Mercy Read online

  Unfortunately, all the pages of correspondence that Louise Ackley had saved were to and from persons who were now dead, and none of it shed even the least bit of light on any of their deaths. Not only that, but there was no evidence, beyond the letters, of Louise Ackley’s bisexuality or her penchant for sexual masochism. It was an absence that aroused suspicion.

  “I’ve never seen one of these people that didn’t keep something around,” Birley said. “Pictures, paraphernalia, magazines, underground literature. Stuff!”

  They were standing in Louise Ackley’s disordered living room, the five of them, Birley, Palma, Cushing, Leeland, and Frisch. Every light was on in the dingy little house, and its small rooms were filled with milling detectives and police officers, including the evening-shift lieutenant, Arvey Corbeil, and his two detectives, Gordy Haws and Lew Marley, who were first out that night. By agreement, they would be picking up the Ackley-Montalvo case from Palma. Technically it had been discovered on their shift, and the immediate judgment was that since it was not strictly one of the female bisexual killings Frisch would let it pass because he wanted Palma to concentrate on the serials. And the lab technicians were still there, two of them, and several patrolmen who were in charge of keeping the house secure.

  “You think the hitter’s job was to get rid of something, too?” Frisch asked. He looked worn out, his thinning hair was plastered to his pale skull by the night’s humidity. The spring had been crazy for homicides—the Jamaican and Colombian coke rings were blowing each other to pieces with Uzis and Mack 10s and vicious abandon. This wasn’t the only case that was giving Frisch worries. But right now, it did seem to be the only case on the verge of getting out of hand.

  “Something, yeah, something.” Birley said, sighing and hitching up his pants. It was hot in the house. There was no air conditioning, and even though the little oscillating fan was still doing its job, the muggy, stagnant air it dragged in from outside warmed quickly under the incandescent fights and turned stale when it mixed with the fetid air that seeped from the two blood-soaked rooms.

  “Two immediate possibilities,” Palma said. “Claire: she could have had something more to fear than just those pictures, or maybe she feared there would be more like them. She could have hired it done. Reynolds: pictures involving him, or his fear that Ackley would disclose something about their relationship. He could have hired it done.”

  “Claire knows Ackley?” Leeland asked. He was standing with his hands in his pockets looking at the stacked boxes of letters they had been going through.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, hell.” Cushing had taken out a handkerchief and was wiping his glistening face. “If the babes in this group are as ritzy as they say, high society an’ all, we got a whole club of suspects. The story of this little group gets in the papers a lot of ladies are going to be scrambling to cover their privates.”

  “The question is, what has this got to do with the bisexual killings?” Frisch said. “It could be incidental, coincidental, integral…“He looked around at them.

  “You think a guy who does what he’s been doing to those women would do this, too?” Leeland asked, tilting his head toward the bedrooms.

  “Shit, this is something totally unrelated,” Cushing said. When he finished with his handkerchief he put it away and then reflexively wiped his face again in the bend of his arm as if he had been wearing a sweat suit instead of a silk shirt. “This was to shut somebody up. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with the bisexual killings, but it had something to do with the fact that the bisexual killings were being looked into, and somebody was afraid that something else would be discovered in the process. Probably something to do with somebody’s sex kinks. Our goofball just happened to stir up somebody else’s water.”

  Palma hated to admit it, but she thought Cushing was right on target. Lalo and Louise were a sideshow, or a whole other story. They didn’t have anything to do with the deaths of Moser and Samenov.

  “I can go along with that,” Palma said. “With an adjustment. Linda Mancera seemed to think Gil Reynolds’s sadomasochist relationship with Louise Ackley was a pretty rough one. I mean, excessive in relative terms to what they were involved in. I think there was something in the way Reynolds came on to Ackley that might have been too revealing. Lalo just happened to pick the wrong night to get drunk with her, but Louise…” Palma ran her hand through her hair. She wanted a bath in the worst way, and she wanted her nostrils cleaned of the stale air of the nasty little house. “I remember Louise asking me in what particular way Dorothy had been killed. I told her I couldn’t go into that with her, and she said, well, what if she happened to recognize something about it? I asked, like what? and she said she didn’t know, and then she started crying again.”

  “Jesus,” Leeland said.

  “I could’ve had it right there.” Palma felt sick about it, but she was a realist, and she knew that hindsight was a cheap source for self-reproach. A waste of time. Still, it stung.

  “You think this was Reynolds?” Frisch asked.

  “You’re damned right I do,” Palma said. “Not the hitter,” she clarified. “But he hired it. When we get to him, he’ll have the time slot for this job solidly alibied.”

  “He killed Moser and Samenov, and was afraid Louise would have recognized something about the techniques?” Birley asked.

  Palma nodded. “I think that’s exactly what’s happened.”

  No one said anything for a moment and the low voices in other rooms of the house carried through to them over a faint background of scratchy, halting radio transmissions from a handset in the kitchen.

  “Look,” Frisch said finally. He had been rubbing his eyes and when he took his hands down from his face the rims of his eyes were red and slightly swollen. “Corbeil’s got this tied down here. We can’t do anything else tonight. Help me get these boxes into the back of my car, and we’ll go home, hash it over again in the morning. Shit, you’re all tired. I’m tired. Let’s call it quits for tonight.”

  “This is Corbeil,” he said. “Arvey…” She was staring at the fluorescent blue digital numbers on her alarm clock, and she had no recollection of picking up the telephone. “You awake, Palma?”

  “Yeah.” Stupidly, she tried to sound alert. “Yeah, sure. Arvey.” The digital numbers said it was two thirty-seven.

  “I think we just got one of your psycho jobs, Palma,” Corbeil said. “And it’s in the Villages, Hunters Creek.”

  “How do you know?” Her voice broke like an adolescent’s.

  “How do I know? The Hunters Creek cop who went to the house recognized the M.O. the second he saw it. Guy’d been: reading our metro memos for a change. He called his chief and I the chief called me. Said come on in. Hell, they don’t want any part of it.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Palma’s head swam, and she lay back on the pillow.

  “Here’s the address,” Corbeil said, and he read it out twice, and Palma looked up at her black ceiling and listened to it. “You get that?”

  “I’ve got it.” Hunters Creek. Her body felt like it was made of lead. She didn’t think she could hold on to the phone.

  “I’m calling Karl now,” Corbeil said. “I’ll see you there.”

  “Ar…Arvey,” she stammered, her mind suddenly jerking into play. “You have a crime scene unit on the way out there?”

  “Sure.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Who is it? Uh, Jay…Knapp.”

  “Arvey, call him, call Knapp and tell him not to touch anything. Not to do anything. I’m calling LeBrun. He’s on these…we want him to do all of them. Okay?”

  “Yeah, I got it. I’ll get on the radio.”

  She sat up in bed, peeled off her pajama top, and called Birley and Julie LeBrun.

  In less than fifteen minutes from the time she answered Corbeil’s call, she was on the Southwest Freeway, her hair, washed before she had gone to bed but not rolled, blowing around her face in a black storm as sh
e let the wind whip through the windows to help her wake up. The damp night would put ripples in her hair that wouldn’t come out until she washed it again. The department car was nearing ninety as she braked and sailed into the turn that took her onto the West Loop. Christ, she hadn’t even asked the woman’s name. She didn’t know why she thought of that now, or why it suddenly bothered her. It was as if she had let the woman down, breached the unspoken covenant that she was beginning to feel for these women, as if they were a lost sisterhood for whom she had assumed the responsibility of redeeming from a special kind of anathema.

  Hunter Wood Drive was in the southeast corner of Hunters Creek, just off Memorial Drive and a stone’s throw from Buffalo Bayou and the golfing links of the Houston Country Club. It was also less than a mile from Andrew Moser’s home. The homes here were large and expensive, set back from the street in the bosky privacy of pines and oaks that disappeared up into the dark morning sky. The address was not hard to find, its entrance through a pair of limestone pillars topped with dimly lighted lanterns was manned by a Hunters Creek police car, and through the hedges and woodsy undergrowth she could see splinters of a police car’s cherry and sapphire flashers.

  She showed her ID to the village officer and drove along the short drive to the front of the house. There were already five or six cars, including the crime scene unit van. She had to nose her car into the underbrush to get it off the drive a little, and then she cut the motor and got out without locking it. Holding her shield aloft to the clutch of city and village patrolmen hanging around the entrance, she walked into the house through the front door that was standing open.

  Corbeil was standing in the entry way talking to two of his detectives and turned around when he heard her steps on the slate floor.

  “Jesus Christ, Palma,” he frowned. “You take a chopper over here?” He nodded toward a living room through opened double doors where she could see a mammoth fireplace, sofas, and armchairs. The Hunters Creek police chief was sitting and talking to a white-maned man in a dark business suit who was also sitting, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees, one hand holding a drinking glass, the other running repeatedly through his thick hair.

  “Her husband,” Corbeil said. “He came home from a trip. San Francisco.” He started walking, and Palma followed him. “Drove in from Intercontinental, got here a little after one.” They started up a curved staircase with a heavy wrought-iron railing ascending up over the entrance hall. Palma took her tortoiseshell clasp from her shoulder purse and began pulling back her frizzy hair. “Said they sleep in separate bedrooms; said they’ve always done that since they’ve been married, which is only a couple of years.” They reached the top of the landing, passed a huge floral arrangement on a French Empire table on the balcony, and turned into a wide corridor. “Bedrooms are at opposite ends of this hallway. His is here…” They passed a heavy wooden door opened up to another sitting room. Palma saw a slightly cluttered desk, obviously used for work, not just for interior decorating, which was very much in evidence everywhere in the house. “…and she’s down there,” Corbeil wheezed. “Said he always checks on her no matter how late it is when he comes in from an out-of-town trip.”

  They reached the far end of the corridor and walked into a sitting room where Jay Knapp was talking with another homicide detective and Dee Quinn, a medical examiner’s investigator. Corbeil extended his arm toward the opened bedroom door on the other side of the sitting room with a be-my-guest gesture, and Palma crossed the room and walked in.

  The bedroom was red—the carpet, much of the upholstery on the furniture, and one of the walls, which was covered with an elaborately detailed Indian tree-of-life fabric from floor to ceiling. An ornate gilt French Empire mirror dominated the wall over the dressing table, which was crowded with as many pictures in gold, black, and red lacquer frames as cosmetics. The bed was an Empire four-poster with a bone silk drapery pulled back and tied at the head of the bed to expose the three open sides.

  As before, the bed had been stripped of everything except the single red satin sheet on which the woman lay in the familiar funereal posture. From a few steps away her face was identical to Moser’s and Samenov’s, almost as if it had been painted with a template. But as Palma got closer, she saw how much of a mask the makeup truly was. The woman’s face had sustained so severe a beating that her features were distorted to the point of extreme deformity. In addition, this appearance was made all the more ghastly by the staring, lidless eyes which were the only cleanly defined items in a disfigured field made eerily grotesque by the pasty effects of the heavily applied cosmetics.

  The woman’s hair was not a true blond, tending more toward russet, with her pubic hair being several shades darker than that. In body shape, she was not as athletically lean as Moser and Samenov, having a kind of pampered attractiveness, high-hipped, full-breasted, and a pale, luminous complexion against which the wounds that had resulted from the removal of her nipples seemed an even meaner violation. They would have been pink ones, rather than dark, Palma imagined. Because the death was recent, and the room temperature was mild, the wounds themselves were still raw and moist.

  Palma moved around the bed slowly, inspecting the woman from several angles. She noted that the toenails were painted. She bent down and smelled them. The polish was fresh; the killer had probably done it himself after he laid her out. She walked around to the right side of the bed and bent down again to smell the woman’s fingernails. Also fresh. And there was something else. She smelled the hands again, then moved lower and smelled her waist. Bath oil. She moved around the body smelling different areas, all of which gave off the fragrance of bath oil. But it was obvious the killer had not bathed her after she died. Had she bathed just prior to this encounter, or had the killer given her a “dry bath,” wiping her down with bath oil afterward? Palma made a mental note to check the washcloths in the bathroom and to see if the victim had this particular fragrance of bath oil among her toilet articles.

  The ligature marks around her neck and wrists and ankles were the same as the others. And the bite marks. But this time the biting had been savage. The killer’s teeth had ripped and torn the flesh, and chunks were bitten out in three places: the left breast, the inner left thigh, and the right vulva, where more than an inch of the labia majora had been bitten away with its hair. Palma was able to make note of this last bite without touching the body only because of a slight change in pattern in this victim’s positioning: her legs had not been closed together tightly. Palma studied this minor variation for a long time, her concern with the state of the body having grown to such an extent as to be obsessive. She had begun to believe that nothing in these homicides, no matter how minute, was incidental. Could it be that the importance the killer placed on a particular detail had an inverse relationship to its size so that the smaller the point of attention, the greater its significance? But this subtle separation of the legs truly did seem incidental, except that it attracted notice to the bite taken from the labia majora.

  And then there was the strange treatment of the navel. Palma bent closer to the woman’s stomach and examined the wound. Again the upper and lower teeth had been placed precisely around the navel in two different positions to form a complete closed circle. Within that circle the tissue was turning black from the blood that had been sucked to the surface of the skin with such force that the killer had almost extracted blood through the epidermis itself. What was the fascination this man had for his victim’s navels? Not only did he consistently abuse them, but he did so with a precision that indicated a ritual significance. Although the other bites seemed almost random—aside from the fact that they were primarily directed at parts of the body that had sexual connotations—the preoccupation with a precise kind of abuse of the navel was quickly becoming a point of focus for Palma, as it was for the killer.

  Straightening up, she moved back from the bed and walked around it, from one side to the other several times, being careful to stay far enoug
h back so that she would not mash into the carpet any hairs that might have fallen during the killer’s ministrations. The red satin sheet provided an unusual foil for the victim’s positioning and allowed Palma to see something she had not noticed with the other two victims. She made another mental note to check the crime scene photographs of Moser and Samenov. She returned to the left side of the bed, gathering her skirt close around her, holding it in her lap as she bent down once again. The sheet was not completely smooth around all sides of the body, but was puckered along the length of the woman’s left side, with a significant bunching of the satin adjacent to her hips. Palma studied the angle of the furrows. Jesus.

  He had lain down with her.

  And what had he done?

  He had tied her up and tortured her; he had mutilated and tormented her while she was still alive; he had strangled her to death; and then he had cleaned her up and carefully, taking great pains, meticulously had applied makeup in a specific manner. What in the hell had he done then? They would find no semen. They would find no discharge other than vaginal fluids she might have smeared on the sheets during their sexual foreplay before the killer had gotten down to business. So what in God’s name had he done at this point? Why did he lie down with her?

  Palma swallowed. What was it that Claire had said? Even at the time Palma had thought the remark provoked an eerie imagery. Psychosexually, she had said from the shadows, Gil Reynolds was a cretin.

  She heard voices coming down the wide corridor outside and recognized Birley and Frisch. They stopped speaking when they entered the sitting room and both were quiet when they walked through the bedroom door. They both looked at Palma, but neither spoke as their eyes settled on the woman on the bed. Frisch stopped a few feet away from the bed, but Birley continued up to the edge, where he stood silently, his experienced eyes ticking off the similarities of the wounds. He shook his head. Palma looked at Frisch, whose long face wore the drawn expression of a lieutenant who knew he was waist-deep in trouble.