The Delilah Complex Read Online Free

for a week. We ran his picture last Tuesday.”
    She picked up the empty envelope, examined the label, then turned it over and investigated the seal. Suddenly, she stuck her hand back inside.
    Betsy pulled out an ordinary household sandwich bag containing a two-inch-long, dark substance.
    Two seconds went by. Three.
    She let out a short breath and dropped the bag on her desk.
    “Oh, my God, it’s his hair, isn’t it?” Robby asked in horror.
    Betsy nodded.

Five

    D etective Noah Jordain sat at the counter in a Japanese restaurant with his partner, Mark Perez. Both had plates of sushi in front of them. Jordain dipped a piece of
uni
into the soy sauce and then smeared it with wasabi.
    “How can you eat so much of that without burning your sinuses?”
    “You are a wimp,” Jordain said in his slow New Orleans drawl, and Perez laughed. Since they’d been working together, Jordain had introduced his partner to all kinds of exotic food.
    Jordain loved to cook and to explore New York’s endless supply of ethnic cuisines. A Renaissance man, he not only cooked, but played piano, wrote jazz, collected antiques and managed not to get ribbed for any of it by a single cop in the department.
    There was just one reason.
    In police work, God was in the details.
    They all knew it.
    Jordain lived it.
    And they respected him for it.
    Jordain’s cell phone rang. Pulling it out, he looked atit as if it were an insect, put it down next to his green tea, speared another piece of sushi, dipped and smeared it, popped it in his mouth and chewed. The phone rang a second time.
    Perez, who was as reactive as Jordain was laid-back, glared at his partner. In the two years they’d been together, Perez hadn’t gained any of Jordain’s patience.
    “You want me to get that?”
    Jordain swallowed, smiled, shook his head and slowly reached for the cell, answering it on the fourth ring.
    As he listened, he ran his hand through his thick silvery hair. And then he did it twice again. Perez noticed and became alert. He’d learned to tell how bad the news was by how many times Jordain brushed the wavy hair off his forehead.
    “Okay, give me a number,” Jordain said as he reached for his notebook. He wrote the number down and read it back. Jordain was dyslexic. It hardly affected him now that he was an adult, but he was bad at retaining numbers in his head, and sometimes he reversed them when he wrote them down. Reading them back alleviated that problem.
    The learning disability had been embarrassing in grade school, made reading tougher for him than for most kids, and kept him from excelling at spelling bees, but otherwise he hardly ever thought about it. However, it had made him listen harder and be more observant. He noticed sights and heard nuances other people missed. Even other detectives missed. Even the best ones.
    “Well, this is one sorry mess,” Jordain said as he snapped the phone shut.
    “What?”
    “Looks like a missing-persons case just erupted into a murder investigation, with a dash of fetish thrown in for good measure.”
    “Who called it in?”
    “That might just be the best part.”
    Jordain took the last piece of sushi from his plate, dipped it in the soy sauce, spread the wasabi on it, looked at it and finally put it back down in the middle of his plate. He laid the chopsticks beside the fish. “Betsy Young.”
    “The crime reporter at the
Times?
”
    “We know and love any other Betsy Young?”
    “What does she have?”
    “Death-scene photos of the victim. Came in her mail this morning.”
    “And the fetish?”
    “Little twist that’s a new one for me. The photos came with a lock of the victim’s hair. And there’s one other thing.” Jordain took a long drink of his green tea, which by now was cold.
    “Which was?”
    “The body has the number 1 written on the soles of his feet.”
    “Number 1?”
    Jordain nodded. “Yeah, and you know what I’m worried about?”
    “You bet. If there’s a number 1, there’s