The Venus Fix

Eighty-One

While I made coffee, trying to focus on the ratio of grounds to water, Nina called Stella. It was, by then, almost two in the morning and Stella wasn’t answering the phone. That wasn’t a surprise. Many people let their machines pick up in the middle of the night. My own phone had rung twice since ten-forty-five that night, and while I’d checked the caller ID both times-Noah-I hadn’t answered either call.

Nina left a message, asking her old friend to please call whenever she got the message. She left her cell number, even though she told me when she got off the phone that Stella already had it.

I poured the coffee. “We need to talk to the police,” I said.

“We can’t. You can’t. You know you can’t.”

I sighed. When it came to the police, Nina took the fine line and then doubled and tripled it, so that it wasn’t that fine at all, but was thick and much harder to cross. We’d been through this before.

I didn’t want to have an old argument with her again. Not that night. Not at two in the morning. “Nina, three women have died. A fourth almost died. How can you justify my keeping silent?”

She waved me off. “Amanda is your patient. You can’t call Noah.”

“We have to do something.”

“As long as you leave Amanda-and the CD-out of it.”

“If I don’t give them the CD, they won’t have anything to go on.” My throat hurt, my nose was running. It was late and I was exhausted. But I couldn’t give up. There had to be some way to do the right thing without crossing that damn line. “What if we can get Stella to go to the police and tell them about what Amanda and her daughter did?”

“That we can do. When we see her, when we tell her what’s happening, we’ll advise her to call the police. To tell them about the CD, about Simone, about the Web-cam girls Simone and Amanda copied. All right? Will that work? Isn’t that better?”

It was a compromise. One that I thought I could live with.