Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect by M. J. Rose

afternoon? Did you let anyone in? Was my door shut all afternoon?” I knew this was hopeless questioning. She sat partway down the hall with her back to my office door. But maybe she had walked by. Maybe she had turned around.
    “Open or shut?” I asked.
    “It had to be shut. I would have noticed if it had been open. I walked by here at least four times since lunch. What do you think—”
    “You’d better call Nina.”
    * * *
    Nina and I stood in the middle of the room assessing the mess. There was nothing of monetary value in the office except for the computer—which was still sitting in the middle of the desk—and the carpet. But we were both worried about the patient files. What if someone had taken any of those? Each file had private and sensitive information in it. While no one even blinked anymore when you said you were going to a therapist, when you said—if you even said it aloud—that you were seeing a
sex
therapist, people inched closer. They wanted to know, even if they didn’t dare ask, what the problem was. Impotency? Frigidity? Lack of desire, too much desire? Worse? Some deviant fetish?
    We are still such a puritan society.
    “Let’s try to make some sense of this mess and see if anything is missing. Do you have a group?” Nina asked.
    I nodded.
    “Well, let’s hurry, then. We have an hour. Forget the books—let’s work with the papers and see what’s what. This could be a disaster.”
    As we shuffled through the papers and I saw the names of past and present clients on my notes, I grew more and more concerned.
    “Most of these notes are fairly cryptic, but if someone wanted to blackmail a husband or a wife—or if someone is in the midst of a child custody case—there’s stuff here that they could use.” My voice was rising toward a hysterical pitch. “There’s no way for me to know what’s missing.
Anything
could be missing. Someone could have taken just one piece of paper that could upset a—”
    Nina came over to me and put her hands on my shoulders. We were the same height and she looked right into my eyes. I remembered when I had been a lost little girl and she had been a grown-up. She’d ignored my smelly clothes and mattedhair, ignored my mother lying on the bed beside me, half out of her mind on painkillers, and she had just lassoed me with her amber eyes and held me in a kind embrace.
    “You didn’t do anything wrong, Morgan.” Thirty years later she was still the only one who could tell me that and make me believe it.
    I took a breath. The way she had taught me. Square breathing. It calmed you right down. Inhale, one, two, three, four, hold it, one, two, three, four. Exhale, one, two, three, four, hold it, one, two, three, four. And again.
    “Should we call the police?” I asked.
    Nina shook her head. I knew she wouldn’t want to do that. While I had worked with the police a few times over the years as an expert witness and had a good working relationship with the D.A.’s office, Nina didn’t.
    In 1996, her husband of only two years and founder of this institute, Sam Butterfield, had been arrested and charged with running an illegal prostitution ring. He was a brilliant, aging hippie who had a child-of-the-sixties hatred of the police. As a radical revolutionary who believed America was backward and puritanical when it came to sexual attitudes, mores and rules, he broke laws and made up new ones without fear.
    The police used a writer named Julia Sterling in a sting operation to infiltrate the institute. Six months later, Sam was convicted. He died of a heart attack the second week he was in prison.
    Nina, who had always had a healthy skepticism balanced with respect for law enforcement, became embittered. She blamed the police and the slick and effective sting operation they had put in place for Sam’s death.
    All they had to do, she’d said more than once, was come out and tell Sam what they’d wanted from him. Investigate him out in the open. But instead,