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  Frisch made a few muffled remarks to someone. “And one more thing,” he added. “They found a couple of fibers in Kittrie’s dress. They think they’re pieces of a fiber mesh, stuff that kinda of looks like horsehair, that some foreign-car manufacturers use to mold their car seats. Mercedes people use it, Volkswagen people use it, or used to. Anyway, they’re trying to narrow down the possibilities.”

  “Broussard drives a Mercedes.”

  “Yeah, we know. We’re trying to determine if we can risk sneaking somebody up to the house to snatch some of it. Anyway, listen, get back to me soon.” Frisch had to raise his voice because of the background noise. “Leeland’s being flooded with calls from people turning in their creepy neighbors, and we’ve got a dozen of our guys trying to follow these up. But aside from that and what you two are coming up with, the investigation’s ground to a standstill. The media are all over us, and the politicians, and as of this afternoon some women’s organization says we’re not pursuing this with enough conviction. And I suppose a charge of ineptitude and mismanagement will be coming soon from the guy who wants to be the next police chief. The people in Hunters Creek have formed some kind of female buddy patrols and the village police are being run ragged checking out peeper calls, false reports of bodies in the bayous, all that sort of thing. We’re catching a lot of heat, and we’re seeing a lot of brass in the squad room now. Everybody looking in personally, that sort of thing. Everybody wants in on the big one.”

  Palma hung up and looked at Grant again. This time he was looking at her, and she opened the door.

  “Give me one more minute. They’ve got some interesting lab results. One more quick call.”

  She closed the door again and put in another quarter. This time she dialed the number that rang on Barbara Soronno’s desk.

  60

  Palma didn’t say anything right away. She wanted a moment to try to sort out how the information fit in, and now that her hunch had paid off and she had the results she expected to find, she also wanted time to examine her own intuition, to understand what it was that had made her ask Barbara Soronno to conduct such an unusual test in the first place. It was an eerie feeling, especially in light of the fact she didn’t know what leap of logic had put her onto the startling discovery.

  “What’s the matter?” Grant asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, stepping out of the booth and coming across to him. “Just trying to understand the data, where they fit in.” She told him everything that Frisch had said and watched his face as he assimilated the information and factored it into his own peculiar arrangement of what he knew of the four murders. Palma had the feeling that, like her, Grant was not telling everything he was thinking.

  A child shrieked in the waiting room, and a shouting match broke out between a furtive Vietnamese clan and a trio of stocky black women whose dusky scowls, flared nostrils, and flashing ruddy tongues made them formidable adversaries for the smaller Asians.

  Grant bowed his head in thought and moved slowly around the corner to the long antiseptic hallway where the odors of alcohol and medication replaced the human odors of the overcrowded waiting room.

  “Vickie Kittrie and an unknown person had been with Dorothy Samenov before she died,” he mused. “An unknown person had been with Kittrie before her death. The unidentified head hair is blond—wig or not—and the pubic hair is also blond.”

  “Dyed or natural,” Palma said.

  Grant nodded without saying anything, his eyes fixed on the far end of the glistening hallway.

  He said, “But no physical evidence from a third person on Vickie’s body, or any of the other victims, for that matter.”

  This was as far as Palma could let him go without telling him what Barbara Soronno had found. Palma didn’t know what Grant was puzzling out, but it had to do with a third person, and Palma had come up with physical evidence of a third person with Vickie Kittrie.

  “There was a third person in Vickie’s case,” she said outright. Grant stopped. He looked at her. They were halfway down the length of the long hall, midway between another nurses’ station and an intersecting hallway. Grant put his hands in his pockets again and leaned against the painted wall. In a room not far away an aspirator was sucking noisily at some kind of human fluid, keeping cadence with a rattily, uneven respiration. Grant waited, regarding her from behind the crooked bridge of his nose with a becalmed concentration, prepared for something revelatory. In the sterile white light of the hospital corridor his hazel eyes complemented the brindled colors of his graying mustache.

  “I just learned this a moment ago, when I made the second telephone call,” she said. “I would have told you about it, but it was such a…crazy long shot, and I didn’t want to appear…unreasonable.” Grant was as unresponsive as a sphinx. “This morning, just before we left Janice Hardeman’s, I grabbed Jeff Chin and told him to take special care of the tampon in Kittrie’s vagina. I told him to mark it for Barbara Soronno’s attention. Then I called Barbara and asked her what the chances were of getting a clean type from it. It all depended on how saturated the tampon was. When she got it, Barbara cut into it and took some fibers from the very center of it and typed it. It was clean. It wasn’t contaminated.”

  Grant’s face was already registering surprise. “It wasn’t Vickie’s type?”

  “No,” Palma said. “It wasn’t.”

  “Broussard’s blood type is on his medical records,” Grant said quickly. “We can get it.”

  “It’s not his blood either,” Palma said.

  “You know his blood type?”

  “No. But after Barbara determined the blood inside the tampon wasn’t Kittrie’s, I asked her to run an additional test. The blood on the interior of the tampon contained no plasminogen and no fibrin, which means it didn’t have the ability to coagulate. It was menstrual blood, but not Vickie’s.”

  “Je-sus Christ,” Grant said. He looked at her. “You knew this?”

  Palma shook her head. “No. Of course I didn’t. I don’t know why I even asked her to run the test. It wasn’t even an official assay. Barbara did it on the side, as a favor.”

  “Well, what in the hell did you have in mind?” Grant was astounded. He seemed to be as amazed at why she had asked for the test as he was at the test’s results.

  “I told you.”

  “Did you think it would be menstrual blood?”

  “I just thought…maybe, I don’t know, that we ought to type it.”

  “And when it wasn’t Vickie’s type…”

  “Then I just wondered where in the hell he’d gotten it. And then I wondered if it was his blood. Did he cut himself to get it? I wondered what his reasoning was. If it wasn’t his blood, and if it wasn’t Kittrie’s blood, then was it human? If it was human, was it a man’s blood or a woman’s blood? I thought about the bites around the navel, about the extracted navel, and it seemed to me that he was trying to tie this in somehow with…maybe, birth, the umbilical cord, the obsession with the victims’ navels.”

  Palma paused, not knowing where to go next. “I don’t know. I just thought it ought to be tested.”

  “You didn’t simply make the assumption that it was Kittrie’s?” Grant asked.

  “For some reason I never thought that it was.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Grant looked at her as if she had begun speaking in tongues. “You’re unbelievable,” he said. “What…” He seemed to be groping for a way to frame his question, and then he seemed as if he wasn’t even sure what the question should be. He shook his head incredulously and looked away toward the nurses’ station, the small figures of women in white dresses. He kept his gaze on them for a moment, completely encompassed by his own thoughts, as isolated as if he had been alone at sea.

  Palma was uneasy, but she didn’t really understand why. In an odd sort of way, she almost felt apologetic for her prescience. And at the same time, she was thrilled at being close to the killer. She thought they had him, though they might not und
erstand exactly how yet. But they were close; she knew they were close. It was a matter of not letting up, of not fumbling the details.

  Grant shifted his weight against the wall. “What in the hell have we got here?” he said, his eyes still on the little white forms of the distant nurses. It was a rhetorical question, and it wasn’t addressed to Palma. Then he turned back to her but kept his head down, looking at the toes of his shoes. “Did your friend Soronno give you any other kind of data about the blood?” He looked up. “Did it appear to be old? None of the other victims were menstruating, were they? I don’t remember seeing it in their autopsy reports.”

  “No, Barbara couldn’t determine anything about how long the blood had been on the tampon. She said it seemed to be consistent with having been in place when the body was found. And no, none of the other women was menstruating.”

  “So he couldn’t have gotten it from them and saved it to use in Kittrie. It hadn’t been a souvenir,” Grant said. “So he either got it from a living acquaintance or, perhaps we could surmise that he killed someone else earlier in the evening and took it from her and inserted it in Kittrie. Or, maybe it was Janice Hardeman’s. He could have found it in her trash.”

  Palma was shaking her head. “I wouldn’t think so. I noticed in her bathroom that she used pads, not tampons.”

  “Why would he do that?” Grant’s voice was edged with incredulity. “What kind of fantasy is this guy working…?” Grant stopped suddenly and looked at Palma. “Anything strike you odd about Mary Lowe’s being at his place all night last night and all day today?”

  “Fair said she had a husband and two children.”

  Grant nodded. “So how does she manage this?”

  “The same way other people manage adultery,” Palma said. “Lies. I wouldn’t think she’s been gone from home longer than they had expected her to be gone, for whatever reason. At least they haven’t contacted missing persons. They’re on tap to get in touch with homicide the second anything resembling these cases comes through.”

  “We’ve got to get inside that house,” Grant said.

  Frisch sat behind his desk with his forearms resting on the arms of his chair, a limp lock of thin, sandy hair sagging over his forehead. His long face looked drawn and monkish in the white fluorescent lighting of his office. To one side Captain McComb and Commander Wayne Loftus of major investigations sat in swivel chairs. McComb’s suit was so wrinkled it looked like it was made of crinoline, while Loftus was wearing a knit shirt and a pair of khaki pants and Topsiders, having been called in from home where he had been stealing a few hours’ sleep because it had looked like nothing was going to develop over Sunday night. Like McComb, Loftus’s career had been built on years of street experience and a judicious sense of what was right for the boys in the division. Assistant Chief Neil McKenna wore a fresh suit and tie, ever sensitive to the media and their potential impact on his own career ladder. Younger than the other two men, McKenna was part of the new breed. Wielding a variety of degrees in law and criminal justice, they spent fewer years on the street and advanced rapidly. McKenna had been in charge of investigative operations for three years. They had just listened to Palma run down the information she and Grant had garnered thus far from Alice Jackson and Mirel Farr, as well as the most recent data from the crime lab, including Palma’s unexpected discovery. Regarding Broussard, all of the information was damaging from the point of view of his professional integrity, but adding up to little more than a sordid story. At most, Dr. Dominick Broussard could be sanctioned by the professional organizations to which he belonged for breaching the trust of his patients and, after the proper panels and hearings, he could be barred from practicing psychotherapy in the state of Texas. He also could be sued by any woman with whom he had had sexual intercourse during the time he was seeing her as a client.

  But as regards the investigation of the serial homicides, Broussard was remarkably untainted. As of yet there was absolutely no physical evidence that connected him to any of the crime scenes, and the only evidence that they had any hope of developing against him hung in the balance by a few short hairs.

  “But the circumstantial evidence is so heavily weighted against him,” Palma concluded, “that we don’t have any doubt that we’ll eventually develop the physical evidence that we need. Unfortunately, it’s only been in the last eighteen hours that Broussard has come to our attention as a suspect, and it has only been within the last seven hours that we’ve come to focus on him as the suspect. There just hasn’t been enough time to develop very much of a case other than the circumstantial evidence we’ve just given you.”

  “He’s with this Lowe woman right now,” McComb said to Loftus. “Been there all night last night, all day today. She’s got a husband and kids, but they haven’t reported her missing so we’re guessing they think she’s out of town, gone to Mama’s or something.”

  “Damn,” Loftus said, “you’re sure he’s not chopping her up in there?”

  “Hell, no, we’re not sure,” McComb said, showing a little heat. “That’s why we’ve got to come to some kind of decision here…how much we’re willing to risk legally and politically, and whatever the hell else, to get in there. Maybe we’ll barge in and bust up a cozy little weekend of adultery that they’d had to plan for a month to put together, and it’ll turn out Broussard’s just a horny psychiatrist whose business has got a lot of fringe benefits. Or we may find him cutting her up and putting her in the freezer, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Actually,” Frisch said calmly, “Grant thinks he won’t kill her in his own home.” He looked at Grant for further explanation.

  Grant was sitting on the edge of one of the desks, his arms folded. Palma thought he was beginning to look more than a little worn. They all were, some of them wearing out a little faster than the others. Frisch looked like he ought to be on sick leave. Palma herself could feel that the muscles in her shoulders were as tight as they were going to go.

  “That’s my feeling,” Grant said. “But I’ve got a caveat. In any given case the suspect naturally will deviate from the behavioral models we’ve come to associate with these kinds of sexually motivated murderers. There’s no such thing as complete predictability, but there are variance tolerances. Broussard has stretched these tolerances to the limit. Insofar as we’ve been able to anticipate certain kinds of behavior, there’s some degree of predictability. Naturally, the better we know the suspect the better we can anticipate his actions.” He looked around the room at each of them. “We know practically nothing about Broussard. Additionally, so far his behavior has deviated from this behavior model more than any other suspect I’ve ever investigated.”

  “What’s all that mean?” Loftus snapped. He wanted bottom-line deductions.

  Grant looked at him evenly. He didn’t like being snapped at.

  “It means that I don’t think Broussard will kill her in his home, but if it was up to me I wouldn’t bet the woman’s life on it. I’d get her out of there.”

  “Fine,” Loftus said. He had one leg crossed over the other with an Astros baseball cap on his knee, and one hand dropped down picking at a tag of rubber coming off the sole of his aged Topsider. “I don’t know what your experience is with these society shrinks, Grant, but I suspect he could get bent out of shape real bad if you’re wrong about him. I don’t know. Hell, I know a preacher in Pasadena who for the last three years has been responsible for leading his congregation to provide more than half the full-time support for two orphanages here in the city. He also collects lesbian sex magazines. I don’t know what he does with them, but I’m sure he doesn’t use them to level up all his wobbly tables. I know an Exxon executive who personally collected over a million bucks in charity money last year and every four years supports a new indigent kid through four years of college. He also wears ladies’ panties instead of boxer shorts. What this means to his brain I do not know. But these guys’ strange quirks haven’t prevented either one of them from being useful citizens. P
oint is, weird don’t count for shit anymore. You can’t arrest people for being weird.”

  Grant nodded. Palma knew he wasn’t going to get into that kind of an argument with a local commander. She also knew Loftus was intelligent enough not to beg the question or miss the point, both of which he seemed to be doing, so she could only believe that this was a serious case of jurisdictional jealousy. Loftus resented having a hotshot from Quantico coming down to Houston telling him how to run his investigations.

  There was a moment’s pause before Frisch said, “I’m going to go with Palma. She’s been following this from the beginning, and I trust her judgment. They need physical evidence and, as far as I’m concerned, they’ve got probable cause. That’s our recommendation. That’s what we’re going to do unless some of you want to overrule us.”

  Palma wanted to jump up and hug him. Frisch never failed to cut through the bullshit. He didn’t want to see a simple decision bog down in a committee decision process.

  “Okay,” McKenna said abruptly. He knew exactly which course of action the administration would consider the most politically hazardous. “I’d rather run the risk of an invasion of privacy lawsuit from a pissed-off psychiatrist than be caught sitting on our asses while the guy kills another woman. Get a search warrant, probable cause being the accumulation of the circumstantial evidence against Broussard and the possible jeopardy to the woman, and go in.”

  61

  Through the long, rising heat of the afternoon they had talked, about love and the lack of it, about revenge and the lack of it, about incest. And Mary had lied to him, and he had listened to her with as much interest in her lies as he had had in the slim threads of her truths, knowing that she no longer acknowledged the difference anyway and that it was all the same to her in the tangled skein of her mind. What he had suspected before had been confirmed to him today as he had listened to her talk from the window seat, that it probably had been years since she had had any concept at all of the meaning of truth. Long ago, years ago, she had abandoned reality for something less brutal, something more imaginative and compassionate. And until now, she had functioned reasonably well, playing the role of a person playing a role. The acting had been effortless because she had grown accustomed to being something other than herself. But in her unconscious, the lies had been unraveling silently until they had frayed beyond restraint, and the increasingly complex patterns of her imagination had overwhelmed her. Chaos had overcome design.