The Venus Fix

Friday The final day
Eighty-Two

Noah Jordain had slept like crap. He’d first called Morgan at ten-forty-five and when she didn’t pick up he’d had a patrol car in her neighborhood check with her doorman to make sure she was upstairs and safe. When they reported back that the doorman had buzzed her and she was okay, he knew what the unanswered call meant. As a very conscientious therapist, she always checked her messages. So that meant she was avoiding him. But why?

That question had kept him awake long into the night. He really was tired of her disappearing on him. Of how her work kept getting in their way. Fine, if she didn’t trust him, he’d accept that. He’d walk away from her. He could take the hint.

A half hour after waking up, he was at the gym, where he worked out for as long as he could stand it, then he took a subway uptown. It was three blocks from the train stop to the station house. He trudged through the snow, kicking at it.

Anyone watching would have thought that he was, like millions of other New Yorkers, sick of the relentless storms, tired of wearing boots and climbing over snowdrifts. But that wasn’t it. He was annoyed that Morgan was avoiding his calls, and, beyond the personal disappointment he felt, the way she was acting reinforced his own conviction that Alan Leightman was lying about being the killer.

Damn. What did Morgan know about her patient that she wasn’t telling him? Damn her ethics. He needed the information she had.

At the office, Jordain listened to his messages and searched his e-mail at the same time. There were all kinds of reasons a woman might not answer her phone or return his calls. But he knew Morgan, and there was only one reason. She was avoiding him because she had found out something she wasn’t at liberty to tell him, and she was not going to give herself the chance to slip.

At that moment he was sure that he never wanted to see her again.

He picked up the yellow pad with his notes on the Webcam killings and read through them all again. There had to be something there. Something he’d missed. One tiny piece of information that would make a difference.

All the poisons-the one used in the lubricant, the one applied to the Band-Aids and the one mixed into the massage oil-were too easily obtained to be traceable. The Atropine in the lubricant was in eyedrops available in every hospital and by prescription, used by millions of patients. The nicotine on the bandages could have been brewed from a few ordinary cigarettes, or from plants. And the cyanide in the massage oil was used by dozens of professionals, including jewelers and gardeners. The tampered products themselves were all major drugstore brands.

There was nothing there.

All of the items used by the Web-cam girls had been found in their apartments, but the police hadn’t been able to find any boxes or envelopes, which might have yielded important information. They must have gotten the gifts weeks or days before and thrown it all out.

Tania, the only one of the girls who’d survived, didn’t know anything about the oil ZaZa had used. Yes, a fan had sent it as a gift, but she hadn’t asked any specifics. It wasn’t the first time that ZaZa had been sent gifts. Many of the girls had post office boxes-in fact, Global Communications recommended it. Clients liked to send presents and photos. It was good business to encourage them. Besides, it wasn’t unheard of for women to receive expensive jewelry from the men who’d fallen in lust with them online.

Butler stood in his doorway. “Hey, boss, you busy?”

“What’s up?”

“I just got a call. The computer in Leightman’s office at NYU is clean. No e-mail to any of the victims’ e-mail addresses.”

“What the hell? I thought Fisher said-”

She continued: “But we have found the computer the email came from. It’s in the NYU library.”

“So Leightman used the computer in the library?”

“Either that or someone who found out his password was in the library using his e-mail address.”