Mercy (29 page)

“What? Tart’ of my problem?”

“Oh, inside joke,” he said, sounding as if he was going to explain a slip of the tongue. “If you don’t start thinking like him, you’ve got a problem. If you do start thinking like him, you’ve still got a problem, only it’s a problem of a different sort.”

That was it. Palma didn’t say anything. It wasn’t much of a joke, and then she realized that was the point of it.

Grant picked up the slack. “It’s not a nice thing, trying to worm your way inside these minds. It’s no good. And…I don’t know…maybe for you, being a woman, it’ll be even more painful because of the victims. Or it could be a great advantage. I guess a lot depends on your own personality.”

Her personality? She heard the teacup again, and then Grant said, “The Bureau doesn’t have any women analysts in this unit, although there are a couple who’ve been through our Fellowship program. The thing is, sexual homicide is a distinctly male activity, and with the exception of homosexual killings, the victims are always women or children. Men against women, men against children, men against everyone, even each other.” He seemed to have grown thoughtful. “You try to figure that out, and it drives you crazy.”

“How long have you been doing this?” she asked.

“Years,” he said vaguely, though Palma didn’t get the impression he was trying to be obscure. The word seemed, rather, to have other connotations for him. “Look,” he said, smoothly changing the direction of the conversation, “I’m going to give you my home telephone number. You have my others?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’d like you to use this only when there’s another killing, but I want you definitely to use it then, immediately. I’m going to want to know if there are any significant changes in patterns in the next one.”

To Palma he sounded as if he had no doubts that there would be others. He gave her the number and she wrote it down, circling it several times. He went on to say something about several days in the following week when he was scheduled to be out of the office, and as Palma listened to him she wondered what he looked like, guessing from his voice that he could be in his middle forties. She wanted to ask him personal questions: Was he married, did he have a family, did he like his job, where had he grown up, how long had he been with the FBI? But she imagined the very hint of such conversation would mean the end of the telephone call, and she didn’t want him to get off the line.

“You mentioned the anomalies,” she said quickly. “He doesn’t hide the body; he doesn’t transport the body; his victims seem to be people he knows and who know him. How am I suppose to interpret these? How am I supposed to use them?”

“Good question,” Grant’s voice was flat. “Those are serious points, especially the latter one. For a sexual serial killer to know his victims is really quite extraordinary, and therefore it may be the key to this whole thing. I think you’ve already done the right thing by checking out the men’s names in Samenov’s address book. It’s a good way to start.”

“But…” Palma anticipated him.

“But I don’t think you’ll find him among the ‘general’ service employments,” Grant said. “That is, TV repairmen, plumbers, electrical repairmen. I mean, how logical is it to assume that any group of people—in this case a loosely organized group of bisexual women, if that becomes a valid category for consideration—would use the same TV repairman or plumber? I don’t use the same plumber as the other guys in my office. We live in different neighborhoods, for one thing. And if we did recommend plumbers to each other, we’d most likely recommend the same plumbing company rather than any one particular employee within that company. I’m thinking that in order for this approach to be valuable to you, you have to look at men whose employment or relative position to the victims has something to do with their bisexuality. The hairdresser, maybe. Do any of the other women own Dalmatians? Does the masseur have a bisexual clientele? You see, the connection must be specifically bisexual—or strictly lesbian—not generic.

“And if the bisexual angle isn’t valid?” Palma asked.

“If it’s a fluke,” Grant said, “then you’ve got a long investigation on your hands. And the next best chance at getting a breakthrough will be the kind that comes at a high price.”

“Another body.”

“That’s it. We need to see the guy do it again.”

25

P
alma put the telephone receiver on its cradle and looked at the scribble-filled pages of her notepad scattered around her on the table along with the wadded napkins and empty take-out cartons from Butera’s and the underlined articles Grant had sent her. There was a little Soave in her glass and she picked it up and sat back in her chair. Her shoulders had tightened again while she had been taking notes and talking to Grant, and she recognized the beginnings of a first-rate tension headache if she didn’t get her muscles to relax. She could take one of the muscle relaxants her doctor had prescribed, but she liked to think she could control these things herself. Or she could begin her own remedy, a warm shower with the water massager pounding on her neck and shoulders followed by stretching exercises on the carpet of the living room floor. But right now she didn’t want to take the time that that required. She opted for a third “cure”: the wine. If she drank enough, it would knock her out like Dramamine.

She got up from the dining room table, went into the kitchen, took the green bottle from the refrigerator, and poured another full glass of the white wine. She put the bottle back, closed the door, and sipped it steadily, standing in the middle of the kitchen with the flat of her hand on the back of her hip. She thought about Sander Grant. Actually, she first thought about the articles he had written, and then she thought about the way his voice had sounded over the telephone. It had been unhurried and chesty, for some reason suggesting to her a large man, unflappable, and comfortable in his knowledge of his subject. He had chosen a grisly career for himself, and she wondered how he managed to live with it.

His particular expertise set him apart from the average homicide detective. Palma didn’t know how many of the murderers she had dealt with were “sane” men, but it was the vast majority. Only a few could be considered “insane” by the Texas Penal Code’s definition: men, who at the time of the conduct charged, as a result of mental disease or defect, either did not know that their conduct was wrong or were incapable of conforming their conduct to the requirements of the law. But she guessed that Grant’s investigations involved offenders of an inverse ratio in these categories. Sexual murderers, especially those guilty of serial crimes, were often defended with the insanity plea. It was almost as if society found it inconceivable that men of sound mind could commit such atrocities. And indeed, all the true crazies she had seen over the years had been sexual killers or mass murderers. To investigate only these kinds of crimes, to spend your days and nights trying to “crawl inside the minds” of these men, had to be extraordinarily stressful.

She looked at her watch. It was nine-twenty. She drank some more wine and walked into the dining room and started clearing off the table. She took the telephone back into the kitchen and then returned to the dining room and started gathering up the empty paper containers from the deli. After she had wiped off the table and loaded the dishwasher, she gathered up the journal articles along with the scribbled pages she had ripped out of her notebook. Cradling these under one arm, she went back into the kitchen where she refilled her wineglass. As she left she turned off the light, did the same in the other downstairs rooms, checked the lock on the front door, and went upstairs to her bedroom.

Setting the wineglass on a bedside table, she tossed the articles and pages on the bed and took off her dress. Opening the closet door, she caught her naked reflection in the full-length mirror on the inside of the door. After her telephone conversation with Grant, she had no inclination to dwell on her figure. Too many other images intruded, and it was too easy to exchange her own face for Samenov’s. It was already weird, but it could get out of hand if she dwelt on it; she had to force her mind elsewhere.

She slipped on a white silk pajama top and got into bed, propped both pillows behind her, got a pencil from the bedside table, and started recopying her notes, occasionally sipping the wine and turning to references in the articles scattered around her on the sheets.

At ten-fifteen she went back downstairs for a third glass of wine. Climbing back up in the dark with the oblique light from her bedroom backlighting the balusters, she was aware that she was taking the stairs more slowly, beginning to feel the effects of the Soave. She was glad, but she wasn’t sleepy. The grim nature of the articles, and her conversation with Grant had given her too much to think about.

She rounded the top of the stairs and went back to bed, again putting the wineglass on the bedside table. She fluffed the pillows again and lay back on them, shoving the papers and articles aside. Then she realized she was hot. The wine did that to her sometimes. She unbuttoned her pajama top and slipped it off, reached for the wine and took a mouthful and swallowed it, took another mouthful, and set down the glass.

The killings were planned
.

Absence of a weapon at the crime scene
.

The victim is known to the killer
.

He personalizes his victim
.

He controls the situation
.

Mutilates while victim is still alive
.

Her head was lifting now, floating. The pillows cradled her aching neck and enhanced the sensation of weightlessness.

Fantasy and ritual are paramount to the killer.

He is of above-average intelligence
.

He will have suffered some kind of precipitating stress.

He will most likely be living with a partner
.

May try to interject himself into the investigation
.

He is likely to have taken a souvenir…a body part
.

What he does is how he thinks
.

Behavior reflects personality
.

Crawl inside his mind
.

Her mother was sitting in the swing alone, looking straight ahead and talking. The swing was making regular mechanical sweeps without any effort on her mother’s part, almost as if it was one of those wind-up cradle swings for infants. Her mother looked small, even childlike herself in the large swing, the hem of her shabby little gardening dress wafting back and forth in the breeze. The thing was, her mother was saying—though no one was around to listen to her—that in Huehuetenango someone was killing all the nuns. Celeste was having to clean up all the bodies, take their temperature. You didn’t know they were dead until the red mercury in the thermometer—which had to go in their vaginas—turned blue. They say it happened very suddenly. It was red and then suddenly it was blue and they were dead. Just like that. Celeste dressed each of the dead nuns in a crisp, yellow habit with yellow wimples and then she took them to the top of a mountain to a tiny meadow surrounded by harsh crags and laid them beside the other dead nuns. There were four now. Celeste sang over them as they lay on stone biers, mist curling up over the crags, Celeste’s voice echoing over the jungle valleys. Then her mother said she knew who the man was who was killing the nuns. She said she knew because she had crawled inside his mind and rode in there with him to the killings. And then Palma was standing in the doorway of a tiny nun’s cell made of damp stones and she was watching the man kill the nun. He was nude, crouching over the sister who was nude also, except for her wimple. Her eyes were open and she was staring placidly up to the dark ceiling while the man, his spine curved so that Palma could see the ripples of his vertebrae, made snuffling noises in her stomach. Palma wanted to see what he was doing, but his pale back and buttocks blocked her view. Then Palma noticed the little body of her mother facing away from her in the back of the man’s head. The man’s snuffling grew louder and Palma could see the nun’s naked legs moving, waggling from his efforts. Then the nun turned and looked at Palma with a faint sweet smile and the little figure of her mother in the man’s head turned too. She told Palma that the man would be through shortly and did Palma notice the man’s hips. Palma looked at them again and they were a woman’s hips, but a man’s back and shoulders. The thing was, her mother said, that women were human first and women second, and men were human first, too. Then blood started splattering on the wall behind the nun, splattering from whatever it was the man was doing, and the nun turned her face back to the ceiling to wait until he was through. The little figure of Palma’s mother produced a thermometer from her gardening dress and held it high as if offering it to Palma and it was so small Palma could barely make it out. Then her mother started screaming. Her mouth was a tiny black hole and she was screaming…screaming…screaming…

When Palma realized it was the telephone, she flailed at the sound of it and knocked over the wineglass. It was empty; she didn’t remember drinking the rest of it. Her alarm clock said one-forty. She was sweating, and she felt slightly nauseous as she grappled with the receiver.

“Hello.” She had rolled over on the papers, her breasts wrinkling the pages against the sheets. Had she said hello? She repeated it. “Hello.”

“Is this Detective Palma?” It was a woman’s voice.

“Yes, this is Palma.” What a goddamned dream. Son of a bitch. She wanted to be sick.

“My name is Claire. I’m the woman in the pictures you found in Dorothy’s condo.” There was a pause as if the woman expected a reaction. Before Palma could put anything together, the woman added, “I’d like to talk to you.”

“Yes,” Palma said. Her mouth wasn’t working very well. “When?”

“Now’s the best time.”

“Right now?” Jesus, she thought, of course. “Fine. Where?”

“At the medical center. Do you know the Baylor College of Medicine?”

“Yes.”

“And the DeBakey Center?”

“Yes.”

“There are trees along Bertner Street there and bus-stop kiosks…no, wait. Do you know where the mall is behind the University of Texas Medical School?”