Mercy (13 page)

Sitting in a lawn chair, she propped her feet up in another, and hiked her dress above her knees. The drink was tall and had lots of ice in it. She sat a moment, thinking, before she picked up the packet of documents she needed to fill out for VICAP, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a nationwide computer information center located in Quantico, Virginia, that collected, collated, and analyzed data on specific violent crimes. With a little luck, the data she fed VICAP regarding the Moser and Samenov killings might trigger a computer “hit” of similar kinds of homicides occurring somewhere else in the nation. If so, she and the detectives covering those cases could exchange information and possibly cut short the career of a serial killer. It was a remote possibility, but one she couldn’t very well afford to ignore.

Starting at the front of the blue printed crime analysis report form, she read from the first page, not bothering to respond to any of the nearly two hundred items of requested information. Most of the data were case specific, and she would have to refer back to the case report before she could complete it. But she wasn’t at it long. When she came to “Section VII: Condition of the Victim When Found,” she stopped. These were images that were not likely to be far from Palma’s consciousness for a long time to come. In fact, she could hardly keep them suppressed.

Suddenly she had no stomach for dispassion or objectivity. It seemed almost a crime itself to grasp these familiar reins of self-control, to use them as an excuse to avoid an emotional investment. She didn’t even know why disassociation was a virtue in cases such as these; she didn’t believe it was. Not this time, at least, not when she was still numbed by the pale, naked image of a man hunched over Dorothy Samenov’s stomach, his face and teeth buried in her navel, not when she could almost feel the lips around her own navel and could see the gnarled ripple of the man’s curved spine as he curled in a fetal crouch, knees against her hips, suckling at her stomach with poisoned ardor.

It was too dark to read by the time Palma shook herself loose from such thoughts. She had forgotten her drink, and when she reached for it the tall, sweaty glass was standing in a puddle of its own condensation, the ice having long ago melted, leaving behind an unappealing, warm, off-color liquid. She heard the tremulous purl of a screech owl somewhere in the dense trees of the neighborhood and swatted a mosquito on the side of her knee. She needed to eat something. In a few hours she would have to talk to Andrew Moser.

10

W
hen Palma got to the diner ten minutes early, Moser was already sitting in a booth next to the front windows overlooking the front parking lot. As she walked inside the diner she was relieved for Moser’s sake to see that the place was sparsely populated. It was too late for the dinner crowds that characteristically came to this reincarnation of a fifties diner, and it was still too early for the equally faithful late-nighters. Moser was nursing a chunky cup of coffee, looking slightly apprehensive.

He stood as Palma approached his booth. He was a tall, thin man, always neatly dressed, but not a clotheshorse, tending toward Houston’s tropical version of the Eastern post-collegiate simplicity. He had a long face and the kind of physiognomy that retained its youthfulness beyond its allotted time and which his wife, had she lived, eventually would have found difficult to compete with.

“Have you got something new?” he asked quickly. The waitress was just on her way over with the coffeepot and an extra cup.

“We don’t think so,” Palma said, putting her purse down beside her and crossing her legs under the table. She paused while the waitress poured her coffee and Moser looked at her with puzzled anguish. He was still taking his wife’s death very hard, and it didn’t help that the circumstances were as strange to him as if she had been swallowed by a python in their church choir.

“You don’t ‘think’ so?” he said, leaning toward her as the waitress left. “What’s that mean?” He was agitated, impatient.

“Something has come up in another case and we’re wondering if it’s related in some way to the circumstances in your wife’s death.”

“Like what? What ‘circumstances’?”

“Let me ask you this,” she said. “When you were going through your wife’s things, did you come across anything that you hadn’t known about? Something that she possibly had kept secret from you, that might have seemed totally out of character for her?”

Andrew Moser was not naive. One of the peculiar things about being a homicide detective was that your encounters with the survivors of a homicide victim often took on an intimacy normally reserved for one’s doctor, clergyman, or spouse. This was even more likely if the victim was a member of the white middle class, which was rarely touched by such things, and if the murder had sexual overtones, as did Sandra Moser’s. The ordeal was so far removed from the normal experience of such persons that the shock of it rendered them emotionally vulnerable for a long time afterward. The homicide detective becomes the “expert” to whom they can turn for help, from whom they hoped to hear answers to questions they had never dreamed they would have to ask.

Andrew Moser had already had to confront the numbing fact that his wife had probably gone voluntarily to the hotel in which she was found dead. This kind of discovery was not the sort of thing many people ever had to face, and it was not the sort of thing many people would be able to face without extreme emotional strain. Moser had run the gamut of emotions during the last two weeks, and Palma had been with him during much of that time. Even now, he still looked haggard. His wife’s mother, a widow, had come from out of state to stay with the children while Moser tried to pick up the pieces and carry on with his life. But the unknown circumstances of his wife’s death, the realization that in all likelihood she had had some kind of other life behind his back, were taking their toll on the man.

Still leaning forward, Moser stared at Palma with his expression of impatience frozen on his features, his eyes opened inquiringly, his head cocked slightly to one side. In the ensuing silence between them, while the cook far off in the kitchen began singing a vibrato rendering of Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful,” while the voices of a man and woman a few booths away rose slightly in argument and then subsided, while the waitresses across the room gathered near the glass-fronted pie cabinets and rested their tired hips against the Formica counter, Andrew Moser’s face slowly changed from defiance to defeat as tears welled in his eyes and all the innocence of what he once had thought his life to be passed away from his memory in the dark shadow of disillusion.

“Jesus.” His voice cracked, and his mouth drew tight, betraying the strain he felt as he struggled for self-control. “Jesus,” he repeated, and it was almost a sob, but he caught it, and sat against the back of the booth and quickly looked away as his eyes suddenly spilled over. He wiped them quickly with his fingers and stared stupidly at the glittering lights of the traffic that passed by on either side of the diner.

“I’m not going to have anything left,” he said. “Nothing. I don’t even know who the hell she was anymore.”

Palma ached for him. The man had been dying by degrees, one or two a day for nearly three weeks, drying up inside so that every moist piece of his fiber was growing brittle and crumbling, changing him forever. Cruelly, Palma kept her silence. He had to talk to her, and he had to hurt before he would talk.

He was breathing heavily, almost wheezing, and then he cleared his throat. But he kept his eyes toward the window.

“In any other context they would have been common items,” he said. “But when I found them together…in a black lacquer box, for Christ’s sake, I knew. A string of large pearls. Small…clips, rubber-coated. An electric massager…with an attachment. I don’t know…do I have to go through all of it?”

“No,” Palma said. “No, it’s not necessary. What did you do with them?”

“I threw them away. The box…all of it.” His head was still turned away. He couldn’t look at her. His Adam’s apple was working to keep back the sobs building in his chest.

Damn, sometimes what she had to do seemed really just too cruel. “Can you tell me,” she said, trying to sound controlled, but not dispassionate, “did you have the impression that these things were…did any of them seem to be intended for sadomasochism?” She couldn’t imagine how that might have sounded to him, and she didn’t want to think about it too much.

He didn’t react with any particular emotion. Maybe the well was dry; he had already taken a lot out of it. He shook his head wearily and continued to shake it seemingly unaware that he was doing it.

“No, not really,” he said. “I didn’t have that feeling. Just the feeling that…you know, that…” His voice thickened. “Why didn’t I know? Why…would she keep it…? We weren’t prudish about sex. It was good. I mean, I don’t think I ever…denied her anything in that way. Jesus! I’ve been over it and over it. I can honestly say…as far as I know…that it was very good.” He finally turned to Palma. “I mean, as sincerely as I can evaluate it, it was good for her. She never, ever, indicated the slightest…discontent about it. And I was attentive. I mean, I was aware of the indictment, you know, about men’s selfishness in that, and I tried to be sensitive about that. I didn’t have my head in the sand about those sorts of things. I…honest to God…I thought everything was…very good in that area.”

He stopped and took some paper napkins from the dispenser on the table and rubbed his eyes. He said “Jesus” again and took a drink of coffee.

“You told us before that you haven’t any idea who she might have been seeing. Has that changed now?”

“Hell, no,” he said without anger. “If I was in the dark about this…then I’m really at a loss on who she might have been seeing. If you’d found me dead in that hotel room you could have found people willing to speculate. Little flirtations people might have seen at the office or something. I mean, you could have made a case that I might have been seeing someone. But with Sandra, no. And as I say this I realize how it must sound, that it can’t carry much weight in light of what I didn’t know about her. But I can’t think of a single possibility there. I just can’t. I’ve never even seen her come on to anybody. It just wasn’t her way.”

This of course had been corroborated by countless interviews with her friends, women she had worked with in her charity activities, women who had been in her exercise classes, in the parents’ organization at her children’s school. Everyone had the same assessment, with one caveat. No one was really close to her, no one really knew her “that” well. She was a good, responsible mother and wife, fulfilled all her social duties, but had no “best” friend.

“Have you ever heard of a woman named Dorothy Samenov?”

Moser shook his head, wiping his eyes again.

“How about Vickie Kittrie?”

“No.”

“Was there anything else, however small, you might have come across in her things? Addresses jotted down somewhere that you didn’t recognize, telephone numbers that weren’t familiar?”

“We’ve already done this,” he reminded her.

“I know, but sometimes things come to you.”

Palma studied him while he looked at his coffee cup. He looked gaunt. Was he still holding something back? How labyrinthine was this thing? He took a drink of coffee.

“Going through her things,” he said, shaking his head again. “I did that when my father died. I went through his things because my mother couldn’t do it. It was rough. But this…At first I just couldn’t do it. If you hadn’t said it was important I still probably wouldn’t have gone through her stuff. The box, I didn’t find the box until the last. Actually it was an accident. She’d hidden it at the back of her closet, inside an air-conditioning duct. She hadn’t put the vent grill back right.”

Thinking back, he said, “But then, once I’d found that I couldn’t stop. I went through everything again and again. I didn’t know what the hell I was looking for, but I was obsessed with finding something else. I even went over the seams of her dresses thinking she might have hidden things in there. I went through every page of her books looking for notes, messages. I took the caps off her cosmetics, her perfume bottles, her eyebrow pencil, nothing was too insignificant. I even…I even took apart all the tampons I could find. I thought, you know, that she would have thought I would never look in a place like that. And I was terrified the whole time that I would find something. It was like getting it into my head that someone had let loose a poisonous snake in the house. I was afraid to look for it, and afraid not to.”

The waitress dutifully made her rounds, poured fresh coffee for them, and Moser added cream and sugar again, thinking of something else the whole time. Palma didn’t know what to ask him next. They had been over everything already, and she had even gone back to see him on a couple of fishing expeditions, but the case had been at a dead end right from the beginning. If Moser was right—and telling the truth—the toys in his wife’s little black box hadn’t had anything to do with sadomasochism. She was just a little more sexually exuberant than he had thought.

Neither of them spoke for a moment and then Moser said, “It was crazy, but I did it. I don’t know if it made me feel better or worse. You know, something like this, it…it’s completely disorienting. At first you’re so stunned by the death, and then that it’s murder—not a car wreck, an aneurism, or cancer—but murder, then you learn that it’s this kind of thing. You lose your wife, the one you had, and then you lose the one you thought you had. You end up with a head full of doubts, not even able to hang on to the memories because you’re not sure they were valid. What about all those things you said and did together over the years? Which parts of your life with her were truthful, which were the lies?” He stopped, resorted to his coffee again, taking a disinterested sip to wet his throat, which had been tightening. “I’m not dealing with this very well at all. I know that.”

“No one deals with this very well,” Palma said. “Not at first, anyway.”

“I’m talking about the whole thing.” The cook started up with Joe Cocker again, and Moser listened for a moment. “I only returned to work yesterday. I had to take some time off, and they were good about it. And then when I returned everyone bent over backward. But I knew everyone was wondering about it: What the hell was she doing in a hotel? All of them sorry for me, sorry that it had happened, but: What the hell was she doing in a hotel? And Sandra’s mother. The woman’s dying inside. We don’t even talk about it. I can’t; she can’t. We talk about everything in the world; we talk too much, but not about Sandra. Not about the goddamn hotel.”