Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect Read Online Free PDF

was being careful.
    Cleo had reached the corner, still unaware of him. Men’s glaces couldn’t be important to Cleo anymore. When someone was willing to give you thousands of dollars to look at you, and touch you, and have you touch them, when you were desired that way, a mere look must have been meaningless. There were other things that might have caught her attention, but a man’s attraction?
    This guy was good at what he was doing. To anyone else on the street who had not watched the ballet of suspense that I had, there would be nothing suspicious to see.
    But I believed she
was
being followed. And I didn’t know what to do with the information. Call her on her cell phone? Warn her?
    Except, what if I was wrong?
    She turned the corner. And ten seconds later he turned, too.
    And then they were both gone.
    Maybe it didn’t mean anything.
    A woman walked west on Sixty-fifth Street at eleveno’clock on a Wednesday morning, and a man, who happened to be going in the same direction, noticed her. He hesitated when he saw her, not to hide in the shadows, not to make sure that he wasn’t seen, but to enjoy the lithe body as it moved by. To smile at the shining hair. He was just appreciating her. And the fact that he went in the same direction? Well, everyone on the street has to go either east or west, north or south. It was a meaningless encounter.
    It was not the first time my overactive imagination had tried to turn an innocent moment on a lovely spring day into a portent of danger.
    Where are you going? When are you coming back?
I would ask my mother, and she would smile and run her fingers through my hair and promise that she’d be back soon, leaving me, again, to wonder if this time my mother was telling the truth or a lie.
    Until she went away for good.

4
     
    T he officer who was supposed to meet me at the morgue wasn’t there yet, so I sat in the anteroom, trying not to smell the antiseptic harbinger of death and mystery that hung in the air.
    Before that spring, my patients didn’t die.
    While I deal with the heart, the head and the sex organs, I don’t wield a scalpel or saw. I have never sliced through the top layer of skin, through fat and muscle, to discover the growth that does not belong, find the tear to sew up or cosmetically alter an appearance. I have never immersed my hands in a human cavity to move aside a pulsing organ or feel the heat of blood spurting out of a wound.
    Instead, I probe with words for the secrets we learn to keep from others and—even more critical—the secrets we keep from ourselves, buried as deeply as a bullet lodged in bone.
    I have never signed a death certificate or had to walk out into a waiting room to find the expectant, anxious faces of a family member clinging past logic to the hope that I could save their ailing loved one.
    My office is not in a cubicle in a hospital and does not smell of disinfectants. Rather, I work in a turn-of-the-century building on the Upper East Side in New York City. Nothing about the building’s elegant facade or classic lines suggests that past the Ionic columns and through the wrought-iron door is the most progressive sex clinic in the country.
    There is a small brass plaque on the outside of the building, identifying it but giving little else away:
The Butterfield Institute
.
    The black cursive letters are etched deeply into the metal plate. Run your fingers over them and you feel the edges pushing into your flesh. Could you cut your skin on those edges and draw blood? Probably not, but even if you did, none of us inside could offer more than a Band-Aid.
    There are only those three words on the bronze rectangle. We do not advertise. Not because we are ashamed of what we do—each of us could work twice as many hours and still not see all the patients who are waiting for an appointment—but because we respect our patients’ privacy: their secrets are ours.
    Inside the marble-floored foyer a glittering chandelier casts a sparkling light