Mercy

by David L Lindsey

  Palma watched the trip from the door of the house to the door of the van and wondered, as she had done more than a few times before, what it must be like to be zipped into such a bag, listening to the barking static of the police radios and surrounded by the muffled crackling of the thick plastic bag as it moved around you. It was the kind of primitive wondering that the living often did about the dead, the sort of thing that had more to do with emotion than reason. Palma knew that, of course, but still she sometimes found herself wondering all the same.

  Janice Hardeman left the crime scene with a couple of friends after being allowed to go into her bedroom with Officer Saldana and collect enough clothes for several days. She was told the police would notify her later in the day about when she would be allowed back into her house. Palma thought about that too, about Janice Hardeman selling her bed. Murders, especially murders like these, played havoc with reason. In fact, the act of murder was a symbol for havoc, in the mind of the murderer as well as in the public psyche. Reason had to marshal all its forces to deal with it, and even then it was a close contest.

  Nothing was found in the street in front of Hardeman’s house that gave them any help, and the crime ribbon was pulled back to encompass only the little plot of yard in front of the house. With the removal of Kittrie’s body and the traffic once again moving by on the neighborhood street, the crowd began to disperse and most of the police cars moved on to their regular beats.

  Before Frisch started back downtown he stood in the shade of an old honey locust near the curb and brought Palma and Grant up to date on the other facets of the investigation.

  “Gordy’s in good shape,” Frisch said, backing well into the shade of the tree. At ten-thirty the sun was already high and white in a cobalt sky, and the humidity was so heavy it appeared like a glaucous vapor in the distance.

  “He’s going to be gimpy for a good while, but no permanent damage. Good excuse to make him lose a few pounds. Uh, Barbish is fine, too. He’s out of danger, and the doctors tell us they expect him to be in good enough condition to be interviewed in another twenty-four hours. It ought to be an interesting conversation, because we’ve got a lot to tell him.”

  “The ballistics information was good?” Palma anticipated him.

  Frisch nodded. “Yeah, the Colt Combat Commander checked out. It was the same weapon that fired the Power Jacket hollow points into Ackley and Montalvo. Barbish is not too smart. Like a lot of other thick-skulled cowboys, he loved his damn weapon too much. He should have gotten rid of it.

  He’s going to have to have a damn good lawyer to keep him from taking the needle in Huntsville. I imagine Gil Reynolds can just about feel the injection himself. The electronic-surveillance guys picked up Reynolds’s reaction at the breakfast table when he saw the morning paper about Barbish’s being wounded in a shootout with police. And then when he got to the part about Mirel Farr he got real quiet, and his overnight girlfriend started asking him what was wrong, what was wrong. She couldn’t figure out what had gotten into him. She kept pestering him until he yelled at her, and she started crying and they had a yelling fight. She ran off into the bedroom, and it’s been quiet there ever since. But so far he’s sitting tight.”

  “What about John?” Palma asked. “What have you heard from him?”

  “Birley’s not having any luck getting anything new from Denise Kaplan’s lovers,” Frisch said, taking out a notebook from his coat pocket. “But the guys we’ve got beating the bushes in Broussard’s neighborhood finally came up with the name of his housekeeper and cook. This was called in just about fifteen minutes ago.” He looked at his notes. “Alice Jackson, a fifty-eight-year-old black woman living not far off Wheeler Avenue near Texas Southern University. Maples and Lee came on to her through another domestic a few houses away. This woman said Jackson had worked for Broussard ten or twelve years. Said Jackson didn’t talk about the man too much except to say that he was ‘particular’ about his privacy. She claimed Jackson was as closemouthed as they come.”

  Frisch tore the sheet of paper off his notepad and handed it :o Palma.

  “What have you heard about Farr?” Grant asked.

  “Her doctor said she could be interviewed later this afternoon,” Frisch said. “He sedated her pretty good for the jaw-wiring, and he wanted her to have time to lose some of the swelling. Maybe around five o’clock. Even then, he’s not going to give you much time with her.”

  Grant nodded. “Okay, then. I guess it’s Alice Jackson.”

  Grant wiped a hand over his face, and Palma could hear the scratchy sound of the night’s growth of beard against his band. Now that they were in full daylight, Palma could see that Grant’s eyes were redder than they should have been, and the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes looked as if they had been chiseled into his face. She was glad that the wine could have its effects on him as well.

  “I’ll be frank with you,” he said to Frisch, loosening his tie. “I’m not sure what the hell’s going on here.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve been here a little over thirty-six hours. Ackley eliminated himself before I got here, Reynolds and Barbish eliminated themselves only hours ago, and no other suspects have come to the forefront besides Dominick Broussard, who fits only a smattering of the characteristics in my profile. And, to tell you the truth, I didn’t see anything today in Kittrie’s case that would make me change my mind about what I’ve already concluded. It’s going to take some more digging but, honestly, I don’t think he’s going to give us much time before the next one. This guy’s really on a tear, his fantasy’s pinging around like a pinball machine and pretty soon he’s going to explode. I think he’ll screw up, completely lose it. In the end, he’s going to get so crazy he’ll practically give himself to us. But not before he kills another woman…or two.”

  “Then you don’t think it’s Broussard,” Frisch said.

  Grant shook his head. “He’s the only guy in sight,” he conceded. “And there are some things I liked about him—we talked about them last night with Leeland. But I’ve been going over it and over it since then, and I’m going to back down a little. The man just doesn’t add up to the profile characteristics we’re used to seeing in these kinds of cases. My cop nose tells me that if a guy has intimate knowledge of every one of the victims, then that’s more than coincidence, and I put him right up there at the top of the list. But my experience with sexually motivated killers tells me he’s not what we’re looking for.”

  Grant was standing in the edge of the shade so that the rising angle of the sun was catching the back of his left shoulder. Beads of perspiration were popping up all over his forehead, and even though he had unbuttoned his double-breasted suit coat it looked hot. Palma remembered his pulling out his shirttail and leaning back on her sofa with his shoes off.

  “On the other hand,” he said, looking at Palma and then back to Frisch, “countering each of those ‘hunches’ are old maxims that I’m finding hard to ignore. The first maxim: ‘A chance element will sometimes send you on a wild goose chase.’

  “The fact that Broussard knows each of the victims could be nothing more than chance. After all, the man specializes in their particular emotional disabilities. Maybe we’re stacking the deck against him because we desperately need a good hand. The second maxim: ‘There are no absolutes in human behavior.’ Just because I haven’t seen it before, even after thousands of cases, doesn’t mean I won’t see it now. Anything’s possible when you’re dealing with the human personality. The variables are incalculable.”

  Palma took Grant to the Hyatt Regency, where she waited in the coffee shop while he quickly showered and shaved and put on a clean change of clothes.

  While she waited, she went over the scene in Hardeman’s bedroom. She stood at the door again and very carefully went over every move they made around the stiffening remains of Vickie Kittrie. She recalled their conversation, Grant’s face, her own thoughts. Her own thoughts, imagining once again the man bent over the body, the bare but
tocks, the rippled spine, what he did.

  Suddenly she stood and walked out of the coffee shop, stopping at the cash register to tell her waitress not to clear her table, that she was only going to make a phone call. She hurried across the lobby to the bank of telephones behind the glass elevators. She took two quarters from her purse. With the first quarter she called Jeff Chin. With the second one she called Barbara Soronno in the crime lab.

  They had a late breakfast sitting at a table that looked out onto Louisiana Street and had their first cups of coffee in a long morning that already seemed like it had been a full day.

  But Grant was fresher after his shower, and certainly appeared more alert than Palma felt, though after making her telephone calls she had gone by the women’s lounge and spent some time trying to make up for what she hadn’t done before they left the house that morning in the dark.

  “I’d mentioned to you I wanted to run some things by you,” Grant said after several sips of his coffee. Palma noted that he was wearing another double-breasted suit—a summer gray—and a fresh white shirt with a spread collar. Very polished, she thought, and she wondered if he had dressed this way when his first wife was alive, or if this was a result of the Chinese woman whose name Grant had never told her. Either way, he wore these rather proper clothes very well, not the least bit self-conscious of them. She looked at his face, squeaky clean from his fresh shave, his British officer’s mustache immaculately trimmed.

  “But first I’d like to get your reaction to what you saw this morning.”

  “My reaction? To what part of it?” Palma asked.

  “Any part of it.”

  She hadn’t expected the question, and her own questions were largely intended to give her time to think. How much of her “reaction” did she really want to share with him? Actually, Grant’s query was wide open. It could encompass Palma’s entire emotional reaction to all these cases, to all that she had seen in the past two weeks, or it could simply be a response to the physical evidence they had seen that morning, whether or not it demonstrated any deviation from what they understood so far about the murderer’s habits with the bodies. Palma knew that how she responded would reveal as much about herself as it would about her understanding of the cases, and it made her wonder what was really behind Grant’s simple interrogatory. She decided to be straightforward about it. She always decided to be straightforward.

  “The main element that’s affected me from the beginning of these cases,” she said, “has been the bite marks. I know they’re common in sexual homicides, but these aren’t common sexual homicides. Not to me, anyway.”

  “Not to you?”

  “I don’t mind admitting to a strong personal reaction to these from the beginning. It’s not anything I can focus on, I mean I can’t identify any key element that makes them different for me, but something’s there. And the bite marks, well, I’ve seen bite marks before, but these turned my stomach. Then with Bernadine Mello I saw the deliberate centering on the navel, then this morning…the whole thing…gone.”

  She turned her head, looked out to Louisiana Street, where the cabbies were lined up outside the hotel. Some of them were sitting in their cars with their doors open, out of the sun but not out of the heat, the buses and the traffic throwing up as much as the sun was throwing down, and the asphalt and the cement, already heated to capacity, weren’t taking any more and were reflecting it back like heat lamps.

  She turned back to Grant.

  “You’ve been in this business a while, seen a lot of things,” she said. “Maybe you’ve seen eyelids cut away before. I haven’t. Maybe you’ve seen navels sucked out of people’s bellies. I haven’t. But for me, the missing eyelids don’t hold a candle to that eviscerated navel.” She lowered her voice, unable to keep out the tonal strain of her tightening throat. “He didn’t remove the eyelids with his mouth,” she said with deliberation. “But that’s damn sure the way he took out her navel.”

  She saw that Grant’s eyes were leveled at her with the same seeing-unseeing gaze that he had had when he was looking at the picture of Denise Kaplan, his mind having gone way beyond the immediate focus of their concentration, and his next question sent a hot rush up from her stomach.

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  Palma looked at him. Neither of them blinked. Jesus Christ, she thought.

  “That’s what it’s like,” he said. His face was an odd mixture of grim knowing and restrained excitement. “It doesn’t always happen, doesn’t always come to you like this, but when it does, there’s really nothing like it. When you tap into one of these guys…there’s really nothing like it.”

  Palma reached for her glass of water and took a long drink to quench the fire in her stomach. She was stunned. She remembered what Grant had said during their second telephone conversation. He had told her that her objective ought to be to start thinking like the killer. Jokingly, she had replied, “No problem.” But Grant had not been that amused. It was too late for her not to have a problem, he had said. If she didn’t start thinking like the murderer, then she had a problem. And if she did start thinking like the murderer, then she still had a problem, only it was a problem of another sort. At the time, she really hadn’t known what he was talking about. Now she was afraid she did. What in the hell had she gotten herself into?

  “Look,” Grant said, bringing her back. He was talking slowly, as if he were coaching her through it, knowing what she was feeling and wanting to reassure her. “You’ve just discovered something about yourself that’s extraordinary. It’s an unnerving realization for anyone, in whatever field of human endeavor, to come face-to-face with a special ability…a gift. It sets you apart in secret ways, in ways that you know you can’t explain, or even admit to anyone else. And it presents you with a burden, and a choice. Either you pick up the burden and carry it, or you don’t. It’s a choice you can’t afford to make lightly, because it’s going to have lifetime consequences. All I’m trying to say is that it’s nothing magical or freakish. It’s just…just like having a hunch, only it’s more intense than that. You’ve got to have the guts to give it free rein, to let it get into you and develop. Accept it. If you can do that, if you’ve got that kind of genius and don’t use it…it would be wrong. You can’t afford to be afraid of it.”

  Palma fought a sense of suffocation. A warm, feverish glow spread over her, and she was sure she was flushed. She took another drink of water, and then looked at him.

  “You’re saying…that you think he actually did that?” she asked.

  “You told me that’s what he did,” Grant said.

  Palma nodded. She had been convinced, but now she realized it had been an unconscious certitude until Grant had pointed it out to her.

  “Yeah, I believe it happened that way,” Grant affirmed. “Or at least it’s so close to the way it happened that we can begin predicating some of our investigative decisions based upon that ‘theory.’ That’s the way it works. You play it down. You follow your ‘hunches,’ and they prove to be remarkably accurate. People will accept that kind of prescience if you call it a ‘hunch.’ Cops are proud of their hunches. But you can’t say what it really feels like, that it’s as if you’d been there yourself.”

  He took a drink of water himself and then shoved aside his half-eaten breakfast and looked at her as a wry grin eased onto his face.

  “The fact is,” he said, “I had sensed that you were getting more out of this than I was. I’m stumped here, but you seem to be connecting on a different level. I still think my profile analysis is correct; I can’t see anything I’d change. But I have to face the fact, too, that it isn’t meshing with our primary suspect. This whole thing seems to be drifting in the wrong direction for me. I think you can put us back on course.”

  Palma was uneasy. Grant was making it sound like she had all the answers, that breaking the case was up to her. “I’ll have to be honest with you,” she said. “I don’t think I understand what’s going on here as much a
s you seem to believe I do. It really is only a hunch. You’re making it sound much more…developed than it is. I mean, I’m sticking with my gut feelings on this…but if you haven’t noticed, I’m still having mixed signals. I said ‘he’ took out Kittrie’s navel with ‘his’ mouth. But I’m sticking with the idea of a female killer. It feels consistent.”

  Grant came back at her quickly, with a steely urgency.

  “Intuition, this kind of ‘insight,’ is not an exact thing,” he said. “It has to be…accommodated. It’s a slender vision of another mind, and you have to have the strength and the faith to let it guide you to ideas you’ve never imagined. That’s why it seems amorphous, unclear. You’re following, not leading. It requires a rare courage to give yourself to an inner voice.”

  Grant was leaning on the table, his eyes leveled at her with a slight, crimped earnestness. His brief exposition had been ardent, a word she normally would not have associated with him. It was disconcerting.

  “Let’s at least double-check Broussard against the list of the profile characteristics you gave us,” Palma said, wanting to reduce the wire-tight tension she was beginning to feel in her brain. She wanted something mundane, something routine and structured to concentrate on. “Good intelligence.”

  “Check,” Grant said. He seemed to understand what she was feeling. “Broussard obviously has that.”

  “Socially competent.”

  “My gut tells me he’s in the cellar on that,” Grant said. “We don’t know that yet, but that’s what we’re going to find out. Let’s say I’m right. That’s a negative.”

  “Sexually competent.”

  “My nose tells me the same thing. Broussard’s as screwed up as the women he consults.”