“She abandoned me,” Mary said hoarsely, spreading her fingers out over his stomach. She emitted a quick, muffled gasp. “Even in the womb, she abandoned me.”
She bent forward and began stroking Margaret’s wig, a gesture so unexpected and tender that it momentarily broke through the numbing paralysis of his hysteria. But he was mute. She lowered her head. He was dumbfounded. He felt the weight of her breasts upon his hips. It was ending. Her mouth began to suck at his sternum. He had wanted to understand the essence of Mary Lowe. He had longed for it, had fervently wished to know it. She began to gnaw at him, to bite him, her teeth gashing fiery gobs of him. Margaret arched his neck and made a sound in his throat through the well of saliva; he rolled his eyes in bewildered horror at such an indescribable sensation as Mary worked her way down his stomach.
62
Everyone agreed that the search warrant should be obtained with the knowledge of as few people as possible. Palma called Birley and asked if he wanted to go along to back up her and Grant, an acknowledgment that Birley had an investment in the case and a gesture of a partner’s respect. Art Cushing and Richard Boucher were already there, since they had picked up the stakeout from Maples and Lee at the end of their shift. Leeland, who had had the patience not to chafe at being deskbound during the investigation, asked at the last minute if he could go along with Birley, a request that was readily granted.
It took them nearly an hour to get organized. While they waited for Birley to drive in from his home in Meyerland, Palma had to go through an ordeal to find the proper judge to sign the warrant. She finally located him at Brennan’s Restaurant, where he had taken his wife for a birthday dinner. Palma and the judge retreated from the dining room to a wrought-iron table outside in a secluded corner of the walled courtyard, where the humidity and heat worked its will on the judge’s shiny forehead and starched white shirt. Palma brought him up to date on the investigation and he, being a careful and politically astute man, had asked a number of questions after making it clear he did not want to be humored with glib responses.
Eventually he consented to sign the warrant, using the side of Palma’s purse to write on.
Followed by Birley and Leeland in a second car, Palma and Grant once more drove west through the tall pines of Memorial Park, the car’s headlights flitting through wispy streaks of night humidity which hung in the air like ribbons of smoke. It had been almost forty-eight hours since she had picked him up at the airport and taken him this route to see the hotel where Sandra Moser had been found, the condominium where Dorothy Samenov had died, and the large red bedroom in Hunters Creek where Bernadine Mello had had her last affair. But Palma’s preoccupation with the case had been so intense it had warped her sense of time, and Grant might have been there a week, or even a month.
They had not spoken since they left the police station, and just as they were passing the drive to the Houston Arboretum and approaching the West Loop Expressway, Grant shifted in his seat.
“How do you feel about it?” he asked.
“What part of it?”
“Confronting Broussard, now that we know a little more about him.”
“I’m thinking that if we don’t find anything in his place that nails him, it’s going to scare the hell out of me.”
Grant didn’t respond and it was a moment before Palma asked, “I didn’t say the right thing?”
“You said exactly the right thing. That’s what it does, scares the hell out of you.”
“When you don’t catch them?”
“That’s right. In the dozen or so years I’ve been doing this, there’s been a fair number of cases we’ve never cleared. In the beginning I consulted on a few that were never resolved, which bothered me, nagged at me, but the first time I was in charge of a case that wasn’t cleared it nearly drove me crazy. Damn thing plagued me. Couldn’t stop thinking about it. Dreamed about it. Daydreamed about it. It turned me inside out. It was the first real job-related stress that came between me I and Marne. That was our first taste of it.”
Grant looked out the window to the darkness, and then back at the headlights through the windshield.
“That first one almost changed the rest of my life, and then somehow I learned to cope with it. Me and Marne.”
Grant stopped talking until they had passed under the West Loop and got onto the tighter, narrower Woodway with the dense woods coming close up to the street.
“And then there was a second one,” he said. “And eventually others. Now there’s a collection of them.” He tapped his head. “They’re lodged in there like tumors turned silent and benign. You know they’re there, but you try not to think about them. If you think about them, draw psychic attention to them, they might come to life again…start killing again.”
“Are you trying to prepare me for something?” Palma asked. She was leaning toward the windshield, trying to find her turnoff.
“I’ve just been thinking about all those uncleared cases you mentioned earlier today,” Grant said, without answering her question. “Four, five thousand a year. Some are cleared eventually, but most aren’t. It adds up to numbers you don’t like to think about.”
“Here we are,” Palma said, and turned right onto a heavily wooded street where the houses were set far back into the dense pine and undergrowth. The only visible signs of habitation were the openings of narrow asphalt drives disappearing into thick vegetation. Occasionally a drive would be bordered with low curb lights casting eerie green splashes as they reflected off the low shrubbery, and occasionally a pale candescent glow would illuminate the magnetic card box of a security gate.
Palma slowed, and turned left into a corridor of thick pines and sapling oaks. She cut to her parking lights and immediately turned right into the drive that led to Broussard’s office. Her parking lights picked up Cushing’s car sitting in the darkness, and in her rearview mirror she caught the twin beads of Birley’s car right behind her.
They stopped perpendicular to Cushing, who had pointed his car toward the front of Broussard’s house so he and Boucher could watch the rest of the drive and the exit gate without having to crane their necks. Palma turned off the ignition, and she and Grant got out of the car. In the still, muggy darkness she could hear the muffled snapping of car door latches as Cushing and Boucher in front of her and Birley and Leeland behind her got out of their cars, and then a quartet of single snaps as the same doors were pushed closed to the first latch. Footsteps crunched over the gravel drive until everyone was standing at the front fender of Palma’s car.
“Nothing shakin’ in there, far as we can tell.” Typically Cushing was the first to speak, but he kept his voice low and soft. They were standing in a loose circle around her, close enough for her to smell Cushing’s cologne. “Place had been totally dark until about an hour ago when Rich noticed a dim light come on in the upstairs window.”
He turned and they all looked through the trees, where a faint glow identified the upper-floor window. “We took a little walk through the woods to get the layout of the place. Circle drive in the front comes out here,” he nodded to the entrance they had just come through, “and a wall goes out from either side of the house with a gate on this near side so you can get to the back. We looked through there, big lawn sloping down to the bayou. Big terrace thing on the back.”
“What about the light upstairs?” Palma asked. “It looks like it’s in a corner room.”
“Yeah,” Cushing nodded. “Top floor, left corner. Matter of fact, it looks like the room runs along the whole far end of. the house ‘cause we could see light along there. Looked like the windows were open; they’re the tall kind, big ones.”
“What’s below the windows?”
“Uh, I think, a hedge close to the house, about fifty or sixty feet of yard, and then the woods, all sloping down to the bayou.” Cushing looked around. “Hey, what is this, a raid? I thought you was just giving the guy a warrant.”
“We don’t expect him to answer the door,”
Palma said. She was hoping no one would actually come right out and ask her if she planned to try very hard to get Broussard’s attention. “Cush, why don’t you stay with the cars in case there’s an effort to avoid us through the drive here?” The possibility of a car chase would appeal to Cushing and would keep him away from seeing anything she might decide to do that wasn’t strictly by the book. “Don, could you and Rich get outside the windows at the far end of the house? If they’re open, there could be an effort through there.” She didn’t know Boucher that well and didn’t want to trust him with a crucial exit site by himself or, like Gushing, with the opportunity to see her do something outside regs. “John, can you take the terrace? There are probably French doors back there, maybe a lot of them, something to allow a view to the lawn and bayou. If Broussard’s in the dark, he could see you coming up on the terrace.” Suddenly she realized she didn’t have to tell him that, but he nodded anyway. She was doing what she was supposed to do.
“Grant and I will go in the front,” she concluded. “If there’s no answer, we’ll go ahead and enter and try to get back to the terrace doors and get you inside as soon as we can,” she said to Birley. “Everybody keep your handsets on.” She looked at Leeland and Birley. “We’ll wait here until you let us know you’re in place.”
Neither she nor Grant nor Cushing spoke as they waited for the other two men to get in place. Grant hadn’t said anything since they had gotten out of the cars, and she wondered what he was thinking of the way she was handling it. She wondered if he always took the backseat in these situations or if he was doing so in this instance because of her. She decided it was his character. It would have been an insult to him to believe otherwise.
It seemed like a long wait, but it was actually less than ten minutes before, “Leeland, ready,” came over the radio, followed a minute later by, “Birley, ready.”
Leaving Cushing with the cars, she and Grant walked up the drive toward the front of the house. As they approached the rear of the two Mercedeses, Grant moved to the edges of the cars and looked inside while Palma walked up to the front door. The doorbell was not lighted, and Palma looked around at Grant, who was now looking in the other side of the cars. She reached in her purse and took out her set of picks, an expensive set that had been her father’s and which she had learned how to use while she was still in high school. She already had the picks working up the pins when Grant joined her on the steps, and before he could say anything she felt the rotor moving and the lock clicked open.
“I didn’t hear the doorbell,” she explained, adhering to the letter of truth if not the spirit, and the moment she spoke it occurred to her why Grant had stayed behind and shown so much interest in the two parked cars. He had worked with a lot of law-enforcement agencies, both large and small, and with all kinds of officers, straitlaced and devious. He probably had learned a long time ago that sometimes it was best for special agents acting as advisers to local agencies not to know all the details of the way the local officers ran their operations. Unoccupied cars and doorbells that couldn’t be heard. There was, after all, a relationship.
Palma was aware of perspiration soaking through her Egyptian cotton by the time she pushed open the door and felt the waft of cold air from Broussard’s air-conditioning system. She was reminded of the morning she had walked into Dorothy Samenov’s condo and the chill of a lowered thermostat had foreshadowed a deeper, stranger chill of another kind.
If the entry had activated an alarm system, Cushing would intercept the call or the investigating officers. Palma and Grant stood in the foyer, letting their eyes and ears get used to the darkness and the silence in the house. Simultaneously they both readied their handguns, Palma remembering the incident in the hallway of Broussard’s office when he had confronted them. She knew they ran that risk here as well, but chose to gamble for the chance of catching him unexpectedly. She saw the entry into the dining room and another room past that with the glow of the city sky seeping in through the dozens of small panes of the French doors that lined the far side of the living room beyond.
She looked at Grant, who nodded at her, and then she started toward the dining room, pausing at a transecting hallway and looking both ways before she continued, skirting the table and dining chairs around to the other side, where she paused before entering the living room. It was a long room, stretching across much of the bottom floor, with its length contiguous with the terrace. Waiting a moment, she scanned the long line of French doors and then saw Birley standing where two door frames came together and provided a thin barrier for him to stand against. She carefully crossed the room and approached the doors, running her hand up the facing until she found a latch, turned it, and opened the door for Birley. She saw the glint of his Colt in the faint light.
Now that the glow from the city sky was at their backs and illuminating the room in front of them, they moved quickly back through the living room and dining room to Grant, who was still waiting in the entry hall. A long stairway went up to the second floor from either side of the entry, and Grant motioned to his left, meaning that was the direction that would take them to the end of the house where the bedroom window was lighted. Palma nodded, and he let her pass him and start up the stairs first. She felt a warm spot growing hotter in the center of her chest as she mounted the stairs carefully but without hesitation.
When she reached the landing, there was no confusion about which way she should go along the mezzanine. To her right the mezzanine continued across the foyer below and toward the stairs on the other side of the entry and to bedroom doors beyond that. To her left, maybe fifteen feet away, a door was open and a lemon light spilled out into the hallway. Palma noted the color of the light and decided it was much too yellow to have been the result of a small-wattage bulb. There was another explanation.
She moved aside to let Grant and Birley gain the landing also, and then motioned to them that she would go ahead. The three of them approached the opened doorway and waited, listening, trying to get some audible bearing. The bedroom door opened in a corner of the room, and along the wall to Palma’s left were the windows that had been visible to them from the front of the house. On the other side of the door, on Palma’s right, a short wing wall created a mini-foyer before the room itself opened up on the same side and ran the depth of the house.
Palma moved carefully, grateful for the thick, expensive carpet, and actually stepped through the bedroom doorway into the small foyer behind the wing wall. As soon as she did so, her heart sank as she smelled the familiar perfume that had pervaded each of the rooms where the other victims had been found. But here, mixed with it, there was another smell too, a faint pungent odor as if something were scorching. And then she heard something familiar, the hissing sibilants of whispering. With adrenaline punching her nerves like a hot prod, she looked around as Grant and Birley moved in close behind her. Then with a sharp nod she stepped out from behind the wing wall and took a firing stance with both hands, her arms pointed straight out to the bed across the room as Grant and Birley burst past her and did the same, one right after the other so that all three of them were crouched in standing firing positions, looking down the lengths of their arms and over the tops of their guns at the macabre sight on the bed twenty feet away.
The room was poorly lighted by a single lamp that sat on a reading table beside the bed. Several yellow scarves had been thrown over the lampshade, one draped directly onto the bulb, which was creating the scorched odor.
Palma could not immediately understand what she was seeing on the bed, stripped of all its cover except its top sheet, but what she saw in the next few seconds confused her and then numbed her so quickly that she forgot herself, forgot to move, or even to breathe. There were two naked bodies, both with long blond hair, both with faces painted like all the previous victims. The body that lay on its back was thickly set, its eyes wide open and glassy. Two huge and irregular circular wounds appeared where the breasts had been and the body had been so severely bitten t
hat from where Palma stood, the person appeared to be thickly covered with smallpox welts. A single stringy, gray entrail extruded from the navel and lay across the stomach, and the pubic region had been completely resected so that the gender of the victim was obscured. Or would have been if Palma had not had such a grim familiarity with the mutilated human anatomy. The thick set of the waist and the narrow hips, the almost right angles of the abdominal muscles and the dark patterns of body and leg hair told her the mutilated body was a man, and even as she comprehended this her eyes were shifting to the second nude figure, a body as exquisitely lovely as the other was nauseous. The woman lay on her side beside the corpse, ignoring them, her attentions fixed hypnotically on the painted, mutilated man, the foot of her top leg stroking his ankle seductively, her head resting beside his on her bent arm while the long, graceful fingers of her free hand traced idly around the two wounds on either side of the man’s chest. Her own long, buttery hair mixed with the flowing locks of the man’s wig as she arched her neck to keep her lips next to his ears. Transfixed by the discordant imagery of what she was seeing, her emotions in disarray, Palma was startled to feel a sob rising in her chest, and then she was startled again to feel it stop. In the near silence the three of them stood in stunned awe listening to Mary Lowe’s whispered gabblings to Dr. Dominick Broussard, apologies and groanings and supplications, reminders of the way it once had been for them, before their long flight through the dingy towns of Dixie, before the seductions and the betrayals, before she had become her father’s whore and her mother’s venging angel.
Epilogue
The media storm that followed Mary Lowe’s arrest was unprecedented and, within twelve hours, international. The idea of Lady Cop Gets Lady Killer with its facile double entendre and sex-and-death formula made the case immediate headline and lead-story material. The moment Mary Lowe was booked, the security was stepped up at the police department and then at the county jail, where she was taken to the women’s ward only half a dozen blocks away on the northern edge of downtown and on the southern bank of Buffalo Bayou. For the first few weeks everyone even remotely connected with the case was hounded by the media, looking for a wedge, however small, by which they hoped to open up the story. As the days passed and the police department released enough information to bleed off the intense pressure created by a breaking story, the supporting cast received less and less attention.
Mercy Page 64
