Mercy Read online

  “Jesus,” he said. “Doesn’t it cool off at nights down here?”

  “Not much,” Palma said, locating the right license plate and going around to the driver’s side of the car.

  “But shouldn’t this rain cool things off?” he asked.

  She jammed her key into the keyhole and looked at him over the roof of the car. “You’ve never been to Houston?”

  “A long time ago, in the sixties. It was December.”

  She nodded. “Well, June is the third-rainiest month of the year down here,” she said, turning the key and popping the latch without taking her eyes off him. “And it’s the third-hottest month of the year, too. The travel books call Houston’s climate ‘humid subtropical.’ The coast from here to Mobile, Alabama, has the highest effective summer temperatures in the United States.” She grinned at him. “You’re going to love it.”

  34

  The car windows fogged with the humidity until the air conditioner cooled it down enough to clear them by the time they passed through the Cleveland Park section of Memorial Drive. Downtown hovered behind them, shimmering in the rain, looking massive and otherworldly.

  For a while Grant didn’t say anything, and Palma assumed it was going to be a silent drive to Dorothy Samenov’s, that he was preoccupied with what he had seen in Bernadine Mello’s photographs. She didn’t feel uncomfortable with that, felt no pull to host a conversation. She wasn’t affected by his silence one way or the other, and rather liked him sitting there, keeping to his own thoughts as they swished along the curving drive, rain glittering through the beams of her headlights like shattered glass falling out of the black sky.

  “How do you feel about all this?” he asked suddenly.

  Their raincoats were thrown over the seat between them, and she felt a wet sleeve against the back of her naked arm. She was surprised by the question, not that she didn’t know how to answer it, but that he would ask. There were two cars not far ahead of them as they entered the edge of Memorial Park, and she followed the four ruby taillights into a thickening fog that swallowed the corridor of tall pines almost as quickly as her headlights picked them up.

  “No need in trying to pretend a ‘professional’ attitude about it,” she said, slowing a little, keeping her distance from the taillights ahead. “I’m having a hard time maintaining any objectivity…Actually, I’ve lost it completely. This guy is all I can think about. It’s been, what, four and a half days since we found Dorothy Samenov, and I suddenly realized what we were dealing with. It seems like a month. Then yesterday afternoon I found Ackley and Montalvo, and early this morning they came up with Bernadine Mello.”

  She lifted her foot off the accelerator as they plowed into the white center of the fog and for a moment they were hurtling through a pale dimensionless world in silence and then suddenly the four taillights appeared again five or six car lengths ahead of them.

  “I used to be in sex crimes,” she continued, putting her foot on the accelerator again and picking up speed. “I’ve seen the work of some pretty sleazy libidos. And since I’ve been in homicide I’ve seen a few women hacked up. I’ve seen worse gore, but I’ve never seen anything creepier than this guy.” She shook her head. “I don’t know…I’ve tried to think him through. I took notes about what you said in our telephone conversation the other night, but Christ.”

  It was a moment before Grant asked, “What bothers you the most about what he’s doing?”

  “You mean what bothers me the most as a homicide detective or as a woman?”

  “As a woman.”

  She really hadn’t expected him to say that.

  “The bite marks. The thing he’s doing with their navels. The bite, the actual bite of flesh and hair, he took out of Mello’s vulva.”

  “Biting is pretty common in these types of killings,” Grant said, looking straight out the windshield.

  “I know,” she said.

  They were approaching the West Loop, and Palma got into the left lane, which split off to become Woodway, passing under the expressway. She swung onto the access road going south and stayed there, the headlights of the sparse traffic up on the expressway to their left breezing past them in the rain.

  She said, “The guy’s going to start eating pieces of them, isn’t he?”

  “I’d be willing to bet he’s already done that.”

  “You mean the nipples? The eyelids?”

  “I’ve never seen the eyelid business,” he said, not answering the question. “That’s one of the most interesting things about these cases.”

  “In what way?”

  “It’s just that I’ve never known eyelids to be considered objects of sexual attraction. Although I’ve seen just about everything else become an obsession. Anything they do to the sexual organs, externally or internally, doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen them take away the uterus as expertly as if they’d been surgeons. Same thing with the ovaries. Sometimes these guys’ clinical knowledge will astound you. But it’s because they’re curious, mostly. A lot of them never had satisfactory relationships with women. They were either rejected or felt like they were rejected by their female peers. Their knowledge about women is woefully lacking, really subnormal. They don’t really know much about them as human beings, so women become objects of curiosity for them. They literally want to take them apart and see what they’re all about. Only their curiosity is limited to the sexual organs and breasts. They want to touch them and feel them and taste them. Inside and out.”

  Grant stopped, and she saw him glance at her.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Well, the point is,” he continued, “the eyelid thing is different. I think it’s another anomaly, which means it’s an important indicator for us. It isn’t immediately recognizable as a sexual mutilation, but it’s obviously symbolic. If it isn’t a sexual symbol…well, it would mean we’re dealing with an anomaly within anomalies, a new psychology, a wholly different kind of animal.” He paused a moment before he added, “And I don’t mind telling you, I’m skeptical about that. I think what we’ve got here is a killer with a special kind of wrinkle, not a special kind of killer.”

  Palma exited at Post Oak, crossed San Felipe, and entered the straight, glittering heart of the posh district. The new Saks Pavilion with its towering palms dominated their immediate right and beyond that, toward the end of the boulevard, the monolithic Transco Tower rose up into the rainy darkness.

  Palma checked her rearview mirror, slowed, and pointed to her left, to the sheer face of the Doubletree Hotel bisected with the recessed glass curtain and the overlapping glass-barreled vaults of the porte cochere.

  “That’s where they found Sandra Moser. Eighth floor, right side, in one of the rooms facing us. The curtains were still open. If you had been in one of the offices facing the street in Two Post Oak Central,” she said, nodding at an office building with silver-ribboned windows to their right, “you could have watched the whole thing go down.”

  Grant was quiet for a moment, bent forward, looking at the building through the rain. Palma had almost stopped the car. He looked to their right, into the Pavilion.

  “Can you pull in here?”

  She turned into the parking area in front of the Pavilion and pulled the car up to the landscaping that bordered the drive, the front of the car looking onto the boulevard and the hotel across the way. Grant stared at the hotel through the clean patches made on the windshield by the passing wipers.

  “Can you tell me which window?”

  She could. She had sat in this parking lot before, staring at the exact window.

  “Eighth row up, counting from one floor above the lobby level. Eight windows over from the glass curtain. A nice coincidence.”

  Grant nodded, but didn’t say anything as he counted eight up and eight over and stared at the window that was identical to the two hundred and fifty-nine others facing them…identical except for what had happened behind its glass almost at this exact hour twenty-three nights earl
ier.

  Grant was leaning forward, his neck close to the dash, his face upturned and close enough to the windshield for his breath to make a little wavering patch on the glass.

  “I wonder,” he said, “when you first walked into the room that morning and found her, did you have any inkling that this one was going to be different, that it might be extraordinary?”

  Because he was leaning forward she had disappeared from his peripheral vision, and had taken advantage of the opportunity to study his profile. She could see the gray streaks in the hair swept back at his temples and the slight ripple in the bridge of his nose.

  “I knew it was going to give us trouble, because of her positioning,” Palma said to his profile. “But I had no idea it would be something like this, a serial killing.”

  Grant nodded and leaned back, keeping his eyes on the hotel. “Okay,” he said.

  Dorothy Samenov’s condo was warm and a little stuffy. The police had adjusted the thermostat just enough to keep the edge off the heat during the day. Samenov’s sister and her husband were scheduled to be back in Houston in the next week to put the condo on the market. The place was exactly as the police had left it, even with the smudges of magnetic ferric oxide.

  Grant held his raincoat over his head for the short walk to the front door, and as soon as they were inside he threw the wet coat over a chair in the living room and walked straight to the bedroom as if he had been there before. He stopped just inside the doorway and looked around, then walked into the bathroom. He looked inside the shower, looked on the floor around the bidet where LeBrun had found the footprints. He turned and opened the medicine cabinet and proceeded to examine each item on each glass shelf, turning the bottles around so he could read the labels even on bottles that were easily identifiable, leaving all the labels facing out.

  He put his hands in his pockets and stood there, looking at the contents of the cabinet.

  “This is a good place to learn about people,” he said. He reached in and took out a flat, clear plastic container and held it up. “Eez-Thru floss threaders. We had a child rape-murder a few years ago. Prime suspects were twin brothers who were in their early twenties and lived together. We didn’t know if one of them did it or both of them, and if it was only one of them we didn’t know if the other one knew about it. The psychology between these guys was strange. They were brilliant, but there were little differences in personality. Just about the time we had one of them figured out, the other one would pick up his characteristics and they’d switch. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. We didn’t have anything on these guys. We were sure it was one of them, but because of their crazy relationship I couldn’t settle on a strategy for any kind of proactive intervention.”

  He took a hand out of his pocket and reached up and took a wheel of oral contraceptives. He looked to see how many she had taken, and rotated the wheel between his thumb and middle finger, then put it back on one of the glass shelves.

  “At the crime scene we’d found a little piece of plastic monofilament, about three quarters of an inch. Nobody knew what the hell it was. Couldn’t figure it out, didn’t know if it was significant. It sort of slipped to the back of everyone’s mind, that little monofilament all by itself in the bottom of the evidence file. One day another agent and myself went to talk to the brothers. While we were there I said I had to go to the bathroom. Sure, go ahead, they said. They had separate but identical bathrooms. I just wandered into one of them, didn’t even know which brother it belonged to. I turned on the faucet so they couldn’t hear me open the medicine cabinet door, and started going through the things on the shelves. I came across one of these containers, looked inside…that was it. I knew what we had in the evidence bag. One of the brothers had a partial bridge. That’s what these things are used for, to thread dental floss behind bridgework. As soon as we knew that, we went to work on them as if we knew which brother had done the killing. The guy confessed within thirty-six hours.”

  He reached into the cabinet again and touched a couple of tubes and a jar, took the jar and put it on the same shelf as the tubes.

  “Three different kinds of topical antiseptic,” he said, looking at them, pausing. “Turned out he was compulsive about keeping his bridgework clean and carried one of these things with him all the time. We don’t know why we never found the looped end of it. But that little piece of monofilament was all the leverage we needed—one sure thing in a puzzle of possibilities. You just never know.”

  Grant gently closed the medicine cabinet door and stepped out of the bathroom, turning off the light as he came out. He walked around the end of the bare bed, paused to look at the stains on the mattress, and then went to the dresser.

  “Where were Samenov’s folded clothes?”

  “On the chair beside the bed.”

  “That’s interesting,” Grant said. “I wonder why he didn’t just hang them up. Closet’s right here. I remember from the photographs he took some pains with them, the lapels just right, the pocket on the blouse just right above the fold. Very precise. Military, you’d think, but it wasn’t. They don’t do it that way in the military. Same as with Mello’s clothes. Not military, but very careful.”

  With his hands still in his pockets, Grant looked over the cosmetics on the dresser, which were disarranged from LeBrun’s fingerprinting. He did the same thing with the bottles of perfume and fingernail polish that he had done with the container in the medicine cabinet, turning the labels out.

  While he was doing this Palma looked at the bed and remembered Dorothy Samenov. The heavy air in the bedroom contrasted in her memory with the morguelike cold in which she been found, and Palma thought how much kinder it had been for Dorothy that the low temperature had been advantageous for the killer. To have lain nearly four days in Houston’s heat without the benefit of air conditioning would have done freakish things to Samenov’s anatomy. At least she was saved that indignity. The chill had been an inadvertent kindness.

  Grant had moved away from the dresser to the closet and was going through Samenov’s dresses. He began at the left side of the closet and moved to the right, dress by dress, several times stopping to pull one out and hold it up as if he were shopping. Then he squatted down and went through her shoes on the floor of the closet, even opening each of the shoe boxes stacked at the back. Dorothy had a lot of clothes. It took him a while. When he was through he stood, backed out of the closet, and looked around the room. He looked at the dresser again and then went back to it, took the tops off several of her bottles of perfume and smelled them, replacing them as he finished with each.

  He turned to the bed and sat down on it, looking at the opened closet. Almost unconsciously, as if his thoughts were elsewhere as he did it, he reached out with his right hand and pressed on the mattress, testing its firmness.

  Then he stood, stepped to the dresser, and pulled open the top drawer and started going through her clothes. As with the dresses in the closet, he did this with considerable scrutiny, as if he were a buyer having to evaluate the quality of the lot, now and then holding up an item to examine it closer. When he came to her lingerie, he didn’t pass over it more quickly out of a sense of decorum, but examined it as closely as he had everything else, occasionally holding up a pantie or camisole or bra, sometimes rubbing the material in his fingers. Once he even placed a pair of panties against his face, just briefly, then returned it to the drawer. The gesture startled Palma, and she looked away quickly, and then immediately she was as flustered by her reaction as she had been by what he had done.

  “The S&M stuff was in the bottom drawer?” he asked without turning to her.

  “Yes, and the photographs.”

  Grant nodded, thinking, looking down into the drawer of lingerie. “You know, you go along for years carrying a lot of baggage—assumptions—about men and women. You can become very comfortable with those assumptions because you don’t see anything to make you doubt them. And then one day it hits you straight in the face…wham! A
myth exploded.” He closed the drawer, and turned around and looked at her. “I think it’s a very dangerous thing to be comfortable.” He smiled crookedly, perhaps at himself. “Let’s go to Mello’s.”

  35

  As Palma pulled away from the curb in front of Samenov’s and turned into Amberly Court, she looked back across the street to Helena Saulnier’s. It was five past eight and the lights were out. There was no doubt in her mind that Helena had watched Dorothy’s windows the whole time they had been there.

  It was almost two miles through the rainy pine-bordered streets to Bernadine Mello’s home. They had to cross Buffalo Bayou and then double back to Hunterwood, which took them almost to the banks of the bayou again before they saw the stone pillars at the entrance of Mello’s drive. A Hunters Creek patrol unit was blocking the entrance, and Palma had to show her shield and Grant’s ID before the two coffee-drinking officers would move their unit to let them in.

  The cinder drive crunched under the tires as they approached the dark house, which was almost hidden from the street by shrubbery, undergrowth, and pines. Only the portico light was burning, leaving the windows on the house as slatey dark and depressing as the damp night.

  Inside Palma turned on the entrance hall lights, and as he had done before, Grant started up the stairs without comment, as if he already knew where the bedroom was located. Intrigued by his homing instinct, Palma simply followed him, watching him appraise the house as he moved up the curve of the stairs, easily finding the light switches on the wall as he came to the juncture of the mezzanine and the hallway that led to Mello’s suite. He passed the darkened doorway of Raymond Mello’s sitting room and continued to the next one farther down. He reached inside and flipped on the switch with his right hand.