Free The Venus Fix by M. J. Rose Page B

when anyone complained.
    She liked that about him. As demanding as he was to work for, he had an artistic streak that she admired. She admired him as a detective, too, but there weren’t many officers who played the piano, cooked Cajun feasts, and cared about things like character in a table.
    Her boyfriend teased her that she had a crush on him, butit wasn’t true. Jordain was too dark. He didn’t joke around enough for her to like him that way. But as a boss, he was fine.
    “Okay, let’s hear what you have,” Jordain said in a voice that was calming, as if he knew that she needed a little encouragement.
    She opened a file and began her report. “Of course, suicide seems unlikely, but to rule it out—no one in her family, or any of her friends, thought she was depressed. They’d all seen her recently and often. She had a lot of good girlfriends, was close to her widowed mom and her younger sister, and her teachers had very good things to say about her.”
    “Teachers?” Jordain interrupted. “You went back that far?”
    “No. She was still a student. An art student, getting her masters at Pratt, in Brooklyn. Only one of her friends knew about the Web-cam work. Said she had plans to stop in another few months, when she’d paid off the last of her loans.” Butler watched Perez jot down a few words on a yellow pad with a tooth-marked pencil. It was the only kind of writing instrument he ever used, and the only paper he ever wrote on.
    “Were those her paintings?” Jordain asked.
    Butler thought there was a deeper level of sadness in his eyes since he’d found out what she studied. “Yes.”
    “They weren’t that bad.”
    Butler nodded, not surprised he’d noticed the details.
    “Her mom said Debra had sold two of her paintings recently, and that a Chelsea gallery was interested in taking her on. She said she was sure that by mid-summer Debra would be supporting herself from her art.”
    “Her mother knew about the Web cam?”
    Butler looked straight into Jordain’s eyes. “No, it was bad enough telling her that her daughter was dead…” She shook her head.
    Jordain gave Butler a minute. He knew she was a professionaland would get through this. It happened to them all. Every once in a while someone just got to you. It could be a little thing—a locket hanging around an elderly woman’s neck with a faded baby picture inside. The connection could help the cases, made you work harder, even when you didn’t think you
could
work any harder.
    “Nothing to suggest that the Web-cam work was depressing her?” Perez asked.
    Butler shook her head. “The friend who knew about it said there were no signs of that. If anything, quite the opposite. Since Debra was getting ready to quit, she had been happier than she had been in a long time.”
    “What about a guy? There’s usually a guy. At least that’s what women tell me all the time. It’s all our fault.” Perez laughed.
    “There was a guy. Until about six months ago. She broke up with him. He was freeloading, but Maxi—that’s Debra’s friend—said she was fine about the breakup. She’d dated some since then, but no one special. Her painting seems to have been more important to her than just about anything else.”
    “Sounds good,” Perez muttered, and then jotted down some more notes. “But that doesn’t mean it is. It wouldn’t be the first time someone said she was a friend and knew the inside scoop when she really didn’t know squat. So I wouldn’t rule out suicide yet.”
    “That’s a pretty complicated way to kill yourself,” Butler said.
    “Not if you wanted to make a statement. Not if the very job you were doing was making you hate yourself,” Perez responded. “You’d do it so that everyone out there in cyberland could watch you slather lubricant on your dildo and play with it, then die a disgusting death online.”
    “But she wasn’t depressed,” Butler argued.
    “Enough guessing. Let’s talk details. Was there any