Precious Blood (28 page)

Anything to get numb, I figured.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I wasn’t sure. I mean, I wasn’t even sure about the medicine cabinet, but it all makes sense.” Jun leaned back.

“Where do you think she got it?”

“I don’t know. She was in the East Village yesterday . . .”

It wasn’t like the 1980s, when there was a dealer on every corner, but over on Avenue D, if you knew where to go, people still sold heroin hand to hand.

He thought back over the last two weeks. Everything was coming together. When did it begin? Wine, first. Vicodin and Ambien, all laid out right in front of her. She’d had plenty of time alone, when he was out running around like a boy scout. But the heroin?

Then he knew: Thursday night, the club. That was why she suddenly wanted to go out. And that guy Perry in the club—when she’d reached under the table, it wasn’t to touch him, it was to cop.

He shook his head. “I should have talked with her, made her see a shrink or something.”

“Her choice, Jenner.” He stood up. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

Later, he sat at the foot of the bed and watched her sleep.

Everything was finished, all the work was done. The cops were putting the last touches on the paperwork and turning back to more routine crimes, the girls were dead and buried,
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the families getting on with their grieving. Everyone had a role to play, and knew how to play it. Except him.

What was he supposed to do about Ana?

The man closed the
Post
and looked at the front page again.

Inquisitor Interrogated. An unflattering close-up of his old client, the usually dapper Dr. Green in filthy khakis and a stained sweatshirt, looking like some bum scraped off a heating grate. Green wouldn’t like that—he was always such a little fashion prince.

He was surprised that he felt no jealousy, no anger at the misplaced credit. His calm was an epiphany, of sorts: it meant that he was actively evolving, operating above the level of ego in a kind of rarefied space only accessed by those who had obtained pure and esoteric knowledges.

Credit was unimportant. All that mattered was that he was doing the work, transfiguring the Saints, creating the beautiful shrines. That his work was immediately torn apart by the police was irrelevant: the important thing was that they had existed, that he had created moments of transcendence, of radiance, of perfect grace. Ecstatic moments where flawed women had been reborn in sainthood, wherein he himself had been cleansed and purified.

They’d realize soon enough that Green was as capable of doing this work as a puppy was of sinking a battleship. Particularly when they saw his next project.

He powered up his laptop and modem, dialed in on the stolen phone signal with a free starter AOL account, then reached his destination. He’d created a camouflaged virtual server on the Hutchins Museum of Military History server, tucked away behind the firewall he’d designed for the college. Today his signal seemed stable. An FMedbase administrator screen came up. He tabbed down to his gateway into Green’s clinic, and hit the Access button.

Nothing happened.

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He hit it again.

Again, nothing.

He ran the diagnostics program. Error message: “No Such Server.”

Ah, of course. The police would have impounded the office computer, and were busy sieving it for kiddie porn, or whatever Green’s particular thrill might be. The New Hope Clinic had automatic remote backups to a data storage facility somewhere in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, but he didn’t have a chance in hell of hacking his way through their security.

He had an instant of unfamiliar panic. What would he do? Those were the women he’d chosen, whores whose threadbare integrity allowed them to sell off the fruits of their womb, to scrape sacred life out of their harlot bellies in return for blood money. They barely deserved the redemption he offered, the rebirth through suffering in the radiant image of pious, glorious martyrs.

He went to his washbasin. In the mirror fragment, his temples were atrophied now, his face gaunt. He picked up the shard, angling it down at his torso; the muscles now seemed bound to a brittle armature of eroded bone, the muscles thickening as the scaffolding on which they hung wasted.

But it was an illusion caused by his weight loss. Inside his skin, he could feel his strength surging. The muscle and sinew were rock hard, the bone underneath strong as marble.

So. One more. One more shrine. He was to do one more.

Then he would be finished. Then he could rest.

Ana de Jong.

He was ready for her now.

Jenner was sitting by the bed, waiting for Ana to wake, when Rad called to tell him they’d located a possible sec-270

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ondary scene: Green had a small apartment on East Seventh, and Crime Scene had found a concealed remote camera system. Rad asked Jenner if he wanted to come along for the search.

He did. He needed the time to figure out what he was going to say to her. Waiting for Garcia, he continued his search of her clothes and her bags, and found another bag of Steppin’ Razor, full this time. He tossed it into the toilet and flushed, standing and waiting to make sure it disappeared.

Then he flushed again.

He recognized Pat Mullins’s bullet-shaped head at the top of the stoop. It was a brownstone between Second and First, not as classy as he would have expected from a guy as affluent as Green.

“Hey, Pat.”

“Doctor. Nice to see you out.” He nodded at Rad and Roggetti.

Jenner said, “Nice work on getting Green.”

Mullins responded with a wink, saying, “Piece of cake, Doc.”

“Is he saying much?”

“Not a peep. He’s got Barry Haimlisch, who’s shut everything right down.”

Jenner remembered Haimlisch. “I’ve met him a couple of times. He’s sharp.”

Roggetti said, “Well, good for him. The case against his client is pretty much open-and-shut.”

“Maybe,” Rad said.

“What? You don’t think so?”

“Too soon to tell, Joey. I mean, SexBat, sure. But the Inquisitor stuff ? The case is still pretty circumstantial.”

Mullins shrugged. “We’ll see. In the meantime, let’s see what we got here.”

As they walked inside, Rad said, “I was talking with Woody Milwood over at the crime lab, and so far they’ve got no fin-Precious Blood

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gerprint matches between Green and any of the scenes. Not a one.”

Mullins shook his head. “Maybe he’s got an accomplice.

Look, even if we don’t have good evidence on the Inquisitor, we’ve got plenty to send his sorry oral-sodomy-committing ass to jail, and that ought to loosen him up a bit. No pun intended.”

Rad grinned. “You backing down on this, Pat?”

“Nope. I think we got the guy. I’m just being . . .” He searched for a word, then found it. “Keeping my mind open.”

The second-story floor-through had been chopped in half; Green’s studio apartment was in back. The kitchen opened into the living room area, filled mostly with a low platform bed with an ugly maroon quilt.

Green had barely bothered to decorate. A framed poster of skiers at Jackson Hole on one wall, on another a blowup of a photo of a generic sunset over a generic beach somewhere, Mexico, maybe.

In an armoire in the corner, tucked between the TV and a mini stereo system, they found one of the small cameras; the second was hidden in a low bookshelf among medical journals and the occasional textbook. One of the crime scene detectives opened a small wood box on the lowest shelf and spilled its contents onto the bedside table—some condoms, a pair of handcuffs lined with matted fake leopard fur, and a small brown plastic vial of Viagra.

In the armoire, Green had a stack of CDs—Kenny G and Phil Collins, Sade and Enya—as well as
The Notebook
,
The
English Patient
, and
Jenna Jameson’s Wicked Anthology
on DVD. Roggetti, poring through the bookcase, pulled out a black plastic album and opened it to show the others a collection of DVD-Rs numbered with black marker ink. Roggetti selected one, put it in the DVD player, and switched on the TV.

There were a couple of flashes onscreen, and the video
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began. A girl on the bed, Green on his knees between her legs, her hands on his head.

Someone said, “Turn up the sound!” and Joey looked over the remote for a few seconds before the volume suddenly leaped to a buzzing roar, the girl’s moans over the white noise echoing in the room. Roggetti turned it down a little.

It looked consensual; the others nodded when Jenner said so. He doubted they’d find anything else there, so he told Garcia he was heading home. He left them watching the TV.

Ana’s clothes were folded neatly and stacked on the table.

He heard water running in the bathroom.

When she came out, her eyes were heavily lined with black, her mascara was thick, and her lips glossy. She looked older, almost old.

He sat down and watched as she put a big Urban Outfit-ters shopping bag on the table and began stuffing her clothes into it. When it was full, she set an X-girl bag next to it. She turned to him and said, “You feel sorry for me, Jenner? Is that it? ‘That poor orphan girl, the horrible thing that happened! And now she’s all fucked up and . . . oh, my God,
look! She’s on drugs!
’ That it, Jenner?”

She turned away and began cramming socks into the bag.

“Ana, please. I’m not judging you. I can’t imagine how hard all this has been on you. I think you’ve been incredibly brave.”

“Was that what you were thinking while you were fucking me?” She struggled with the zipper of her cheap plastic makeup bag, then threw it down, turning to focus on him.

“No, really, tell me what you were thinking—I’d really like to know! ‘I’m helping her now, I’m doing this for her own good? This oughta make her forget her dead friend!’ ”

He looked away.

She was done packing.

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“And now you’re blue because your little orphan bitch is doing smack? You’re afraid it’s your fault, right?”

He didn’t look up.

“Answer me!” she screamed. “Don’t just fucking sit there, say something, say anything. Take a fucking
risk
!”

He looked at her, but didn’t speak.

She grabbed a candlestick and hurled it at his head. He threw up his arm, knocking it away.

“Fuck you! Fuck you, you fucking
coward
!”

She lifted the bags, one of which immediately broke at the handle and spilled her things onto the floor. She collapsed to her knees, sobbing as she tried to gather the clothes together in her arms.

He watched her crawling under the table, her flushed face streaked with mascara. A pair of socks, rolled into a ball, skittered out of her reach, and she sank onto her clothes, curling up and crying freely.

He knelt down to help her up, but she pushed him away.

She stood and ran to the sink, pulling out a garbage bag. She scooped most of her clothes into the garbage bag, then spun it shut and picked up the shopping bag. She put the bags on the couch, then put on her coat. Shouldering her bags, she turned to him.

“I don’t need your help, Jenner. You need mine.
You need
mine!
So fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, good-bye.”

She slammed the door.

At twilight, around 4:00 p.m., he walked to Williamsburg, to Dalrymple’s Food Discount, and spent the last of his money.

He’d been trying to keep pure by eating only vegetables and grains, but decided he needed more protein, and calcium for his bones, so he allowed himself organic milk and beef, despite the expense.

Back at the warehouse, he unpacked his groceries. His kitchen area was as cold as most refrigerators, but he kept
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food in an old steel toolbox because of the rats; the meat went out on the window ledge in a metal biscuit tin.

He boiled some cauliflower. Eating at the bench, he leafed through the Dalrymple’s flyer by candlelight, imagining what he would buy if he had a hundred bucks to spend.

It was a holiday season flyer, and the cover—an old illustration, maybe from the fifties—showed a family gathered around for a Christmas dinner. The fireplace in the background had stockings and swags of holly, and the mom was hefting an enormous turkey onto a dinner table filled with decorations and side dishes as the dad and the brother and the sister looked on with enthusiasm and delight.

The children would have already got their gifts—kids got the presents in the morning, he knew. They wake up and come down and there are presents from Santa under the tree and in the stockings, and then Mom and Dad come down and give them more presents. After church, the women cook dinner.

His Christmases had been different. He would wait all day on the bench by the farmhouse door for the church people who brought them a turkey, not wanting them to come in and see his mom and dad passed out at the kitchen table.

He finished the cauliflower and leaned back.

He needed a van.

tuesday,

december 17

She came in just before dawn. Jenner heard her let herself into the loft, the scratch of her keys settling on the table. She slipped under the sheets and lay against him; when she lowered her head to his chest, he felt her tears on his skin.

He figured she was high, but he didn’t care. He would help her get through this, get straight.

She was asleep. He looked at her face, now without makeup.

She was beautiful.

He would help her. He would get her help, and everything would be fine.

To his surprise, she was up before him. He found her in the living room, tapping numbers into his cell phone’s memory.

“Here,” she said, handing him the phone. “I want to test it.”

She opened her phone up and showed him. “Look, you’re on speed dial.”