Mercy

by David L Lindsey

  “I want to get Sander Grant down here,” Palma said. “No one here has ever seen anything like this. This is dark water, Karl.”

  Frisch, moving stiffly, approached the bed. “Goddammit,” he said.

  “She’s right,” Birley said. He grimaced. “Shit, just look at this.”

  “Goddammit.” Frisch’s thin shoulders sat at an odd angle, one hand holding a handset emitting short bursts of static.

  “I’m going to call him,” Palma said, and walked out into the sitting room where a telephone rested on a gilt-trimmed French secretary. Corbeil was standing in the doorway of the bedroom and a few more people were inching through the hall door into the sitting room. LeBrun still hadn’t arrived.

  Palma dialed Grant’s number, which she had memorized. She looked at Corbeil and then at the cluster of people. “I’m going to have to have some privacy,” she said. Corbeil started getting them out and shouted out to someone to get everybody the hell downstairs and put crime scene ribbon at the bottom of the stairs with a couple of officers.

  Palma heard the phone ringing at the other end and then, remembering, she turned to Corbeil.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Her name? Oh, Mello…Bernadine.”

  “Hello,” Grant said.

  PART TWO

  FIFTH DAY

  31

  Friday, June 2

  “Oh, let’s see,” Clay Garrett mused, squinting a little at the rain pelting through the low beam of his headlights as he turned off the Sam Houston Parkway onto John F. Kennedy Boulevard that approached the Houston Intercontinental Airport from its south side. Oncoming cars on the other side of the esplanade threw splashes of light over his hook-nosed profile, mottled with shadows from the raindrops on the windshield. “Sander’s kind of a serious sort of fella. I used to work in the same field office with him a long time ago, before he was in this BSU business. Like most of us, he doesn’t seem to have changed any, just gets deeper into how he is.” Garrett smiled at that.

  Palma waited, looking through the windshield at the rain drifting across the broad, lighted corridor that had been cut through the dense pines. They began to pass under the green signs suspended high over the boulevard that told you what airlines were in what terminals. To their left, across the esplanade and the oncoming traffic, were the air cargo terminals: Aramco, Conoco, Tenneco, Shell, Exxon…

  “He’s…polite. A gentleman, sort of, but not all that easy to get to know.”

  The Intercontinental Airport was on the north side of the city, half an hour’s drive out in good traffic. They were almost there and Palma had just now gotten around to asking the question after a lull in conversation. She had been awake only half an hour when Garrett picked her up at her home in University Place. The day had been long and hectic, and she felt the mild disorientation she always experienced when she went to sleep in the late afternoon and woke just as it was getting dark. After staying at the scene of Bernadine Mello’s death until Julie LeBrun had finished and taken his findings to the crime lab, and the body had gone to the morgue, Palma had spent the rest of the morning going through Mello’s personal effects with Birley.

  This latest death had changed the face of the investigation, as everyone knew it would when it finally happened. The media were all over the story within hours, and no matter how tight a homicide division runs its shop, the big picture cannot be kept under wraps indefinitely. Bernadine Mello’s death took the covers off. The media didn’t know much, but they soon connected the deaths of the three West Houston women who had died in the last few weeks. The headline articles in the late-morning editions of the papers and the lead story on the noon radio and television news didn’t hesitate to use the terms “psychopath” and “serial killer.” The stories were short, but the reporters smelled fresh meat, and they were swarming.

  Karl Frisch was quick to set operational parameters and establish a system of procedures for a task force. Don Leeland’s past experience in crime analysis landed him the desk job of case review coordinator. Assisted by another detective, he would function as the central clearing point for all the new information that would come in about the four cases (Ackley and Montoya were considered as a single case) from the task force’s investigative teams. He would review and analyze their reports and supplements regarding suspects, victims, witnesses, and physical evidence, looking for new relationships between leads, create files on each witness and suspect (including photographs), create charts and diagrams of the progress of each case, monitoring changes in suspect status, and coordinating follow-up interviews to prevent duplicate contacts or omissions.

  Jules LeBrun was put in charge of evidence control and storage and would act as liaison with Barbara Soronno in the crime lab. If there were any screwups regarding evidence, the buck stopped with LeBrun.

  Cushing got a new partner and was to continue concentrating on the list of men found in Dorothy Samenov’s address book and pursuing any leads that came from those interviews. Palma and Birley’s assignments took them in opposite directions. Birley now had to check out Bernadine Mello’s physicians as he had done with Moser and Samenov, as well as having the immediate task of familiarizing Manny Childs and Joe Garro with the earlier cases so they could pick up Bernadine Mello.

  Frisch himself would be responsible for communicating with the media, working with Leeland to determine what non-sensitive material could be released in careful information bites to satisfy the journalists. The captain would take the heat from the politicos and the police administration. Nobody was looking forward to it.

  Palma had to go back to Saulnier to try to get as many names of women in the society as Saulnier could be persuaded to cough up, including Claire’s, and she had to try to establish whether Bernadine Mello was also a member of the group. But by the time all that was hashed out it was one o’clock in the afternoon and she was headed home for a few hours’ sleep. It seemed she had hardly gotten her clothes off before Garrett was calling to tell her he was on his way, and by four o’clock they were on the darkening, rainy streets headed to the airport to pick up Grant and Robert Hauser, the other agent coming with him.

  “But Sander’s had a run of hard luck.” Garrett bent forward to read a sign passing overhead. “He’s got twin daughters. Few years ago…uh, it’s been three, I guess, a little over, his wife died of cancer. It was one of those things where she went in for a checkup and they discovered it and in ninety days she was gone. It was about four months before the girls were to go off to college. They decided they’d sit it out a year, a semester at least, but Sander made them go on. He knew it’d be easier on them to get into something new, not mope around the place with him. They went on. But it was hell on Sander. Had a house full of women, then six months later nobody but him.”

  They drove under a runway just as a lumbering airliner was passing across, its engines screaming with a loud, sucking whine, and then Garrett steered the car into the coils of ramps that brought them to the parking garage outside Terminal B. He took a ticket at a gate, and then parked directly across from the terminal doors. He cut off the motor, but didn’t move to get out of the car.

  “He got depressed,” Garrett continued, pulling the key out of the ignition and draping his wrists over the steering wheel. “Twins were in school up in New York—Columbia—so they couldn’t come home that much. Sander got to where he couldn’t stand the house. They lived somewhere around Fredericksburg, big old home, because it was close to Quantico. Twins grew up there mostly. But he couldn’t take it. Sold the place, pulled up all his roots, and moved into Washington. That’s a pretty good commute down Interstate 95 to Quantico every day.”

  Garrett thought a moment, started tapping the key on the steering column, thinking. “I don’t know what happened, exactly, but there was something about him getting involved with a Chinese woman…some kind of diplomat’s wife. He married her. I think she was…totally out of character for Grant. She was a real knockout, and he just went nuts over her. An
d then it all blew to hell.”

  Garrett shook his head. “I don’t know. Rumors. Hell, Sander never confided in people, that’s his problem. That’s what Marne was, his confidante. When she died…screwed up his psychological equilibrium. Guy like that, what he does for a living. It’s like being a pathologist; dead people from breakfast to supper. Except with Sander and his boys it’s the psychological stuff too, not just the bodies. With a pathologist he can just walk away from it, leave it at the morgue. These guys with Sander, they carry it around in their heads.”

  Garrett looked at Palma. “But I understand he got through it all right. Chinese lady an’ all.”

  “How long has that been?” Palma asked.

  Garrett shook his head. “I don’t know, exactly,” he said, reaching for the door handle.

  They made their way along the crowded concourse, past the security checks that took them into the gates.

  “There’s Hauser,” Garrett said, looking at his watch. “They’re early.”

  They approached a good-looking young man with thick, closely barbered blond hair who was standing by a small pile of luggage at the edge of the gate’s waiting area, eating a Butter-finger. He recognized Garrett across the flow of pedestrian traffic in the concourse, took the last bite of the candy bar, and wadded up the wrapper, tossing it into the trash. By the time they got to him he was swallowing and grinning, putting out his hand.

  Garrett made the introductions and apologized for being late.

  “Naw, we’re fifteen minutes early,” Hauser said. “Tail winds.” He pointed his chin at the bank of telephones across the concourse.

  “Sander’s over there,” he said, and he and Garrett quickly fell into a conversation while Palma turned toward the telephones. There were eight telephones in a row facing the concourse, and another eight on the other side, out of sight. All the ones on the near side were busy: two women, six men. Palma tried to pick him out, but none of them seemed right to her. She looked at the legs under the bank of telephones on the other side. Four men, one in jeans, one in khakis, two in suits. She was looking at the two pairs of suit trousers when she realized that the last man on the right was looking at her from between the telephone boxes. He was talking, but watching her, and when their eyes met he was not the one to break eye contact. She pretended she hadn’t seen him looking at her, let her eyes go down the length of the crowded concourse, and then turned to Hauser and Garrett, catching Hauser cutting his eyes at her while Garrett was ending a story that Hauser could have comprehended quite easily at three times the speed.

  “Here he comes,” Hauser said, and both Garrett and Palma turned to see a man cutting through the concourse traffic wearing a double-breasted suit. She had never seen a special agent wear a double-breasted suit. The suit coat was unbuttoned and Grant was putting a breast pocket wallet into his coat as he stalled once or twice in the cross traffic. Palma guessed him at six-two or three, maybe one hundred seventy pounds. He had dark hair going gray, and which he wore a little fuller than she would have expected, combing it back at the temples so that the gray streaked and was visible from a distance. He wore a clipped mustache that was slightly darker than his hair. His nose was not broad, but straight and handsome, or rather it had been straight. A significant crook in the bridge signaled its having been broken, perhaps more than once. His eyes were slightly hooded with the beginnings of crow’s-feet at the corners. He walked with his shoulders back, not with a military bearing but with a rather loose-gaited, comfortable stride. As he approached, he smiled and put his hand out to Palma first.

  “Detective Palma,” he said. “It’s good to see you, finally.” He turned to Garrett. “Clay, I appreciate your coming out to get us.” They shook hands and then Grant reached down and picked up his small, soft leather valise and hanging suit bag, as did Hauser, and the four of them started walking.

  “Sorry about the short notice,” Palma said. “But I was afraid this was going to get out of hand before any of us could get a grip on it.”

  “It’s okay. We do a lot of short-notice work,” Grant said. “Anything since this morning?” They had stepped out in front of Garrett and Hauser, and Palma was having to take long steps to keep up with Grant. While they walked down the long concourse she told him about forming the task force and how it was set up.

  “That’s good,” he said. “It’ll be easier that way. I’ve got some stuff for you from one of the VICAP analysts. It’s not much. They didn’t have any strong hits, but there’re some things you need to check out. Something in New Orleans, something in Nashville, and a long shot out in Los Angeles.”

  They emerged into the main concourse and started across the cavernous terminal lobby, getting separated by the crowds, coming back together, finding Garrett and Hauser ahead of them.

  “How’re you holding up?” Grant asked, dodging a pair of airline stewardesses quick-walking across in front of them with their luggage on small wheeled carts.

  “I don’t even know,” she said.

  Grant looked around at her and smiled. “Well, maybe it won’t last too long.”

  “It’s already done that,” Palma said. “This is my first one of these. I don’t like the way it makes me feel. And I’m not talking about the loss of sleep.”

  This time Grant didn’t say anything. Palma wanted to look at him, but they were already going through the electric doors, out into the drive across from the garages.

  On the way into the city Palma turned and leaned her back against the door and reviewed Bernadine Mello’s background.

  “She was forty-two; her husband, Raymond Mello, is sixty. Mello’s a structural engineer. Made a personal fortune on a patented method for testing the tensile strength in construction steel, and still travels a lot doing this. They’d been married just a little over two years. She’d been divorced three times before she married Mello, and he’d been married once before. According to him, this marriage was going under too. Mello’s pretty candid and readily admits the marriage hadn’t worked out like he’d hoped. He said both of them had had other lovers, in fact her lawyer had hired a private detective to substantiate his affair. He suspected she was about to sue him for divorce. He wasn’t sure of the men she’d been sexually involved with, except one, her psychiatrist. When we asked him if he had any reason to believe that his wife might be bisexual, he seemed flabbergasted by the idea. And we didn’t find anything in her house that would have suggested it, either.”

  “How was he reacting to her death?”

  “Genuinely shocked, I think.”

  “How long had his wife been seeing the psychiatrist?” Grant asked. The rain on the side windows of the car cast gray spatters over the front of his white shirt as they sped along Interstate 45, heading south into the city.

  “Five years.”

  “And did the affair predate the marriage to Mello also?”

  “He said he thought so.”

  “Then the psychiatrist should be able to enlighten you on the bisexual question,” Grant said. “For our purposes, he’ll be more valuable to us than the woman herself. How old is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He hasn’t been interviewed yet?”

  “No.”

  “There shouldn’t be any client-doctor privileges now that she’s dead. He could be a gold mine in leads, especially if there is a connection with her and the other women and their organization.”

  Grant had been sitting forward a little as Palma talked. Outside, the stormy late afternoon was as dark as dusk from the lowering clouds, and Grant’s face was largely obscured except when it was being illuminated in brief washes of pale light as they passed the freeway lights at regular intervals. Only the left side of his face was periodically visible to her. As she listened to him talk and watched his eyes in the passing washes of mottled light that came through the rainy window, she felt them looking at her with a calm regard that seemed to operate from a different level of consciousness than his words. They did not seem to
her to convey an inner world consistent with his personality.

  If Sander Grant seemed easily congenial at first meeting, she was sure that she could not trust in that assessment. As Garrett pushed the Bureau car through the complex interchanges of expressways that brought them into the city, Palma began to have the feeling that Grant’s eyes were what the man was all about, and the amiable personality that greeted her at the airport was only a practiced facade that he presented as a matter of professional necessity. She wondered how long he employed the mask or if, in fact, he ever took it off at all. She hoped he did and that he would do it quickly and get it over with. She didn’t look forward to working with a man who held her at arm’s length with a bogus cordiality. Nor did she relish waiting for the inevitable moment when, because of tension or competitiveness or unsuppressable egoism, he would yank off the mask of amicability and confront her with whatever it was his eyes were really hiding.

  Suddenly, whether justified or not, the prospect of working with Sander Grant took on a slight edge of apprehension that was quite separate and apart from the context of the grisly murders he had come to help her investigate.

  32

  Holding a black umbrella over his head, Dr. Dominick Broussard stood on the back terrace of his three-story brick home and looked past a margin of pines at the afternoon mist hovering in the honey locusts and redbuds scattered across the sloping lawn to the bayou below. Accompanied by a big, tawny Labrador that he ignored, he stepped off the terrace and progressed along a stone path that wandered through his property toward a smaller building that architecturally echoed the larger house and which served as his office. This building, which he pretentiously referred to as his studio, was situated nearer the bayou than the main house, and was nestled in a dense wood that extended beyond it some distance before reaching the end of the doctor’s property. Woods provided the same seclusion on the opposite side of the large house as well. He had privacy, he liked to remind himself, a great deal of privacy.