The Halo Effect

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.

All she had expected was to have to get naked and give the john a blow job, or spread her legs and pretend to enjoy it.

But this? No, she had not counted on this.

The young woman was lying on the bed. The first one they had found on a bed. And somehow that, too, made it worse. For the comfort the bed pretended to offer. For the pain she had to have felt there.

Like the victims before her, she had been dressed in a nun’s habit pushed up to reveal the devil’s handiwork, which in this case included wrapping her naked body in barbed wire. One length of it encircled each leg. Another few yards girdled her torso and spiraled upward around her breasts. And the smallest piece was wrapped around her head. A crown of thorns.

She had been turned into a human pincushion. Everywhere the wire touched her skin, the sharp metal barbs had pierced her skin and she had bled.

The room smelled of the sickly sweet liquid that still oozed out of the hundreds of punctures and dripped down in rivulets, making rivers and streams of blood. It had flowed from her and saturated the white sheets beneath her. Jordain imagined the stain went deeper, past the sheets to the mattress. Did it go deeper still? From the mattress had her blood dripped on the floor and into the carpet and into the wood and then into the ceiling of the room below?

“We might have something here,” Perez said.

Jordain looked away from the rosary that hung from between the woman’s legs, his perp’s very distinguished signature.

“What is it?” Jordain asked when he saw Perez lean over and bag something that had been on the floor. “Is it something we can use? Did he slip up?”

“Hardware-store sticker. Must have come off the wire.”

“Maybe he didn’t notice it.”

“Maybe it got stuck to his shoe.”

“True Value.” Jordain moaned. “There must be what? Two thousand of those stores?”

It wasn’t his style to be negative. To let the frustration come to the surface. But this case was torture. Maybe Morgan Snow would turn up something. Maybe her ability to twist along into the tunnels of someone’s mind would illuminate just one thing that had eluded the rest of them.

He’d call her when they were done. Maybe she would have something to tell him.

“No, you’re right. It is something. It’s a big something. It’s got to be in the area. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut. There can’t be more than a few dozen stores.”

Jordain turned back and looked at the poor girl on the bed, because no matter how hard he tried to make her into a tough street hooker who should have known better, he couldn’t.

She was a kid. Someone’s daughter. Someone else’s sister.

He sighed and leaned against a wall and waited while the photographers finished up.

“You know what is going to happen?” Jordain was only forty years old, but he knew he sounded like someone who had already lived a whole lifetime. It was in every weary syllable and the lethargic cadence of his words.

Perez shrugged.

“We’ll find all the stores that carry this wire. We might even narrow it down to a few stores that have sold this exact length in one purchase. We might even be lucky enough to find the clerk who sold it. But when we look, there will be no credit card to check. You know it will be a cash purchase and, of course, the purchaser’s face won’t be memorable. Who would remember a man who had bought a few yards of barbed wire along with a few other things he’d thrown in there to make certain he was a forgettable customer?”

“Maybe he slipped up with that.” Perez didn’t even wait for Jordain to respond. “I know. Don’t even tell me how unlikely that is. We are dealing with someone who’s as smart as we are. If not smarter. At least so far.”

Jordain looked back at the young woman. Just stared at her for a few seconds. “We could still catch a break on where the nun’s habits come from.”

“How the fuck does a man buy nun’s habits and not be noticed? Even if he was a priest, he would be remembered.”

“Hobart doesn’t think he is a priest. Neither does Morgan. Although she thinks he might have once been a priest.”

“You know, I don’t hold out any hope for what the shrinks think. Mostly they guess. And it’s only after we find the perp that suddenly they claim they always said he was a whatever all along. How often does any of their bullshit make a difference? When was the last time we caught anyone from a profile?”

Jordain shrugged. “It’s a moot point. We don’t know anything. We don’t have anything.”

“We are gonna crack this on the habits,” Perez insisted.

“From your mouth…”

Perez gave him a half smile. The detective was used to Jordain’s appropriating his expressions by now. But it still made him grin to hear the Southern detective with the New Orleans patois use his grandmother’s favorite saying.

While the M.E. and his team worked the scene, the detectives filled out their reports. Then Perez’s cell phone rang.

“Anything?” Jordain asked when the call was over.

His partner shook his head. “Yes, no. They’ve worked their way through another half-dozen religious-supply stores and no luck with the habits yet.”

“But they’ve had that first outfit for two weeks. How long can it take to figure out where the thing was bought?”

“Because he cut the fucking labels out of the habits. And this particular model is the most basic and popular one made. You do not want to know what our guys now know about nuns’ clothes.”

“Well, they better find out a little bit more. The commissioner is getting anxious,” Jordain said. But the truth was, he was the one getting more and more anxious, and his partner knew it.

“It would have been easier a few years ago to track down those costumes. But now that you can buy anything on the Internet…”

Jordain looked away as one member of the M.E. team extracted the bloody rosary from the girl’s vaginal cavity with a pair of tweezers.

“Hey, Perez. You just said something. Costumes. Has it occurred to anyone that these are not real habits at all but costumes? Has anyone…”

But he didn’t have to finish. Perez was already on the phone calling in the suggestion.

Jordain’s eyes returned to the cop who was holding out a new evidence bag for the M.E. tech. The rosary was still hanging in the air. One drop of blood, dark red like a precious stone, hung on the end of the cross, glinting in the light, shining. It held for a few seconds, then fell off and landed on the cop’s shoe.

Only Jordain had seen the spill. And it made him nauseous. Just then his cell phone rang, and he answered it with a sharp “Jordain.” It was one word he pronounced with the full, slow drawl of his hometown. Playing the word for all its music. He’d heard his dad do it for years, and he was barely aware he was doing it himself.

“Hey, boss, I wanted you to know. She’s leaving the club.”

“Alone?”

“Yup. Want me to follow her home?”

“No. Just follow her until you are sure no one else is.”