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 outside 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.