The Venus Fix

Seventeen

That afternoon when Officer Butler got back to the station house, she read the note on her keyboard and immediately did as it asked: she proceeded directly to Jordain and Perez’s shared office. When she got there, they were both on the phone.

Perez motioned for her to sit. After a few seconds, Butler realized they were on a conference call, talking to someone about the candidate search going on for a forensic psychologist to replace Fred Randall, who’d retired to teach at the police academy.

While they discussed their reasons for rejecting the latest candidate, Butler inspected the scarred wooden table where she sat. Nothing in the room was in worse shape than the table, but Jordain refused to have it replaced. “It gives the room some character,” he always said when anyone complained.

She liked that about him. As demanding as he was to work for, he had an artistic streak that she admired. She admired him as a detective, too, but there weren’t many officers who played the piano, cooked Cajun feasts, and cared about things like character in a table.

Her boyfriend teased her that she had a crush on him, but it wasn’t true. Jordain was too dark. He didn’t joke around enough for her to like him that way. But as a boss, he was fine.

“Okay, let’s hear what you have,” Jordain said in a voice that was calming, as if he knew that she needed a little encouragement.

She opened a file and began her report. “Of course, suicide seems unlikely, but to rule it out-no one in her family, or any of her friends, thought she was depressed. They’d all seen her recently and often. She had a lot of good girlfriends, was close to her widowed mom and her younger sister, and her teachers had very good things to say about her.”

“Teachers?” Jordain interrupted. “You went back that far?”

“No. She was still a student. An art student, getting her masters at Pratt, in Brooklyn. Only one of her friends knew about the Web-cam work. Said she had plans to stop in another few months, when she’d paid off the last of her loans.” Butler watched Perez jot down a few words on a yellow pad with a tooth-marked pencil. It was the only kind of writing instrument he ever used, and the only paper he ever wrote on.

“Were those her paintings?” Jordain asked.

Butler thought there was a deeper level of sadness in his eyes since he’d found out what she studied. “Yes.”

“They weren’t that bad.”

Butler nodded, not surprised he’d noticed the details.

“Her mom said Debra had sold two of her paintings recently, and that a Chelsea gallery was interested in taking her on. She said she was sure that by mid-summer Debra would be supporting herself from her art.”

“Her mother knew about the Web cam?”

Butler looked straight into Jordain’s eyes. “No, it was bad enough telling her that her daughter was dead…” She shook her head.

Jordain gave Butler a minute. He knew she was a professional and would get through this. It happened to them all. Every once in a while someone just got to you. It could be a little thing-a locket hanging around an elderly woman’s neck with a faded baby picture inside. The connection could help the cases, made you work harder, even when you didn’t think you could work any harder.

“Nothing to suggest that the Web-cam work was depressing her?” Perez asked.

Butler shook her head. “The friend who knew about it said there were no signs of that. If anything, quite the opposite. Since Debra was getting ready to quit, she had been happier than she had been in a long time.”

“What about a guy? There’s usually a guy. At least that’s what women tell me all the time. It’s all our fault.” Perez laughed.

“There was a guy. Until about six months ago. She broke up with him. He was freeloading, but Maxi-that’s Debra’s friend-said she was fine about the breakup. She’d dated some since then, but no one special. Her painting seems to have been more important to her than just about anything else.”

“Sounds good,” Perez muttered, and then jotted down some more notes. “But that doesn’t mean it is. It wouldn’t be the first time someone said she was a friend and knew the inside scoop when she really didn’t know squat. So I wouldn’t rule out suicide yet.”

“That’s a pretty complicated way to kill yourself,” Butler said.

“Not if you wanted to make a statement. Not if the very job you were doing was making you hate yourself,” Perez responded. “You’d do it so that everyone out there in cyberland could watch you slather lubricant on your dildo and play with it, then die a disgusting death online.”

“But she wasn’t depressed,” Butler argued.

“Enough guessing. Let’s talk details. Was there any atropine in the apartment? Any recent visits to a hospital? Prescriptions on record for any eyedrops?” Jordain asked.

Butler shook her head.

“Nothing?”

“Nope.”

“I think it’s unlikely an artist would choose to die that way,” Jordain said. “In front of a camera? Recording a hideous death? A visual person wouldn’t have wanted to be seen that way.”

Butler nodded.

“So that leaves us with an accident or a murder. What about the lubricant? Any way the factory could have screwed up the formula?” Jordain asked.

“No. It’s just a simple water-soluble glycerine-based product. The factory doesn’t use atropine. At all. Ever,” Perez answered.

“So what do we have? A lunatic who is tampering with products? Does that mean we can expect more of these in the next few days?”

“How ’bout it, Butler? You sure there’s no one in her life who wanted her killed?” Perez asked.

She shook her head. “I’ll keep looking, talking to people. I’ve only been on this for two days, but she looks like what she was…a sweet kid who wanted to be a painter.”

“And who just happened to make her living doing Internet porn,” Perez finished.

“That doesn’t mean she wasn’t a sweet kid who wanted to be a painter.” Butler’s voice was slightly tense. “She just wasn’t that complicated. Jeez. She was twenty-three. A smart kid from a normal neighborhood on Staten Island. No drugs. No abortions. No big problems with her parents. She had good friends whom she’d known for a long time. Even the boyfriend. Nothing stellar, but clean.”

“Okay then,” Jordain said as he scribbled something down.

“What do I hear in your voice?” Perez asked.

“We’re going to need to get a court order.”

“For what?” Butler asked.

“I know it could be product-tampering and that Debra just happened to buy the wrong tube of jelly, but there are thousands…tens of thousands…hell, maybe there are hundreds of thousands of men who have been watching her and drooling over her the past four years. I think we’re going to have to investigate her online swains. Her e-mail address is right on her site. Anyone could have contacted her. I don’t want this to be true because it’s going to turn the next couple of days into a full-time nightmare, but that’s where we go from here.”

Perez was nodding. Butler rubbed her forehead, as if she was getting a headache.

“We’re going to need to read her e-mail, listen to her phone messages, go over her phone records, and then cross-check everything with the porn company’s records. They’re not going to like showing them to us. But I’m betting that one of her admirers sent Debra that lubricant and asked her to use it for him. On camera. So he could watch.”