Of all the horrors, it was the sight of her feet that made Noah sad. The wrinkled soles were small. There was something so fucking innocent about the woman’s feet. He wished he could wet a towel and wash them off, clean them of the offending finger-painting of a devil.
Something was moving between her legs.
No. That wasn’t possible. He focused. Even before he consciously figured it out, memory informed him of what it was going to be. He should have been prepared, because it had been there at the first bloodbath.
Like a reptile, like a living thing, the rosary dangled between her legs, half stuffed into her vaginal cavity, half exposed, and dripping with the poor whore’s blood.
It was the constant trickle that caused the holy prayer beads to sway to some rhythm that Noah did not recognize from anything he had ever played.
No one would have listened.
Down each bead of the rosary, down over the medallion of the Virgin Mary, down over the Christ figure on the cross, drops of blood fell to the floor, where they pooled on the white tiles.
Like Mrs. Rodriguez, the maid in the hotel on Fifty-sixth Street, Noah subconsciously intoned a prayer: Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.
Taking a few steps forward, he stood as close to the dead woman’s body as he could without contaminating the crime scene and looked down into the oversize bathtub. Its gleaming silver taps reflected her face, with its closed eyes, back at him.
On the bottom of the tub were ten fifty-dollar bills, soaked in blood, laid out in the shape of a cross.
The photographer had arrived and Noah stepped out of the bathroom to give him room to do his job. Noah and his partner talked to the uniformed cop who had arrived first on the scene, asking him questions and listening to his detailed answers.
“She checked in last night at 10:00 p.m.”
“Not dressed like a nun, I’m guessing,” said Noah.
“The desk clerk who was on duty isn’t here. But I’ve got his name and home phone number. Do you want it?”
“We’re done,” the photographer said, coming out of the bathroom. “She’s all yours.”
Tibor Mercer, the M.E., took over then, making a preliminary examination before moving the woman. He was a middle-aged, overweight man with curly red hair and had been with the department for his entire career. After being an expert witness in an important televised trial, he had become one of the most trusted M.E.s in the country, appearing on crime shows and being quoted in newspapers. But even with all his experience, he had never become hardened by his job, which earned him the respect of many of the people who worked with him. Including Noah Jordain.
Finally Mercer pulled her away from her porcelain prie-dieu.
“How long do you think she’s been dead?” Noah asked.
“Probably died shortly after midnight.”
Noah watched the man do his job. A few minutes passed.
“Look at this.”
Noah knew Mercer well enough to not like the sound of his voice. “What?”
“See for yourself.”
The M.E. held the prostitute’s mouth open with his plastic-sheathed fingers. Noah peered in and saw a communion wafer.
No. That wasn’t what it was, damn it.
On the corpse’s tongue, the same shape as a wafer blessed by a priest, was a perfect, carefully placed, pristine and unused condom, still coiled and flat. A circle of pale, translucent latex.
As if in the hour of her death, she was taking communion.
After all, it was Sunday morning.
11
After I dropped Dulcie at drama school on Monday, I started to walk uptown to my office. On the corner was a trio of kiosks holding the morning papers. While I waited for the light to change, I scanned the headlines on the New York Times, but it was the three words on the front page of the New York Post that screamed out at me.
Second Holy Horror.
And then in smaller letters: Magdalene Murderer Strikes Again. Hooker Slain in Nun’s Habit.
I put two quarters in the slot, pulled the handle, and the smell of the ink wafted up from inside the metal cage.
I read the article, missing the first green light and the next. According to the reporter, the murder was almost identical to the first crime, which had occurred a week before.
This woman had also been found in a midtown hotel frequented by business people and tourists. Rooms went for two hundred dollars. She, too, had paid for the room with cash. No one had seen who she was with. There were no discarded clothes found in the room, and the desk clerk claimed that he had most certainly not seen a woman in a nun’s habit signing in.
Her name was Cara De Beer. Twenty-two. From Austin, Texas. Had been working in New York since she’d left high school at seventeen. She had two priors.
In as lurid language as the reporter could use, he described the nun’s habit, the pools of blood left on the bathroom floor-he had gotten to the room after the body had been taken away-and he quoted one of the cops as saying that “a rosary had been inserted into one of her body cavities.”
But the police wouldn’t elaborate. Just as they had not said any more about the first woman who had been found the week before. The rosary might have been in the hooker’s mouth, her ear or any other opening.
I reread the woman’s name and her stats. I didn’t know this one. She wasn’t one of the women I’d ever treated in prison. Moving on to the next paragraph: “Someone is obviously targeting prostitutes,” said Detective Noah Jordain of the Special Victims Unit. “And we urge every sex worker to be careful. If anyone has any information, please come forward. We need to catch this man.”
I shut the paper but held on to it.
I wasn’t smelling the newsprint anymore. The scent of blood was in my head. We have all smelled it. A bad cut, a birth, our baby’s bloody nose, our periods. Not the violent bloodletting described in the paper. But that didn’t matter. The odor of blood does not change according to why it flows. I watched people passing by, but they didn’t distract me from the imagery of the girl’s death. We have all seen so much violence on television and in the movies that it has become too easy to picture a body on the floor, the pools of blood, the lifeless face.
I wanted more coffee. No, needed more coffee. And stopped at the first Starbucks I passed and ordered a double espresso.
For the past few nights I hadn’t slept well. Not since Dulcie had burned her arm. Not since the divorce had gone through. Even though my daughter hadn’t had any pain, I had kept waking to check on her. My own arm had throbbed worse in sympathy than the actual injury, and the phantom ache had kept me awake. And when I couldn’t fall back asleep, I’d been reading Cleo’s book, but was still a hundred pages shy of finishing.
As she had warned me, Cleo hadn’t done a very good job at disguising the men. While she had given them all nicknames, like Midas or King Henry or Valentino, she had written so much about the businesses they ran or their occupations that I was engaged in playing a guessing game.
No wonder Caesar was nervous about her publishing this book. Once the men she’d written about discovered their private lives were going to appear in ink, there would be a lot of anger and fear among them.
Her exposé was not like one of those bestselling suspense novels by Dan Brown, Doug Clegg or Stan Pottinger that kept me turning pages. Instead, Cleo’s insights into the men who came to see her and her “troupe,” as she called the prostitutes who worked for her, were too rich and complicated to read quickly. If she wanted to become a therapist or a sociologist or write more books on the same subject, she would have no trouble. Her writing style was simple but clear, and her passion for and knowledge of the subject matter came through. Her empathy for the other women who worked in the industry was sincere, and she understood them and explained their lives in a refreshingly unmelodramatic yet dramatic way.