken an oath to keep the society a secret was also the reporter who had broken the news of the members’ deaths. It was clearly a conflict of interest.

  The only ethical way for a reporter to handle being in her position was to disclose it to her editor, take her chances, and hope her boss would let her cover the stories despite the collision of her professional and personal lives.

  Had she done that?

  If she had, wouldn’t the editor have taken her off the story?

  Certainly, she hadn’t written about the men’s involvement with the society in her stories. And from what Noah had told me, she had not disclosed it to the detectives working the case.

  Why?

  To hold something back from the authorities in case she needed ammunition? To protect the society? And if that was the reason, if she was keeping her promise to the society, then what was she doing writing the stories?

  On the tape, the auction continued. Even if she were in this crowd, I wasn’t sure I’d recognize her. Most of the women were wearing masks. Timothy stepped forward on the makeshift stage. I’d seen this footage before. It made me more sad this time than it had the other day.

  Was it simply a coincidence that the killer was confessing through a reporter who belonged to the society? But I didn’t believe in coincidences. So Betsy Young aka Liz had to have been chosen to break the stories precisely because she was a member of the society.

  But why?

  On the screen, Tim left the stage with the woman who had won him.
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  At that moment the phone rang.

  “Hello.”

  “Morgan, I’d like you to come down and see what we found,” Noah said. “I’m sending a car for you.”

  Thirty-Nine

  For the second time in five hours, a rookie cop escorted me to the office at the end of the hall. I wondered how one night could last so long.

  “Detective Jordain said he’d be right with you, Dr. Snow.”

  I sat down in the chair opposite Noah’s and stared at the wall I’d seen a week earlier. The collage was different: a new layer of photographs, of another man, had been added. I wanted to turn away but I couldn’t help staring.

  Chicory-spiked coffee perked in the pot and a few beignets, covered in powdered sugar, sat on a white china plate that was definitely not police department issue. It made me smile despite my surroundings. Then my attention was drawn back to the wall. Mixed in with the photographs of the three dead men were papers, notes, newspaper articles and maps. Knowing Jordain, there had to be some kind of logic to the way the ephemera had been arranged, but I couldn’t figure it out.

  The men were so pale. You’d think they were asleep, except living people’s skin is never that color. Looking at death is disturbing. But with the added insult of the sexual focus, it was also distasteful. Humiliating.

  “How did you see those marks?” Noah asked as he walked in, holding a thick stack of photos. I smelled something sharp, chemical. But couldn’t place it.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “It must just be that I’m shorter than the two of you. When I’m sitting here, the shots of the feet are at my eye level. I focused on them. They’re too low for the two of you.”

  “We had enlargements done of all of the backgrounds on every single shot—searching for something, anything, to tell us where the bodies are. And we enlarged all the fullbody shots…but…” He was shaking his head in disbelief, still trying to understand his oversight. “Anyway. You were right.”

  He walked over to the coffee. “Do you want some?”

  “No.” It was going to be well after midnight by the time I got home. I had to be up at six. I couldn’t afford to overdo the caffeine or else I’d just lie there obsessing about Liz or Betsy or whatever I should be calling her. And about Noah.

  It was surreal to be sitting in his office just hours after we’d made love in my apartment. Nothing intimate between us now—just the disquieting photographs.

  “Here, take a look.” Noah laid out half a dozen blowups of the three men’s feet. As he was doing that, Perez and Butler came in. I’d met them both before and we exchanged greetings.

  From the looks of both of them, Noah had called them back to work after they’d gone home.

  “Just in time,” Noah said to them. “Get some coffee, pull up a seat.” He waited until everyone was gathered around the desk.

  “Look.” He said it slow and drawn out, making it sound like two words, not one.

  In the first set of photos the feet were life size. This alone made me shudder. When an image is diminutive, even if you know you are looking at someone who is dead, there is a disconnection because of the size. You can be horrified but it’s more of an intellectual horror.

  As I stared at the full-size feet with red numbers drawn on them like graffiti marring a marble wall, my eyes blurred. I wanted to turn away and protect myself from the images, knowing I wouldn’t be able to forget them.

  The next group of enlargements offered some relief. Each showed only four inches of a man’s right foot. Just an abstract canvas with markings on it. These could have been hanging on the wall of a conceptual art gallery in Chelsea, waiting for some brave collector to snap them up. Now that we were looking at the feet out of context, everyone saw what I had noticed.

  There was a brown, circular mole. In the same spot on each foot.

  Noah slapped another set of shots down on the table. Now the mole, and half an inch around it, had been blown up to fifteen or twenty times its size.

  Clearly, it was not a freckle. Not a mole. It wasn’t even brown anymore, but deep bloodred.

  Scarlet, with black mixed in.

  “It’s a tattoo,” Butler said, shocked.

  “Are those intertwined snakes?” Perez asked, speaking over her.

  Noah didn’t respond to either of them. He was looking at me, because I was looking at those same images and had not said a word, not asked a single question.

  I didn’t have to.

  I was the only person in the room who knew exactly what I was seeing. What appeared to the others to be a circle of snakes was two S’s, one flopped and overlapping the other. Two Ss for the Scarlet Society. And to someone as smart as Jordain, my not asking a question or making a guess was suspicious.

  Forty

  The photographer arranged the lights.

  Harsh white lights.

  Hard to see anything but the glare. Not the face. Not the person. Just the bright white lights. And the voice coming from behind the camera.

  “You look more forlorn in this kind of light. No filters to soften or flatter. But I don’t have any need to show you off or make you look good. That isn’t the purpose of these photographs. Fear is. The kind that wakes you up at fourforty in the morning, when it is still dark, and prevents you from doing anything but lying in bed, tossing and turning, trying to find a cool spot on the pillow, but knowing even if you do, it won’t matter. The worry and anxiety is too deep to let you fall asleep again.”

  Bruce Levin blinked. It was sinking in. He wasn’t dead yet. But he didn’t feel right. He tried to get his eyes to open wider, to make some sense of where he was, but he couldn’t. Someone was touching his chest. His thighs. The fingers felt like ice streaking across his skin. God he was cold. It occurred to him that he must be naked. He couldn’t understand that, either.

  “Don’t worry,” the photographer said to him. Or at least he assumed it was the photographer because he could see a camera looking down at him.

  Bruce couldn’t answer. There was something in his mouth.

  His mouth?

  His mouth was full of—what? It was tasteless and had wicked every drop of saliva from the inside of his cheeks and his tongue.

  “Nothing will hurt. As long as you don’t try to fight me. I don’t like fighting.” A laugh.

  What was so funny? he thought. What kind of lunatic had brought him here and tied him up? More important, why? If he knew why, maybe he could figure out how to get free. But he couldn’t think—not think straight, anyway. He wasn’t sure if it was morning or night or how long he’d been here or even where he’d been before he was here. What had happened? Had there been an accident? Had he been hurt? Were there bandages in his mouth?

  Bruce tried to concentrate on that. He was someone who could always figure things out. Complicated things. But now it was as if part of his memory had been cut out. That had to be the drugs. But what drugs? He’d taken his share of drugs when he was in college, but nothing made him feel this sick.

  It took a huge effort but he managed to open his eyes. And this time he could see just a little bit more. It would have been better if he hadn’t, since what he saw were hospital gurneys with shapes on them. Silent shapes. Naked. Pale. Freezing. How could he know that? He couldn’t. But the air around him was so icy, he was so cold, those shapes had to be equally frigid.

  The light glaring off the steel edges of the scissors blinded him. Christ, that hurt! But he fought against the pain. At least it was distinct. At least it wasn’t hazy the way everything else was. The scissors were coming toward him, toward his face…closer…and closer…and he thought, I should prepare myself for this, but how?

  The fear now was so deep that it was inside of his chest and forcing his heart to race. Christ, he could hear the beating, and then the scissors moved toward his forehead.

  Involuntarily, even though he made a big effort not to, he closed his eyes.

  That’s when Bruce heard the sound. It made no sense given the
rest of what was going on around him. Blades. Cutting. But cutting what? A swish and hiss and after that the sandpaper sound of hair being shorn. His hair.

  Why would anyone want his hair?

  He was dreaming about someone he’d had sex with once. Someone whose body he knew as well as his own, but only the body. It was better to fuck strangers and not know what they were upset about or what their bosses had said to them that morning, and not have to worry about when they would start to expect more: more words, more actions, more commitments.

  He liked his partners to tell him what they wanted him to do with their bodies. It put them in charge. And he liked that because he didn’t have to use his imagination on how to please them. They told him. And by doing so, they took away the one aspect of sex that was the most dangerous as far as he was concerned.

  Women fell in love with you, not because of who you really were, but because of the fantasy you fit. They kept silent and selfish about what they wanted, so you made it up as you went along, and God forbid if you guessed right, you bypassed go and became some fucking sort of hero. And then the only place you could go was down.

  But this way, they made the rules. The women made you move right or left or up or down or lick or suck or bite or come or wait, and there was never the next morning when they’d look at you with their sloppy lovesick eyes and tell you that they had been waiting for you for a long time.

  Because this way, you were no more to them than a dildo come to life.

  He was hard.

  Christ, in this place?

  Tied to this steel bed?

  Freezing his nuts off and scared out of his mind, he had enough blood running through his veins for some drug-induced dream to give him a hard-on?

  No.

  It was the gloved hand that was stroking him. Shit. The photographer’s hand sliding up and down the shaft of his penis, slower and faster and slower, and his body was responding as if none of this horror existed at all.