The Delilah Complex

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.