Mercy (23 page)

Reynolds nodded again, but it was clear he really didn’t buy Palma’s glib effort at easing his conscience. But he went on, “The sadomasochism…it was between them, Dorothy and Vickie. They tried to explain it all to me but…it was so foreign…well, I think I pretended to understand it, tried not to be judgmental about it. They just said it was something they both understood. That they weren’t involved in the shame and humiliation part of it, just pain-pleasure things…“He stopped, not knowing where to take it from there. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to know too much about it.”

“As far as you know,” Palma said, “were the two of them involved only with each other in this? There was no one else?”

He nodded. “That’s what they said.” He looked at his hands.

“Do you believe them?” she asked.

“Does it make any difference?”

“I’d like to know your feelings about it.”

He didn’t answer immediately, his eyes moving restlessly over the top of his desk as if he might find the right words there among the workaday clutter.

“I think,” he said finally, “There may have been men involved.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You asked for my ‘feelings.’” He looked at her with an expression that told her that was as far as he wanted to go with it. “I can’t give you anything stronger than that.”

20

A
ll the way downtown on Memorial Drive, Palma thought about the way Gil Reynolds expressed himself, how there was almost a feeling of wistfulness about him that seemed edged with the hard acceptance of the realities of his situation. She tried to imagine how much of a shock it must have been to him when he learned that Dorothy Samenov was bisexual, or how much honesty it had taken to admit that there were not only women in Samenov’s life, but other men as well. All in all, it appeared that Gil Reynolds had gotten far more than he had bargained for when he decided to place himself in the hands, and between the thighs, of Dorothy Samenov.

It was noon by the time Palma walked into the homicide squad room, maneuvered around the little knots of detectives and civilians and got back to her cubicle. She found them all there. Birley, looking a little tousled, was standing at his desk putting labeled packages of Samenov’s personal papers into a ragged cardboard box, his shirttail worked out and sagging over the back of his pants. He was talking to Cushing. Leeland, leaning on the door frame, spoke to her and smiled from under his mustache while Cushing, lounging in her chair, ignored her arrival except to grudgingly move his legs a little so she could get to her desk. None of them looked as if they had had enough sleep.

“Hi, kid,” Birley said, interrupting his dialogue with Cushing as she tossed her purse next to her computer and put down the Pepsi she had gotten from the vending machine outside. With exaggerated weariness, Cushing lifted himself out of her chair and gave it a surly shove toward her with his foot.

She saw the manila package from Quantico on her desk. “Anybody have any luck here?” she asked, ignoring Cushing’s insolence as he moved around and propped an arm on top of the filing cabinet.

“Some,” Birley said, stopping what he was doing and turning to her. Palma sat in her chair, kicked off her shoes, and popped the top on the Pepsi, tossing the tab into the trash can. “I went through the rest of her financial stuff, which didn’t provide any useful information except for the payments to Louise Ackley. Her letters—there weren’t many—were all from her folks back in South Carolina. I couldn’t see anything there to help us. There were no letters from ‘significant others’ like I was hoping. It was pretty much of a dry run.

“But the address book is interesting,” he added, going back into the cardboard box. “Aside from the businesses we’d noted earlier, there are a few men’s names and numbers. I called them this morning.” He found the book and flipped through it. “There’s a hairdresser, a masseur, an electrical repairman, a guy who raises Dalmatians, a used-car dealer, a plumber, a TV repairman, a clerk at a video store, and a clerk at a bookstore. And then there’re several dozen women’s names, but only their first names, and the telephone numbers are apparently in code because none of them are working numbers. Some of them aren’t even metro exchanges. We need to get this to somebody who can find a pattern here. I can’t get to first base with it.”

“Care if I try?” Leeland asked.

Birley tossed him the book. “I don’t know. I think the names are coded too. Except there is a Marge in there, and a Nancy and a Linda.” He shrugged.

“Was there a Sandra?” Palma asked.

“I don’t remember one. You mean Moser?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you come up with a connection?”

Palma sipped the Pepsi, which was cold and sharp. “No, just hoping.” She looked at Leeland. “What did you get?”

Leeland had cut himself shaving around his mustache that morning and had sustained a considerable wound just under his left nostril, which he had managed to coax into a powerful scab. He monitored it occasionally, lightly touching it with the back of his right index finger.

“I talked to the Board of Pardons and Parole in Austin and they’re sending Ackley’s prison records.” Leeland closed Samenov’s address book and looked at her with his large, doleful eyes. “They’re looking for him because he just dropped out of sight, quit checking in with his parole officer. Then, of course, this other stuff came up in Dallas. He tended to hang around with some pretty unsavory characters in the Ramsey unit at Huntsville, all of them still in the pen except one. Guy named Dwayne Seely, also in for aggravated assault, got out within a month of Ackley and also came to Houston. He and Ackley have continued to buddy around together. There’s a warrant out for him now on a parole violation. Nobody’s heard from him in a couple of months.” Leeland touched the side of his nose. “And I’ve put Ackley on the computer and coming out in the next bulletin. That’s it.”

Palma looked at Cushing.

“Okay.” Cushing took the paper clip he had been chewing on out of his mouth and turned around to face her. “I talked to the officer in Dallas who’s looking for Ackley. Ackley was seen with an ex-con named Clyde Barbish on the day of the night that Clyde decided to commit mayhem and molestation on Debbie Snider, a student at SMU. Debbie was attacked and raped by two men, but could only make one of them from the files. The second man was always behind her, she said, and when he came around front to do her, he covered her face with her dress. Ackley was in the file along with Barbish, but she didn’t make him.”

“The Dallas police think Barbish and Ackley are together?”

“That’s what they’re guessing. I also had a long conversation with a good man in their central crime analysis,” Cushing continued. “Guy’d been there forever, one of those photographic memory types. I went over the whole thing, and we talked about a dozen or more cases. None of them really seemed to mesh, but a few were interesting. One of them, a woman with a single nipple removed, the right one, not the left one like Moser’s, was also a blond, but her body was not made up, and she was posed in a sexually suggestive position, not laid out like Moser and Samenov. She was also found in an abandoned house in a sleazy part of town. Not our man’s kind of terrain.”

“It’s interesting, though,” Leeland put in, “that SMU’s in the swankiest part of Dallas.”

“Snider’s rape occurred on the eighth,” Birley said. “And Moser was killed on the thirteenth. That’s just five days between.”

“It only takes a few hours to make the drive,” Palma said. “What about Walker Bristol?”

“Oh, yeah,” Cushing said, sliding his eyes at Leeland. “Donny talked to him mostly.”

Leeland’s calm eyes lingered a second on Cushing, then he picked it up. “Bristol’s a VP at Security National. Fortyish. Married, no children. Claims he dated Samenov two years ago before he married. He’s only seen her casually since then. Didn’t have any idea about her S&M business, didn’t know anything about her during these last three years. Didn’t know Dennis Ackley.”

Shifting his feet, Leeland once again touched his finger to the side of his nose. “I think he’s lying. The man was really careful about what he said, tied into a knot about it, but trying to come across cool. We ought to do some background and make another run at him. As for Dirk somebody, there’s a woman in the registrar’s office at the University of Houston trying to track it down for us.”

“So what about you?” Birley said. “Did you get to see your people?”

“Yeah, I did,” Palma said, pulling a tissue out of the box on her desk and wiping up the wet spot from the Pepsi. “There are some surprises.”

She went straight through each of the interviews, Kittrie again at her place with Isenberg and Saulnier, Linda Mancera, Louise Ackley, and finally Gil Reynolds with his astonishing revelation.

“Dykes!” Gushing feigned an exaggerated incredulity. “These babes are
dykes?
Hey, I don’t know about Mancera,” he laughed, his eyes widened at Palma as he shook his head, “but this Marge Simon is a real baby doll. What a waste!” He cackled again, and looked at Leeland. “I love it.”

“We don’t know about Simon and Mancera,” Palma corrected him. “The information goes only for Samenov and Kittrie.”

“Shit,” Cushing said, still grinning. “I don’t have to be hit over the head with it. I’ll bet they’re all cream puffs.”

“Well, that explains why Samenov used first names only for the women in the address book,” Birley said.

“Seems kind of an elaborate system.” Leeland looked at Palma. “Did Reynolds really think they were that secretive about it?”

“He seemed to.” Palma drank the last of her Pepsi. She didn’t know why it offended her that Cushing, still shaking his head and grinning, was enjoying the lesbian angle so much. “I don’t think we can assume that Marge Simon, Nancy Segal, and Linda Mancera are lesbians, but even if they are, I don’t know where that gets us. We don’t have any connection between them and Dennis Ackley. So far they’ve all spoken of him as if he were contaminated. Unless they can be considered potential targets.”

“So what are we supposed to think about Sandra Moser then?” Birley said. “That the little lady was a closet bisexual?”

“I think we have to,” Palma said. “Considering the group’s composition.”

“There’s her S&M stuff,” Cushing said.

“There’s not a Sandra in the book.” Leeland was already flipping through the pages again.

“How did Ackley meet her?” Birley asked.

“It’s this way,” Cushing speculated, his legs straight out, hips leaned back against the filing cabinet. “Samenov was lying to Reynolds about her ex being a bastard. Ackley and Samenov are together on this S&M deal. There’s the photographs of Samenov—who took the photographs? She procures these women, lesbians, for their trios. They were doing Moser together and she dies, maybe accidentally. They make it look like a psycho job just to screw up the investigation. Later Ackley does Samenov because she’s the only witness. Ackley’s been around. He knows to clean up after these things. And he stages it to look like the first one.”

“If Samenov was lying to Reynolds about Ackley being a bastard,” Palma countered, “then Louise Ackley is lying about it too, and so are Linda Mancera and Vickie Kittrie. I think Ackley’s criminal record backs them up.”

“Okay, fine. So the guy was a certified bastard, all the more reason why he and his ex-wife were turning S&M tricks together,” Cushing persisted.

“You’re missing the point, Cush,” Palma snapped. “It’s not likely any of them would have wanted to work with him.”

“Bullshit,” Cushing came back at her. “You don’t know that. People will do anything…”

“I think we’d better decipher that damn address book,” Birley broke in. “And talk to every person listed in there.”

“I’m betting the women’s names won’t get us that much,” Palma said. “The main value of that address book is that it does list the names of more men. Admittedly the odds are on Ackley, but what if it’s not Ackley? There are eight or ten men’s names in there who ought to be checked out. Did they have a connection to Sandra Moser? Did the TV repairman repair her TV too? Did she regularly buy video movies from the same store as Samenov? Did she use the same plumber?”

“She’s right,” Birley said. “We need to go through the service records for each one of those names. And we’d better keep our eyes open for any woman’s name that might come up in the records or client lists of any of these men.”

Palma’s telephone rang and she answered it. It was for Cushing, who took it, said yeah and great, and hung up.

“Soronno’s got some lab results for us,” he said, going for the door. “Be right back.”

While Cushing was gone, Birley opened another Tupperware lunch packed by Sally. He ate it without much pleasure, offering some brownies to Leeland, who said he had already eaten. Palma’s stomach was rumbling, but she pushed her hunger to the back of her mind as she looked through her notes from the Reynolds interview.

It did not take Cushing long to get back, carrying the report and a fresh Coke. Cushing had a thing about Cokes, and the thing was that he poured a little bit out of each can and spiked it with rum. He thought no one knew it, but Palma and Birley had been keeping tabs on him for a long time, and Palma was sure it was no secret to Leeland.

“Okay,” he said, rolling the typing chair from the squad room ahead of him. “We’ve got some things here that tie in.”

He swiveled the typing chair around and straddled it and leaned forward with the back of it against his chest, his legs splayed out toward Palma. The ultimate macho posture, lots of sex appeal. Palma thought it was pitiful that Cushing always had to be on for her, always had to swagger and strut. Having his penis pinched must have done something to his psyche. Maybe Cushing really did have his brains between his legs.

“Fingerprints: they didn’t find any other than Samenov’s in the bathroom and bedroom, though they got some unknowns from other parts of the house, mostly from the kitchen and study. Same with palm prints.

“Footprints: we got some, but they’re a woman’s, on either side of the bidet.

“Nothing on the clothes folded in the chair.