Her eyebrows came together and her eyes narrowed. “You are still doubting my judgment?”
“You taught me to look at every side of an argument when dealing with patients. To assume nothing. But you’re being stubborn about this.”
“Morgan, do you know the name of any person who is going to be targeted?”
“You know I don’t.”
“Do you know the name of anyone who is targeting members of this society?”
“I don’t. One of the women in the group thinks she might. But that isn’t the point.”
The light changed and we crossed together, still in step.
“It is. What you should be doing is working with these women to help them deal with their grief and counseling them about how they feel about their activities. And while you are doing that, you should be working on your paper about the changing level of sexually aggressive behavior among women who have assumed high levels of power.”
“Do you care that four men have been killed by some madman?”
“You’re insulting me, Morgan.”
“I can’t believe you are being so stubborn.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not as black and white as you are making it out to be. These men are being killed. The only thing they have in common is the Scarlet Society. One of the members of that society is a reporter who is breaking the stories, who shows manic tendencies and exhibits signs of stress and guilt. And who has hidden her profession from the other group members and hidden her knowledge of what ties the men together from the police and the New York Times. Add to that another member who told me tonight about some guy who was paranoid and possibly bipolar, who had left the group before the killings started, and who seemed to have a lot of anger toward several of the other male members. So that’s two possible suspects. And the police don’t know about either of them.”
“The police know the reporter. You told me they do. And I’m sure they think she’s a suspect.”
“Based on the fact that she’s breaking the stories. Yes, possibly. But they’d take that much more seriously if they also knew she’d had sex, for God’s sake, with every one of those men, is feeling completely unattractive and is jealous of the younger women in the group.”
We’d stopped for another light. The wind blew and a crimson leaf fell off a tree and across Nina’s face. She brushed it away and it drifted to the pavement.
“We have a job to do, Morgan. That job does not include doing the work of the New York Police Department.”
“We are doctors. Our job includes saving people’s lives.”
“That’s very naive. We just do the best we can. We’re not superheroes.”
“I agree with you. That’s why we can’t make decisions like the one you are making. In other words, we have to remain silent at any cost?”
But the light had changed and Nina had started crossing the street. She hadn’t heard my question. Or she hadn’t known how to answer it.
Fifty
He had only slept for four hours, and fitfully at that, because he was anxious. The New York Times was always delivered to his apartment door at five-thirty. Would there be another article this morning? Another mention of the last murdered man? Another criticism of how long the police were taking to make any headway with the cases?
He padded into his kitchen in his Frette terry-cloth robe and turned on the kettle. While the water boiled, he took out a Limoges cup and saucer, a silver teaspoon and a box of loose black tea. He filled a bamboo basket with the tea leaves, pinched a sprig of mint off the plant on his windowsill, rinsed it and dropped it in the cup just as the kettle started to sing.
As he poured the water, he heard the thud of the paper on his doormat and left the tea to steep while he retrieved the Times.
Sitting on the couch, the cup on his coffee table, he scanned the front page. Nothing. It took about five minutes to search through the National section and the Metro section, looking for any press about the Scarlet Society murders.
Nothing.
This was going to ruin his day. Was going to make the low-level depression he never escaped escalate to midlevel.
No. He couldn’t give in.
Abandoning the paper, he returned to the kitchen, heated up the water again, toasted an English muffin, slathered it with raspberry jam from Fauchon in Paris, and took his breakfast back into the living room. He knew what to do. He’d done it before and it had helped.
Half of the muffin in hand, he stood in front of the wall of articles and, beginning with the very first, reread them. He didn’t skip a word, and paid even more attention to the sentences he’d underlined with the red marker. Some particularly pleased him; others annoyed him.
He had read each of these articles dozens of times by now, but it still never got boring. He loved seeing the black type on the newsprint, the way the serifs bled into the paper, the way the lines marched like soldiers up and down the page, in perfect formation. More than once, he lost the meaning of the words, forgetting that each connected to the next to make a phrase, which added to the next made a sentence, which added to the next made a paragraph. Instead, he saw the straight lines and curved forms, the dots and dashes and negative spaces between them. He ran his finger over the designs, seeing the patterns in the way the margins broke and how the indents made holes. And there was the abstract design of his marker-the only color amid the monochromatic type. An artist, he appreciated the way he’d slashed through the colorless information with red, marking all mentions of when the loved ones had last seen the victims alive and what the mood and manner of the men had been. He’d also highlighted direct quotes from the police-specifically Detective Noah Jordain. No matter how well he couched what he said, it was all too clear to Paul that Jordain really had not made any inroads in identifying a suspect or discovering the whereabouts of any of the bodies.
Paul had starred-again in red marker-every instance in which the reporter had hinted at what the connection between the men was. It was very subtle. He wondered how many people had picked up on it. Had the police?
“The scarlet numbers on the bottom of his feet were…”
In each article, Betsy Young had referred to the color of the markings that way. It was always scarlet. Not red, which would have been a much more obvious choice. Or vermilion, which probably would have been the choice of anyone educated in the study of color. Not bloodred, which would have been slightly flowery for the New York Times, but a possibility considering the crime.
No. She had used scarlet as her adjective of choice.
Who was she, and what did she know?
He thought of going down to the Times offices and meeting her. Trying to trick her into revealing her knowledge of the Scarlet Society.
But how?
He resumed rereading.
There was one section he’d accentuated for entirely different reasons. He looked at these two paragraphs now, focusing on them, wondering yet again about this sexpert and how smart she really was.
Dr. Morgan Snow, a sex therapist who works at the Butterfield Institute and who was instrumental in solving the recent Magdalene Murders, said that there are signals in photographs the paper has chosen not to run that these might be crimes of a sexual nature. In one, an unseen photographer shot directly between the victim’s legs. There is black-and-blue bruising on the victims’ wrists, ankles and testicles. This, said Dr. Snow, strongly suggests a sexual component to the crimes.
“Black-and-blue discoloration often indicates S & M. Restraints can heighten both the sense of control and submission in sex play,” said Snow.