Mercy Page 22

  “They were lovers?” Palma was incredulous. She could not imagine the two women as she remembered them in these strange new roles.

  Palma’s mother nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “They were.”

  “How did you know this?”

  For a brief instant a flicker of discomfort passed across her mother’s face.

  “How? I saw them together.”

  Palma was surprised by a melancholy note in her voice.

  “You saw them?”

  Her mother nodded. “At the church of St. Anthony, in the vestry, during the saint’s feast day. Years ago. You must have been eight or nine, I guess. Yes, at least. It was that long ago. You remember Lydia Saldano? I had promised her I would put new candles in the altar holders for her. She had called me the night before; her brother was dying in Victoria. It was in the afternoon.” Her mother paused and shook her head slowly, remembering.

  “I left the festival grounds and walked across the lawn and through the trees to the church. I came in through a back door to the rooms behind the altar. It was empty, of course, and all the stained-glass windows were pushed open, and I could hear the sounds of the festival across the lawn. As I crossed toward the other side of the church I heard a sound, something scraped or dragged against the floor, and then I thought there were soft voices. It came from the vestry. I wasn’t even thinking, my mind was on something else, I don’t know what. I turned and went that way. When I came around the corner of the passageway—the vestry is out of the way, at the end of a passage by itself, you know—the door was open. I saw them suddenly. They never even heard my footsteps.”

  She paused. She was watching the doves, the three of them pecking at invisible nothings around the damp margins of the fountain.

  “I was astonished. You can imagine. They were completely naked, their dresses and underthings scattered on the floor. I was amazed to see this, frozen to the spot. I watched them,” her mother said matter-of-factly. “Lara. Quiet, meek Lara, was very much in control of their lovemaking, and Christine…well, she was the niña, I suppose. It was as if they had exchanged personalities. I could see it immediately and for some reason, I don’t know why, that was as shocking to me as what they were doing. They were very passionate, very sensual and imaginative in the way they touched each other. I had never seen anything like it before.” She stopped, her eyes only incidentally on the speckled doves. “I could hear them breathing, whispering and hissing in their passion. I could see the perspiration on their skin in the afternoon light that came through the high windows of the vestry.

  “I will admit,” she said with a droll smile, her eyes still on the doves, “I watched as long as I dared, until they had exhausted themselves. For me, this was truly a revelation. Not the kind, I am sure, that God would have chosen to occur in His church, but a revelation all the same.”

  Palma was stunned. Her mother seemed to be remembering the event with such detail that Palma could not help but wonder how often she had thought of it in the ensuing years. And why.

  “For weeks and weeks I could not get that encounter out of my mind,” her mother said. “I would find myself thinking about it at all hours of the day and night. I never told anyone about seeing these women, not even your father. In some kind of odd way, by this accident of my arrival and my decision to watch, in secret, the great sadness of their passion, I felt that I had shared this with them and owed them the loyalty of my silence. These two women, I have thought about them over the years as I watched them continuing to live their lives, presenting their masks to the community, to their husbands, to their families. They must have suffered greatly, having to hide so much of themselves from the rest of the world. I know they continued their relationship until Lara died. One would not have noticed. But I knew because I watched them. Little things, you know, became significant. They were such different personalities that when they happened to be at the same place at the same time no one took any notice. But I did. I saw their eyes meet, a brush of their hands in passing. Several times over the years I actually saw them passing notes.”

  Something stirred the dark plantains near the fountain and the doves flushed in a whir of whistling, beating wings. But they didn’t go far, only to the higher reaches of the catalpas.

  “How did you feel about that?” Palma asked, recovering from the surprise of hearing such a story from her mother.

  “What, their lovemaking?”

  “Yes, the homosexuality.”

  The old woman shrugged. “They call them ‘gay,’ I know. What irony.” She paused. “What was I supposed to feel? Pity? Maybe, but not really, no more than I would feel for the star-crossed lovers of different sexes. Condemnation? The church says it is abominable, but I am sorry, what I saw was not abominable, even though I know that there is more to it than what I saw and so, perhaps, there is an abomination in something else.” She took her handkerchief again and wiped around her hairline. “But I have to admit to a little prejudice, I guess, because the idea of two women making love has never offended me like the idea of two men. And when I actually saw it, I still was not offended. I don’t know why that is. Maybe because I am a woman and can imagine a little more the complicated things that women feel, the small winding ways of their hearts. Over the years, I have given them a lot of thought, Lara and Christine. I do not condemn them. I gave up my license to do that along with my youthful wisdom. I don’t even understand it. How can I condemn it?” She shook her head.

  Palma looked at her mother. This was one story she could not possibly have anticipated. It never would have occurred to her that her mother had ever given a moment’s thought to female homosexuality. She would have liked to have been in her mother’s mind at this very moment. Palma could have asked her what she was thinking, but no one, not even a woman as candid as her mother, ever answered such a question with absolute honesty. After a few moments one of the doves returned to the fountain, followed shortly by a second.

  Her mother turned to her. “I will tell you something, Carmen, something it has taken me a long while to understand. A woman is human first…and a woman second. This fact, I promise you, should not be forgotten.”

  24

  It was just past eight o’clock when she finished the articles that had arrived in the manila envelope from Sander Grant. She had been sitting at the dining room table with a pencil and pad, underlining passages and making notes as she sipped a glass of Soave. She had eaten a variety of cold salads she had picked up at Butera’s deli on Montrose on the way home, and the paper cartons, plastic fork, and napkins she had used were still scattered around the table. And the telephone was there beside her, too, its cord pulled around the corner from the kitchen.

  She stretched her shoulders, rounding them forward, twisting them to the left and then the right, and rolled her head from side to side. She wanted a cup of coffee, but she didn’t want to go to the trouble of getting up and making it. She looked at the articles scattered in front of her, now heavily underlined and crowded with marginal notations. They were photocopies from a wide range of prestigious professional journals, American Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Medical Science and the Law, Journal of Clinical Psychology, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Forensic Sciences, Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, and others. Sander Grant had written many of them and had co-authored most of the others. They were incredible documents, providing stunning insights into the psychology and behavior of sexual killers. Sander Grant, she decided, must have had his share of nightmares. She had just about decided he was going to wait and call her at the office in the morning when the telephone rang. She shoved aside the articles, picked up the receiver, shoved the dirty napkins even farther from her, and turned over a clean sheet on her notepad.

  “Hello.”

  “This is Sander Grant.”

  “I’d almost given you up.”

  “Sorry,” he said, sounding a little tired. “We’ve been covered up with stuff. So h
ow’s it going down there? Have you gotten anything new that’ll help us out?”

  “Maybe. We learned today that Dorothy Samenov was bisexual, but predominately lesbian. She was very secretive about it. Vickie Kittrie, the girl who found her, was her lover. Samenov had been married, but divorced for about six years. But she still dated a number of men until about a year ago when she went strickly lesbian.”

  “What about Moser?”

  “Not as far as we can determine at this point, but we’re still looking into it. The only thing that connects them so far is the S&M paraphernalia and the fact that Moser’s husband was employed at a company that bought computer programs from Samenov.”

  “Okay,” Grant said. “Let me tell you what I see here, and then we’ll come back and pick up on this. You read the articles?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I want to emphasize that for right now I’m going to be talking in generalities, but maybe there’ll be something here you can build on, give you some direction.” Without waiting for a comment, he went right into his assessment.

  “At first glance, both victims in these two cases seem to be in the low-risk category: Moser, an upper-middle-class housewife and mother, active in community services and attentive to her familial responsibilities; and Samenov, an upper-middle-class professional woman who doesn’t hit the singles bars and dates with moderate frequency. Both lived in low-crime areas; both were killed in low-crime areas. Now, the bisexual angle seems to throw a kink in our effort to classify them as low-risk victims, but I’m not sure it does. Statistically, bisexual women are a low-risk group—certainly in comparison to their male counterparts—and especially if they don’t frequent the lesbian bar scenes. Okay, that’s at first glance. However, when we add to this assessment the presence of sadomasochist paraphernalia found in the residences of both victims, the picture changes.

  Their possession of that paraphernalia automatically puts them into a higher-risk bracket. This is necessary even though we don’t understand how this paraphernalia might have been used, that is, autoerotically, or for the purpose of enhancing innocuous fantasies during sexual play with a partner, or for actual pain-inflicting activities. If either woman used them for the former two reasons, then we can probably put her back in the low-risk category. But if the latter is the case, she’s higher risk because to some degree she’s leading a double life and her ‘other’ life moves in a high-risk environment.”

  There was a slight pause, and Palma thought she heard Grant drink something.

  “Normally,” he continued, “we identify a serial murderer as someone who’s involved in three or more separate homicides with a cooling-off period in between. The cooling-off period can be days, weeks, or months. Even though you have only two homicides here, I think we can justifiably anticipate a serial killer because of the distinct behavior. It’s highly unlikely that these cases would be unrelated. And they demonstrate the kinds of behavior that we’ve come to understand are the characteristics of a sexual serial killer. This man doesn’t kill because he’s involved in a criminal enterprise; he doesn’t kill for selfish or cause-specific reasons such as a family dispute, or self-defense, to steal drugs or whatever. He kills for sexual reasons, reasons that have meaning only for him.

  “The offender risk in both these cases was moderate to low. Moser, in a private hotel room with no danger of interruption for hours; Samenov, in a private home with no other family members and no immediate danger of interruption.

  “Both victims were killed approximately between eight o’clock and ten o’clock in the evening. The murderer had plenty of time to act out whatever fantasy he found necessary for satisfaction, and yet he was not at the scene long enough to run any great risk of discovery—under the circumstances.”

  Grant paused for another drink. “This’s hot tea,” he suddenly explained, “not scotch. Maybe I’ll do scotch later,” he kind of laughed. “Are you with me? I’m barreling right on through it, so pull me up if you want.”

  “No, everything’s fine. I’m taking notes.” Grant’s unexpected aside about the tea and scotch, and his solicitious question about rushing her, took her by surprise. His demeanor up until then had been polite but businesslike, which had already influenced her mental image of him. Now that image softened. It was good to hear that tone of concern in a male voice again; it had been a while. She wanted to reciprocate the kindness, but she was too slow, too long out of the habit, and he was filling the silence before she could speak.

  “Okay. Now, as for crime scene scenarios I’m largely baffled,” Grant continued. “And the major sticking point is not knowing whether Moser was also a closet bisexual. All we know so far is that she was heterosexual. If we knew for sure, either way, we could begin building on that as a reflection of something about the killer’s personality. But as it stands, we don’t know whether it was a fluke—from the offender’s point of view—that Samenov happened to be bisexual, or whether this offender is specifically targeting bisexual women. It would make a tremendous difference in constructing his personality if we knew. So, rather than offer you something misleading on this score, I’m going to bypass reconstructing the crime scene scenario. I just don’t believe I know enough to do it.

  “However, I do see enough here to know you’re dealing with an ‘organized’ murderer rather than a ‘disorganized’ murderer, though you have to keep in mind that even though our profiling techniques have identified and categorized sexual killers into these two general classes, in reality the crime scenes are often a mixture of the two characteristics. Still, these killings demonstrate a predominantly ‘organized’ murderer at work.

  “Let’s go down the checklist of the crime scenes of organized murderers.”

  Palma scrambled through her articles to find the section on the distinguishing characteristics of organized and disorganized murderers. There were behavioral characteristics and crime scene characteristics, and she wanted to have them for reference while Grant was reviewing them.

  “The killings are planned.” Grant began ticking them off. “Moser acted according to a prearrangement, checking into the hotel under an assumed name. In both cases the offender brought his own ligatures, and his own cutting instrument, and his own makeup. He knew what he was going to be doing and what he’d need to do it.

  “There was no weapon or any physical evidence left by the killer at the crime scenes. Nothing overlooked in haste, none of the ligatures or cutting instruments inadvertently mislaid.

  “The killer personalized his victims: both women were near the same age and blond. Both were made up in a specific way. Have you compared the photographs of the two women?”

  “Yes, I did,” Palma said.

  “What’d you see?”

  “The same shade of eye makeup on each, the same hairstyle. The rouge was the same.”

  “Exactly the same,” Grant said. “The way he used the makeup was exactly the same. Same style arch to the eyebrows, the same dip to the center of the upper lip when he used the lipstick…he even did that on Samenov, though her lips didn’t actually follow that configuration. It was almost as if he had painted a face on her. It seems that these women in their natural state—before he touches them—have to conform to a particular ‘type.’ But beyond that, after he has completely overpowered them, he ‘perfects’ a preconceived mental image of what he wants them to look like by using makeup.

  “The killer controls the situation. Both women allowed themselves to be tied by their wrists and ankles. They were beaten after being immobilized, not before. The crime scene reflects overall control by the killer, including the use of ligatures. The folded clothes, the meticulous cleanup. Incidentally, often when a detective sees this sort of ‘maintenance’ at a crime they think…ex-con. He’s cleaning up after himself, covering his tracks. But in sexual homicides you have to consider that much of this may be something compulsive in his behavior that has nothing at all to do with being street smart. He may be doing it to satisfy an inner ne
ed.

  “The killer initiates aggressive acts while the victim is still alive. In these two cases the facial beatings, the vaginal bruising and abrasions, the bite marks, all inflicted while the victim was alive. But in each of your cases there’s one exception. The autopsy shows that Moser’s nipple was cut off postmortem, probably because this was his first killing and he hadn’t perfected his procedure. Also—you don’t have the photographs in front of you now, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m looking at my copies and you can see hesitancy cuts, almost scratches, around the nipple—an indication that he was new at it. Sometimes, even with a guy like this, the first time you cut up a human body is a little unnerving. But with these guys, it’s usually only the first few moments, from then on they take to it like a duck to water. In fact, this guy conforms to the true character traits of organized killers when he gets to Samenov. He mutilates her before she is dead, having to gag her to muffle her screams. Except for the eyelids. Those were removed after death only because he couldn’t keep her head still enough to do it before she was dead, and it was important to him not to do a messy job of it.”

  Grant paused, but it was only for emphasis. Palma quickly adjusted the telephone she was holding between the side of her chin and her raised shoulder. She was frowning. “…he couldn’t keep her head still enough to do it before she was dead…important to him not to do a messy job of it…” How the hell could Grant make these kinds of statements?

  “Fantasy and ritual are paramount for the organized offender,” Grant went on. “This is very important to remember because it’s a window into the guy’s mind. There’s evidence of it everywhere, both victims are blond, the use of certain kinds of ligatures which he must provide himself, the use of a particular kind of makeup which he must provide himself, and the specific manner of application, the specific funereal positioning of the body, and the removal of the eyelids, which is a far more significant amputation than the removal of the nipples. This guy has a specific fantasy. And watch carefully on the next one: you’re likely to see something new with the next victim, something additional as he tries to ‘perfect’ his fantasy.