Read Online Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect by M. J. Rose - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: M. J. Rose
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the handle, and the smell of the ink wafted up from inside the metal cage.
I read the article, missing the first green light and the next. According to the reporter, the murder was almost identical to the first crime, which had occurred a week before.
This woman had also been found in a midtown hotel frequented by business people and tourists. Rooms went for two hundred dollars. She, too, had paid for the room with cash. Noone had seen who she was with. There were no discarded clothes found in the room, and the desk clerk claimed that he had most certainly not seen a woman in a nun’s habit signing in.
Her name was Cara De Beer. Twenty-two. From Austin, Texas. Had been working in New York since she’d left high school at seventeen. She had two priors.
In as lurid language as the reporter could use, he described the nun’s habit, the pools of blood left on the bathroom floor—he had gotten to the room after the body had been taken away—and he quoted one of the cops as saying that “a rosary had been inserted into one of her body cavities.”
But the police wouldn’t elaborate. Just as they had not said any more about the first woman who had been found the week before. The rosary might have been in the hooker’s mouth, her ear or any other opening.
I reread the woman’s name and her stats. I didn’t know this one. She wasn’t one of the women I’d ever treated in prison. Moving on to the next paragraph: “Someone is obviously targeting prostitutes,” said Detective Noah Jordain of the Special Victims Unit. “And we urge every sex worker to be careful. If anyone has any information, please come forward. We need to catch this man.”
I shut the paper but held on to it.
I wasn’t smelling the newsprint anymore. The scent of blood was in my head. We have all smelled it. A bad cut, a birth, our baby’s bloody nose, our periods. Not the violent bloodletting described in the paper. But that didn’t matter. The odor of blood does not change according to why it flows. I watched people passing by, but they didn’t distract me from the imagery of the girl’s death. We have all seen so much violence on television and in the movies that it has become too easy to picture a body on the floor, the pools of blood, the lifeless face.
I wanted more coffee. No, needed more coffee. And stopped at the first Starbucks I passed and ordered a double espresso.
For the past few nights I hadn’t slept well. Not since Dulcie had burned her arm. Not since the divorce had gone through. Even though my daughter hadn’t had any pain, I had kept waking to check on her. My own arm had throbbed worse in sympathy than the actual injury, and the phantom ache had kept me awake. And when I couldn’t fall back asleep, I’d been reading Cleo’s book, but was still a hundred pages shy of finishing.
As she had warned me, Cleo hadn’t done a very good job at disguising the men. While she had given them all nicknames, like Midas or King Henry or Valentino, she had written so much about the businesses they ran or their occupations that I was engaged in playing a guessing game.
No wonder Caesar was nervous about her publishing this book. Once the men she’d written about discovered their private lives were going to appear in ink, there would be a lot of anger and fear among them.
Her exposé was not like one of those bestselling suspense novels by Dan Brown, Doug Clegg or Stan Pottinger that kept me turning pages. Instead, Cleo’s insights into the men who came to see her and her “troupe,” as she called the prostitutes who worked for her, were too rich and complicated to read quickly. If she wanted to become a therapist or a sociologist or write more books on the same subject, she would have no trouble. Her writing style was simple but clear, and her passion for and knowledge of the subject matter came through. Her empathy for the other women who worked in the industry was sincere, and she understood them and explained their lives
I read the article, missing the first green light and the next. According to the reporter, the murder was almost identical to the first crime, which had occurred a week before.
This woman had also been found in a midtown hotel frequented by business people and tourists. Rooms went for two hundred dollars. She, too, had paid for the room with cash. Noone had seen who she was with. There were no discarded clothes found in the room, and the desk clerk claimed that he had most certainly not seen a woman in a nun’s habit signing in.
Her name was Cara De Beer. Twenty-two. From Austin, Texas. Had been working in New York since she’d left high school at seventeen. She had two priors.
In as lurid language as the reporter could use, he described the nun’s habit, the pools of blood left on the bathroom floor—he had gotten to the room after the body had been taken away—and he quoted one of the cops as saying that “a rosary had been inserted into one of her body cavities.”
But the police wouldn’t elaborate. Just as they had not said any more about the first woman who had been found the week before. The rosary might have been in the hooker’s mouth, her ear or any other opening.
I reread the woman’s name and her stats. I didn’t know this one. She wasn’t one of the women I’d ever treated in prison. Moving on to the next paragraph: “Someone is obviously targeting prostitutes,” said Detective Noah Jordain of the Special Victims Unit. “And we urge every sex worker to be careful. If anyone has any information, please come forward. We need to catch this man.”
I shut the paper but held on to it.
I wasn’t smelling the newsprint anymore. The scent of blood was in my head. We have all smelled it. A bad cut, a birth, our baby’s bloody nose, our periods. Not the violent bloodletting described in the paper. But that didn’t matter. The odor of blood does not change according to why it flows. I watched people passing by, but they didn’t distract me from the imagery of the girl’s death. We have all seen so much violence on television and in the movies that it has become too easy to picture a body on the floor, the pools of blood, the lifeless face.
I wanted more coffee. No, needed more coffee. And stopped at the first Starbucks I passed and ordered a double espresso.
For the past few nights I hadn’t slept well. Not since Dulcie had burned her arm. Not since the divorce had gone through. Even though my daughter hadn’t had any pain, I had kept waking to check on her. My own arm had throbbed worse in sympathy than the actual injury, and the phantom ache had kept me awake. And when I couldn’t fall back asleep, I’d been reading Cleo’s book, but was still a hundred pages shy of finishing.
As she had warned me, Cleo hadn’t done a very good job at disguising the men. While she had given them all nicknames, like Midas or King Henry or Valentino, she had written so much about the businesses they ran or their occupations that I was engaged in playing a guessing game.
No wonder Caesar was nervous about her publishing this book. Once the men she’d written about discovered their private lives were going to appear in ink, there would be a lot of anger and fear among them.
Her exposé was not like one of those bestselling suspense novels by Dan Brown, Doug Clegg or Stan Pottinger that kept me turning pages. Instead, Cleo’s insights into the men who came to see her and her “troupe,” as she called the prostitutes who worked for her, were too rich and complicated to read quickly. If she wanted to become a therapist or a sociologist or write more books on the same subject, she would have no trouble. Her writing style was simple but clear, and her passion for and knowledge of the subject matter came through. Her empathy for the other women who worked in the industry was sincere, and she understood them and explained their lives
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