The Venus Fix

Nine

The apartment, on 17th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, was just one room, twelve sorry feet wide by fourteen pathetic feet long. The only thing that saved it from being unlivable, Jordain thought, was the magical view out the window, where the tower of the Met Life building sparkled like a beacon.

There was a bathroom but no separate kitchen. Everything-bed, table, small refrigerator, smaller stove, still smaller sink-was crammed in. But it was astoundingly clean. Spotless tub and toilet. Not even a stray hair in the sink.

That made the stench all the more horrific. It made the sight of the young woman, folded up on herself, fallen out of her chair, all the sadder.

Jordain watched the forensic team preparing the body for removal.

“How old?” he asked the medical examiner who was leaning over the girl.

“Twenty-three.”

“She looks younger.”

“Yeah,” the ME agreed.

Jordain looked away from the woman’s bloated face to the shocking pink plastic dildo on the floor beside her left foot, the color of the sex toy too bright for the solemn occasion. He looked up at the wall and at the paintings. Three canvases, each of a nighttime Manhattan skyline. They weren’t bad.

“You read the descriptions of the symptoms she exhibited?”

The ME nodded.

“Any educated guesses as to what it might have been?”

Sam Gordon looked up. “Noah, give me some time. Don’t make me guess what happened until I at least run some tests.”

“But your instincts are so right on that I thought-”

Gordon held up his hand. “Buttering me up won’t get me to speculate. I need some time.”

“Time. Yeah. Sure, you take your time. After all, it’s not your fault it took so fucking long to find her.” Jordain’s voice was full of recrimination.

Across the room, Perez looked up. “Hey, it happened. Calm down.”

Jordain shook his head. “It shouldn’t have.”

Officer Tana Butler, who was standing at the woman’s desk dusting her computer for prints, heard Jordain’s complaint and turned around to explain. “The calls were too scattered, boss. They came from all over the country into local police stations and no one noticed the pattern for the first forty-eight hours.”

“I heard.”

“Then finding the company that owns the company that owns the porn site wasn’t easy. Did you know that a subpoena issued in New York City, even to a company that does business as New York Girls and employs some New York girls, doesn’t mean much to a group of guys working out of a parent company in Shanghai called Global Communications?”

“Excuses,” Jordain muttered as he watched the forensic team lift the body. He’d seen this ritual enough times that he should be inured to it. But on occasion something would get to him. Like the lock of hair that had fallen across the young woman’s forehead as they put her into the bag. He wanted to brush it back, get it out of her eyes.

Butler was still quoting statistics. “Approximately five thousand men logged on to Penny’s Web site during the last hour of her shift. That doesn’t mean they all saw the end of her performance. Some of them no doubt left their computers because of phone calls or wives coming home, or because they just weren’t in the mood. There’s no way to know how many men might have still been watching during the last fifteen minutes, when she actually got sick. But certainly, men were signing on at various points throughout her performance. She’s usually on for at least an hour and a half. She got sick after forty-five minutes.”

“These guys were sitting in front of their screens, their eyes glued to Penny’s bare breasts, wide eyes and wet lips, and they listened to her moans and dirty chatter and watched her get sick and didn’t do anything about it? What did they think?”

“Well some of them thought she was getting a flu or had food poisoning,” Butler said.

“Or that it was a kinky new game she was playing,” Perez said.

“I still don’t understand why it took so long for us to find her,” Jordain said. “From the report, within the first twenty-four hours, fifty calls had been made. Within forty-eight hours there were hundreds. I know the calls meant nothing without the woman’s name and address. But she was online, for Christ’s sake. Wasn’t there a way to trace her connection?”

“Sure. If her connection had stayed live,” Butler answered.

“I didn’t hear about that. What happened?” Jordain asked.

Butler plugged the power cord back into the laptop. A red light came on. “It looks like her battery died.”

So it had taken five days from the time the first phone call had been logged to find the woman whose screen name was Penny Whistle, and whose ad claimed that she’d “Wet your Whistle, so good.” That had been one hour and twenty-four minutes ago. At that point, the police had realized that Penny was the same woman whose parents had reported her missing thirty-six hours earlier-just a dozen hours short of what the NYPD requires before starting work on a missing persons case.

“Is there any chance she could have been saved if someone had gotten to her in time?” Jordain asked just before they took the body away.

Gordon, who was at the door, turned, looked back and shook his head. “I won’t know that until I know what killed her. Besides what good is knowing?”

No one needed to answer.

“And there is absolutely no sign of anyone breaking in?” Jordain asked even though he knew the answer.

“And no sign that anyone was here with her,” Perez said.

Jordain couldn’t stop staring at her, asking her questions in his head.

Did you kill yourself? Or did you get sick? It couldn’t have been that sudden. Why didn’t you call someone before it got too bad? Didn’t you realize how sick you were? Or did someone do this to you?

Jordain shook his head. At no one. Or at her ghost, who couldn’t answer, anyway. They’d find out eventually. As if it would matter to her. As if it would matter to anyone who loved her.

If she hadn’t died from an illness or an accident-if someone had done this to her-then at least they might be able to protect another life. That was what you had to focus on. His father had always said it. And Jordain knew it was true. “Your job isn’t to punish, it’s to protect.”

Perez nodded at the laptop Butler was dusting. “There’s got to be information on there that can help us.”

Jordain looked over at Butler, and as he did he noticed a small, finely painted, porcelain robin on the floor behind the chair.

“Did you see that?” he asked her.

She hadn’t. Jordain walked over and inspected it. A simple painted porcelain bird. A lovely thing, except for a chip in one wing. Had that happened when it fell? The bird had his head cocked and there was a sparkle in his black eye. Had someone given Debra-her real name was Debra, and the least he could do was call her by her name-this bird? Had it meant something to her?

It didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything to anyone anymore.