Mercy (47 page)

At this point Birley asked his only question of the morning. Palma had noticed that he had taken few notes, but then she knew when Birley was concentrating he didn’t do anything but concentrate. Clearly, Grant fascinated him, and on several occasions she caught Birley nodding slightly to himself.

“At the beginning you didn’t want to know anything about our suspects,” Birley said. His tie was loosened and the recent loss of sleep was showing on him by scoring the flesh around his eyes with deep, seemingly indelible lines, creases that aged him by years and functioned as symbols of the years deducted from his life because he had served long, cruel hours in the company of death. “At what point can we discuss them with you? It seems to me that we could benefit from a little feedback from you about these characters. How long you gonna want to keep your distance?”

“A few more hours,” Grant said quickly. “I want to see the videotapes of the crime scenes first. That’ll give you more time to follow up on some more questions and maybe narrow down the suspect list even a little more. I think this whole thing is going to start moving faster now. There’s a certain amount of momentum building.” He looked at Frisch. “Is that all right with you? Let me look at the tapes first, and then I’ll be available to do whatever you want.”

“Fine with me,” Frisch said. “Okay. Everybody check out through Leeland so we don’t pass up any interviews. I know some of these suspects have now overlapped into the purview of several different detectives, so you’re going to have to work it out among you as to who picks them up. When that’s decided nail it down with Leeland or Castle. And check with them about the tips. They’re coming in steadily now; they’ve got to be followed up.”

39

A
fter the meeting broke up, Palma took her time getting her things together, but Grant was quickly engaged in conversation with Frisch and Captain McComb, who had also sat in on the meeting. She wasn’t going to be the last to leave the room, or even among the last, so she tossed her Styrofoam cup in the trash can beside the door on her way out and glanced back once through the plate-glass window as she went out into the squad room. Grant had his head tilted slightly, listening to McComb.

“You off to Shore’s?” Birley asked from her blind side.

“Claire,” she said, as they walked toward their office. “But could you help me with the other one?”

“Check out his alibis?”

“That’s right,” she said, stepping in front of him as she rounded the corner to the narrow aisle to their cubicle. “I don’t want her to know we’re checking up on him,” she said, walking through the door and tossing her notebook on her desk. “I called over to the medical school early this morning. She’s got a seminar lecture this morning.” She glanced at her watch. “She’s supposed to be in her office for about an hour or so after the seminar, so I’m going out there right now, catch her off balance.”

“Do you want me to take him straight on? I don’t know that we really have time to play with it.”

“That’s fine with me,” Palma said. “After I talk to her this morning it’s not going to matter anyway.”

“But you don’t want me to blow her little secret, do you?”

“No.”

“Great,” Birley said.

The Baylor College of Medicine was at the end of M.D. Anderson Boulevard, almost in the center of the vast Texas Medical Center. Its main building was shaped roughly like a Roman numeral III, with inner courtyards on either side of the central building. Palma parked in the lot across Moursund from the hospital and crossed in a light mist to the college’s south entrance. She located Dr. Shore’s name on the directory and proceeded through the long halls to the college’s departments of obstetrics and gynecology, where the hallways were busier and the air of youth and of academia mingled and humanized the scientific and minimalist feel of the shiny corridors of the hospital. According to the information Palma had received this morning, Dr. Shore should have been in her office nearly fifteen minutes. Palma made her way past the doorways with the right sequence of numbers, and entered a door in the middle of a corridor echoing with the voices of students and the occasional squeegeelike squeal of rubber-soled shoes.

The secretary’s office was orderly but very much a place of business, a stack of three cardboard cartons just being delivered by a man with a two-wheeled dolly who had left them to one side of the secretary’s desk. She was on the telephone, a woman in her fifties with half-lensed tortoiseshell reading glasses on the bridge of her nose and a gold chain attached to either arm tangling on either side of her neck. She nodded and smiled at Palma as she talked, signing the invoice for the deliveryman while she assured the person on the telephone that the test scores would be posted outside the lecture hall by Wednesday noon. The deliveryman left and the secretary frowned at the boxes, looked again at Palma, rolled her eyes, and thanked the person for calling and ended her call.

“I’m sorry,” she said, hanging up the telephone and making a note on a slip of paper. “Can I help you?”

“Yes, I need to see Dr. Shore, please. My name is Carmen Palma. I don’t have an appointment.”

“Does she know what you need to see her about?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. Just a moment.” She regarded the boxes again as she picked up the telephone, hit two numbers and looked at the invoice while she waited for an answer. “Dr. Shore, Carmen Palma is here to see you.” She hesitated, and looked up at Palma. “Yes. Carmen Palma,” she said more slowly, raising her eyebrows at Palma as if to confirm her name.

Palma nodded.

The secretary frowned and hung up the telephone. “I think she’ll be right out.”

They both heard a door open down the hallway behind the secretary, and Palma saw Dr. Shore step out into the hallway and walk very deliberately, without hurrying, without seeming nervous, toward her. Just before she got to the secretary, she said, “Ms. Palma,” and motioned to her. She was out of the secretary’s field of vision. She waited for Palma to reach her and then turned and preceded Palma the few feet to her office. Inside she let Palma close the door behind them while she walked around and stood behind the desk, crossing her arms.

“I suppose I should have known this would happen.” Her face was ashen. “Why didn’t you just call me? Why did you come here?” she asked sharply.

Behind her the windows looking out over the buildings of the medical complex let in a muted, gray light. Dr. Shore was decidedly blond, and younger than Palma had guessed in the wet night when they first had talked. The dark wig, too, could have seemed to age her. She was an attractive woman. Palma would never have guessed her to have been old enough to have the kind of professional history that she had, or to be the mother of two teenage sons.

“There’ve been more killings,” Palma said, watching her.

Shore placed her hands on the back of the high-backed chair behind her desk. “I know it. I read the papers.”

“Did you know Bernadine Mello?”

Shore shook her head, her light hair pulled back in a chignon, a single gold bead in each ear providing just the right amount of accent to her emerald silk dress. She evoked a sense of cool intelligence and an unmistakable sexuality that must have assured a steady attendance at her lectures. She was also nervous and visibly furious.

“What did you think when you read about Louise Ackley?”

“What did I think? She seemed flabbergasted by the question, which she clearly considered absurd. She shook her head and looked away.

“I found her myself,” Palma said. “I went to Mancera again, as you suggested. She sent me to Louise, but someone had gotten there ahead of me. She was still in bed. She’d been sitting up, and they blew her brains all over the wall.”

Shore quickly looked back to Palma, her eyes wide, not from shock or surprise, but to keep back the tears, sustaining her anger.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were Dorothy Samenov’s physician, as well as Sandra Moser’s?” Palma asked.

“You didn’t ask me,” she said.

“You told me a lot of things I didn’t ask you,” Palma countered. “Remember, you’re the one who got in touch with me. But I’ve discovered you were very selective with your information. That makes me cautious.”

“Of course I was selective,” Shore said. “Christ!” She struck the back of her chair with a fisted right hand. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing here?” It was too loud. She stopped herself, lowered her voice. “Goddammit. I could’ve met you somewhere.”

Palma ignored her temper. Reaching inside her purse, she pulled out the photographs of Samenov with her masked partner, stepped to Shore’s desk and handed them to her. They were standing close to each other now, just the width of the desk between them. “Do you know the man?”

Shore took them, and as soon as she saw what they were she swore under her breath. She quickly looked at each photograph, jerking each from the top of the stack and slapping it underneath, jerking another one off the top and slapping it underneath.

“Am I supposed to recognize someone in that…thing?”

“Somebody had better start recognizing somebody,” Palma said, now having trouble controlling her own temper. She leveled her eyes at Shore. “Let’s get something straight. I’m not a callous person, but I’m not a fool, either. I won’t hesitate a second to expose you and everyone else in this thing if I think it’ll keep that man from getting his hands on one more woman. I won’t lose a minute’s sleep over it. I don’t want to have to do that, but you people aren’t leaving me any choice. And I have to admit, frankly, that I find it disturbing that you seem to value your career more than you do these women’s lives. How the hell can you withhold information in a situation like this?”

The photographs in Shore’s hands were trembling wildly, and she was fighting tears of rage and frustration. Her jaws were so rigid it seemed to take an incredible effort for her to moisten her lips with her tongue, which she did slowly, barely controlling the shape of her mouth. She spoke steadily, with the taut, hoarse voice of strained emotion, bracing herself against the leather back of her chair, the pictures gripped in one white fist.

“Jesus Christ.” She flung the pictures onto her desk. “I do not participate in nor do I condone this sort of sexuality. Look, I’ve already pleaded guilty to stupidity for letting myself be talked into posing for the photographs. I regret it—Vickie Kittrie has put a lot of people in touch with regret—but I’m not going to let you pin that S&M crap on me. I’ve had no part in that kind of malignancy.” She glared at Palma, her mouth quivering, her chest fighting to control her breathing. “Reynolds. Bristol. Dorothy, Vickie, Sandra. Their kind of destructiveness is appalling in whatever form it surfaces. It’s life-negating. I won’t be lumped together with that kind of mentality.” She paused. “I am a doctor, for Christ’s sake.” She paused again. “I don’t know what you think I can give you.”

Shore shook her head, crossed her arms and moved away from the back of the chair, walked a step or two to the window and looked out to the monstrous ashen clouds hanging low over the city, moving slowly inland from the coast, dragging bands of rain behind them.

“I want to know the names of the women who allowed Gil Reynolds to ‘punish’ them,” Palma said to Shore’s back. “I don’t give a damn about the fine distinctions of your sexuality, whether it stretches from pure to profane. If you were a nun holding out on me like this, I’d still threaten you, if I could find the leverage. It hasn’t got anything to do with your proclivities or preferences. It’s got to do with a man who’s killing women; it’s got to do with stopping him.”

There was a dead silence between them as Shore continued looking out the window. A wind had gotten up and was beginning to fling rain against the window, a few drops at first that trickled almost all the way down the invisible glass, and then more of them, spattering, making flicking noises in Shore’s face. She turned around.

“The only three I knew about are dead,” she said.

“Moser, Samenov, and Ackley.”

Shore nodded.

“But you didn’t know Bernadine Mello?”

“No.”

Palma could feel her gut tightening. This case had nothing symmetrical about it at all. Nothing ever came around full turn, no definite pattern was discernible among the ragged threads that made up the tapestry of the five deaths.

“You knew about Linda Mancera’s friend Terry,” Palma said. “You sent me back to Mancera for that reason.”

Shore nodded, stepped to her desk, and opened a cigarette box. She took out a cigarette and lighted it, resting the elbow of the hand holding the cigarette on her other arm, which she had laid across her waist.

“Did you know Terry yourself?”

“I met her once.”

Palma leaned over and slowly gathered up the photographs scattered on the desk. Shore moved as if to help her and then stopped; there were only a few photographs. She seemed, perhaps, a little self-conscious about the display of anger that had put them there. Noting this, Palma put the photographs in her purse and then looked Shore in the eye.

“Are you absolutely sure your husband doesn’t know of your involvement with women?”

Hating already permitted herself to feel anything less than defiance and absolute self-assurance, the direct question caught Shore with her guard down. Her mouth dropped open as if to reply, but nothing came out. She simply stared at Palma, a motionless blond portrait with pale doll’s eyes against a backdrop of a darkening slate sky. She stayed that way longer than Palma had ever seen anyone lost for words, and then she dropped her hand and mashed out her cigarette in an oval, cut-crystal ashtray. Her head was bent slightly as she did this, and the part in the center of her hair showed blond to her white scalp.

Looking up, she crossed her arms again, her face devoid of rancor or calculation, absent of any role of physician or professor or dauntless professional.

“At one time, maybe three or four years ago, I thought he suspected something,” she said, her voice empty of tension. “Perhaps he did. But if he did, he came to a solitary reckoning about it. It’s not the sort of thing he would have shared with me, his doubts or his suspicions. It was only something I sensed. I can’t, now, even recall what made me believe he surmised something out of the ordinary.’.”