Mercy Page 14

Mancera shook her head.

  “Have you ever heard of Wayne Canfield or Gil Reynolds?”

  “No, sorry.” Mancera paused and looked at Palma, finally realizing what all the questions were adding up to. “You don’t have any leads on this? You’re still trying to come up with something?”

  “We haven’t had a lot of luck so far.”

  Mancera hesitated for a second, but went ahead. “What…exactly, were the circumstances?”

  “She was strangled.”

  “In her home?”

  “Yes.”

  “They broke in?”

  “It doesn’t appear so. She might have known the person.”

  “Jesus. Oh, I can see…” She looked at Palma, nodding. “I’m sorry. I really wish I could be more helpful. Poor Dorothy. You just don’t ever imagine these things, not in a million years.”

  “Well, I appreciate your taking the time.” Palma stood and laid one of her cards on the plate-glass desk. “My home number is on the back of the card. If you should think of anything you believe might be helpful to us, please call me. Anytime. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning.”

  Linda Mancera walked Palma back through the aqua corridor to the reception area, saying that she would do anything she could to help, that she wanted to be available if there was any way Palma thought she could use her. She seemed genuinely affected by Dorothy Samenov’s death and sincere in her desire to be of service. She was the first glimmer of something positive that Palma had encountered.

  14

  Mary Lowe was ten minutes late, but she made no reference to it as she came into his office. She was Broussard’s last appointment in the afternoon. They exchanged a few brief pleasantries as Dr. Broussard pulled his armchair over nearer the chaise than he normally kept it, and Mary sat on the edge of the chaise and unbuckled her sandals. Today her hair was down, and she wore a polished-cotton chintz sundress with a full skirt and bare shoulders that once again gave him a view of the tops of her breasts. He watched them as she swung her feet onto the chaise and lay back.

  “What would you like to talk about?” he asked, crossing his legs and settling into his armchair.

  “My father.”

  Broussard was surprised. After so many weeks of inanities Mary seemed to be finally wanting to get to the crux of her own psychological story. Perhaps the last session had indeed been a turning point. It had been a long time coming.

  The idea that Mary should undergo psychotherapy had not been hers, but her husband’s, and Broussard had seen from the beginning that she was going to require a rather complicated therapy. Paul and Mary Lowe had been happily married for four years. They had two children, a boy, three, and a girl, one and a half. Paul was an executive in a successful computer-manufacturing firm with a salary that put them in the higher income brackets. Mary had help with the children and the house; she didn’t have to worry about balancing a tight budget. She was attractive, well dressed, well educated, and active in one or two civic organizations with the proper social standing. Her life, by all appearances, was very good indeed.

  This was common with his clients. On the surface of things, none of them appeared to belong there.

  Then, nearly a year earlier, Mary began making excuses in order to avoid sexual intercourse with her husband. The frequency of their intercourse decreased. At first her husband believed they had let their lives become too crowded with obligations; they needed to set aside more time to nurture their relationship. He told Dr. Broussard he had read about this sort of thing in magazines. They simply weren’t spending enough “quality time” together. Paul Lowe was a good husband. He began to be more attentive to her; he arranged for occasional long weekends during which the two of them would take short trips alone. He did everything that the experts in the magazines said a man should do to revive a flagging marriage.

  But nothing changed. Mary persisted in making excuses, avoiding intercourse whenever she possibly could. When her husband confronted her with her obvious disinterest, even aversion, she reluctantly relented to his overtures and tried to discount his concern. But she was still unresponsive and tense. He had sexual intercourse with her—alone—a bizarre feeling that he could not long tolerate. Eventually it became clear to him that she actually was repulsed by intercourse, though she had no objections to lying in bed and holding him, or to being held by him. She seemed to find this comforting, seemed even to desire it, but sexual interaction beyond this simple demonstration of affection caused her immediate anxiety.

  Even with all this, Paul could not believe the sexual part of their marriage had come to an end. From time to time he would try to initiate intercourse, believing if he were gentle enough, delicate enough, understanding enough, loving enough, then she once again would become comfortable in their intimacy. The result was that Mary developed functional dyspareunia, and finally vaginismus. She developed a vaginal rash she could not relieve. She told her husband that her gynecologist was puzzled by her disorders and was trying a variety of medicines to cure them. But there was no change.

  Finally, their damaged relationship and Mary’s condition became so unbearable that Paul called her doctor himself, only to learn that the gynecologist had been telling Mary for months that in all likelihood her disorder had psychological and emotional origins, and he had encouraged her to consult a psychiatrist. He had given her several names and recommendations, but she had not acted on his advice. This discovery led to Paul Lowe’s ultimatum that either she sought professional therapy or he could no longer live with her. Because she truly loved her husband, Mary was horrified at his threat. But she refused to see any of the doctors her gynecologist recommended. Instead, a friend gave her the name of Dr. Dominick Broussard. It was not the best of circumstances under which to begin a relationship with a psychiatrist, but it had to do.

  He began with a goal-limited therapy to relieve her anxieties, which were the source of her physical symptoms. But even this took longer than he expected, and while he was enjoying being with her because of her remarkable beauty, he was also extremely impatient with the psychodynamics of her disorders. There was little she could say or demonstrate that he had not heard or seen in some other fashion in the context of some other woman’s miseries.

  “My stepfather, actually,” she said. Her sundress had a fabric cord belt and she held the two loose ends of the cord in her hands, toying with them. The small pucker at the corner of her mouth tightened ever so slightly. “He was an executive with Exxon. When we finally stopped running, we ended up here in Houston. I remember a period of time in boarding-houses still, while she was trying to find a job, and then finally she did. My mother is a very beautiful woman, even now. She’s only fifty-four. She has a contradictory personality. Though she’s very efficient, very orderly, she has blind spots…about people. She seems very compliant, not pushy, but it’s largely a deceptive front. When you stand back and look at what actually happens to her, you see that she always comes out on top of things. She’s a very skillful manipulator. She looks out for herself.

  “Anyway, she got a job with Exxon, a secretarial job, I think. She met my stepfather there. After a while, a year maybe, they were married. Our lives changed overnight—dramatically. We moved from a boardinghouse in Brookhaven to an enormous ivy-covered home in Sherwood off Memorial Drive. Mother quit working. I was enrolled in a private school. We bought clothes, so many clothes. Douglas, his name was Douglas Koen, didn’t deny us anything. He was a kind man, and he must have gotten a great deal of pleasure out of giving us a new life. He spoiled us and we loved it, and we loved him for doing it.

  “That first year in our new home was like a dream. It seemed too good to be true, and sometimes I lay in my clean bed at nights and remembered the two years of dirty rooms, and I never ever wanted to live like that again. And I remembered my father too, and wished that somehow he could have been a part of our happiness also. I felt guilty about the fact that he was fading further and further into the back of my mind, that he
had become secondary to my own happiness and comfort.”

  Broussard looked at Lowe’s legs. The hem of her sundress was riding just under her knees, and even though she was not wearing stockings her legs were as smooth and tan as a mannequin’s. But her feet betrayed her flesh and blood, especially her blood, for several long blue veins ran along the underside of her ankle and down the top of her foot toward her toes. These were not the swollen veins of older women, but the smooth veins of health, strengthened by several hours of tennis daily. And her skin was fair enough that he knew, too, that if he could see her nude he would see similar veins, though paler, more subtle, in one or two places around her breasts.

  “Mother had discovered all the wealth of the Borgias in one prematurely balding executive eight years older than herself,” Mary continued. “And she was not about to let it slip away. Keeping Douglas happy became her one aim in life, and she made sure that I realized the importance in this too. At her constant urging, I thanked him so many times that first year that it must have been sadly comical. And I was thankful, of course, but Mother had me fawning on him to the point of embarrassment.

  “One day when I got out of school he was there waiting for me. He had gotten away from the office early and had called Mother and told her he would pick me up at school. I suspected later that he had planned it so he could talk to me away from her. In the course of our conversation during the drive home, he tactfully let me know that it wasn’t actually necessary for me to be so constantly grateful. He said that there was an art to accepting someone’s kindness and that there were many ways to express gratitude without having to say thank you all the time. He said he knew I was appreciative and that that was reward enough for him. He said other understanding things too, kind things, as if he knew just how I felt and wanted to put me at ease. He spoke to me as though I were a whole person, worthy of his full attention. I had never been talked to that way before.

  “That was a magical afternoon for me, because after that I began to be drawn into a feeling of security that I had never known in my life. He won me over, heart and soul, during that brief drive home from school, and it was never to be the same again. I grew to love the man dearly. I was ten.”

  Broussard tensed. Premonition had been an unexpected consequence, an ensuant gift, of his years of practicing psychoanalysis. It was not something he had anticipated or tried to develop, but it came to him as a natural result of his refinement by continual practice of his own innermost abilities. It was not a gift he had come to regard with unmixed feelings. Though it had proved to be an enabling talent that had allowed him to better enlighten his clients, it had also had the effect of oppressing him. He was like a man who had been given a magic sack filled with a hundred pounds of gold coins. No matter how many he spent the sack was always full, but in order to have access to the coins he must carry it on his back. If he ever took it off, the gold and all the good it could do in the world would cease to exist. The blessing, and his ability to use it, was also an inescapable burden.

  The prescience was not a clearly defined knowledge, so that when it occurred he was racked with anxiety until he could decipher it, unriddle it, and employ the new understanding to help his client. So it was with a growing sense of dread that he listened to Mary Lowe’s story, knowing, surely, that today or the next, or the next, her story would turn dark, very dark indeed.

  “Those dreams I dreaded, of disintegrating? They began to go away,” she said. “Everything was fine for a year.” She didn’t go on.

  Broussard waited. He looked at his clock. She was capable of extraordinary silences. But not this time.

  “You have something to drink here, don’t you?” She turned her head toward him.

  “Yes.” But he didn’t move.

  “May I have a little bit of vodka?”

  “Stoli?”

  “Fine.”

  He got up from his armchair and went to the cabinet where he poured a glass for both of them. When he turned around she had gotten up from the chaise and was standing at the window, looking outside. She had gathered her skirt in her hands and was holding it up above her knees as if she were going wading. He walked up behind her.

  “Stoli,” he said.

  She dropped the left side of her skirt and held her hand up over her shoulder without turning around. He handed it to her, and she sipped without hesitation, still holding half her skirt in her right hand. He was close enough to smell her. She casually moved along the glass wall to the foot of the chaise.

  “How long have you had this office?” she asked.

  “About eight years.”

  “Oh?”

  He waited.

  “You’ve heard a lot of stories here, then, spent a lot of afternoons looking down to the bayou.”

  “Quite a few,” he said.

  “Do you like hearing them?”

  “It’s not a matter of liking them,” he said. “I try to use them to help people.”

  “You must hear a lot of the same stories,” she said into the plate glass. “At least, similar ones.”

  He knew better than to answer that one. Everyone wanted to believe his story was unique. He was thinking of this, looking at her hair falling across her bare shoulders, when he realized that she had continued to gather the right side of her skirt in her hand until almost her entire right thigh was showing. It was an extraordinary sight.

  “What kind of a story do you like?” she asked.

  There was a moment, and then he managed to say, “I don’t have any preferences.”

  “Everyone has preferences,” she said.

  He said nothing, his eyes transfixed on her long, tan thigh. Then her wrist flicked and the hem dropped a little, then a twitch, and it fell a little farther. Her fingers held the rest of it. Then, slowly, she began to gather it again, and the tan thigh emerged from the folds of the sundress with the same erotic impact of total nudity. He didn’t know why he looked up just then, but he did, and was startled to see her looking at him from her reflection in the glass. She did not smile or have the vixen-eyed gaze of calculated seduction, but she was watching him. He had no idea what to make of her expression, but it seemed to him—and he was almost sure of it—that she was absorbed in a well-practiced fantasy which had become, through many hours of indulgence, an absolute reality for her. Whatever it was, she was living it as surely as Broussard himself was living this very moment.

  15

  When Palma got back to her office she found a message to call Clay Garrett. Taking twice the time he should have, Garrett told her he had faxed her request up to Quantico. He said he had already talked to them about the case and that she would be hearing from an agent named Sander Grant. The VICAP forms would be processed overnight, and she should be hearing from one of their analysts within the next couple of days as to any possible matches in the violent crime databank.

  Palma thanked him, hung up the receiver, and flipped on her computer. Helena Saulnier was first. A driver’s license check: nothing. Person inquiry: nothing, neither of her names showed up as an ID name or an alias. National Criminal Information Center: she was not wanted on any criminal charges.

  Texas Criminal Information Center: she was not wanted for questioning in any crimes. Pawns: she hadn’t pawned anything within the past six months or sold anything to a pawnshop within the last week. Location check: no record of the police ever having been called to her residence on Olympia for so much as a Peeping Tom check. Well, it was a long shot.

  She did the same for Nathan Isenberg, Wayne Canfield, and Gil Reynolds. Again, nothing, except that Reynolds had accumulated too many speeding tickets within a ten-month period in 1986. His driving license had been in jeopardy, but then his violations suddenly stopped and he had managed to redeem himself with his insurance agency over the next several years.

  Dennis Ackley was a different story. Almost every screen she called up had something to say about Dorothy Samenov’s ex-husband. From 1967 to the present he had fourteen moving viol
ations, including three DWIs. He had done time in Hunts-ville for the last one. He was known under four different aliases and had been arrested seven times, including three times for aggravated assault against his wife, Dorothy Ann Samenov Ackley. All three times she had refused to press charges, though on the last occasion she requested a restraining order against him. He was paroled on the DWI sentence in August 1988 and on February 1989 a warrant was issued for his arrest on the basis of parole violations. He was also wanted by the Dallas Police Department for questioning in an aggravated assault of a woman in Highland Park four months earlier. A month before that incident he had pawned a pair of Zeiss binoculars along with a 9-mm Smith & Wesson Model 459 automatic pistol.

  Palma picked up a pencil and made one additional note. When she had begun her investigation of the Sandra Moser case she had checked with Houston’s central crime analysis division to see if any other homicides in the city had an M.O. pattern resembling what she had seen with Moser. The search had been negative. Now, considering the fact that Ackley was wanted in Dallas for questioning in an assault on a female, she decided to check with their crime analysis unit as well. Additionally, she wanted to check with the crime analysis office of the Department of Public Safety in Austin, which collected statewide information.

  The telephone rang and Palma picked it up. It was Birley, still at Samenov’s.

  “I’m about to shut down here,” he said, sounding tired, “but I’ve made some progress. I found Samenov’s financial papers, bank statements, income tax returns, personal correspondence, and a photograph of Dennis Ackley. He looks like a real sleazoid. The gal had strange taste. Anyway, I went through the bank statements and the checks first, and I think there’s something a little screwy here.”

  Palma could hear him flipping the pages in his notebook, which she knew he was looking at through his cheap plastic half-lens reading glasses that he had bought off a rack at Walgreen’s.