“The bite marks. I’ll admit they threw me at first, since I’d come to associate them with male aggression in sex crimes. I was preconditioned to think of them from a male perspective because I’ve been taught—and taught by the best, I ought to say, including John and my own father—by males. But it occurred to me that maybe there are some other ways to look at these bites. Given the circumstances of these killings, and from a woman’s perspective, it seems that a woman could easily have made the bites as well as a man. It dawned on me that it fits right in with one of the old cliches about fighting women, violent women—kicking, scratching…biting women.
“Absence of sperm in swabs or smears or at crime scene. I’m well aware that it’s common for sexual homicide scenes not to evidence semen. But I’m offering an alternative reason as to why it’s absent.
“Timing. You’d mentioned Thursday nights as possibly being a boys’ night out. Same goes for women. Club night. Girls’ night out. Aerobics class. Moser even had gone out to meet this person in exercise clothes, supposedly on her way to aerobics class.”
Palma stopped. She had never taken her eyes off Grant.
“None of the physical evidence we’ve gathered so far precludes a woman killer. In fact, there’s been no evidence at all that suggests a male killer. We’ve yet to find a single head hair short enough to be male. So far, aside from pubic hair, all we’ve found is long blond head hair.”
She stopped, then cringed inwardly, waiting for the awkward silence that would follow as Grant tried to think of how to respond. But Cushing, lying in wait for revenge, stepped right in, licking his lips.
“Well, hell,” he said, lowering his chair, which he had reared back on two legs as he listened to her, grinning. He looked around the room. “I think she’s got something here. But I’ve got a theory of my own that seems to have more credibility. I think it was an impotent orangutan. No sperm at the crime scene. Zoo’s closed on Thursday nights. Those big teeth. He’s a special kind of…”
“Cushing, shut up, dammit,” Frisch snapped, and cut off Cushing as well as a few snickers that were building. Palma kept her eyes glued on Grant, who had dropped his eyes to the folder in his lap, a gesture of neutrality while the locals worked out their personnel problems. Cushing’s sophomoric ridicule didn’t bother her, but the way Grant and the others handled her idea was going to be crucial. She was curious as to just how far their male myopia would take their response.
Grant looked up. “What you’ve pointed out is true. On the face of it.” A qualifying statement that subtly attempted to put Palma’s theory itself on the sophomoric level. Obviously there was more to it than just the face of it. “Everything you’ve said seems solid.” Seems…“But as I said earlier, we’re playing the odds here. It’s a little bit like case law. We look for precedents.” He paused a couple of seconds. “I’ve been working in the behavioral science unit at Quantico from the beginning of the program,” Grant said, his lips thin and firm under his mustache, “and I’ve never seen a woman commit a violent, sexually motivated homicide.”
“How do you know?” Palma wasn’t completely successful at keeping the challenging edge out of her voice.
Grant lifted his eyebrows, in surprise at first, and then as a gesture of how the hell was she going to challenge the evidence. “I’m telling you we’ve never seen it,” he said.
“Have you cleared every case you’ve handled?” she asked rhetorically.
Grant waited for her to make her point.
“Every year, nationwide, we have eighteen thousand to twenty thousand homicides,” she said. “Every year, approximately a quarter of those cases go uncleared…forty-five hundred to five thousand cases. Every year. Just in the past decade alone that adds up to nearly fifty thousand uncleared homicides. A good portion of them sexual homicides. I don’t know what percentage they represent, but I do know from the Bureau’s own statistics sexual homicides are on the rise. Are you going to tell me that you know that none of those unsolved sexual homicides are committed by women?”
“No,” Grant came back, “I’m not. But I’m telling you we’ve never seen a female sexual killer.”
“And that gets me back to my original question: How do you know you haven’t?” Palma had their attention now, she could feel it, even though she had never taken her eyes off Grant. She could see Leeland, probably the most naturally analytical of all of them, frozen in his seat. “I understand that historically all the sexual killers you’ve worked with have been males. You people are rightly credited with being the first to recognize the serial killer, the ‘lust’ killer, the sexually motivated killer. But do you think you really have the definitive story on this phenomenon?”
Grant waited, his hooded eyes resting on her with the cool dispassion of a veteran. No one moved.
“When we were looking through Dorothy Samenov’s condo, you made a remark that stuck with me,” Palma said. “You were talking about assumptions people make about men and women, that they go along for years without these assumptions being challenged, and then suddenly one day something causes them to see things differently and a myth is exploded. You said that it was a very dangerous thing to be comfortable with our assumptions. Well, try to look at your profiling analysis program from another perspective.”
Palma was talking fast, not wanting to be interrupted, wanting to spit it out before she lost momentum.
“The behavioral psychology framework you set up to analyze sexual homicides is grounded in the data you gleaned from extensive in-depth interviews conducted with thirty sexually motivated killers over a long period of time. And you’ve continued to add to that data base over the years by interviewing other killers. All male. So the behavioral model used to analyze all sexual homicides is based on male psychology. All of your analysts at Quantico are male. So what happens when your analysts get a case they really can’t fit within the framework of the behavioral model you’ve established?”
Grant’s eyes telegraphed incredible concentration. He hadn’t even blinked.
“Wouldn’t your analyst—wouldn’t you yourself—try to explain this behavior as an aberration within the framework of the behavioral model you’ve already established for male sexual killers? The ‘case law’ assumption that only males commit sexually motivated homicide is so ingrained in detectives—who are mostly male—that even though you may not understand what you’re seeing at a crime scene, you automatically exclude the only other suspect possibility available to you.
“Would it ever occur to you, any of you,” she asked, now looking around the room for the first time at the men staring at her with their mouths practically hanging open, “that you couldn’t explain something you’d seen at one of these uncleared crime scenes because it resulted from female behavior rather than male behavior? I doubt it.” She turned back to Grant. “In fact, you’ve just proved that: you say you don’t have a special kind of killer here, you’ve just got your standard male sex killer with a ‘special kind of wrinkle,’ which you haven’t figured out yet. It’s never even occurred to you that you don’t understand what you’re seeing because the killer is thinking, and acting, like a woman, not like a man.”
42
After Evelyn Towne left his office, Broussard had somehow made it through the afternoon and well into the night before he had given in to Librium and a strange, dreamless loss of time, until he had awakened to this morning’s gray light and the leisurely sound of rain. He was famished and ate an enormous breakfast, and then immediately fell into a deep depression and stood for an hour in the sun room looking out the windows at the slowly drifting mist thickening toward the bayou until it obscured the thick foliage that hugged its margins. Then he had gotten the call on the number to which only his most favored patients had access. Mary Lowe wanted to see him, her session having been canceled by him the day before. She was controlled, he noticed, but her restraint was taut. It was remarkable enough that she should call him at all, under any circumstances, and that she should do
so the very day after a canceled appointment indicated an urgency to which she would never admit. He agreed to see her.
He heard the front door to the studio open. Had it been anyone but Mary, he simply would have refused. Even as it was, he would find it difficult to be attentive. But maybe it wouldn’t take more than his silence to satisfy her. That was so often the case, that he was wanted only as a human-size ear, an orifice without soul or opinion or judgment, something into which they could spill their insecurities, their faults, their gloomy intimations, and sometimes lustful dreams.
He was still looking out the windows when she spoke behind him.
“Thank you,” she said, “for allowing me to come.”
He turned around and saw her standing just inside the doorway to his office, unbuttoning her raincoat.
“That’s all right,” he said, and watched her slip off the raincoat and hang it on a brass hook on the wall behind the chaise. She was wearing a short-sleeved shirtwaist dress of blue rayon with tiny petallike designs in white. He approved of the single strand of tiny pearls that draped like beads of white liquid between the small protrusions of her clavicles.
“I want to talk,” she said unnecessarily. He nodded, and she walked to the chaise and slipped off her flats, swung her legs up onto the chaise, and leaned back, raising her hips slightly to straighten her skirt. Broussard imagined that this was the ideal woman for whom Freud had introduced the chaise longue. Mary had seemed to take to it from the beginning, though at first it hadn’t had any effect on her being cooperative. Nevertheless, she had never hesitated to lie down, to play the role of analysand in posture, if not in spirit.
Broussard settled himself in his armchair out of her sight and waited a moment for her breathing to become regular. He reached over where the switches to the recorders were installed under the lip of the desk and flipped one on. A small red light glowed from the shelves where the recorders sat in unobtrusive mahogany boxes resembling cigar humidors. He took a notepad off his desk and uncapped his fountain pen, turned to a clean sheet, and waited for Mary to introduce the topic she felt so urgently in need of discussing.
“It progressed oddly,” she said after a few minutes of silence. Obviously she was beginning in medias res, and Broussard cast his mind back to the subject of their last meeting on the previous Wednesday…the first time her father had fondled her sexually…in the swimming pool…his orgasmic hunching against her childish buttocks under the water.
“I was distant with him for a while after that,” she said. “I couldn’t help it. Even if he did act as if nothing had happened. I knew something had happened. But he was kind, genuinely kind to me, and I didn’t doubt in the least that he really loved me. Whatever had happened in the pool…well, that was maybe bad manners…or something. Or maybe it wasn’t even that.”
Mary’s hands rested at her sides on the blue rayon dress, with only her right hand visible to Broussard. He looked at it. She was a very beautiful woman. An image of Bernadine flashed in his mind, and he almost choked on a sob.
“The next time…we were watching television. I remember it clearly. Over the years all the…times run together, but this was the first time he went to my vagina…so I remember it. It was within a week or so of the pool incident. We were curled up on the sofa together, him and me. We were eating popcorn, and I had on my robe but I was in my panties, you know, ready for bed. The popcorn was salted and buttered; he’d go to a lot of trouble to get it just right. I was leaning next to him, and we were watching ‘G.E. Theater.’ It was a commercial break and a woman was standing next to a refrigerator which she was opening to show us. He had just eaten some buttered popcorn and his fingers were still slick because he hadn’t wiped them on a napkin yet, and he just reached down and slipped his fingers under the edge of my panties.”
Mary stopped, her narrow tapered fingers moving softly on the rayon as if she were mentally going through a piano exercise, only very subtly.
“I was petrified. And I remembered feeling a kind of humming spread all over me, and I felt instantly hot and then cold. I didn’t even take my eyes off the lady and the refrigerator, although I was wanting to in the worst way. I didn’t move. I was too young to have any pubic hair, so his buttery fingers just went round and round my vagina without any problem, and I remember thinking I might faint. He kept it up, getting more and more energetic, and I could feel his hips grinding again like in the pool. Finally he just made one quick dip into my vagina with his finger and lunged his hip against my side and kept it there. I didn’t know…all the signals. But it was over.”
Mary moved her tongue around in her mouth, trying to stir it to moisture. It didn’t seem to work, but she continued.
“After that he was still a minute. Then he pulled his hand out of my underwear and got up from the sofa and went into the bathroom. I didn’t take my eyes off the television. I didn’t stop eating popcorn. I was ignoring the whole thing as hard as I could. I thought if I stopped eating popcorn all these things would have to be confronted. After a while he came back and sat back down on the sofa, but I had moved over a little way. He didn’t try to get me to come back over to him, and we just went on watching television until the program was over and it was bedtime.”
Broussard had been watching Mary’s face, the profile perdu of all his clients who reclined on the chaise, and when she paused he glanced at her hand again. She had gathered a fistful of her skirt, squeezing it, the hem on the side pulled up to her knee.
“I went to bed and lay awake waiting, but neither of them even came in to kiss me goodnight. I guess he was feeling ashamed. When I was sure they were both asleep, I got out of bed and went into my bathroom and washed between my legs, scrubbed with a washcloth and soap until it was raw, and then I dried and put perfume around there to get rid of the butter smell. Then I went back to bed and lay there a long time staring into the dark before I started crying and cried myself to sleep.”
Mary released her grip on her dress, and Broussard’s gaze went back to her profile. A single wet rivulet traced a slightly darker path down the side of her face and into the blond hairline at her temples. Broussard thought of the stories Bernadine had told him, all the different kinds of stories. She was the consummate raconteur, a Scheherazade who talked to forestall not her death, but her dissolution into the dark winds of insanity. That’s what all of them did, together all of them became a composite Scheherazade, talking, talking to save themselves. But he was no sultan, no executioner turned deliverer who, at the end of a thousand and one nights, could proclaim them liberators of their sex and set them free. And modern life allowed for no such romantic endings. Their lives were not redeemed by their cleverness or even by the compassion elicited by their despair.
“It was a month or two before he started coming to my bedroom,” she said, having once again wadded her skirt into another tight fist, advancing the hem of her dress still farther, above the knee, to the beginning muscles of her long, straight thigh. “At first he would come only deep in the night. I would be sleeping, and then I would feel him lifting the covers and his naked body sliding in beside me. He taught me how to masturbate him while he played with my vagina. He was very gentle with me. He didn’t hurt me. He would talk to me, tell me how much he loved me and how he believed I loved him too. This was the way we could show our love for each other, he said. He said that giving each other pleasure like this was a mutual sharing and sharing was what love was all about. Of course, he always assumed I was enjoying it; he never asked me if I was. And I was afraid to tell him otherwise. I don’t know why I was afraid. He never threatened me.
“His penis,” she said, pausing, preoccupied with the memory of that strange member, filtered through the mind of the child she had been. “I’d never felt anything quite like it, hadn’t even imagined anything like it. The stupid little shape of it. Sometimes he would come into my room before it was erect and want me to work it up. It was such a strange piece of anatomy, stuck on the front of him there,
seeming not really to fit anywhere. I always thought it seemed so out of place, rather like an afterthought…just stuck on there. I mean, it seemed ill-planned, having a life of its own, changing shape the way it did. As a child, it struck me that way. So there was some curiosity. But mostly, I was just revolted by the whole thing, by the oily secretions and then the ejaculate itself, viscous and noisome.”
She stopped, her eyes having the unseeing glaze of a hypnotic stare that often accompanied a total immersion in recalling the past.
“I was a child.’”” She frowned in incredulity. “He had no right to acquaint me, however gently, with those sensations. I hadn’t the vaguest understanding of what he was going through, and I grew to hate the signs of it that I soon became familiar with. A child, only a child. I didn’t understand, but I came to a sad knowledge of the crude signals of his sexual anguish, the moanings and whimperings as I tugged on his penis. I was only a child, yes, but I had an innate understanding of what pathetic meant, and he became the embodiment of it. Whacking him off in those gray nights, I felt overwhelmed by the repulsion and sadness of it all.”
Mary stopped again. Broussard followed the path of her staring eyes, but they were going nowhere. He believed she was looking at the thick coverage of the treetops, the oaks and tallow trees and catalpas where the mist and light rain were sifting down from the lowering sky. What did she see there? Why did she stop? He waited. Her lips were parted slightly, the hint of a pucker at one corner visible to him at this angle. She was laboring to control her breathing, her gray-blue eyes enlarged slightly as if it were part of her effort to gain control of her breathing.
“I had already learned to remove myself from what was happening by thinking of something else,” she began again. “It was a childish effort, more like daydreaming. I thought of scenes of movies I’d seen. The Sound of Music. I was eleven when it came out. I saw it five times, and I retreated into the innocence of that movie many, many, many nights while I hammered away on him. Julie Andrews was all the sweetness that I imagined it possible for people to be. She was so good. And she was completely untainted by the sort of things that went on in my life.”
Mercy Page 41
