Through a slit in the closed blinds, he looked out at the mostly residential street, three stories below. The block was undergoing massive change, with many of the old brownstones and parking garages being demolished and replaced by high-rise pricey condo complexes. This little brownstone that Avery had shrewdly purchased for his practice – and apparently for some extra-marital activities as well – for just three hundred thousand dollars nearly thirty years ago was dwarfed by all the new construction.
Janice had it done over after Avery’s death, the examination table gone, the sleek stainless-steel cabinets, autoclave, and sink all gone. Chase had taken many of the surgical instruments for himself; she would have just thrown them out, tens of thousands of dollars of precision German steel, unused boxes of syringes and needles for administering Botox, he’d even kept the cartons of purple propylene gloves, and sutures with which he practiced tying knots. He felt a hint of nostalgia. There was no glamour left, even Avery’s exquisite artwork – Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces – Janice had boxed up and sent to auction. He’d been furious with her, seething that she’d not given him one of the glorious canvases that showed beautiful Renaissance men and auburn-haired women, drawn with intense realism, their perfectly proportioned faces aglow as if lit by rays of sun. She’d said that she couldn’t, that there couldn’t be anything traceable between the two of them.
Now, waiting for Janice to finish prepping Morgan, he sat silent, imagining the room as it once had been, and picturing himself in the role of the surgeon, the central fantasy shifting subtly over time as the details filled in. Powerful, handsome, successful, and rich; he’d have it all. He’d be married by the time he finished medical school. His wife would be beautiful, although he doubted she would be better looking than he, and intelligent. She could also be a little older – like that Dr. Conyors. Before he’d ransacked her office – an exercise in futility as the cells were nowhere to be found – he’d looked her up on the Internet. She was one very hot woman, which was further confirmed by the picture he had of her with her newborn – even then, after the stress of childbirth when most women are drained and look like hell, she’d glowed with a dark beauty as she stared at her baby. Janice, who clearly despised her, had even called her ‘pretty’. But that wasn’t the best of it, she was a doctor and a director of a facility. It would be useful to have a spouse who could support them both. But his prospective wife couldn’t be too old; he wanted children, two of them, and Dr. Conyors with her new baby and breast pump was obviously fertile. He’d found the news story of her dead husband and wondered why there were no other family pictures anywhere in her office – it seemed a wrong note, but maybe she didn’t want people to know too much of her private business. He wondered what her reaction had been when she found her office all torn up, would she be frightened? Janice had wanted him to be discreet … oh well, sometimes she couldn’t get her way, and the longer he’d looked for the cells the more furious he’d become. What had she done with them? Did she even have them?
He heard Janice’s knock. And then her backlit silhouette through the open door. ‘She’s ready. Are you done?’ she asked.
‘Yes, they’re all waiting.’ He followed her into the office. He looked at Morgan slumped in a leather chair, her head had fallen back; her mouth hung open and she was snoring. The girl had wasted no time; she’d called Janice within an hour of leaving his office. She was young, younger than any of the others, exactly the kind of girl Avery Fleet and so many other men found exciting. He’d idolized Avery as a man who’d achieved everything that Chase wanted – power, money, respect … at least that’s what he’d once thought. The truth of his double life had been revealed in layers, like an onion coming undone, after his death.
‘Get her ready,’ Janice said.
Chase noticed eagerness in her eyes, a glitter as though this weren’t just about the money – money that she never split fairly. ‘How much will she bring?’ he asked, tipping the girl’s chair back and dragging it across the rug toward the leather couch. ‘You know she kind of reminds me of—’
‘Don’t,’ Janice warned, as she pulled a wine-colored velvet spread from out of a cabinet and draped it over the sofa.
He waited while she smoothed it out and then he lifted the drugged girl and set her down.
‘The minute she walked in the door,’ Janice said, ‘it was like going back in time; she could have been her sister.’
‘I know; I’ve been her counselor for the past couple years, but it was only recently I made that connection.’ He knelt and pulled off her shoes, noting the poor quality and how the blue-plastic heel on one had pulled away from the sole. Timing his words so that he could catch Janice’s expression, he added, ‘Just like Krista Brent.’ He looked up, noting the lines in her face, the pucker around her mouth and under her nose, and the hollows in her cheeks as she winced. If Avery had still been alive he’d have done something about that, probably several somethings – a total lift, Botox on the forehead, and a chemical peel to tighten the pores.
He unsnapped Morgan’s jeans, pulling them and her purple nylon thong off, while Janice worked away at the striped top, with no bra underneath. ‘I’d always wondered,’ he said, ‘do you remember that night you and Avery took me to dinner?’
‘Of course,’ she said warily, as she stepped back and took an appraising view of the naked girl. She shook her head, ‘These need to go,’ and snapping on propylene gloves, carefully removed the iridescent-purple belly-button ring, and a series of earrings, three on one side and two on the other. ‘At least there are no tattoos.’ And careful not to gag the girl, she opened her jaw, lifted her tongue, and pulled off the backing for the ball-shaped piercing and then the stud. ‘Disgusting,’ and she put it and all of Morgan’s clothes into a black plastic garbage bag.
‘That would have been close to the time you took in Krista.’
‘What are you getting at, Chase?’
From one of the built-in cabinets behind her desk he retrieved a red-plastic tackle box and set it on the coffee table. He clicked it open and lifted back the top tray, which held an assortment of cosmetics. In the bottom was an array of makeup brushes and tubes of foundation. He glanced at the girl and pulled out a shade slightly darker than her skin, squeezed out a generous amount onto a soft pad. ‘Maybe I’m wrong, but I always wondered if you’d been considering taking me in as your foster child.’
‘You weren’t wrong,’ she said, stepping back as Chase rapidly worked over the girl, making any small pimples and blackheads disappear; he gently made up her face, being careful to give her as youthful an appearance as possible with the barest touches of blush on her forehead, the apples of her cheeks and chin. For lipstick he used a translucent pink gloss
‘So why didn’t you?’ he asked, thinking he already knew.
She looked at Chase as he rearranged the girl to appear as if she’d fallen asleep on the couch. ‘It was Avery. He liked you, said you had great potential, but he thought you didn’t need us, that you’d make it through on your own. Krista, on the other hand … he felt she’d been “horribly used by the system”. He wanted to rescue her.’
‘He wanted to fuck her,’ Chase said bluntly, and he went to retrieve his briefcase from the other room.
‘In hindsight, perhaps. Although, he’d said the affair hadn’t started until after she’d turned eighteen.’
‘You believe that?’ Chase asked as he set up the cells on Janice’s desk, all fully charged and on speaker, with the single number to be dialed preset and ready. The last one he’d use to send the video stream.
‘No, I don’t. I knew Avery for over twenty years. In the end he was just a cliché.’
‘Mid-life crisis.’
‘Yes, and a pervert and a child-molester. He got what he had coming. Are you ready?’ she asked.
‘In a second.’ He finished setting up the phones, while keeping Janice in his periphery. There was something in the tone of her voice; she hated this subject, while he found it
fascinating, how in one afternoon both of their lives had been transformed. ‘So he was all those things, and a highly successful surgeon. If you’d not walked in on the two of them fucking, it would have kept going. It might still be going on.’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
‘He said something.’
‘He said lots of things, and because I didn’t say a word he figured it would all work out, that I’d just roll over. Give him a divorce, watch as he married that little tramp, lose my career, my house, probably my license because after all I was supposed to protect that girl from men like Avery. Can you imagine the headlines? For God’s sakes I was the Commissioner of Family and Youth Services. He would have used all of that to buy my silence.’
Chase systematically checked the phones, even though he’d already completed the setup. ‘He actually said he was going to marry her?’
‘I don’t know why we have to go over this. Yes, he said they were in love and that he no longer loved me. He told me that he’d never loved me.’
‘And then you just left them there and went to work.’
‘Chase, drop it. Are you ready?’
He nodded, turned on the video, and adjusted the focus. He thought back to the day eight years ago, and how different Janice had been at his weekly session. At the time she was the newly appointed commissioner, but had kept him and a couple other patients in an effort to not lose touch with the reality of the children and teens she was supposed to serve. That day she’d had a blank look, one he associated with 9/11, everyone walking around not certain of where they were going or what they were supposed to do. Janice had just found her husband screwing their foster child; her world had cracked open, and to keep from falling apart, she’d gone to work. For Chase it had been an opportunity unlike any other. He’d sensed her pain and given her everything she’d needed; it had started with ‘What’s wrong?’ Half an hour later she’d cancelled the rest of her appointments and meetings for the day. Beneath her shock he’d seen the rage, and like a good therapist – God knows he’d met with enough of them – he’d brought it out. ‘He’ll get everything, the money, the house, the pretty young wife. You’ll get nothing.’
‘So what am I supposed to do, kill him? Kill them both?’
He hadn’t flinched as he’d given her his greatest gift, a glimpse inside his mind where everything was possible, and all of the rules that held everyone else inside their ticky-tacky little boxes didn’t apply. ‘It’s what he deserves. It’s what they both deserve. But do it fast. The minute one other person knows about this, it will be too late,’ he’d told her. By the following morning Dr. Avery Fleet would be dead from an unintentional drug overdose and Krista Brent – a troubled girl – had run away from home, as she had done many times before, never to be heard from again.
Now, he looked at Janice, sitting behind her desk, powerful, wealthy, and dependent on no one … but him. He turned on all the phones and dialed. She waited until they’d all picked up. ‘Good evening,’ she said, ‘I hope everyone is well. Are you all receiving the video and can you hear me?’ She paused until four male and three female voices responded with a broad range of accents, Southern, Asian, Middle Eastern, British, and German. ‘Good, I’ll remind you of the terms of sale. Payment is by bank wire, the account number will be provided to the winning bidder at the end of the auction. Payment must be received within an hour of auction’s end, and the merchandise must be picked up within three hours. As you are aware, we do not provide a shipping service. Failure to comply with either term of sale voids the transaction and the auction will be repeated … of course without the offending bidder.’ An Asian woman and the Brit chuckled. ‘Questions?’ There was silence. ‘Excellent, I’m sure you’re all eager to see what’s on the block this evening.’ She nodded at Chase, the Bluetooth function on his phone glowed as he zoomed in on Morgan’s sleeping face, her delicately parted lips. And slowly he panned back revealing more and more of the teenager, who just this morning had been complaining about every portion of her wretched life. He hoped she’d bring a lot of money, and could care less that bad as the girl’s life had been, it was about to get a whole lot worse. He imagined himself in the role of the high-fashion photographers who had once shot his pictures; he let the camera play over Morgan, checking how she was framed in the tiny LED screen. He was conscious of the lights and the glow on her skin; the hot spots and the shadows. He made her beautiful, and was barely aware of Janice in the background.
‘I have an opening bid of one hundred thousand,’ Janice said. ‘Do I hear one ten?’
TEN
It was night and Jerod had turned off the only light in his cell-like room, with its locked door, bolted-down furniture, and wire-meshed window. There was a full moon and it spilled silver light across the waxed floor. The voice in his head was barely there, mostly a noise with no clear words. His thoughts were jangled and while he no longer felt the horrible aches of withdrawal, he wondered if he would survive. Images of Carly tortured him, her by his side, taking his hand as they walked, at times almost skipped, through the East Village. The night she’d entered his room and asked if she could sleep, ‘just sleep’, with him. He’d been barely able to breathe as she settled next to him on his tumbled nest of blankets and sleeping bags. He’d not wanted to scare her, and held back despite his powerful longing. The smell of her hair, the way it tickled his nose. ‘Hold me,’ she whispered, and he did, wrapping an arm around her as they spooned. He knew that she’d been through bad times, all of them had. He’d caught snippets of her story, not wanting to push or to pry. She’d been taken from her home because her mom smoked crack and her father had left when she was still a baby. He’d seen her bare arms – usually kept covered – when she’d shot up. There were old scars tracking up her wrists and forearms; they weren’t needle marks; she cut, she told him she did it with a razor blade, or if she didn’t have one anything she could find, even her fingernails. He stayed awake that entire night, even though he knew it would make the voices worse. He listened to her breath and could tell the point at which she fell asleep. He wondered if in the morning she’d be horrified to find him next to her. She wasn’t. Tears squeezed from his eyes as he remembered how she’d woken; turning lazily into him, smiling and giving him a dry kiss on the lips, ‘My breath is gross,’ she said, and rested her head against his chest.
The memory faded with the sound of footsteps. A female guard looked through the small window in the door, knocked, and softly called his name. ‘Jerod, I need to take you to the infirmary. You need to have your admission physical.’
‘OK.’ He got off the bed, noting a dull ache in his chest.
The guard stood by the door and waited for him to put on his hospital-issue no-tie rubber-soled slippers. ‘They should have done this when you arrived,’ she said, ‘but it’s always like this. Just go ahead and dump on second shift.’
He recollected that a doctor had come into his room earlier in the day and quickly listened to his heart and lungs and made him stick his tongue out, but maybe this was something else, so he said nothing.
He followed the guard through the eerily quiet ward, all the rooms locked. He sensed the others in their cells, everyone watching through tiny windows or lost in their own thoughts or dreams. The guard unlocked the door that led to the nursing and security areas. In front of the nursing station he saw a row of monitors, each one trained on a patient’s room. The nurse on duty wasn’t looking at any of them, but was absorbed in a paperback that had a beautiful woman with fangs and a lot of cleavage sinking her teeth into a handsome man’s neck on the cover.
‘This way,’ she said, ‘it’s kind of a hike.’
He lost track of the twists and turns, the staircases they went down until finally they came to a brightly lit examination room. Inside, a sandy-haired man in his late twenties wearing a lab coat was standing by a stainless-steel counter; he was leafing through a blue plastic binder with J. BLANK written in bold letters down the spine. He looked up, his e
yes bright. ‘Oh, good, you got him. Hi, Jerod.’ He stood and put Jerod’s chart on the counter. He extended his hand. ‘I’m Dr. Nader, if you could take off your shirt and slippers I’ll give you a quick physical.’
Jerod did as instructed, catching the reflection of his tall skinny frame in the glass-fronted cabinets. He sat up on the examination table and watched while the young doctor washed his hands and slapped on a pair of gloves – he seemed nervous.
The doctor glanced at the guard. ‘You can wait outside if you want.’
‘You’re sure?’ the guard asked.
‘Yeah.’ The doctor made eye contact with Jerod. ‘I don’t think Jerod is going to cause any problems.’
The guard left the room and Jerod felt a shiver of something not right about this doctor. It was in his eyes, too bright, but maybe it was just the lighting, and Jerod always had to be careful because it was easy for him to get paranoid. Maybe it was just his imagination that the chatty young doctor seemed jumpy. He followed all of the rapid-fire instructions. ‘Follow my fingers with your eyes, shrug your shoulders, smile, frown.’ He felt a shiver spread across his bare flesh as the doctor examined his injection sites.
‘When did you last shoot dope?’ the doctor asked.
He had to think, it was still Tuesday, he thought about Bobby and Ashley, mumbled, ‘Few days.’
‘How big a habit did you have?’
‘I don’t know, couple bundles a day. However much I could get.’
‘They giving you methadone?’
‘No,’ Jerod said, wondering why the doctor didn’t know this.
‘Interesting,’ he flashed a light in Jerod’s eyes, ‘look straight ahead.’
It was then Jerod made the observation that the doctor’s eyes weren’t right. His pupils were tiny, almost not there.
‘OK,’ the doctor said, as he again leafed through Jerod’s chart. ‘There it is. You’re on Buprenorphine.’
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