They heard sirens and raised voices outside, car and van doors opening and closing. The window curtains on the other side of the bed were flushing blue and cherry, blue and cherry. In the next few minutes the three of them would lose their privacy.
“When we get through with this,” Grant said, “I’d like to run something by you. Just the two of us. This isn’t looking good at all.”
53
As the predawn sky lightened to gray, then pearl, Janice Hardeman’s bedroom became the focal point of intense scrutiny. Until she and Grant had had time to work through the scene again and again, Palma would not allow the body to be moved or anyone to enter the small bedroom except Jules LeBrun, who went through his arcane and solitary chores with the studied precision of a tai chi chuan master, pausing occasionally to consult with Palma and Grant as to the particulars of their special requests.
Palma watched the color in the room change, as clean, pale daylight overrode jaundiced incandescent and, with the changing light, Vickie’s nude body seemed to evolve from a symbol of mysterious and perverse sexuality to something banal and even tawdry, evoking not excitement, but depression. Palma found herself oddly affected by this transformation, her perceptions unexpectedly recast in much the same way that they are when one sometimes is surprised to hear a perfectly ordinary word in a peculiarly different way, so that it seems altogether new and unfamiliar. The dead woman became una cosa de muerte—a thing of death—her father’s term, by which he meant that the human element had disappeared. She was something dead, formerly warm-blooded but otherwise unrecognizable, a pale and gaunt, split-finned thing with a doll’s head slapped onto its gristly, elongated torso, its lidless eyes staring at all that moved and didn’t move with the same mindless detachment.
Palma resisted this mirage of disassociation. Homicide detectives were famous for creating these mirages, a mother becomes a case number, a daughter becomes “the girl in the landfill,” a sister becomes “the coat hanger case,” a wife becomes “the woman in the Dumpster.” But Palma was finding it impossible not to empathize with these victims. For her, the four women were mother, daughter, wife, sister and, try as she might, they could not be depersonalized to the peripheries of her emotions. She was in it up to her heart, and she didn’t want it to be any other way. The woman on the bed became una cosa de muerte only momentarily before she returned to the reality of what she had been and was still.
Like the dead woman in her bed, Hardeman had to give up hair samples from various parts of her body, one of her towels was taken to match with fibers in Kittrie’s mouth, her sheets were taken from the bed, her bedroom floor selectively vacuumed, and the occasional dust balls that she had allowed to drift along the edges of the hardwood floors and accumulate around the legs of the bed and corners of her closet were gathered for microscopic examination, a ridiculous idea in any other context, but which suddenly had accrued to a major element in a grim methodology because of what had happened on her bed within the last twelve hours.
When the three of them were finished, they left Kittrie to the coroner’s investigator and walked out through the living room to the front yard, where the sky had achieved the bird’s egg blue of a new morning, and Corbeil and Frisch were waiting for them with other detectives and uniformed officers within the taped-off parameters fronting Hardeman’s house. A throng of reporters and cameramen had made camp outside the yellow ribbon and had been joined by a sizable neighborhood crowd, some of them sipping mugs of coffee, a few women in housecoats, and a number of kids who looked as if they were going to be late for their first class, if they made it to school at all. A gathering of grackles had begun to shriek and snap and whistle in a tall and bulky mulberry at the corner of Hardeman’s house, and the almost subliminal sound of early traffic on Kirby Drive a couple of blocks away was audible in the background.
Ignoring the shouts from the reporters and turning their backs to the cameras, Palma and Grant held their necessary debriefing with Corbeil, who was now working past the end of his shift, and Frisch, who had been called early to his.
“Vickie Kittrie,” Frisch said, looking over at the house as if he might see her there. He was holding a cup of coffee, too, in an insulated paper cup.
Palma nodded. No one was going to say it, but Palma knew what they were thinking. The main suspect in her fancy female-killer theory was now a victim, which essentially pulled the plug on her credibility. Grant had never been seriously challenged.
“She have any idea why Kittrie was here?” Frisch gestured with his paper cup toward Janice Hardeman, who was still sitting with the policewoman and had been joined by a neighbor.
“We haven’t had the chance to interview her,” Palma said.
Corbeil was looking at Grant, probably drawing conclusions about how he had gotten to the crime scene so quickly.
“I got something for you on the two stakeouts,” he said, turning to Palma. “Reynolds sure enough didn’t leave his condo. The electronic surveillance verifies that. Broussard has never come out of his place, so we’re assuming he’s in there. You two left the station last night about ten-fifteen, and by ten-forty Martin and Hisdale were sitting a few drives away from Broussard’s house. At ten-fifty a woman driving a Mercedes registered to Broussard entered his drive. She hasn’t come out yet. At eleven-forty another woman driving another Mercedes—this one registered to a Paul Lowe—entered Broussard’s drive, and she hasn’t come out yet either.”
“You checked on Lowe?” Palma asked.
“Lives on Brookmore. Hunters Creek. No police record, a few speeding tickets. He’s thirty-eight and married.”
“Could have been his wife, a sister, sister-in-law, friend,” Palma said.
“But Broussard’s not married, is he?” Frisch asked.
Palma shook her head. She was preoccupied, not caring too much about what Frisch or Corbeil might conclude about her theories from their questions or by what they had seen or hadn’t seen. Like Grant, she thought something was terribly wrong here, and she couldn’t keep her mind from going over and over it. Nor could she keep her thoughts off Vickie Kittrie and her extracted navel.
Jeff Chin, the coroner’s investigator, stepped through the front door of Hardeman’s house and came over to them along the sidewalk. The earphones of a Walkman were hanging around his neck, and he was wearing a Mexican guayabera outside his jeans and cowboy boots, which were the color of butter.
“I’m going to be a little longer in there,” he said looking around at all of them, but his eyes finally settled on Carmen as he fished in the breast pocket of his guayabera for a pack of cigarettes. “But at this point I’m guessing that she died an hour either side of ten-thirty last night.” He jogged up a cigarette, lipped it out of the pack, and lighted it with a red Bic. “Rigor mortis is extreme. Under ordinary circumstances—woman dies of natural causes in room temperature conditions—rigor mortis usually reaches its full development anywhere from six to fourteen hours after death. However, those aren’t ordinary circumstances in there. She was tied up, bitten, cut, chewed, beaten, adrenaline squirting everywhere. From all that we can assume her antemortem emotional and muscle activity was strenuous, and that contributes to a more rigid onset of rigor mortis and would also push the timing closer to six hours than to fourteen.”
He drew on the cigarette and frowned. “Livor mortis is well developed, which takes about three or four hours. It reaches its maximum degree of development in eight to twelve hours. But I think she’s still got a way to go, so I’m going to go with the lower numbers. Her liver was only one degree below normal. The house is open, so the ambient temperature was—what was it last night?—seventy-four, seventy-six, which is okay. So, considering the postmortem temperature plateau of four to five hours, it looks like she could have been dead about six hours, give or take one. Ten-thirty’s still a good guess.”
“You feel good about the time, then?” Palma said.
“It’s a good guess,” Chin said.
“Can you do the autopsy t
his morning?”
“The sooner the better?”
Palma nodded.
“Will do.” He nodded at them, slipped his headphones on as he turned on the sidewalk, and started back toward the house, adjusting the radio in one of the fat pockets of his guayabera and taking a few last drags off the cigarette before he went back inside.
No one spoke for a moment, and then Frisch said, “Jesus!” and tossed his cold coffee out onto the damp grass.
“He could have been in the trunk,” Corbeil said, talking about Broussard. “Or just lying down in the seat. Woman drives in past Martin and Hisdale, and he’s lying down in the seat.”
“Then there’d be more than one person involved,” Palma said.
“I don’t understand how he got her,” Frisch said, turning the subject back to Vickie. “How could she have been that stupid?”
“She had bigger problems than fear,” Palma said. “And she’d been afraid before. I think she rather liked it. When you think about it, it had to be Vickie sooner or later. If we’re surprised by anything it should be that it didn’t happen to her sooner. I should have seen it coming. I really should have.”
“You?” Frisch looked at her. “Don’t start talking like that. We knew the odds were that he’d get another one, or two—or more. We can’t be responsible for a bunch of women who don’t have enough goddamned sense to…” He stopped himself. “Shit,” he said.
“We ought to see what we can get from Hardeman,” Palma said. They were wasting time just standing there. What Frisch was thinking about—how to handle the press, what and how to tell his superiors what was happening, how best to use the men he had and how to get more—was not Palma’s concern. Not at this moment, anyway.
Frisch looked at her and then nodded. “Yeah, go ahead.” He caught her eye before she turned away, and Palma guessed that Corbeil had shared his inaccurate deductions.
After Palma and Grant introduced themselves to Janice Hardeman, the patrol officer and neighbor made themselves scarce and Hardeman asked if she could get out of the car to talk. They stood at the front of the car, and she folded her arms and leaned her hips against the front fender. She wore a small utilitarian chrome wristwatch that Palma had seen on so many nurses that she imagined they must be as regulation as the uniforms.
“The woman was Vickie Kittrie,” Palma said flatly.
Hardeman’s eyes widened and she gasped, thrusting her head forward.
“Then you did know her?” Palma asked.
Hardeman frowned and swallowed, but she didn’t answer. She straightened her stance against the car, unfolded her arms, and pushed back her black hair from her temples. She had a pale, almost luminous complexion that she apparently had been careful to protect from the harsh Southwestern sun. It wasn’t the sort of nature-girl look that went best with a swimsuit, but it was flawless and elegant, and rare. Her lips were the color of washed-out lipstick, with a slightly redder ring around the edges where she hadn’t chewed it all off yet.
“You’ve been reading the papers?” Palma persisted.
Hardeman nodded. Her hands were braced against the fender behind her and she was looking down at the ground.
“Then you’ve read the names of the victims?”
Hardeman looked up.
“We’ll find out anyway, you know. There’s nothing to be gained from holding out; it’ll only waste time, cause all of us a lot of trouble.” She paused a couple of beats. “Besides, it’s a felony to withhold information in a homicide investigation.”
Hardeman looked suddenly tired. She shifted her white-stockinged legs, bending one knee, putting all her weight on the other leg. Her face bore the hard expression of an overstressed woman who was getting close to pulling the plug on her emotions. There was a limit. She nodded, a gesture of resignation.
“Yes. I knew her.” Hardeman’s voice was subdued.
“But you didn’t know she was coming here last night?”
“No, of course I didn’t. I hadn’t seen Vicki in…maybe two months.” She saw Palma’s questioning look. “She had a key to my place. When we broke up she gave it back, but I guess she could have had a duplicate made.” She ran her fingers through her hair again.
“Why did you stop seeing her?”
“Well, I really hadn’t known her that long. Four or five months. I didn’t know about her…proclivities. When she started trying to get me involved, I put her off. But she kept at it, really wouldn’t let it alone. She was even getting rough in our own relationship, trying to ease me into it. I just…couldn’t do that. I see too much pain in my work. I don’t want it in my sex life, too. I just quit seeing her.”
“Has she ever done anything like this before? Come into your home while you were away? Use your place to meet men, or other women?”
“No. Not that I’ve known about, anyway.”
“I guess you don’t have any idea who might have been here with her.”
“God. I can’t even imagine.” She cringed, as if remembering what had happened. “This is too, just too bizarre.” She glanced over her shoulder at the crowd of neighbors in the early-morning sunlight. “Look at them. I don’t believe this is happening to me.”
“Who did Vickie do most of her S&M with?”
“Oh, hell,” Hardeman said wearily, and Palma saw tears glistening at the corners of her eyes. “Uh, there were the women in the paper…who’ve been killed. Dorothy, Louise, Sandra. Uh, and there was Mirel Farr.” She shook her head. “I think those are all the names I remember.
“Did you know all these women?”
Hardeman nodded. “Only by sight, really. But not because of this. Just as friends of friends. You know, some of the women we knew.”
“What about Bernadine Mello? Did you know her?”
“No, I didn’t know her. I saw her name in the paper, but I didn’t know her.”
“Do you know anyone who knew her?”
Hardeman shook her head.
“What did you think,” Palma asked, “when you read about the killings in the paper?”
“What did I think?” Hardeman frowned. “What do you mean? I was scared, for Christ’s sake.”
“Why were you frightened? Did you think you had a reason to be?
“Well, after Dorothy was killed, yeah. It doesn’t take a genius to see a connection there. I mean, two people you know are murdered and the only reason you know them is because of…your mutual sexual interests. You don’t think we’d be scared, all of us?”
“You think this could have happened to any of you, then?”
“At first I did, sure. But then we’ve all been talking about it, in groups, among ourselves. We’ve picked over it, thought it out some more, and came to the conclusion it’s confined to the S&M crowd. We were convinced of it.”
Palma looked at her. “I guess you speculated about who it might be.”
“Sure. Every guy those women messed around with was a candidate, as far as we were concerned.”
“But wasn’t a lot of it strictly between women? Lesbian S&M?”
“It was, right.”
“But you didn’t suspect any of the women?”
Hardeman looked at Palma. “Well, yeah. There was some talk about that.” She shifted on her feet again and once more glanced around at the crowd. Palma felt sorry for her. She was wiped out. Palma guessed that after working a night shift in a Ben Taub war zone and then coming home and finding a friend butchered in your bed that you would have just about emptied every drop of adrenaline your body was capable of producing. She wasn’t going to be able to stay on her feet much longer.
“And who were your candidates among the women?”
“Well, shit,” Hardeman said, nodding toward her house. “The number one vote-getter is right in there.”
“Any one else?”
“Some mentioned Mirel Fair, but I couldn’t go along with that. Mirel’s in the business. It’s her trade. She does it for money. Whoever does that…in there, they do it because it
’s a passion with them, not a business.” She bent her head over and started rubbing the back of her neck. “That’s the way I see it, anyway.”
“You think a woman could have done that sort of thing?” Palma was going to get it straight from the horse’s mouth for Grant, who, so far, hadn’t made a peep.
Hardeman stopped rubbing her neck and cut her eyes up at Palma with a tired but amused smirk. “You’ve got to be kidding.” She slid her eyes to Grant and then back to Palma. “Jesus!” She shook her head. “Listen,” she said to Palma, “you ought to take the boys down to Mirel’s. Get them a comfortable chair behind her two-way mirrors and let them watch what goes on there for a week or so. Change their attitudes.
Only difference between men and women’s S&M—aside from the anatomical differences—is that women never spit between their teeth.” She looked at Grant. “That’s distinctly male behavior.”
“What about the men?” Grant asked. If he was put off by Palma’s setup and Hardeman’s sarcastic response, he didn’t show it in the least. “Who were they?”
Hardeman said, “A guy named Clyde, and a businessman…uh, Reynolds. And Louise Ackley’s brother. I remember I found that pretty incredible. Louise’s brother, for God’s sake. They’re the only ones I ever heard her talk about. Like I said, I didn’t want to hear about it too much. It was too off the wall.”
The grackles shrieked in the top of the mulberry, where the first rays of the morning sun were turning the blue leaves to green. In a few hours the oppressive heat would be unbearable as the rain-soaked city began steaming under a bright clear sky.
“Do you know if Vickie had ever sought psychiatric help?” Palma asked.
“I don’t know. She sure as hell should have, but I can’t say that she did. I just don’t know.” Two men from the coroner’s office unloaded an aluminum gurney from the back of a morgue van and took it up the sidewalk toward the front door. Hardeman’s shoulders slumped even more. “Jesus, I’m not believing this. I’m really not.”
“Have you got someone you can call to stay with today?” Palma asked. “Our lab technicians are going to need some time in your house.”
Mercy Page 54
