M J Rose
The Halo Effect
The first book in the Butterfield Institute series, 2004
For Mara Nathan
Halo-1. The circle of light with which the head is surrounded in representations of Christ and the saints; a nimbus.
2. The ideal glory with which a person or thing is invested when viewed under the influence of feeling or sentiment.
3. A more or less circular bright or dark area formed in various photographic processes.
Halo Effect-psychol., the favorable bias in interviews, intelligence tests and the like generated by an atmosphere of approbation. A common error in rating intelligence tests is known as the “halo effect.” If an individual creates a favorable impression by his excellence in one trait, you are apt to rate him near the top in every trait.
And the day came when the risk to remain
tight in the bud was more painful
than the risk it took to blossom.
– Anaïs Nin
1
The first thing she saw were the woman’s feet, so white they looked like the marble feet on the statue of the Virgin Mary with the gold halo that stands in the Catholic church where she attends mass every morning before coming to work at the high-rise hotel on Sixth Avenue. The church where she attended Sunday mass only four hours before. Except these feet oozed black-red blood.
Celia Rodriguez stared, not yet comprehending.
The Virgin’s feet do not bleed, though. Christ’s feet do. Holes through to the soles, spilling blood.
For the love of God.
No. No love here. Blood. Pools of congealed nighttime blood.
These were still only fragments of thought as her mind raced to keep up with her eyes. She could not make sense of this scene. Not yet.
The mosaic of horror seemed to take forever to fall into place, but in reality, from the time the maid walked into the room to the time she finally opened her mouth to attempt-and fail at-a scream, only one minute passed.
Holy Mother of God.
In random order Celia Rodriguez registered that there were fifty-dollar bills, no longer green but soaked dark brown, dozens of them, surrounding the woman’s head. Like a halo. And what she had first thought was a blanket was a voluminous black dress pushed up to show shapely naked legs. No, revealing more. Pushed up farther to reveal a chestnut patch of hair between the legs. Too bare. More naked than naked.
The fifty-year-old housekeeper and mother of three stared, sure that what she saw was a vision of some kind.
The woman’s pubis had been shaved in a particular shape. She knew this shape. But before she could focus on that, she saw that there was blood oozing from there, too. Celia’s eyes shifted from right to left, taking in that the woman’s arms were outstretched in a T position and lying in yet more viscous blood.
Celia could not believe what she saw. None of it. Especially not the shape the hair had been shaved into. She knew this shape. It was engraved on her own heart. It hung around her own neck in gold.
It was a cross.
With that, everything finally slipped into place: the plentiful and flowing dress was a nun’s habit.
The Hispanic woman who opened the door only seconds before fell to her knees and touched the corner of the robe. Her hand came away, stained with bright crimson. She was mesmerized by this horror that made her think of a shrine in the back of her church. Our Lady of Sorrows.
Her eyes returned to the shape carved out of the wiry hair. Why did she have to keep looking there? At that cross. At that blasphemy.
And then she saw more. There was more?
Dripping from the woman’s nether mouth was not just blood, but something that was alive, moving, almost crawling. No, it was a rosary that was dripping blood, drop by drop from bead to bead. The blood had washed over the oval medal of the Virgin and had painted the Christ figure. What had flowed off him had soaked into the carpet. And still it came. And still it came. Christ’s blood. This poor woman’s blood.
The housekeeper opened her mouth and tried to scream but no sound came. She called for her God, and even if He heard her, no one else did.
It would be nearly half an hour before she could make any noise. Then hotel security came, followed ten minutes later by three uniformed policemen. But it would take an hour for Detective Noah Jordain of the Special Victims Unit to get the phone call while he was sitting in a steamy and crowded restaurant in Chinatown, finishing up a spicy bowl of hot-andsour soup and about to start in on a platter of crabs in black-bean sauce.
Twenty-four hours later, Jordain learned that the woman who had been brutally murdered was not a woman of God at all, not married to Jesus Christ or pledged to charity or good works, but rather a call girl who had one prior and had just finished up a stint in prison four months before.
“At least she had a head start at getting into heaven in that outfit,” Jordain said after leaving the autopsy room, while he and his partner, Mark Perez, examined the nun’s habit the woman was wearing.
“Noah, if you say prayers, you’d better start praying,” Perez suggested.
“To help her get in?”
“No, that this isn’t the beginning of something.”
Jordain nodded. He’d already been there, thought that. A murder like this, ritualistic and designed, was not just an act of passion. It was, in all likelihood, the calling card of a psychopath on a mission.
Statistically, things would get far worse before they got any better.
2
“Good girls don’t kiss and tell.” She stroked the cushion she had put in her lap, and the movement of her fingers was mesmerizing.
“Does that mean you’re not a good girl? Or that you aren’t going to tell your story?” I asked.
Cleo Thane laughed. A child’s laugh that was all delight with only an innocent hint of sensuality. “I’m good, but not a good girl.”
To look at her shining blond hair, the flawless skin, the light makeup that highlighted rather than hid, to take in the classic diamond stud earrings and the watch-subtle platinum, not gold-the designer blazer and slacks, the chic shoes and the status bag, you might guess she was an executive at a cosmetic company or the director of an art gallery.
But the night before, this lovely woman had been whispering lies into the ear of a television newscaster whose name you would recognize, while she brought him to a violent orgasm in the back of a stretch limousine with only a thin layer of glass separating them and their hot breaths from the driver. And before she met him, she’d charged his credit card two thousand dollars for the privilege of spending three hours with her.
The contrast of who she was and how she presented herself was just one of the many things that intrigued me.
“Dr. Snow, no matter what kind of gentle words I wrap it up in…I sell sex. That’s what I do for a living. How could I be a good girl?” She kicked off one of her very high-heeled shoes and noticed my glance. Even though I’d looked at her shoes before, she’d never paid attention until today. I made a mental note of that.
“In my line of work, you always wear stilettos.”
“Because they are so sexy?”
“Because they are weapons.”
That was the last thing I had expected her to say. I certainly knew how dangerous prostitution was for street hookers, but the way Cleo had described her extremely exclusive business, the need for weapons hadn’t occurred to me. I covered my surprise. “Other than your shoes, you make a real effort to look like a good girl, don’t you?”
“It’s how I look. Why is that so hard to reconcile? I look like this. And I sell sex. And since I do, I can’t possibly be a good girl, now can I?” By repeating the question, she made it impossible for me to ignore it or how important the issue was to her. We’d talked about this before in the past six months, but there was obviously something about it that we still hadn’t uncovered.