“Of what?” I whispered.
“Of being found out.”
I nodded. “What else?”
“To know I’m doing something that could blow the whole fucking lid off my life,” he said.
I wanted to ask him why. To get him to talk about that. I wanted to help him. But I was the honey, not Dr. Morgan Snow. I didn’t have those two letters before my name in here. I didn’t even have a last name. I was just Morgan. Someone whose job was to figure out how to give pleasure.
This was far more confusing than I had imagined. But I couldn’t stop. I needed to understand what kind of danger he meant. How far that danger would go. Would it translate into taking a woman and hiding her away somewhere, or to hurting her, or to making her tell him if she really was writing a book and if he was in it?
It was strange to know things about Judas that he didn’t know I knew. To have read about him and studied his psychology as Cleo had laid it out.
“If it would be okay with you, can you tell me what you’d want me to do? So I can figure out if I’m right for you? If I’m not I can find someone who would be.”
He leaned forward. Even closer. “I’d like to tell you. But first you have to take this.” He pulled out a wad of cash from his pocket and peeled off five one-hundred-dollar bills.
The soft light from the small lamp on the table shone on his money clip, which was in the shape of a snake, curling around itself. The sinuous creature had a small tongue-black enamel-and two tiny ruby eyes. It was unusual, yes, and worth looking at on its own, but what stopped me was that I had read a description of this money clip in Cleo’s book.
But not in the part about Judas.
In Cleo’s book, the money clip belonged to a man she called the Healer-that fifth man, whom Gil hadn’t recognized-and she had described seeing it every time he took it out of his pocket. That fifth man had handed her bills exactly the way Judas had just handed me bills, putting the money in my palm, then closing my fingers around it.
There wasn’t supposed to be a charge for this evening. Gil had explained that. “What is this?” I asked Judas.
“If I am going to give you my secrets, I need to make sure you have an incentive for keeping them.”
If only I could have told him how safe his secrets would be with me. But the question on my mind was, did he trust Cleo with them or was he worried that she was going to tell on him?
I shook my head. “You don’t have to.” I handed the money back to him.
“I want to. Please.” He pushed it back at me.
I didn’t want to make a fuss over the money and disrupt any confidence he was about to share, so I took the bills and put them in my bag. I would figure out what to do with them later.
“You were going to tell me what you liked,” I reminded him with what I hoped was an inviting smile. But what the hell was an inviting smile? How was I ever going to get through meeting four of these men? Or five, if Gil ever figured out who the Healer was.
Judas smiled. “What I like to do is go places. In public. Places where other people are.”
I nodded.
Cleo had listed a few of the places where he had taken her. Into his wife’s chambers once at night. Into the dressing room of a men’s department store in New York. Into an empty room off the stage at the opera the night of a huge fund-raiser while his wife was sitting in their season box. He had gotten Cleo a ticket and a date and had arranged to meet her there.
But I wanted to hear him tell me about it. See if, since Cleo had written about him, he had changed any, if he now needed to push his fantasy, to go closer to the edge of his boundaries.
“Where was the last place you took Cleo?”
The smile on his face wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t suffused with pleasure the way it had been a minute ago when he was giving me money. What was I seeing? Was this a deeper darkness of someone who didn’t have any boundaries?
“I took her to the bank. To the vault. I gave her money. It gave me pleasure. I miss her.” His voice was suddenly thick. He lowered his eyes.
“We all miss her,” I said.
We did. And we were all worried about her. Very worried.
31
At six-thirty the night maid opened the door to room 1543 in the Pallard Hotel, and within twenty minutes Noah Jordain and his partner were speeding out of Manhattan to the large hotel in nearby Newark, New Jersey, both of them hoping that what they were about to find in that room was not another notch in the belt of the man they referred to as the Magdalene Murderer.
For Jordain, this series of crimes was worse than most, if in fact there could be such degrees of horror when you dealt with the depths of depravity. Not only were they more personally disturbing, but he’d never had such a cold case before. So far forensics hadn’t turned up any serious leads.
The M.E. said the murderer hit the women over the head with a blunt object that was slightly convex. After he knocked them out, he strangled them with latex-sheathed hands. They were the kind of gloves you could buy in any drugstore.
Conjecturing, the M.E. also said he didn’t think the women regained consciousness after they’d been knocked out.
At least there was that-they never knew what happened. So they never knew that once they were dead, the man defiled their bodies, dressed them as nuns and posed them in blasphemous tableaux.
Dozens of people had probably seen the murderer passing through the hotel on his way to his assignations. But to them, he was just one more man in the lobby, in the elevator, in the hall.
“We need to get someone to compare the surveillance tapes from all the different hotels and see if by chance the same face shows up more than once,” Jordain said to his partner as he drove across town.
“Oh, great,” was Perez’s sarcastic response.
It was not going to be easy. All they could do was assume the perp was dressed as a businessman so that he blended in and probably carried a small suitcase that held the nun’s clothing and accessories.
“I know.” Jordain nodded. “It’s not much, but he’s not making any mistakes, and so far the hotel rooms are just too damn full of crap. If he’d only picked more expensive hotels with better surveillance, or if some desk clerk had paid more attention to who’d checked in. Or if someone had had a bedspread washed in the last month…” Jordain let the sentence trail off in frustration. There was no point in going over all the scenarios that could make their job easier. So far, the three crime scenes had offered up such a mess of hair, fiber and prints that the lab had not isolated anything meaningful. Inevitably, the same scenario would be repeated at this newest location.
“He has to make a mistake sooner or later,” was the best Perez could offer.
“I want it sooner, damn it.”
“It sure doesn’t help that he’s killing women no one is watching out for.”
The light changed. Jordain nodded and pressed down on the accelerator.
It was a warm night. Breezy, full moon, not much traffic, the lights of the city sparkling as if it were a magical place full of hope, instead of the terrors that Jordain knew were there. For every light there was a darkness. For every window that blazed there was a man or woman who was capable of slipping from grace into garbage.
The church, his church, the same church that ordained men to spread God’s word and women to do God’s work, said that children were born innocent. But as good a Catholic as Jordain was, he no longer believed that. He had seen too much carnage. And he knew he was about to see more.
32
She was young.
Younger than any of the others. Not a line on her face. Not a shadow of age. Not a shadow of life, either.
“Eighteen?” Jordain asked the M.E.
“Maybe.”
They were all jaded, but Jordain still wanted to get down on his knees and cross himself and pray that in her hour of need an angel had come down and eased this woman’s way and she had not known what the monster had done to her.