Mercy Read online

  “Who was that?”

  Terry leaned her head back and squinted, thinking. “Uh, Barber…Barbish. Something Barbish.”

  “Clyde,” Palma said.

  “Yeah, right. Clyde Barbish.”

  “Did Dorothy go to Mirel Farr’s very often?” Palma did not allow her excitement to show.

  “No.” Terry shook her head and looked at the pictures. “I didn’t know she’d ever been there. Dennis and Barbish and Reynolds went to her, but I hadn’t heard about Dorothy. I guess it just never came up.” She stood and handed the pictures over to Palma.

  “Did Reynolds know Barbish?” Palma asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Reynolds slummed with those two. He’s just as sleazy as they are, only he comes from the other side of town.”

  Palma couldn’t believe her luck. “Do you know how I can get in touch with her?”

  “No,” Terry said. “But if you’ve got Louise’s address book and things, you’ll find her under the code name Alyson.” She spelled it for Palma, who was writing it down. When Palma returned the pictures and her notepad to her purse, she pulled out two of her business cards and laid them on the coffee table.

  “If any of you hear that Bernadine Mello was, after all, involved with any of the women in the group,” she said, “I’d like to know about it.” She looked at Terry. “Listen, I appreciate your help. I may be getting back in touch with any of you.” She stood. “Don’t hesitate to call me about anything at all—anytime. Leave messages if you have to, on my recorder at home or at the office.”

  Only Mancera stood and walked Palma to the door, following her outside to the porch, pulling the door closed behind her.

  “Listen,” she said, haltingly. “Last night, I…I may have been a little too familiar. I do know better than that. I’m going to lay it off on too much to drink before you got there.”

  Palma smiled at her. “That’s fine with me,” she said. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

  Mancera lifted an eyebrow and nodded with an appreciative smile. “I don’t want to alienate you,” she said candidly. “I’d like to be friends, real friends.”

  “So would I,” Palma said.

  It was a congenial parting, one that relieved Palma of a particular kind of tension that more than a few times had delicately played itself out with men, but which she had never had to negotiate with a woman: the mutual understanding that a relationship was based on friendship rather than sexuality. It was surprising to her how many times she had to deal with that in her life, and how difficult it was to come to such an accord.

  But Mancera’s gesture of honesty was quickly supplanted in Palma’s thinking by the excitement of the chain reaction of ideas that Bessa’s words had catalyzed in Palma’s thoughts. As she hurried down the sidewalk in a fine, drifting mizzle, she was trying to sort it all out, putting a theory into perspective that, for her, would reconcile the discord of evidence that had begun to make her increasingly uneasy with their investigation.

  41

  Now that the series of women’s deaths had been brought out in the open, reporters from every branch of the media were digging into the women’s lives, researching “investigative” pieces, interviewing witnesses, hounding the victims’ families, and generally muddying the waters for the detectives. The newspapers were running full-page articles about the victims with pictures of each and skimpy bios, and a map showing where their bodies had been found.

  The number and frequency of the deaths, and the upscale lifestyles of the victims, were attracting so much attention that the tip lines were ringing off the wall. To catch up, Childs and Garro postponed their trip to the Houston Yacht Club to check on Ted Lesko’s alibi, and stayed in the office to go through the tip sheets to look for anything that might be immediately attractive, and by the time Palma got back to the office Cushing and Boucher had come in from checking out more of the names in Samenov’s address book. Someone had brought in sandwiches, and there was an impromptu meeting in Frisch’s office, each detective making do with whatever spot he could find to spread out the contents of his paper sack.

  Palma had just finished telling them of her interview with Dr. Alison Shore and Terry and looked around the room at the scattering of detectives. Cushing with his spiked Coke had eaten very little food other than salty chips, while Haws, having consumed half of Cushing’s smoked ham and Swiss, was now doing the same with the other half of Marley’s roast beef on rye. Garro was eating a BLT, a cigarette tucked between his fingers, while Leeland, surrounded by notebooks and file folders, was finishing a barbecue sandwich wrapped in paper stained with barbecue sauce. Hauser was scraping the bottom of a yogurt cup, while Grant, mostly ignoring his half-eaten tuna salad, had turned around at his desk to listen to something Birley was saying. All of them were going on too little sleep and knowing they would have to do it for some time longer, probably days.

  “…so Dr. Morgan Shore is sewed up tight,” Birley was saying. “He was making hospital rounds at the time of both Moser’s and Samenov’s deaths.”

  “Reynolds, on the other hand, says he was at home alone at the time Samenov was killed,” Frisch said. “What about Moser? Where was he when she was killed?”

  “I didn’t get into that with him,” Palma said. “My interview with him was early on. We weren’t this far along.”

  Frisch looked at Grant, who was sitting in one of the torturously uncomfortable metal typing chairs that seemed ubiquitous in the department. He was in shirt sleeves, his hands jammed into his pants pockets, his legs crossed at the knees and stretched slightly out in front of him, a large manila folder in his lap. His eyes seemed tired to Palma, and his broken nose a little more damaged than before. He had spent the morning going through the crime scene videos and photographs, taking notes, and talking with Hauser. He had listened carefully to Palma’s report of what Terry had said about Reynolds’s treatment of Louise Ackley.

  “When you interviewed him,” Grant asked her, “what was his attitude, his demeanor?”

  “Self-assured,” she said. “Gave the impression of being straightforward, unfailingly honest. He readily admitted that it was his fault that his family had fallen apart—a result of his affair with Dorothy Samenov. No excuses. Said it had taken him a while to accept the responsibility for having thrown it all away. He was even still wearing his wedding ring, as if it were a sentimental gesture, an old habit that evoked fond memories. Christ.”

  Grant smiled as if she had described one of his old friends with a rakish reputation. “You feel a little stupid, getting suckered in by him?”

  Palma was surprised at the personal note in the question. “Well, yeah. As a matter of fact, I do.”

  Grant grinned. “If you ever come across another one of these guys, it’ll happen again. That’s what’s so scary about them. They blend in so perfectly with the rest of us. You can’t blame yourself for not seeing what isn’t there.” Grant shrugged. “Then you began hearing contradictory stories about him.”

  “Right,” Palma regarded him a little more closely as she spoke. “From Claire first.”

  “Did she mention if Reynolds had talked on more than one occasion about his being a sniper?”

  Palma shook her head. “She didn’t say. But she did tell me to talk to Mancera if I wanted to know more about Reynolds’s sadistic side. And then Mancera put me on to Terry.”

  “That’s lucky,” Grant said. He was looking at the manila folder, thinking. “Reynolds sounds good. Has most of the profile characteristics we’re looking for.”

  Palma winced. She wished to God she had committed herself earlier. Every time Grant took another step in favor of Reynolds, she knew it was going to make her proposal look that much more out of line.

  “But if he’s got a solid alibi for even one of these numbers, we’re going to have to put him aside no matter how good he looks.” Grant took a hand from his pocket and touched the edge of the folder, straightening it on his lap the way some people idly fold and refold paper napki
ns, while they talked. “So far we don’t have any physical evidence tying him to even one of these. We already know that he’s extraordinarily careful. If he’s alerted at this point, whatever physical evidence might exist is going to be destroyed immediately. And, if for some reason he suddenly stopped killing, and that’s happened to us before, then we’re out of it.”

  Grant looked at Frisch. “I’m thinking we ought to keep him completely in the dark about his being a key suspect. Right now he’s pretty satisfied with himself. No one’s been back to see him so it’s likely he thinks he’s not in the forefront of the investigation. Safe. He’s feeling very secure, very self-confident. He’s savoring the fantasy, playing it out.”

  “But,” and Grant raised a cautionary finger, “his cooling-off periods are getting shorter, which means his fantasy is escalating, intensifying. As he gets increasingly carried away with it, the chances he’ll get careless will increase also, especially if he believes he’s not under suspicion. If we tip him off, it could be like a slap in the face, bringing him to his senses. At this point his own self-confidence is his worst enemy. If we can learn more about him, maybe we could take advantage of it.”

  “So how do you want to approach it from here on?” Frisch asked.

  “Put him under constant surveillance. Wire his condo and his car. Get a search warrant and go through his place when he’s not there. Your probable cause will be the ‘trophies,’ but I’ll be surprised if we actually find anything directly connected with the murders.” Grant nodded, anticipating their thoughts. “Yeah, I know what I said before, but after looking through the crime scene videos I’m beginning to feel we’re going to have an exception here. These items will be very special trophies. He’ll keep them in a special place, well hidden. If he has women to stay over with him at nights, he’s not going to want them to stumble onto this stuff. It’s sacrosanct. When it’s fantasy time, he’ll reverently pull them out of hiding. As for the wire, I’d hope to pick up some communication with Barbish.”

  “Then what are you really wanting to get out of the search?” Leeland asked.

  Grant nodded again.

  “Two things. First, I’d like to get detailed photographs of every room, every piece of furniture, books, insides of drawers of all kinds, closets, everything you’ve got time to photograph. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find the trophies. Fine. But he’s shrewd, and chances are we won’t get enough evidence to convict him unless we can work on his mind, make him screw up. Men like this are very controlled, and it won’t be easy. Therefore, it’s to our advantage to do our homework before we make any kind of move at all to try to influence his actions. He’s not operating under any feelings of guilt for what he’s doing. I doubt if he feels any great stress at all, so it’ll be hard to jack him up psychologically until we know more about him.

  “Second, I want to get the smell of the guy.”

  That was it. Grant didn’t elaborate, and no one asked him to.

  Leeland followed up.

  “Carmen’s already checked him through vice and intelligence and all the computers,” he said. “With no luck. I’ll go ahead and pull his military records and see if he had any kind of problem with his superiors related to his Nam sniping.”

  “Fine.” Grant picked up a pencil and notepad from a nearby desk, flipped open the pad, and started writing. “Also, we ought to do some backup investigating on Denise Reynolds Kaplan. Especially the ‘Kaplan’ part of her life. Get the missing persons file on her. Find out if she’d ever been sexually involved with any of the victims. We need a good picture of her to see if she resembles the victims after they’ve been made up by the killer. Try to find out what women from Samenov’s group were her lovers, and see if they remember anything she might have said to them about her relationship with Reynolds. Anything that might be revealing about his personality.”

  “What about trying to verify his whereabouts on the nights of the killings?” Birley asked.

  Grant tilted his head and grimaced, indicating a tough call. “I’m still afraid of tipping him off.” He looked at Frisch, then back to Palma and Birley. “Actually, I’d rather hold off on that for right now. Let’s wait and see what we come up with.”

  “One thing,” Garro said, lighting a new cigarette. “We know that Moser and Samenov and Louise Ackley had done rough scenes with Reynolds. We don’t know about Mello. We don’t even know if Mello knew him.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” Lew Marley said. He was picking his teeth with the sharpened end of a wooden match. “And it seems to me that if there are other women in the group who’ve been with him before, they’re the ones most at risk. He’s going to go back to them.”

  Grant was making another note on his pad.

  He said, “Since all of the women have been in touch with each other about this, don’t you suppose Reynolds is going to find it almost impossible to make an arrangement with one of them? I’d imagine they’re as suspicious of him as we are. He may find himself frozen out, and this may cause some frustrations I hadn’t taken into consideration.”

  “I don’t know,” Birley spoke up, chewing on a bite of a dill pickle still dangling in his fingers. “I can’t believe this guy doesn’t have access to other women. You know he does, bound to. Maybe through Mirel Farr, or hell, just from cruising. And shouldn’t we get a picture of Mello to Farr to see if there is a tie-in there?”

  “Yes, definitely,” Grant was now stroking his mustache with his right hand, his brown eyes staring out through Frisch’s picture window into the squad room. “I wonder,” he said, “if the fact that these women were all victims of childhood sexual abuse has anything to do with Reynolds’s thinking. Could he know that about them? I wonder about Bernadine Mello, since maybe she wasn’t one of the group. I’d like to know something about her childhood.”

  “Dr. Broussard,” Palma said.

  Grant nodded without looking at her. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got to talk to him…this afternoon.”

  “I’d like to throw something on the table for consideration,” Palma said.

  Grant finished what he was writing and looked up, and out of the corner of her eye she could see Cushing stop his Coke halfway to his mouth. Everyone else looked her way with mild curiosity. She did her damnedest not to seem hesitant. She didn’t want any of them to realize how intimidated she felt, even though, after her conversation at Mancera’s a few hours earlier, she was convinced she was right. Everything had come together in that one enlightening session.

  She looked at Grant. “On the way to Samenov’s last night you said that you believed that we had a killer here with a special kind of wrinkle, not a special kind of killer. I’m thinking we do have a special kind of killer…at least one that’s different from what you’re used to seeing in this type of crime.” She paused, though unintentionally. She shouldn’t have. She plunged on. “I think the killer is a woman.”

  There were several beats of silence before she heard Cushing hiss a sarcastic, “Shit,” and Gordy Haws gave a snort. Grant’s expression didn’t change, and he nodded for her to go ahead. She wished she could have seen Birley’s face, or even Leeland’s. She hoped she would have seen something there besides scorn or a condescending, poker-faced effort at interpersonal diplomacy.

  But Palma was ready.

  “First, there’s the condition of the body,” she said. “The use of cosmetics, bath oils, painted finger- and toenails, all of that. It doesn’t seem quite so bizarre when you consider these are women’s tools. In a way, sort of the ‘natural’ thing to do within the context of her mental condition.

  “The victim’s folded clothes at the crime scenes. Not military-style you said, but it is certainly consistent with someone who’s compulsively neat. Perhaps someone for whom ‘cleaning up’ was second nature. A wife, a mother, someone who’d been taught to develop habitual neatness, an attribute that’s been distorted under the circumstances of her abnormal psychology. This holds true regarding the general neatness of the ent
ire crime scene, including the washed body.

  “Victims willingly meet the killer. None of the women in Samenov’s group, or any woman for that matter, would have hesitated to meet another woman. No coercion necessary. No apparent risk. Not even the possibility of a subliminal threat which might arise as a ‘sixth sense’ in the company of even the nicest man in light of recent events.

  “There are the anomalies you pointed out,” she continued, still addressing Grant. “Behavior that doesn’t conform to the usual characteristics of organized killers, but which figure logically when you consider a female offender: victims are not targeted strangers. Women are not stalkers. The killer is one of the women in Samenov’s ‘group.’ She knows all the victims—another reason they willingly go to meet her. Victim’s body is not hidden. No need to. Killings are not conducted in public areas such as a park, lakeshore, or lonely roadside, where men often abduct and rape women. But a woman, especially a woman operating within the context of this ‘group,’ would most likely encounter her victims in a bedroom or hotel room. A place of sufficient privacy. Victim’s body is not transported. Same reason, no need to. But also, the bodies may not be moved because it’s something that would be physically impossible for most women to do. The killer circumvented this obstacle by using her brains rather than her brawn. She arranged the killings to occur at places where it would not be necessary to move the body to avoid detection.

  “The old saw that women are too squeamish for this sort of violence, preferring poisonings and hired killers, is given the lie by the fact that we’re dealing with a group of women who are hard-core S&M enthusiasts used to tying each other up and being tied up. They’re familiar with violence, have gotten used to all forms of it, and are willing, even eager, to participate in it. We even have Dr. Shore’s testimony that Vickie Kittrie’s S&M was so violent it could be ‘lethal,’ that she almost killed Walker Bristol.”

  There was a snigger from someone, probably Cushing or Haws again, the only ones who had the bad manners to express their opinion, that she was embarrassingly off-base, with derision rather than silence. But Palma didn’t even hesitate.