The Venus Fix

Five

Detective Noah Jordain, of the NYPD Special Victims Unit, leaned against the Jefferson Parish courthouse. His cell phone was wedged between his ear and shoulder while he sipped a cup of real New Orleans coffee and waited for his partner, Mark Perez, to get back on the phone.

Watching the street traffic, he squinted against the sun’s brightness, put the cup down on the stone ledge of the building, pulled his sunglasses out of his pocket, and put them on.

Coming back to New Orleans, his hometown, had always been bittersweet, but since the hurricane it was also surrealistic. How could so much have changed? So much still be left to do? And yet feel the city’s spirit so alive?

Across the road a light-skinned man wearing jeans, a short-sleeved white shirt and sunglasses walked down the block for the second time since Jordain had been standing there. Something about the way he swaggered alerted the detective.

It was most likely nothing, but he couldn’t be too sure. The Hatterly trial had made a lot of people angry five years earlier, and now that the defendant’s lawyers had won an appeal, those same people were getting angry all over again. Much of it was directed at Jordain, whose incriminating testimony had been critical to the prosecution before and would be again.

To be more precise, which Jordain always was, the papers were reporting that he’d been the nail in Louis Hatterly’s coffin. Everyone expected that same nail to be driven back in again.

Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Perez got back on the line and continued describing the brand-new nightmare where he’d left off. “All over the country, 911 operators started getting calls. According to the guys watching the Web cast, one minute she was playing with herself, the next she was sick. That lasted for about a quarter of an hour. Some of them were more specific about what sick meant, some less, but it sounded pretty brutal. Then she dropped offline.”

“How many calls were there?”

“Over 150. Jersey City operators took twenty-two. Dallas took thirteen. Syracuse, twelve. Eighteen in New York. You want me to keep going?”

“I don’t know, you want to keep going?”

“Not unless you have a while,” Perez quipped. “The calls started on Thursday night. Most of them were logged by Friday a.m. A few are still dribbling in.”

“Four days later?”

“Guilty consciences.”

“If calls were taken all over the country, we’re handling this out of New York why?”

“A few of the guys described the top of a building they could see out of her window. Three of the New Yorkers identified it as the Met Life tower.”

“And it took us until today to get this because…?”

“You don’t really want to go into that now. You’d much prefer I keep filling you in on the more important information. It’s just bureaucratic crap that will raise your blood pressure, and you have to go on the stand in a few minutes. Instead, I’m going to tell you that no one has any idea who the girl is or where she is or anything about her except for the URL where the guys went to see her little show.”

“You getting details?” Jordain asked.

It was his most oft-repeated phrase and there were cops both in New Orleans-where he’d worked until five years ago-and in New York who called him Detective Details.

“The URL is registered to a porn site registered to a holding company, which is owned by another holding company, which is owned by a corporation in China, and communicating with them is taking some work. It’s all going to come back to some guy sitting in an office right here in Manhattan or L.A. or New Jersey. You know it is. But we have to circle the world first.”

“Is there anything that suggests foul play? Could the woman have just been sick? Or could it be suicide?”

“The descriptions of how the illness was presented suggest poison. Self-inflicted is possible, but unlikely. Add that to the sex angle and we hit the jackpot. Besides, they know that we have absolutely nothing else to do.”

“Funny, funny man. Okay. I’ll be finished here by two and should be on a five o’clock-” Jordain broke off. The stranger in the cap was walking down the street again, now for the third time. “I’ll call you and see if you need me to come in.”

“No need tonight. We don’t have enough.”

“Yet.”

The man crossed over and was heading toward him. Jordain’s hand moved to his waist and rested on his gun. It was an unconscious move.

Nothing happened, though. The man sauntered by, not even glancing at him. But while Jordain had been paying attention to the man in the glasses, he hadn’t noticed the woman who was now standing right in front of him.

“You aren’t ever wrong, are you, Detective?” Mrs. Hatterly, the defendant’s mother, was in her sixties, with white hair pulled back off a face that was deeply etched. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she was trembling. She stood so close to him that he could smell her sweet perfume.

“Perez, gotta go.” Jordain snapped the phone shut. “I’m sorry for everything you’ve had to go through, Mrs. Hatterly.” His New Orleans drawl made the word sorry stretch all the way out.

“What I’ve had to go through is nothing. It’s my son who is suffering. Because of you. Because you are so sure you’re right. Don’t you realize that your being right is what got my son convicted-”

A young man came over and put his hand on the woman’s arm. “Mom, let’s go inside.”

But Mrs. Hatterly wasn’t done with Jordain yet. “You’re so sure. But what if you are wrong? Haven’t you ever been wrong? Haven’t you-”

Her son pulled her away just before her angry fists reached Jordain’s chest.

He sighed. Other cops claimed they got used to people’s pain, and he envied them for that. But becoming hardened took its toll in other ways.

He watched until she was gone from sight, and then he, too, headed toward the courtroom.

It took some effort. And not because it was so hot out and the air was so heavy. He loved that air. No, that wasn’t why. This case had been bad enough the first time. Having to go through it all again was bringing back ghosts, because during the last trial, his father, Detective André Jordain, had died.

Jordain had been back to New Orleans often since moving to New York. He’d been to the cemetery where his dad was buried. But this was different.

He couldn’t stop the memories from washing over him. The defendant’s mother had shook him up, and whenever he was unnerved, the dam he’d erected to keep the past from seeping into the present leaked.

Jordain passed through the cool lobby and proceeded to the courtroom. He stopped in the hallway and looked in. Five years earlier, Jordain had been on that stand when his lieutenant had walked in and stood, as if at attention, at the back of the room. Noah had wondered why he was there. But he didn’t find out until after he had finished his testimony: His father had died.

He stared at the spot where he’d been when he’d heard. The ghosts were demanding their time.