Mercy Read online

  “Plenty of room,” he said offhandedly. He looked around the sitting room a moment before going to the bedroom, again reaching inside with his left hand to flip on the light. Having already seen the crime-scene photographs, he did not remark on the red fabric walls, or the dominant tree-of-life weaving. His eyes were seeing other things.

  As he had done at Samenov’s, he proceeded to the bathroom, a luxurious affair of marble and glass and a patterned tile shower so large and ornate that it seemed to have been lifted whole from the baths of Herculaneum. Grant noted this, but hardly hesitated, making his way to a long marble table built into the wall and over which were open glass shelves. Here, Bernadine Mello kept a plethora of medicines and beauty supplies, a daunting task for Grant’s curiosity. He plunged right into it.

  Palma watched him from across the room. His inventory was thorough, and he randomly—as far as she could tell—opened an occasional bottle and smelled it or dipped a finger in to rub the cream or liquid between his thumb and forefinger. He still seemed like a big man to Palma, and fully clothed amid the mirrors and marble and fragrances of a woman’s dressing room he was out of place, as if he were the last person in the world who might understand the woman who had lived in these surroundings.

  “Sometimes,” he said, not pausing in his preoccupation with Mello’s collection, “I go to a large pharmacy and simply wander through their aisles. You learn a lot about the human body that way, as well as the mind. The things people do to themselves, maybe because they have to, or maybe because they’re hypochondriacs. Or maybe they’re simply obsessed with the way they appear or feel or smell. Americans spend a hell of a lot of money on their bodies. I don’t know,” he said, taking the lid off a tiny amethyst flask and smelling its contents, “they say by 2010 the median age in the United States will be thirty-nine.”

  She followed Grant into the fiery bedroom and listened to him offer comments from time to time as he methodically worked his way through Mello’s closets and chests as he had Samenov’s. It took longer here because there was more of it, but Grant never flagged, never grew impatient or hurried past anything. It was as if he had all the time in the world to do this.

  Palma watched his every move. She noticed what he noticed, saw what made him pause and give a little extra attention, what he seemed to find of no, or little, importance. She noticed what clothes he took time with, what items of Mello’s lingerie he rubbed between his fingers, what panties he held up, what chemise he brushed against his face. He was very quickly becoming as interesting to her as the killer he was trying to conjure into life.

  “There were no sadomasochist paraphernalia here, was there?” he asked, closing the last drawer and turning to her.

  “None,” Palma said.

  “If she proves to be part of Samenov’s clique, she’ll be a little different in that respect, won’t she?”

  Palma nodded.

  Grant put his hands in his pocket and strolled thoughtfully across to a window that Palma knew overlooked a garden-courtyard. He moved the curtain aside with one hand, looked a moment, then turned into the room, putting his hand back into his pocket. He walked across to her.

  “The thing about the psychologist,” he said, “is that here’s a guy—if he’s not the killer—who can give us insight not only into Mello, but into all the women—if Mello is one of the clique. He’ll know if Mello had sadomasochist tendencies. Maybe he’ll know about her lovemaking with other women, maybe even other men. We can squeeze him for everything he ever told her because the man’s gotten himself in a hell of a lot of trouble by having sex with her all these years. He’s probably doing the same with other women as well. It could ruin him. You ought to dangle that in front of him in exchange for his spilling his guts about her. Believe me,” Grant said soberly, “the man knows enough about her to put her mind on a plate for us. And that’s exactly what you ought to ask for. We want her complete file, every name she ever mentioned, how she liked her sex—lights on, lights off, on top of spikes with black balloons tied to her toes and needles through her nipples—whatever. Get the lurid details.”

  Grant’s face had hardened as he said this, the preoccupied air with which he had searched the room had dissipated, and something sterner had taken its place. He looked at her, then turned and walked to the bathroom and carefully turned off the light. When he came out again, he folded his arms and ducked his head, thinking, and stopped in the middle of the room.

  “You haven’t talked about suspects,” he said.

  “You said you didn’t want to hear about them.”

  “That’s right,” he almost smiled, his head still down. “In light of those general guidelines I gave you over the telephone, have you got any possibilities?”

  “One.”

  He looked up, immediately interested, then nodded. “Does he fit the descriptors we talked about?”

  “About half of them, as far as I can tell. We don’t know that much about him yet.”

  Grant lifted his chin in a half nod.

  “Well, you can add something else to your inventory about the guy,” he said. He looked over to the bed as if Mello were still there. “I thought at first that he had beaten their faces so severely because he knew each of them intimately…the old homicide rule of thumb. I actually thought you would find that he might have been the relative of one of them, and a secret lover of the other.” He shook his head. “But I was all wrong there. You haven’t turned up anything like that, and you’re not likely to. He may know these women he’s killing, but that won’t have anything to do with why he’s hammering their faces. It’s got to do with his fantasy—he’s intimate with the woman they become. He’s destroying her over and over. It has nothing to do with who they really are.”

  He shrugged. “In retrospect that may appear to be obvious, but for some reason I didn’t think that was a valid reading at first. Maybe I was trying too hard, mixing the behavioral patterns of sexually and nonsexually motivated murderers.”

  He wiped a hand over his face and touched either side of his mustache at the corners of his mouth with a thumb and forefinger. “There’s just something a little off about these. I can’t quite nail it. But it doesn’t lend itself to fancy footwork just yet.” He shook his head. “This guy’s killing somebody he loves, and he’s seeing her face in the face he’s painting on his victims.”

  “Someone he loves?” Palma frowned. “Not someone he resents, someone he’s accumulated grudges against, has nurtured a hatred for?”

  “Love, hate, desire, repulsion. It’s all the same to some of these guys,” Grant said. “Their emotions are short-circuited. They’re not always sure what’s driving them. That’s why they often leave conflicting messages at the crime scenes. Their emotions are so whacked-out they don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “What about the rest of it? The bath oil, the perfume.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s not using the exact cosmetics, same brand and shade of lipstick she uses, same fragrance, same bath oil, rouge, all of it. Jesus. He might even be using her cosmetics.”

  “What?”

  “His mother, if he’s unmarried and still living with his parents. His wife. A lover. She’s gone, he takes her cosmetics, and does his work. Maybe she has a job, has to work on Thursday nights. Let’s upscale that a little bit; maybe she belongs to a Junior League-type organization that meets on Thursday nights. A Jazzercise class. Something that gets her out of the home on Thursday nights.”

  “She’d have to be gone three or four hours,” Palma said.

  “I don’t see a problem with that. I could think of half a dozen activities that would keep her out that long.”

  Palma thought of Reynolds. He said he lived alone. She simply had taken his word for that, but a girlfriend was easy enough. Walker Bristol was married, and from what little they knew about him he had enough kinks to qualify for a Roman circus, and maybe a brainful of resentments. Who knows what Cushing would find in the list of names from S
amenov’s address book? And what about Claire’s husband? Palma knew she was gone at nights.

  Suddenly an idea hit her like a fist in her forehead. Christ! How could she have overlooked it so long? What had she been thinking about? She made a mental note to check it out. She was kicking herself for being so obtuse when she heard Grant’s voice.

  “Hey.” He was looking at her, eyebrows raised. “You have an idea or something?”

  Palma shook her head. She wasn’t sure she liked the tone of his voice. “Just trying to put things together,” she said. She didn’t care if she sounded evasive. She wasn’t going to bubble over every time an idea came into her head. On the other hand, what was her problem? He had been pleasant, not overbearing, not even condescending. Why was she reluctant to simply tell him what she was thinking?

  Grant studied her and nodded. “Fine,” he said. “Come on, let’s go.”

  They retraced their steps along the broad hallway, then down the sweep of stairs, Grant turning off the lights behind them so that darkness trailed after them at a distance like a wary black dog, and the huge home gradually went dark until there was nothing left but the lighted portico as they drove over the crunching cinders and out into the street.

  Again they were on Memorial Drive, the rain slackening to a drifting mist. The digital clock on the dashboard said 9:50, as Grant loosened his tie and sat back in his seat in silence once more. She wondered what he was thinking, but she was no more inclined to ask him than she guessed he would be inclined to tell her. She accelerated and pushed the car beyond the speed limit, past the wooded estates of the Duchesne Academy on the left and then St. Mary’s Seminary on their right, heading toward the West Loop.

  Grant looked out the window, and Palma nursed her own thoughts, beginning to wonder what in the hell she was thinking, being so arch with him. If she thought she was being smart, she was making a big mistake. Even if she felt she was justified on a personal level, it sure as hell wasn’t justified from a professional perspective. She was defeating the very purpose for which she had wanted him to come down in the first place, and for which she needed him. And she knew men. If she didn’t pick his brain herself, if she couldn’t make him feel comfortable sharing his insights with her, then it would be very easy for her to find herself cut out of the information loop altogether on this thing. It would be only natural for him to share most of the substance of his observations with Frisch, falling back on the bureaucratic safety net of “procedure.” She had seen it happen before. And she couldn’t blame anyone but herself if she let this slip out of her hands. Christ.

  “It’s almost ten o’clock,” she said. “You want to get something to eat? I guess you haven’t had anything since lunch.” She tried to keep her voice as neutral as possible, no lingering inflections of impatience or feminine wile.

  “Sure, something to eat would be good,” he said.

  “There’s a pretty good diner on the way downtown. The food’s good and the coffee’s guaranteed.”

  He looked at her. “Guaranteed to what?”

  Did she detect an edge of sarcasm? Did she give a shit? She tried to put a little breeze in her voice without choking on it.

  “Guaranteed to keep you awake long enough to eat a piece of Mom’s American apple pie, if you don’t mind Mom being a bachelor and the American being Polish.”

  Grant smiled. “Sure. Let’s see what you call Houston coffee.”

  Meaux’s Grille had settled into the nighthawk time of late night, coming up on the hours when a different kind of people moved quietly into the almost empty diners and truck stops and grills that never closed. These were coffee-and-cigarette people, the kind who seemed to carry old regrets in the pouches under their eyes like unforgivable sins, whose unblinking, early-morning stares were testimonies to their fear of sleep and its companion ghosts. These were private people, the strange few for whom loneliness was a desirable thing, the better portion of lives of uncertain value.

  They took a booth by one of the front windows that looked out to the glistening street and the huge catalpa tree with broad, dripping leaves where Palma had parked the car. The night shift at Meaux’s was Salvadoran: a cook who looked like the inevitable twisted heavy in all the Mexican movies she had seen in the barrio as a girl, a busboy who was beautiful enough actually to have been a movie star, and a waitress named Lupe who had extraordinary, straight white teeth and who had tearfully confided to Palma late one night when the place was empty, except for them, that of all the people in her guerrilla unit that had roamed the mountains around Chalatenango, she had been the best, the absolute best, with the piano wire.

  They each ate a blue plate special with a minimum of conversation, and then Lupe brought them fresh coffee and a generous wedge of apple pie for Grant, who ate almost half of it before he sat back against his seat and took a deep breath and a sip of coffee.

  “Jesus, that hits the spot,” he said, wiping his mustache with his napkin. “Very good.” He looked around the grill, watched Lupe a moment as she worked behind the counter, and then he quickly took in the few scattered solitaires and a couple of Rice coeds conferring conspiratorily in their booth, their legs folded underneath them as they leaned toward each other on their elbows. His eyes came back to Palma. “Your hangout?”

  “Pretty much,” she smiled. “I don’t live too far from here. It’s a good place for breakfast, and for late at night when there’s not enough companionship at home and too much anywhere else.”

  “You’re not married?”

  “Divorced. Six months ago.”

  “Still a tender subject?”

  “Not really,” she lied. “It was over before it was over. I knew it had to be done long before I did it.”

  Grant nodded. He ate another bite of pie and looked out the window while he chewed it. Then he sipped the coffee again and looked at her.

  “I was married twenty-three years,” he said. “She died a couple of years ago after a brief illness. Maybe you were lucky, didn’t have that much of an investment in it. All those years, then nothing.”

  Palma was startled to hear such a statement. It certainly wasn’t what she had expected.

  “You call two daughters ‘nothing’?”

  Grant’s eyes went flat, and he looked at her with a dispassionate, level gaze. “You’ve done a little research?”

  “That’s not research. That’s just keeping your ears open.”

  He regarded her with an expression that looked very much like disappointment. “I guess that’s right,” he said.

  Palma felt the sting of regret for having a quick tongue. She had already broken her resolution to back off.

  “Look,” she said. “That was out of line. I…it just came out…wrong.”

  Grant twisted his head a little in a forget-it kind of shrug. “I set myself up for it,” he said. “I knew better.” He took another sip of coffee. “As a matter of fact,” he said, tilting his head toward the college girls in the booth on the other side of the room, “they reminded me of my daughters when we came in.” He smiled. “They’re in Columbia. School of Journalism. Setting the world on fire.”

  Palma was chagrined, didn’t know what to say.

  “As for you—four years in homicide. How do you like it?”

  “Now that’s research,” she said.

  “Right. The big FBI vetting,” he said. “I called a friend of mine, said I was going to be working with this Palma person, what did he hear about her?” This time only his eyes smiled. Now he was the one trying to defuse the tension.

  “I like it,” she nodded. “My father was a detective in this division. I’d always hoped we might be able to be here at the same time, but it didn’t work out.”

  “Well, you’ve got a good rep,” he said.

  Jesus. He was bending over backward. Rep was a potent thing in this business. If you were lucky enough to have a good one, it went a long way. It opened doors, made things happen. If this was flattery, it had more class than comments ab
out her beautiful eyes.

  In the kitchen, Chepe turned up his Japanese portable and the tinny, jerky strains of conjunto music strayed into the room. The pretty busboy did some suave, subtle turns and tucked a hand into Lupe’s buttocks as he passed her on his way to the kitchen. Lupe didn’t even acknowledge the crude gesture; her expression never changed, she never stopped working. The kid was lucky he was on the night shift. That was the sort of thing Lauré wouldn’t have missed. She would have fired him for it—after a tongue-lashing.

  “It took me a while to get to homicide,” she said. “Two years in uniform, two in vice, two in sex crimes. But this is where it feels right.”

  “Your dad know what you wanted to do?”

  “Oh, sure. It was his ‘fault,’ according to my mother. I loved his war stories, when he’d tell me how he figured something out, how he ‘hunched onto’ the idea that this was so or that was true, and then how he set about to get it straight. ‘A good detective sometimes comes in at the back door. You gotta figure out what didn’t happen.’ He taught me about liars: ‘A good liar will make you ignore the evidence.’ He taught me about eyewitnesses. They were ‘one of the major flaws in the justice system,’ he said.” She laughed. “He said a lot of things.”

  “I take it your husband wasn’t a cop.”

  She didn’t know how he managed to “take” that. “No, he wasn’t,” she said. “But that’s not what ended it. It was more fundamental than that.”

  Grant nodded, looking at her, but his mind was somewhere else. She had noticed that it was easy for him to do that, to shuttle his thoughts off in another direction if the topic at hand didn’t fully occupy him. Certainly she knew her former marriage wasn’t the most riveting subject. Still, after having been so attentive it was a little like a splash of cold water to see him turn you off right in the middle of your response to a question he had asked himself. Working with Grant wasn’t going to be all that smooth. Not at all.