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.
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.