Mercy

by David L Lindsey

  Palma looked at Denise. The photograph was made five months before she disappeared by one of the women she had been seeing in Samenov’s group. It was a four-by-six color shot. Denise was standing on an empty beach, the shoreline disappearing behind her into the coastal haze. She must have been tossing food to the seagulls, because two of them hovered low in the sky behind her. She was developing a first-class sunburn, and the brisk Gulf air was making her short blond hair stand up on one side of her head. She was not a particularly attractive woman, but she had a kind face and large eyes that sagged slightly at their outside corners, giving her a vaguely doleful appearance.

  Palma handed the photograph to Grant, who held it in both hands and looked at it. She watched the minuscule jerky movements of his eyes as he took in the receding shoreline and the floating birds and the sunburned face of the woman who smiled hesitantly, as if by permission, at the photographer. Palma saw Grant’s eyes settle on Denise’s face and stay there. He looked at her for a long time.

  Grant’s own face was indecipherable, an attribute that was beginning to get on Palma’s nerves. It was not that the man was stone-faced. His face was not expressionless. The real peculiarity about him was that he never showed her anything that she knew damn well he hadn’t thought out beforehand and had decided he wanted her to see. When they had met at the airport he showed a convivial smile, a good-humored, pleasant demeanor. When she had confronted him in Frisch’s office that morning, he showed a thoughtful seriousness in keeping with his role. When they had lunch together he knew to loosen up a bit, ease back on the formality in order to soothe her ruffled feathers. And it wasn’t that he lacked spontaneity. His manner never seemed forced or bogus. But the irritating thing to Palma was that it was when his mind was turning on its most interesting course that his face became the most enigmatic—the most deceptive. She didn’t care about the convivial Grant, or the thoughtfully serious Grant, or the eased-back Grant. She wanted to know the Sander Grant who looked at the photograph of the plain and mysteriously disappeared Denise Kaplan Reynolds and was so moved by what he saw that he believed it was necessary to disguise his feelings.

  “Birley’s talked to two women, besides the one he’s with now, who’ve had sexual relationships with Kaplan,” Leeland said, interrupting the silence. “And all of them claimed they didn’t know whether Kaplan had ever had affairs with any of the victims. Birley said he thought a couple of them were lying, that they were afraid to talk because of the killings.”

  Nancy Castle, who had been making and answering telephone calls while they were standing there, hung up the telephone, looked at her watch, made a quick note, and waved the paper at Leeland.

  “That was Garro,” she said. “He and Childs have taken over from Cushing and Boucher, and they’ve followed Reynolds and his date back to his condo. Garro and Childs have gone into the surveillance van, and one of the electronics men is putting a bug and a listening device in Reynolds’s car. They’ll sit on him there.”

  “Cushing and Boucher are going home?” Leeland asked.

  “Said they’d check in again in six hours.”

  “Okay, we’ve talked with Broussard,” Palma told Leeland, and she went over the highlights of the interview, passing on the facts as they had learned them.

  “You mean the guy’s had all three victims as clients?” Leeland’s solemn eyes widened.

  Palma nodded.

  “Damn. So how do you read this guy?”

  Palma turned to Grant. She wasn’t about to answer that. She wanted to hear what Grant had to say. He looked at her; he knew what she was doing.

  “Okay, let’s talk about Reynolds’s condo first,” Grant said, his eyes pulling away from her and going to Leeland. “You remember I said photographing his place, looking through it, would tell me something about him? Well, it did, but it wasn’t what I’d expected. I’ve known a few men who were snipers in Nam. All of them were long on native intelligence, and tended to be patient, exacting, obsessive. So I wasn’t surprised at the sniper shell souvenirs, except for the number of them. After that girl, Terry, told Carmen of Reynolds’s rifle scope fantasy involving Louise Ackley, the souvenirs were almost expected.

  “What I didn’t expect was that Reynolds would go down a notch on my suspect list.”

  Leeland looked at Palma, but she kept her eyes on Grant.

  “I’ve said several times that sexually motivated killers were souvenir keepers,” Grant began explaining, “but the sniper shells don’t count. Not in this particular context, anyway. If we were investigating sniper killings, okay. But they mean nothing in these cases. I don’t doubt that Reynolds has problems, but I don’t think they’re our problems. Not on the serial killings, anyway.”

  “Then you didn’t find anything?” Leeland couldn’t believe it. Lack of sleep had puffed his eyes and emphasized his weighty jowls, giving him the countenance of a mildly surprised walrus.

  “That place was empty as far as any reference to these cases is concerned. Nothing. But Reynolds is one cold individual—no picture albums, no mementos or references to his family, no letters to anyone or from anyone…nothing of any personal nature at all. The place could have been a motel room occupied by someone different every night. I imagine,” he said to Palma, “the rifle Terry told you about is kept in his office or the trunk of his car.”

  “Couldn’t he be keeping his souvenirs there too?” Leeland asked.

  “I just can’t feature it,” Grant said, folding his arms across his chest and standing swaybacked to relieve the tired muscles in his lower back. “He’d have kept them at home, well hidden maybe, but they’d be in that condo. We were there a little over two hours. I’ve had a lot of practice looking for those sorts of things. If they’d been there, I think I would have found them.”

  “Broussard, on the other hand…” Palma said, as if cuing him.

  Grant nodded. “Exactly. This guy we’ve got to look into. Aside from the obvious facts we’ve already mentioned, there were a couple of things that really impressed me. The facts he gave us about child abuse…female offenders.” He looked at Palma. “That must’ve done your heart good. But the point is,” he addressed Leeland again, “he wasn’t expecting us, and even if he had been I doubt if he could have anticipated our line of questioning. Yet he rattled off those percentages of various abuses as if he’d just looked them up. Two possibilities: either he was mightly impressed by those facts and figures when he read them somewhere and took special note to remember them, or he has a specific interest in that subject and has a ready recall of the statistics. I’m guessing the latter.”

  “He did say almost all of his clients were women,” Palma reminded him. “It seems logical to me that he’d be up on those kinds of studies.”

  “Right.” Grant nodded warily as if knowing she was going to say that. “But the next point isn’t so easy to explain. When I kept after him to speculate about what kind of thinking process our murderer might follow, he was reluctant to do it. Didn’t want to at all. But when he finally did, his observations were expressed in the first person, not the third person. It’s true I’d asked him to try to put himself in the killer’s place. Still, the choice of pronouns was significant. Additionally, his assessment was perfect, accurate in every aspect. I don’t think this can be explained by way of his being a psychologist. Criminal psychology is a specialty. Unless a psychoanalyst had a particular interest in criminal psychology, he’d have to do considerable reading before he could rattle off the information Broussard gave us this evening. But he had a ready grasp of it, and of this precise criminal typology—the sexual killer.”

  Grant said this with unmistakable satisfaction. Obviously, Broussard was tracking true to form.

  “The interesting thing,” Grant added, “is that he gave it all to me. Straight out. He made no effort to blow smoke at me. It was as if he was saying, ‘Okay, here’s my life, here’s what it’s all about. But even knowing this won’t do you any good because I’m still more cle
ver than you by half.’ He was challenging me. And that’s what I was waiting for.”

  “Christ, when you think of it, he was extraordinarily cooperative,” Palma said. “Victimology, volunteering that he was Samenov’s doctor.”

  “Exactly,” Grant said again. “We’ve got a lot of work to do on this guy.” Suddenly he turned back to Leeland. “Anything new from the lab?”

  “Oh, yeah, there is.” Leeland reached around to his desk and shuffled through his files until he found a yellow-tagged report from the crime lab. “LeBrun brought it over shortly after five o’clock.” He flipped over the cover sheet and read a moment.

  The telephones had been ringing steadily, keeping Castle and the clerk busy. When both of them were on the telephones as they were now, Leeland and Palma and Grant had to move a little closer together to cut down on the noise level.

  “Okay,” Leeland said. “Remember we had five unidentified pubic hairs collected off of Dorothy Samenov’s bed. Of those five, three came from one source and the other two came from another single source. Well, the three pubic hairs matched Vickie’s.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Palma said. “But we still have a chronology problem. A bath or shower most likely would have washed away any hair she picked up from sexual partners. If it was her habit to bathe in the mornings, then the period of time during which she could have had sexual relations would have spanned, say, from six in the morning until the time she was killed at approximately ten o’clock that night.”

  “She might have bathed when she came home from work,” Grant said. “Then she would’ve picked up those hairs within about three hours or less, assuming it would have taken her, say, forty-five minutes to drive home from Cristof’s and bathe.”

  “You might be able to account for her workday hours,” Leeland said. “She might have been with someone practically every minute of the day, which would confirm she was clean until she drove away from the club.”

  “Which would put both sexual encounters within that three-hour period,” Grant said.

  “Birley and Leeland speculated from the beginning that she might have had a menage a trois,” Palma said, looking at Leeland.

  “But I didn’t have any idea that one of them would be Vickie Kittrie,” Leeland said. “Damn, we didn’t even know we were talking about women.”

  “We still don’t,” Grant picked up the lab report from Lee-land’s desk and looked at it. “We still have two unknown pubic hairs. These women are bisexual.”

  Palma was disappointed. If Grant was seeing any validity at all in her theory—and she hoped that his elimination of Reynolds as a major suspect was an indication that he was—then he was not letting go of the traditional male killer theory very easily. But, realistically, she couldn’t expect him to.

  “And these were all telogen hairs?”

  “That’s right,” Leeland said. “No sheath cells, can’t be DNA-tested, can’t be sex-typed.”

  “Still, it’s likely that Kittrie had been sexually involved with her within, at least, three hours of her death,” Grant said.

  “Unless Samenov hadn’t bathed that evening and she had been with Vickie sometime earlier in the day,” Palma interjected. “Or unless she, for some reason, didn’t bathe that morning or even the night before and she was with someone twenty-four hours earlier in a menage a trois or separately, twenty-four to thirty-six hours apart.”

  “Or,” Leeland said, “unless someone planted the hairs there, either Kittrie’s or the others, or both.”

  “Reynolds,” Palma said. “He would’ve, and could’ve done that. He’s had access to Kittrie’s hair.”

  But Grant wasn’t interested in Reynolds anymore. The evidence might well eliminate him as a suspect later on or, as was likely, implicate him in the Ackley-Montalvo deaths, but as far as Grant was concerned he was out of the picture on the serial killings. It had been a quick reversal, but Grant didn’t waste any time on rehashing previous miscalculations. Broussard now commanded his full attention.

  “For all we know right now, Broussard could’ve had access to her hair too,” Grant said. “I think we’re going to find the good doctor’s sex life very interesting, and I’m not going to be too quick to exclude any of these women from having a part in it.”

  “How realistic is it to believe that Broussard would’ve thought of something like this?” Leeland asked.

  “Hell,” Grant said, “whoever’s killing these women would have had the intelligence, and probably the inclination, to have thought of everything we can think of, and I’m quite sure much more. You bet he could have planted the hair.” He thought a moment, tossed the lab report onto Leeland’s desk, and reached out and pulled up a straight-backed metal chair. He propped one foot on a bottom back rung.

  “On the other hand,” he said, gripping the back of the chair with both hands, his arms straight out, “I’m wary of getting too fancy here. It’s easy to fool yourself with speculation. I’ve screwed up more than once doing just this sort of thing. It’s too easy to do, especially when you know you’ve got a formidable adversary. But we’ve got to keep it clean.” He looked at Palma with the first genuine grin she had seen from him. “We ought to take your dad’s advice, Carmen. We need to decide what didn’t happen.”

  Leeland nodded thoughtfully, his eyes staying on Grant, who was now loosening his tie as he studied the flowcharts of events that Leeland and Castle had diagramed on a chalkboard behind Leeland’s desk.

  “You’re right,” Leeland said. “But I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. The facts accumulate, but they don’t seem to add up to anything.”

  “They will,” Grant said. “They always do. We ought to do a couple of things, and unfortunately, I guess we’ll have to wait until Monday now, but we need to check with the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association to see if either of them have ever had any grievances filed against Dominick Broussard. Also,” he said, “even though he lives in a ritzy neighborhood and those areas are usually pretty tight-lipped when it comes to giving out information about each other, we ought to have people out there knocking on doors. See if Broussard has domestic help. These people ride the same bus lines together, and talk about their employers is often a major pastime. They’re good sources. We’ve got to find out more about him.

  “I thought it was interesting, too, that he felt compelled to tell us that he’s likely not to have alibis for the nights in question. Actually, he already knows he doesn’t. He realized that when he read the newspaper account of Mello’s death which summarized all three murders and gave the dates.

  “My back’s breaking,” he said, taking his foot off the chair rung, turning the chair around and sitting in it. “Christ,” he groaned.

  Palma sat down on the edge of Castle’s desk beside her purse, and Leeland sat in his own desk chair.

  “And we have to do something with Vickie Kittrie,” Grant said, crossing his legs a little stiffly.

  “What we do with her is we make her a suspect,” Palma said. “Once more,” her voice was tight with frustration, “we’re working awfully hard to avoid the obvious. We’ve just been through all kinds of contortions with the chronology of Samenov’s last day to try to explain how Kittrie’s and someone else’s pubic hair got mixed in with Samenov’s—except to conclude that she was with Samenov when she died. That’s ludicrous. Why the hell don’t we consider the obvious: that Kittrie was with Samenov when Samenov died and that Kittrie might have killed her? It’s really wrongheaded to keep avoiding this possibility.”

  “But Jesus, Carmen,” Leeland said, “she gave you her pubic hair without so much as a mild complaint.”

  “Oh, come on. What was she going to do, make me get the search warrant? Was that going to look suspicious, or what?”

  “She called the police herself,” Leeland persisted. “You said in your own report that she was practically distraught over Samenov’s death. She fainted when she saw the body, for Christ
’s sake.”

  Palma looked at Leeland. “Yeah, I wrote that. And she was distraught. And even if she did faint, neither of those occurrences is even half a decent reason to eliminate her as a suspect. I know women who don’t need a reason to cry. It’s their first response to everything unexpected. Vicki has cried every time I’ve seen her. And do you think that rookie who was with her when she fainted would know a theatrical faint if he saw one? I talked to him too, and he was as shaken at finding the body as Kittrie seemed to be.”

  “Look, I don’t see any reason to go through this kind of thing,” Grant said to Palma. “Just go after her. Start with her alibis and keep going. Let’s find out if she knows Broussard. How is she to interview?”

  “Tough. She runs the gamut from cooperative to hysterical. She can be intractable, but not bitchy, not dykey. She’s completely feminine, so her resistance to cooperation comes on like little-girl stubborn.” Palma gave an apologetic twist of her mouth. “I’ll admit, after what I’ve learned about her in the last couple of days her bimbo act seems to have been pretty calculating. Which convinces me all the more that we’d be making a serious mistake to overlook her simply because she doesn’t fit the formula.”

  Grant hung his head in thought a moment. “We need to talk to Mirel Farr as soon as the doctors will let us. She ought to be able to give us considerable insight on Kittrie. I think we can make it clear to her that she’s in enough hot water that it would be to her benefit to cooperate with us a lot more than she was willing to cooperate with Marley and Haws.” He looked at Leeland. “Would you call us as soon as that interview’s possible?” Leeland nodded, making a note.

  “But most important,” Grant said, “is that it’s essential to get a round-the-clock surveillance on Broussard. What are our chances of getting that? What’s the mood of the administration? Are they going to want to put up the money to cover this?”