Mercy (70 page)

Though it was his intention to relate more informally with Mary, Broussard almost mechanically slipped into the language of his professional manner. Like many men, he was an animal of habit—and of inhibitions—and Mary Lowe was the kind of creature from which he unconsciously protected himself. It would have taken a resolute effort for him to have lowered his defenses in her presence without the benefit of his feminine persona.

“Freud,” he continued stiffly, “though he really didn’t understand women very well, at least revealed to us the invaluable discovery that every child’s initial erotic attachment is to its mother. For males, this eventually causes a conflict with the father—Oedipus complex. In females, however, this separation from the mother takes a different form. She turns to her father, but this change from mother to father is prolonged and painful. Her pre-Oedipal attachment to her mother is extraordinarily intense, and she does not find the changeover an easy one to make. In fact, it is never adequately resolved. Therefore, women never satisfactorily develop a demanding superego, and this results in a developmental lacuna, a feminine deficiency: a less discriminating ethical construct.”

Broussard paused. Mary was following his cursory explanation with a fixed, passionless stare. It was as if she had turned off all her emotions, though the fact that she was absolutely motionless belied her intense interest. There was something pathetic about the lack of feeling in her face. In the quiet moments he perceived this; he was also aware of the first rich fragrances of the rain-dampened woods borne through the opened windows on the warm late-morning air.

“For a number of years now,” Broussard said, “most of my clients have been women. A majority of these women have been either lesbian or bisexual. And a majority of them have been victims of childhood sexual abuse, mostly incest.”

Mary Lowe very slowly moved her toes and leaned her head forward to rest her chin on the tops of her bare knees. It was her only movement, and it was done in such a way that it reminded Broussard of a cat.

“Incest is a very complicated thing,” he continued cautiously. Mary’s eyes did not move. They were light enough to see into, to see through, as if they were openings to another world. “Whereas a boy’s first sexual attraction is to a person of a different sex, a girl’s first attraction is to a person of the same sex, and because of this it creates a bond that is much stronger than that which occurs in the male. And since it occurs so early in the girl’s life, it forms an unbreakable link that always underlies subsequent sexual attachments to men.”

He paused, surprised by a sense of growing apprehension, though he had no intention of stopping.

“One of the primary tragedies of father-daughter incest is the damage that is done to the mother-daughter bond. When incest is initiated early in a little girl’s life, this bond is interrupted much earlier than it would normally occur in the natural course of a girl’s emotional development. The relationship with the mother is cut short and forever leaves the daughter with an intense longing for a nurturing relationship with another woman. This early break with the mother is natural for little boys, but not for little girls, whose attachment to their mothers is normally extended for a longer period…except in cases of incest.

“Like Persephone, abducted by her uncle (the father figure), the little girl incest victim is torn too early from her mother by her father. She is forever marked by the double wounds of paternal betrayal and maternal loss. Like Persephone, the incest victim is doomed to return, through memory, to her father, who is her betrayer, her abuser, her lover—to Hades, a symbolic hell. Memory and guilt will hound her unrelentingly for the rest of her life, unless she learns to resolve the discord of her imagination.”

55

V
ickie Kittrie came out of Janice Hardeman’s front door headfirst in a thick, black plastic bag, and everyone standing behind the yellow crime scene ribbon finally got to see what they had been waiting for. They saw where her feet punched up the narrow end of the bag, and they saw how the weight of her shifted in the bag as though she were still pliable, which she was, as the morgue attendants bumped the legs of the aluminum gurney against the back of the morgue van, making them fold up as they slid Vickie Kittrie out of sight and closed the doors.

Palma watched the trip from the door of the house to the door of the van and wondered, as she had done more than a few times before, what it must be like to be zipped into such a bag, listening to the barking static of the police radios and surrounded by the muffled crackling of the thick plastic bag as it moved around you. It was the kind of primitive wondering that the living often did about the dead, the sort of thing that had more to do with emotion than reason. Palma knew that, of course, but still she sometimes found herself wondering all the same.

Janice Hardeman left the crime scene with a couple of friends after being allowed to go into her bedroom with Officer Saldana and collect enough clothes for several days. She was told the police would notify her later in the day about when she would be allowed back into her house. Palma thought about that too, about Janice Hardeman selling her bed. Murders, especially murders like these, played havoc with reason. In fact, the act of murder was a symbol for havoc, in the mind of the murderer as well as in the public psyche. Reason had to marshal all its forces to deal with it, and even then it was a close contest.

Nothing was found in the street in front of Hardeman’s house that gave them any help, and the crime ribbon was pulled back to encompass only the little plot of yard in front of the house. With the removal of Kittrie’s body and the traffic once again moving by on the neighborhood street, the crowd began to disperse and most of the police cars moved on to their regular beats.

Before Frisch started back downtown he stood in the shade of an old honey locust near the curb and brought Palma and Grant up to date on the other facets of the investigation.

“Gordy’s in good shape,” Frisch said, backing well into the shade of the tree. At ten-thirty the sun was already high and white in a cobalt sky, and the humidity was so heavy it appeared like a glaucous vapor in the distance.

“He’s going to be gimpy for a good while, but no permanent damage. Good excuse to make him lose a few pounds. Uh, Barbish is fine, too. He’s out of danger, and the doctors tell us they expect him to be in good enough condition to be interviewed in another twenty-four hours. It ought to be an interesting conversation, because we’ve got a lot to tell him.”

“The ballistics information was good?” Palma anticipated him.

Frisch nodded. “Yeah, the Colt Combat Commander checked out. It was the same weapon that fired the Power Jacket hollow points into Ackley and Montalvo. Barbish is not too smart. Like a lot of other thick-skulled cowboys, he loved his damn weapon too much. He should have gotten rid of it.

He’s going to have to have a damn good lawyer to keep him from taking the needle in Huntsville. I imagine Gil Reynolds can just about feel the injection himself. The electronic-surveillance guys picked up Reynolds’s reaction at the breakfast table when he saw the morning paper about Barbish’s being wounded in a shootout with police. And then when he got to the part about Mirel Farr he got real quiet, and his overnight girlfriend started asking him what was wrong, what was wrong. She couldn’t figure out what had gotten into him. She kept pestering him until he yelled at her, and she started crying and they had a yelling fight. She ran off into the bedroom, and it’s been quiet there ever since. But so far he’s sitting tight.”

“What about John?” Palma asked. “What have you heard from him?”

“Birley’s not having any luck getting anything new from Denise Kaplan’s lovers,” Frisch said, taking out a notebook from his coat pocket. “But the guys we’ve got beating the bushes in Broussard’s neighborhood finally came up with the name of his housekeeper and cook. This was called in just about fifteen minutes ago.” He looked at his notes. “Alice Jackson, a fifty-eight-year-old black woman living not far off Wheeler Avenue near Texas Southern University. Maples and Lee came on to her through another domestic a few houses away. This woman said Jackson had worked for Broussard ten or twelve years. Said Jackson didn’t talk about the man too much except to say that he was ‘particular’ about his privacy. She claimed Jackson was as closemouthed as they come.”

Frisch tore the sheet of paper off his notepad and handed it :o Palma.

“What have you heard about Farr?” Grant asked.

“Her doctor said she could be interviewed later this afternoon,” Frisch said. “He sedated her pretty good for the jaw-wiring, and he wanted her to have time to lose some of the swelling. Maybe around five o’clock. Even then, he’s not going to give you much time with her.”

Grant nodded. “Okay, then. I guess it’s Alice Jackson.”

Grant wiped a hand over his face, and Palma could hear the scratchy sound of the night’s growth of beard against his band. Now that they were in full daylight, Palma could see that Grant’s eyes were redder than they should have been, and the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes looked as if they had been chiseled into his face. She was glad that the wine could have its effects on him as well.

“I’ll be frank with you,” he said to Frisch, loosening his tie. “I’m not sure what the hell’s going on here.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve been here a little over thirty-six hours. Ackley eliminated himself before I got here, Reynolds and Barbish eliminated themselves only hours ago, and no other suspects have come to the forefront besides Dominick Broussard, who fits only a smattering of the characteristics in my profile. And, to tell you the truth, I didn’t see anything today in Kittrie’s case that would make me change my mind about what I’ve already concluded. It’s going to take some more digging but, honestly, I don’t think he’s going to give us much time before the next one. This guy’s really on a tear, his fantasy’s pinging around like a pinball machine and pretty soon he’s going to explode. I think he’ll screw up, completely lose it. In the end, he’s going to get so crazy he’ll practically give himself to us. But not before he kills another woman…or two.”

“Then you don’t think it’s Broussard,” Frisch said.

Grant shook his head. “He’s the only guy in sight,” he conceded. “And there are some things I liked about him—we talked about them last night with Leeland. But I’ve been going over it and over it since then, and I’m going to back down a little. The man just doesn’t add up to the profile characteristics we’re used to seeing in these kinds of cases. My cop nose tells me that if a guy has intimate knowledge of every one of the victims, then that’s more than coincidence, and I put him right up there at the top of the list. But my experience with sexually motivated killers tells me he’s not what we’re looking for.”

Grant was standing in the edge of the shade so that the rising angle of the sun was catching the back of his left shoulder. Beads of perspiration were popping up all over his forehead, and even though he had unbuttoned his double-breasted suit coat it looked hot. Palma remembered his pulling out his shirttail and leaning back on her sofa with his shoes off.

“On the other hand,” he said, looking at Palma and then back to Frisch, “countering each of those ‘hunches’ are old maxims that I’m finding hard to ignore. The first maxim: ‘A chance element will sometimes send you on a wild goose chase.’

“The fact that Broussard knows each of the victims could be nothing more than chance. After all, the man specializes in their particular emotional disabilities. Maybe we’re stacking the deck against him because we desperately need a good hand. The second maxim: ‘There are no absolutes in human behavior.’ Just because I haven’t seen it before, even after thousands of cases, doesn’t mean I won’t see it now. Anything’s possible when you’re dealing with the human personality. The variables are incalculable.”

Palma took Grant to the Hyatt Regency, where she waited in the coffee shop while he quickly showered and shaved and put on a clean change of clothes.

While she waited, she went over the scene in Hardeman’s bedroom. She stood at the door again and very carefully went over every move they made around the stiffening remains of Vickie Kittrie. She recalled their conversation, Grant’s face, her own thoughts. Her own thoughts, imagining once again the man bent over the body, the bare buttocks, the rippled spine, what he did.

Suddenly she stood and walked out of the coffee shop, stopping at the cash register to tell her waitress not to clear her table, that she was only going to make a phone call. She hurried across the lobby to the bank of telephones behind the glass elevators. She took two quarters from her purse. With the first quarter she called Jeff Chin. With the second one she called Barbara Soronno in the crime lab.

They had a late breakfast sitting at a table that looked out onto Louisiana Street and had their first cups of coffee in a long morning that already seemed like it had been a full day.

But Grant was fresher after his shower, and certainly appeared more alert than Palma felt, though after making her telephone calls she had gone by the women’s lounge and spent some time trying to make up for what she hadn’t done before they left the house that morning in the dark.

“I’d mentioned to you I wanted to run some things by you,” Grant said after several sips of his coffee. Palma noted that he was wearing another double-breasted suit—a summer gray—and a fresh white shirt with a spread collar. Very polished, she thought, and she wondered if he had dressed this way when his first wife was alive, or if this was a result of the Chinese woman whose name Grant had never told her. Either way, he wore these rather proper clothes very well, not the least bit self-conscious of them. She looked at his face, squeaky clean from his fresh shave, his British officer’s mustache immaculately trimmed.

“But first I’d like to get your reaction to what you saw this morning.”

“My reaction? To what part of it?” Palma asked.

“Any part of it.”

She hadn’t expected the question, and her own questions were largely intended to give her time to think. How much of her “reaction” did she really want to share with him? Actually, Grant’s query was wide open. It could encompass Palma’s entire emotional reaction to all these cases, to all that she had seen in the past two weeks, or it could simply be a response to the physical evidence they had seen that morning, whether or not it demonstrated any deviation from what they understood so far about the murderer’s habits with the bodies. Palma knew that how she responded would reveal as much about herself as it would about her understanding of the cases, and it made her wonder what was really behind Grant’s simple interrogatory. She decided to be straightforward about it. She always decided to be straightforward.