Mercy (41 page)

Grant gently closed the medicine cabinet door and stepped out of the bathroom, turning off the light as he came out. He walked around the end of the bare bed, paused to look at the stains on the mattress, and then went to the dresser.

“Where were Samenov’s folded clothes?”

“On the chair beside the bed.”

“That’s interesting,” Grant said. “I wonder why he didn’t just hang them up. Closet’s right here. I remember from the photographs he took some pains with them, the lapels just right, the pocket on the blouse just right above the fold. Very precise. Military, you’d think, but it wasn’t. They don’t do it that way in the military. Same as with Mello’s clothes. Not military, but very careful.”

With his hands still in his pockets, Grant looked over the cosmetics on the dresser, which were disarranged from LeBrun’s fingerprinting. He did the same thing with the bottles of perfume and fingernail polish that he had done with the container in the medicine cabinet, turning the labels out.

While he was doing this Palma looked at the bed and remembered Dorothy Samenov. The heavy air in the bedroom contrasted in her memory with the morguelike cold in which she been found, and Palma thought how much kinder it had been for Dorothy that the low temperature had been advantageous for the killer. To have lain nearly four days in Houston’s heat without the benefit of air conditioning would have done freakish things to Samenov’s anatomy. At least she was saved that indignity. The chill had been an inadvertent kindness.

Grant had moved away from the dresser to the closet and was going through Samenov’s dresses. He began at the left side of the closet and moved to the right, dress by dress, several times stopping to pull one out and hold it up as if he were shopping. Then he squatted down and went through her shoes on the floor of the closet, even opening each of the shoe boxes stacked at the back. Dorothy had a lot of clothes. It took him a while. When he was through he stood, backed out of the closet, and looked around the room. He looked at the dresser again and then went back to it, took the tops off several of her bottles of perfume and smelled them, replacing them as he finished with each.

He turned to the bed and sat down on it, looking at the opened closet. Almost unconsciously, as if his thoughts were elsewhere as he did it, he reached out with his right hand and pressed on the mattress, testing its firmness.

Then he stood, stepped to the dresser, and pulled open the top drawer and started going through her clothes. As with the dresses in the closet, he did this with considerable scrutiny, as if he were a buyer having to evaluate the quality of the lot, now and then holding up an item to examine it closer. When he came to her lingerie, he didn’t pass over it more quickly out of a sense of decorum, but examined it as closely as he had everything else, occasionally holding up a pantie or camisole or bra, sometimes rubbing the material in his fingers. Once he even placed a pair of panties against his face, just briefly, then returned it to the drawer. The gesture startled Palma, and she looked away quickly, and then immediately she was as flustered by her reaction as she had been by what he had done.

“The S&M stuff was in the bottom drawer?” he asked without turning to her.

“Yes, and the photographs.”

Grant nodded, thinking, looking down into the drawer of lingerie. “You know, you go along for years carrying a lot of baggage—assumptions—about men and women. You can become very comfortable with those assumptions because you don’t see anything to make you doubt them. And then one day it hits you straight in the face…wham! A myth exploded.” He closed the drawer, and turned around and looked at her. “I think it’s a very dangerous thing to be comfortable.” He smiled crookedly, perhaps at himself. “Let’s go to Mello’s.”

35

A
s Palma pulled away from the curb in front of Samenov’s and turned into Amberly Court, she looked back across the street to Helena Saulnier’s. It was five past eight and the lights were out. There was no doubt in her mind that Helena had watched Dorothy’s windows the whole time they had been there.

It was almost two miles through the rainy pine-bordered streets to Bernadine Mello’s home. They had to cross Buffalo Bayou and then double back to Hunterwood, which took them almost to the banks of the bayou again before they saw the stone pillars at the entrance of Mello’s drive. A Hunters Creek patrol unit was blocking the entrance, and Palma had to show her shield and Grant’s ID before the two coffee-drinking officers would move their unit to let them in.

The cinder drive crunched under the tires as they approached the dark house, which was almost hidden from the street by shrubbery, undergrowth, and pines. Only the portico light was burning, leaving the windows on the house as slatey dark and depressing as the damp night.

Inside Palma turned on the entrance hall lights, and as he had done before, Grant started up the stairs without comment, as if he already knew where the bedroom was located. Intrigued by his homing instinct, Palma simply followed him, watching him appraise the house as he moved up the curve of the stairs, easily finding the light switches on the wall as he came to the juncture of the mezzanine and the hallway that led to Mello’s suite. He passed the darkened doorway of Raymond Mello’s sitting room and continued to the next one farther down. He reached inside and flipped on the switch with his right hand.

“Plenty of room,” he said offhandedly. He looked around the sitting room a moment before going to the bedroom, again reaching inside with his left hand to flip on the light. Having already seen the crime-scene photographs, he did not remark on the red fabric walls, or the dominant tree-of-life weaving. His eyes were seeing other things.

As he had done at Samenov’s, he proceeded to the bathroom, a luxurious affair of marble and glass and a patterned tile shower so large and ornate that it seemed to have been lifted whole from the baths of Herculaneum. Grant noted this, but hardly hesitated, making his way to a long marble table built into the wall and over which were open glass shelves. Here, Bernadine Mello kept a plethora of medicines and beauty supplies, a daunting task for Grant’s curiosity. He plunged right into it.

Palma watched him from across the room. His inventory was thorough, and he randomly—as far as she could tell—opened an occasional bottle and smelled it or dipped a finger in to rub the cream or liquid between his thumb and forefinger. He still seemed like a big man to Palma, and fully clothed amid the mirrors and marble and fragrances of a woman’s dressing room he was out of place, as if he were the last person in the world who might understand the woman who had lived in these surroundings.

“Sometimes,” he said, not pausing in his preoccupation with Mello’s collection, “I go to a large pharmacy and simply wander through their aisles. You learn a lot about the human body that way, as well as the mind. The things people do to themselves, maybe because they have to, or maybe because they’re hypochondriacs. Or maybe they’re simply obsessed with the way they appear or feel or smell. Americans spend a hell of a lot of money on their bodies. I don’t know,” he said, taking the lid off a tiny amethyst flask and smelling its contents, “they say by 2010 the median age in the United States will be thirty-nine.”

She followed Grant into the fiery bedroom and listened to him offer comments from time to time as he methodically worked his way through Mello’s closets and chests as he had Samenov’s. It took longer here because there was more of it, but Grant never flagged, never grew impatient or hurried past anything. It was as if he had all the time in the world to do this.

Palma watched his every move. She noticed what he noticed, saw what made him pause and give a little extra attention, what he seemed to find of no, or little, importance. She noticed what clothes he took time with, what items of Mello’s lingerie he rubbed between his fingers, what panties he held up, what chemise he brushed against his face. He was very quickly becoming as interesting to her as the killer he was trying to conjure into life.

“There were no sadomasochist paraphernalia here, was there?” he asked, closing the last drawer and turning to her.

“None,” Palma said.

“If she proves to be part of Samenov’s clique, she’ll be a little different in that respect, won’t she?”

Palma nodded.

Grant put his hands in his pocket and strolled thoughtfully across to a window that Palma knew overlooked a garden-courtyard. He moved the curtain aside with one hand, looked a moment, then turned into the room, putting his hand back into his pocket. He walked across to her.

“The thing about the psychologist,” he said, “is that here’s a guy—if he’s not the killer—who can give us insight not only into Mello, but into all the women—if Mello is one of the clique. He’ll know if Mello had sadomasochist tendencies. Maybe he’ll know about her lovemaking with other women, maybe even other men. We can squeeze him for everything he ever told her because the man’s gotten himself in a hell of a lot of trouble by having sex with her all these years. He’s probably doing the same with other women as well. It could ruin him. You ought to dangle that in front of him in exchange for his spilling his guts about her. Believe me,” Grant said soberly, “the man knows enough about her to put her mind on a plate for us. And that’s exactly what you ought to ask for. We want her complete file, every name she ever mentioned, how she liked her sex—lights on, lights off, on top of spikes with black balloons tied to her toes and needles through her nipples—whatever. Get the lurid details.”

Grant’s face had hardened as he said this, the preoccupied air with which he had searched the room had dissipated, and something sterner had taken its place. He looked at her, then turned and walked to the bathroom and carefully turned off the light. When he came out again, he folded his arms and ducked his head, thinking, and stopped in the middle of the room.

“You haven’t talked about suspects,” he said.

“You said you didn’t want to hear about them.”

“That’s right,” he almost smiled, his head still down. “In light of those general guidelines I gave you over the telephone, have you got any possibilities?”

“One.”

He looked up, immediately interested, then nodded. “Does he fit the descriptors we talked about?”

“About half of them, as far as I can tell. We don’t know that much about him yet.”

Grant lifted his chin in a half nod.

“Well, you can add something else to your inventory about the guy,” he said. He looked over to the bed as if Mello were still there. “I thought at first that he had beaten their faces so severely because he knew each of them intimately…the old homicide rule of thumb. I actually thought you would find that he might have been the relative of one of them, and a secret lover of the other.” He shook his head. “But I was all wrong there. You haven’t turned up anything like that, and you’re not likely to. He may know these women he’s killing, but that won’t have anything to do with why he’s hammering their faces. It’s got to do with his fantasy—he’s intimate with the woman they become. He’s destroying her over and over. It has nothing to do with who they really are.”

He shrugged. “In retrospect that may appear to be obvious, but for some reason I didn’t think that was a valid reading at first. Maybe I was trying too hard, mixing the behavioral patterns of sexually and nonsexually motivated murderers.”

He wiped a hand over his face and touched either side of his mustache at the corners of his mouth with a thumb and forefinger. “There’s just something a little off about these. I can’t quite nail it. But it doesn’t lend itself to fancy footwork just yet.” He shook his head. “This guy’s killing somebody he loves, and he’s seeing her face in the face he’s painting on his victims.”

“Someone he loves?” Palma frowned. “Not someone he resents, someone he’s accumulated grudges against, has nurtured a hatred for?”

“Love, hate, desire, repulsion. It’s all the same to some of these guys,” Grant said. “Their emotions are short-circuited. They’re not always sure what’s driving them. That’s why they often leave conflicting messages at the crime scenes. Their emotions are so whacked-out they don’t know what they’re doing.”

“What about the rest of it? The bath oil, the perfume.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s not using the exact cosmetics, same brand and shade of lipstick she uses, same fragrance, same bath oil, rouge, all of it. Jesus. He might even be using her cosmetics.”

“What?”

“His mother, if he’s unmarried and still living with his parents. His wife. A lover. She’s gone, he takes her cosmetics, and does his work. Maybe she has a job, has to work on Thursday nights. Let’s upscale that a little bit; maybe she belongs to a Junior League-type organization that meets on Thursday nights. A Jazzercise class. Something that gets her out of the home on Thursday nights.”

“She’d have to be gone three or four hours,” Palma said.

“I don’t see a problem with that. I could think of half a dozen activities that would keep her out that long.”

Palma thought of Reynolds. He said he lived alone. She simply had taken his word for that, but a girlfriend was easy enough. Walker Bristol was married, and from what little they knew about him he had enough kinks to qualify for a Roman circus, and maybe a brainful of resentments. Who knows what Cushing would find in the list of names from Samenov’s address book? And what about Claire’s husband? Palma knew she was gone at nights.

Suddenly an idea hit her like a fist in her forehead. Christ! How could she have overlooked it so long? What had she been thinking about? She made a mental note to check it out. She was kicking herself for being so obtuse when she heard Grant’s voice.

“Hey.” He was looking at her, eyebrows raised. “You have an idea or something?”

Palma shook her head. She wasn’t sure she liked the tone of his voice. “Just trying to put things together,” she said. She didn’t care if she sounded evasive. She wasn’t going to bubble over every time an idea came into her head. On the other hand, what was her problem? He had been pleasant, not overbearing, not even condescending. Why was she reluctant to simply tell him what she was thinking?