I picked up the menu. I was sick of talking about it. I’d tried to solve it alone in therapy, and then in marriage counseling with Mitch. I hadn’t been able to. We hadn’t been able to. That was that.
Following my lead, Nina picked up her menu, too, and together we read through the two pages of offerings.
“I’ll have the niçoise salad,” she said when the waiter appeared.
“The warm goat cheese salad for me.”
The waiter left.
“You have that look in your eyes, Morgan.”
“What look?”
“The I-should-have-done-better look.”
“No, I have the so-this-is-how-your-life-turns-out look.”
We smiled ruefully at each other.
“For two women who spend their working lives helping people with their sexual problems, we can be pretty pathetic.”
We both laughed.
“Better luck next time,” she offered.
We clinked glasses. She drank from hers, but I just held mine.
“Do you want a next time?” I asked.
“Sometimes I do. Other times…I’m not sure.” She shook her head.
“I know.”
“But we will.”
“Do we have to? Life is really much easier to deal with if you cut romantic relationships out of the equation.”
She burst into laughter.
Our salads arrived and we dove into the beds of lettuce, attacking the leaves with a voracity that was almost predatory.
“Freedom is just another word for being alone,” she said.
“But being alone means not having to make allowances for anyone else’s screwups.”
“And not having to deal with anyone else’s screwups means never having to clean up after them.”
Nina knew a lot about that.
“Sex and love and marriage and attraction and fantasy, and flirting and seduction, are all other people’s problems-at least for today.” I speared another lettuce leaf with the tines of my fork.
Nina put her lips around an olive and scraped off the meat with her teeth. “Passion is passé,” she said. Then, daintily, with her manicured nails, she put the pit on the side of her plate and just as delicately did not mention that tears were streaming down my cheeks.
6
It was the end of the day for most people, but not for Detective Noah Jordain and his partner, Mark Perez. Tana Butler, the thirty-something officer who was a whiz at noticing things that other people overlooked, had just arrived with her report, and the three of them had work to do. The evening was just beginning.
A fresh pot of coffee perked on a battered table in the corner and Jordain stood above it, waiting impatiently to pour himself a cup.
“The problem with a hotel room-” Tana was saying when Jordain interrupted.
“Don’t even bother telling us. You’ve got too much contamination to know what has to do with our perp and a hundred perfectly acceptable guests,” he said in the slow New Orleans way he had of speaking.
Tana Butler nodded.
“Is there anything you can isolate? Under her fingernails? Toenails? In her mouth, for Christ’s sake?” Perez asked, almost shouting.
Anyone who worked with Jordain and Perez found out quickly that while they were completely efficient, they were extremes. Perez had a quick temper and wanted data even before the evidence was collected. Jordain was thorough. Overly analytical. Almost to a fault. Almost to the point of taking too much time.
The two of them-one laid-back, the other in-your-face- balanced each other out.
Tana flipped through her file. “No, Mark. Sorry. Of course, there are fibers under her nails-from the rug, from the nun’s habit, other detritus from the room. Nothing that helps. Soap residue. Matched the soap the hotel puts out. She took a shower or a bath in the room. Either before he got there or while he was there.”
Jordain paced. “So we know either she liked to be clean or he wanted her to be clean.”
“That’s a hell of a lot to learn. Boy, are we the lucky bastards or what?”
As he did when his partner’s sarcasm went too far, Jordain gave Perez a sidelong glance. Perez saw it, got up, grabbed a can of Diet Coke and popped the tab. He took a slug.
He was addicted to the beverage, but Jordain matched him can for cup of the chicory-laced coffee that he drank all day long.
“The rosary? The nun’s habit?” Jordain asked.
“We are working on it.”
“Not good enough, Tana,” Perez said. “You know that we need a lead while this is fresh. The first forty-eight hours-”
“What about the hotel tape?” Jordain interrupted his partner on purpose. Tana was a professional. She didn’t deserve a lecture just because they hadn’t turned up anything yet.
Perez took another sip of his soda.
“How are we doing on the hotel tapes?” Jordain asked.
Tana looked down at the report on the table. “It’s the same story. A crowded lobby of a midtown hotel. Hundreds of people coming and going. She checked in at five-thirty. Died at two in the morning. He could have come up to the room anytime before, say, midnight.” She shook her head. “Along with about a hundred other people. We’ve got tons of head shots-mostly from the back.”
“Why do these idiots put the cameras in such ridiculous places?” Perez asked.
“It’s worse than that, Detective. Like almost every other hotel, the system is ancient. The quality of the pictures is horrible.”
Jordain sighed and pushed his coffee mug away from him, then pulled it closer and took a long sip.
“Let’s not walk away from the tapes. I want blowups of every man who went up and down every one of those elevators. It might not help us now, but if this guy is a repeater, I want to be ready.”
“There is one thing,” Tana said.
Both men turned to face her. “It’s not much. It looks like the girl was given last rites.”
“Details?” Jordain asked. It was his most-oft-repeated response. Some younger cops, who didn’t know him well enough yet to respect him as much as most people did, called him Detective Details behind his back. Jordain knew about it. And it didn’t bother him in the least.
God, his father had taught him, is in the details. That’s where you solved a case.
“She had a smear of olive oil on her forehead and that’s-”
“We’re both good Catholic boys,” Perez said. “We know priests use olive oil. Blessed olive oil.”
Tana didn’t react to his sarcasm as she continued with her notes. “And she’d recently consumed a small amount of red wine.”
Jordain was up, pouring himself more coffee. “The sacraments? The archdiocese is not going to be happy about this. But we’re going to have to call them.”
“It’s a priest? A priest did this to her?” Perez asked, mostly muttering it to himself. “When I was a kid, there were no church scandals. The sacred was never mixed with the profane. Or if it was, it was so well hidden that no one ever found out. Now there are priests in the news all the time.” He walked to the window. “Do you think it’s a priest doing this shit?”
“I don’t know. It could be. But it could also be someone who was a priest,” Jordain said. “Or someone who wants us to think he is a priest,” he added.
“Okay, let’s get on it,” Perez said. “We’re looking for a male. Probably Roman Catholic. New York metro area. Usually they don’t stray too far from home.”
7
Because it was raining when I left the office, I hailed a taxi and popped a peppermint into my mouth before I opened the door. I have a very sensitive sense of smell, and taxis often harbored too many stale scents. But with the candy in my mouth, most of them could be diffused.
I gave the driver the address of my apartment on the corner of Madison Avenue and Eightieth Street, and then opened my briefcase and pulled out the package Cleo had given me.