Read Online Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect by M. J. Rose - Free Book Online

someone in the NYPD. And he’d also left home because he hated walking down the streets and smelling the river and doing all the things that made him remember.
    The restaurant that had become his regular haunt was two blocks away from Noah’s apartment. Caroline’s had a long mahogany bar, a fireplace in the dining area and a beat-up old upright Steinway in the front that no one had touched since the previous owner had died twenty years before. After a few months of getting to know the current owner, having drinks or dinner there at least three times a week, occasionally bringinga date—never the same woman twice—Noah asked if he could play.
    His soulful jazz was like New York. Moody and energetic, dark, then bright. He played the way they played in the twenties and it fit the restaurant. Caroline’s had had a musical history; it had been a popular jazz club and speakeasy during prohibition, catering to a crowd that sat and sipped their illegal gin, listening to music just like Noah’s.
    Now he had a regular gig. Friday and Saturday nights. On Sundays he slept off the homesickness and the nightmares that followed the purging music. Usually he slept late. Till at least noon. His one sin of the week. Well, maybe not his one sin, but the one he felt the guiltiest about because he’d been brought up to be in church on Sunday mornings. Not in bed.
    It had been four years since he’d walked into any house of God. The day of his father’s funeral. It wasn’t a loss of faith so much as a break of faith. A jagged cut that bled and bled and wouldn’t heal, and until it did, he’d rather sleep.
    But that Sunday morning the phone call had woken him up at 9:00 a.m. It was the second Sunday in a row that he’d been woken this way.
    “Were you sleeping?” Mark Perez asked.
    “Umm.”
    “Having a nightmare?”
    “No.”
    “Wrong answer,” his partner said.
    “Oh, no,” Jordain said, anticipating the next sentence.
    “Looks like we might have a serial killer, after all. You were right.”
    “Damn, this is one time I wish to God I’d been wrong.”
    “You have no idea.” Perez then gave Jordain the address of the hotel where the woman’s body had been found fifteen minutes earlier.

10
     
    A s he walked through the bedroom of the hotel suite, Noah took it all in: the unmade bed, sheets pulled back, pillows indented. Nothing violent. Nothing alarming about the scene. The rest of the room was relatively undisturbed. A bottle of mineral water was next to the bed. A glass was partially filled with clear liquid.
    The television was set to an all-day news station, and a familiar reporter was talking about a suicide bomber in Israel who had blown himself up, along with seventeen others, in a supermarket. It happened so often, Noah realized, that you became inured to it, and you could walk by the TV and not stop to listen.
    Not right, Noah thought, and for a few seconds, he did stop and then said a silent prayer for the people who had died at the hands of an overzealous lunatic.
    And then he walked on, toward the world of another madman, the sound of the newscaster fading into the background.
    Her back was to the bathroom door, and she was on her knees in front of a makeshift shrine. A plastic Jesus on a cross nestled in the niche of the soap dish. It was a crappy plastic religious artifact. Not like the heavy and sacred gold cross in the cathedral at home that the priest touched with reverence and that gleamed in the soft lights of the church.
    This one glared.
    Like the woman who had preceded her, she was wearing a nun’s habit. That much was obvious, even though it was pulled up and exposed her bare ass as she prayed at the tub, her head bowed.
    Noah didn’t rush. She was past saving.
    The perfect pale skin of her back was streaked with the dark red of dried blood. The marks were not random smears but crosses. Finger-painted crosses all over her back, her buttocks, the backs of her thighs and the soles of her poor