Mercy (51 page)

Grant was making another note on his pad.

He said, “Since all of the women have been in touch with each other about this, don’t you suppose Reynolds is going to find it almost impossible to make an arrangement with one of them? I’d imagine they’re as suspicious of him as we are. He may find himself frozen out, and this may cause some frustrations I hadn’t taken into consideration.”

“I don’t know,” Birley spoke up, chewing on a bite of a dill pickle still dangling in his fingers. “I can’t believe this guy doesn’t have access to other women. You know he does, bound to. Maybe through Mirel Farr, or hell, just from cruising. And shouldn’t we get a picture of Mello to Farr to see if there is a tie-in there?”

“Yes, definitely,” Grant was now stroking his mustache with his right hand, his brown eyes staring out through Frisch’s picture window into the squad room. “I wonder,” he said, “if the fact that these women were all victims of childhood sexual abuse has anything to do with Reynolds’s thinking. Could he know that about them? I wonder about Bernadine Mello, since maybe she wasn’t one of the group. I’d like to know something about her childhood.”

“Dr. Broussard,” Palma said.

Grant nodded without looking at her. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got to talk to him…this afternoon.”

“I’d like to throw something on the table for consideration,” Palma said.

Grant finished what he was writing and looked up, and out of the corner of her eye she could see Cushing stop his Coke halfway to his mouth. Everyone else looked her way with mild curiosity. She did her damnedest not to seem hesitant. She didn’t want any of them to realize how intimidated she felt, even though, after her conversation at Mancera’s a few hours earlier, she was convinced she was right. Everything had come together in that one enlightening session.

She looked at Grant. “On the way to Samenov’s last night you said that you believed that we had a killer here with a special kind of wrinkle, not a special kind of killer. I’m thinking we do have a special kind of killer…at least one that’s different from what you’re used to seeing in this type of crime.” She paused, though unintentionally. She shouldn’t have. She plunged on. “I think the killer is a woman.”

There were several beats of silence before she heard Cushing hiss a sarcastic, “Shit,” and Gordy Haws gave a snort. Grant’s expression didn’t change, and he nodded for her to go ahead. She wished she could have seen Birley’s face, or even Leeland’s. She hoped she would have seen something there besides scorn or a condescending, poker-faced effort at interpersonal diplomacy.

But Palma was ready.

“First, there’s the condition of the body,” she said. “The use of cosmetics, bath oils, painted finger- and toenails, all of that. It doesn’t seem quite so bizarre when you consider these are women’s tools. In a way, sort of the ‘natural’ thing to do within the context of her mental condition.

“The victim’s folded clothes at the crime scenes. Not military-style you said, but it is certainly consistent with someone who’s compulsively neat. Perhaps someone for whom ‘cleaning up’ was second nature. A wife, a mother, someone who’d been taught to develop habitual neatness, an attribute that’s been distorted under the circumstances of her abnormal psychology. This holds true regarding the general neatness of the entire crime scene, including the washed body.

“Victims willingly meet the killer. None of the women in Samenov’s group, or any woman for that matter, would have hesitated to meet another woman. No coercion necessary. No apparent risk. Not even the possibility of a subliminal threat which might arise as a ‘sixth sense’ in the company of even the nicest man in light of recent events.

“There are the anomalies you pointed out,” she continued, still addressing Grant. “Behavior that doesn’t conform to the usual characteristics of organized killers, but which figure logically when you consider a female offender: victims are not targeted strangers. Women are not stalkers. The killer is one of the women in Samenov’s ‘group.’ She knows all the victims—another reason they willingly go to meet her. Victim’s body is not hidden. No need to. Killings are not conducted in public areas such as a park, lakeshore, or lonely roadside, where men often abduct and rape women. But a woman, especially a woman operating within the context of this ‘group,’ would most likely encounter her victims in a bedroom or hotel room. A place of sufficient privacy. Victim’s body is not transported. Same reason, no need to. But also, the bodies may not be moved because it’s something that would be physically impossible for most women to do. The killer circumvented this obstacle by using her brains rather than her brawn. She arranged the killings to occur at places where it would not be necessary to move the body to avoid detection.

“The old saw that women are too squeamish for this sort of violence, preferring poisonings and hired killers, is given the lie by the fact that we’re dealing with a group of women who are hard-core S&M enthusiasts used to tying each other up and being tied up. They’re familiar with violence, have gotten used to all forms of it, and are willing, even eager, to participate in it. We even have Dr. Shore’s testimony that Vickie Kittrie’s S&M was so violent it could be ‘lethal,’ that she almost killed Walker Bristol.”

There was a snigger from someone, probably Cushing or Haws again, the only ones who had the bad manners to express their opinion, that she was embarrassingly off-base, with derision rather than silence. But Palma didn’t even hesitate.

“The bite marks. I’ll admit they threw me at first, since I’d come to associate them with male aggression in sex crimes. I was preconditioned to think of them from a male perspective because I’ve been taught—and taught by the best, I ought to say, including John and my own father—by males. But it occurred to me that maybe there are some other ways to look at these bites. Given the circumstances of these killings, and from a woman’s perspective, it seems that a woman could easily have made the bites as well as a man. It dawned on me that it fits right in with one of the old cliches about fighting women, violent women—kicking, scratching…biting women.

“Absence of sperm in swabs or smears or at crime scene. I’m well aware that it’s common for sexual homicide scenes not to evidence semen. But I’m offering an alternative reason as to why it’s absent.

“Timing. You’d mentioned Thursday nights as possibly being a boys’ night out. Same goes for women. Club night. Girls’ night out. Aerobics class. Moser even had gone out to meet this person in exercise clothes, supposedly on her way to aerobics class.”

Palma stopped. She had never taken her eyes off Grant.

“None of the physical evidence we’ve gathered so far precludes a woman killer. In fact, there’s been no evidence at all that suggests a male killer. We’ve yet to find a single head hair short enough to be male. So far, aside from pubic hair, all we’ve found is long blond head hair.”

She stopped, then cringed inwardly, waiting for the awkward silence that would follow as Grant tried to think of how to respond. But Cushing, lying in wait for revenge, stepped right in, licking his lips.

“Well, hell,” he said, lowering his chair, which he had reared back on two legs as he listened to her, grinning. He looked around the room. “I think she’s got something here. But I’ve got a theory of my own that seems to have more credibility. I think it was an impotent orangutan. No sperm at the crime scene. Zoo’s closed on Thursday nights. Those big teeth. He’s a special kind of…”

“Cushing, shut up, dammit,” Frisch snapped, and cut off Cushing as well as a few snickers that were building. Palma kept her eyes glued on Grant, who had dropped his eyes to the folder in his lap, a gesture of neutrality while the locals worked out their personnel problems. Cushing’s sophomoric ridicule didn’t bother her, but the way Grant and the others handled her idea was going to be crucial. She was curious as to just how far their male myopia would take their response.

Grant looked up. “What you’ve pointed out is true. On the face of it.” A qualifying statement that subtly attempted to put Palma’s theory itself on the sophomoric level. Obviously there was more to it than just the face of it. “Everything you’ve said seems solid.” Seems…“But as I said earlier, we’re playing the odds here. It’s a little bit like case law. We look for precedents.” He paused a couple of seconds. “I’ve been working in the behavioral science unit at Quantico from the beginning of the program,” Grant said, his lips thin and firm under his mustache, “and I’ve never seen a woman commit a violent, sexually motivated homicide.”

“How do you know?” Palma wasn’t completely successful at keeping the challenging edge out of her voice.

Grant lifted his eyebrows, in surprise at first, and then as a gesture of how the hell was she going to challenge the evidence. “I’m telling you we’ve never seen it,” he said.

“Have you cleared every case you’ve handled?” she asked rhetorically.

Grant waited for her to make her point.

“Every year, nationwide, we have eighteen thousand to twenty thousand homicides,” she said. “Every year, approximately a quarter of those cases go uncleared…forty-five hundred to five thousand cases. Every year. Just in the past decade alone that adds up to nearly fifty thousand uncleared homicides. A good portion of them sexual homicides. I don’t know what percentage they represent, but I do know from the Bureau’s own statistics sexual homicides are on the rise. Are you going to tell me that you know that none of those unsolved sexual homicides are committed by women?”

“No,” Grant came back, “I’m not. But I’m telling you we’ve never seen a female sexual killer.”

“And that gets me back to my original question: How do you know you haven’t?” Palma had their attention now, she could feel it, even though she had never taken her eyes off Grant. She could see Leeland, probably the most naturally analytical of all of them, frozen in his seat. “I understand that historically all the sexual killers you’ve worked with have been males. You people are rightly credited with being the first to recognize the serial killer, the ‘lust’ killer, the sexually motivated killer. But do you think you really have the definitive story on this phenomenon?”

Grant waited, his hooded eyes resting on her with the cool dispassion of a veteran. No one moved.

“When we were looking through Dorothy Samenov’s condo, you made a remark that stuck with me,” Palma said. “You were talking about assumptions people make about men and women, that they go along for years without these assumptions being challenged, and then suddenly one day something causes them to see things differently and a myth is exploded. You said that it was a very dangerous thing to be comfortable with our assumptions. Well, try to look at your profiling analysis program from another perspective.”

Palma was talking fast, not wanting to be interrupted, wanting to spit it out before she lost momentum.

“The behavioral psychology framework you set up to analyze sexual homicides is grounded in the data you gleaned from extensive in-depth interviews conducted with thirty sexually motivated killers over a long period of time. And you’ve continued to add to that data base over the years by interviewing other killers. All male. So the behavioral model used to analyze all sexual homicides is based on male psychology. All of your analysts at Quantico are male. So what happens when your analysts get a case they really can’t fit within the framework of the behavioral model you’ve established?”

Grant’s eyes telegraphed incredible concentration. He hadn’t even blinked.

“Wouldn’t your analyst—wouldn’t you yourself—try to explain this behavior as an aberration within the framework of the behavioral model you’ve already established for male sexual killers? The ‘case law’ assumption that only males commit sexually motivated homicide is so ingrained in detectives—who are mostly male—that even though you may not understand what you’re seeing at a crime scene, you automatically exclude the only other suspect possibility available to you.

“Would it ever occur to you, any of you,” she asked, now looking around the room for the first time at the men staring at her with their mouths practically hanging open, “that you couldn’t explain something you’d seen at one of these uncleared crime scenes because it resulted from female behavior rather than male behavior? I doubt it.” She turned back to Grant. “In fact, you’ve just proved that: you say you don’t have a special kind of killer here, you’ve just got your standard male sex killer with a ‘special kind of wrinkle,’ which you haven’t figured out yet. It’s never even occurred to you that you don’t understand what you’re seeing because the killer is thinking, and acting, like a woman, not like a man.”

42

A
fter Evelyn Towne left his office, Broussard had somehow made it through the afternoon and well into the night before he had given in to Librium and a strange, dreamless loss of time, until he had awakened to this morning’s gray light and the leisurely sound of rain. He was famished and ate an enormous breakfast, and then immediately fell into a deep depression and stood for an hour in the sun room looking out the windows at the slowly drifting mist thickening toward the bayou until it obscured the thick foliage that hugged its margins. Then he had gotten the call on the number to which only his most favored patients had access. Mary Lowe wanted to see him, her session having been canceled by him the day before. She was controlled, he noticed, but her restraint was taut. It was remarkable enough that she should call him at all, under any circumstances, and that she should do so the very day after a canceled appointment indicated an urgency to which she would never admit. He agreed to see her.

He heard the front door to the studio open. Had it been anyone but Mary, he simply would have refused. Even as it was, he would find it difficult to be attentive. But maybe it wouldn’t take more than his silence to satisfy her. That was so often the case, that he was wanted only as a human-size ear, an orifice without soul or opinion or judgment, something into which they could spill their insecurities, their faults, their gloomy intimations, and sometimes lustful dreams.

He was still looking out the windows when she spoke behind him.