Mercy (77 page)

“Then I just wondered where in the hell he’d gotten it. And then I wondered if it was his blood. Did he cut himself to get it? I wondered what his reasoning was. If it wasn’t his blood, and if it wasn’t Kittrie’s blood, then was it human? If it was human, was it a man’s blood or a woman’s blood? I thought about the bites around the navel, about the extracted navel, and it seemed to me that he was trying to tie this in somehow with…maybe, birth, the umbilical cord, the obsession with the victims’ navels.”

Palma paused, not knowing where to go next. “I don’t know. I just thought it ought to be tested.”

“You didn’t simply make the assumption that it was Kittrie’s?” Grant asked.

“For some reason I never thought that it was.”

“I’ll be damned,” Grant looked at her as if she had begun speaking in tongues. “You’re unbelievable,” he said. “What…” He seemed to be groping for a way to frame his question, and then he seemed as if he wasn’t even sure what the question should be. He shook his head incredulously and looked away toward the nurses’ station, the small figures of women in white dresses. He kept his gaze on them for a moment, completely encompassed by his own thoughts, as isolated as if he had been alone at sea.

Palma was uneasy, but she didn’t really understand why. In an odd sort of way, she almost felt apologetic for her prescience. And at the same time, she was thrilled at being close to the killer. She thought they had him, though they might not understand exactly how yet. But they were close; she knew they were close. It was a matter of not letting up, of not fumbling the details.

Grant shifted his weight against the wall. “What in the hell have we got here?” he said, his eyes still on the little white forms of the distant nurses. It was a rhetorical question, and it wasn’t addressed to Palma. Then he turned back to her but kept his head down, looking at the toes of his shoes. “Did your friend Soronno give you any other kind of data about the blood?” He looked up. “Did it appear to be old? None of the other victims were menstruating, were they? I don’t remember seeing it in their autopsy reports.”

“No, Barbara couldn’t determine anything about how long the blood had been on the tampon. She said it seemed to be consistent with having been in place when the body was found. And no, none of the other women was menstruating.”

“So he couldn’t have gotten it from them and saved it to use in Kittrie. It hadn’t been a souvenir,” Grant said. “So he either got it from a living acquaintance or, perhaps we could surmise that he killed someone else earlier in the evening and took it from her and inserted it in Kittrie. Or, maybe it was Janice Hardeman’s. He could have found it in her trash.”

Palma was shaking her head. “I wouldn’t think so. I noticed in her bathroom that she used pads, not tampons.”

“Why would he do that?” Grant’s voice was edged with incredulity. “What kind of fantasy is this guy working…?” Grant stopped suddenly and looked at Palma. “Anything strike you odd about Mary Lowe’s being at his place all night last night and all day today?”

“Fair said she had a husband and two children.”

Grant nodded. “So how does she manage this?”

“The same way other people manage adultery,” Palma said. “Lies. I wouldn’t think she’s been gone from home longer than they had expected her to be gone, for whatever reason. At least they haven’t contacted missing persons. They’re on tap to get in touch with homicide the second anything resembling these cases comes through.”

“We’ve got to get inside that house,” Grant said.

Frisch sat behind his desk with his forearms resting on the arms of his chair, a limp lock of thin, sandy hair sagging over his forehead. His long face looked drawn and monkish in the white fluorescent lighting of his office. To one side Captain McComb and Commander Wayne Loftus of major investigations sat in swivel chairs. McComb’s suit was so wrinkled it looked like it was made of crinoline, while Loftus was wearing a knit shirt and a pair of khaki pants and Topsiders, having been called in from home where he had been stealing a few hours’ sleep because it had looked like nothing was going to develop over Sunday night. Like McComb, Loftus’s career had been built on years of street experience and a judicious sense of what was right for the boys in the division. Assistant Chief Neil McKenna wore a fresh suit and tie, ever sensitive to the media and their potential impact on his own career ladder. Younger than the other two men, McKenna was part of the new breed. Wielding a variety of degrees in law and criminal justice, they spent fewer years on the street and advanced rapidly. McKenna had been in charge of investigative operations for three years. They had just listened to Palma run down the information she and Grant had garnered thus far from Alice Jackson and Mirel Farr, as well as the most recent data from the crime lab, including Palma’s unexpected discovery. Regarding Broussard, all of the information was damaging from the point of view of his professional integrity, but adding up to little more than a sordid story. At most, Dr. Dominick Broussard could be sanctioned by the professional organizations to which he belonged for breaching the trust of his patients and, after the proper panels and hearings, he could be barred from practicing psychotherapy in the state of Texas. He also could be sued by any woman with whom he had had sexual intercourse during the time he was seeing her as a client.

But as regards the investigation of the serial homicides, Broussard was remarkably untainted. As of yet there was absolutely no physical evidence that connected him to any of the crime scenes, and the only evidence that they had any hope of developing against him hung in the balance by a few short hairs.

“But the circumstantial evidence is so heavily weighted against him,” Palma concluded, “that we don’t have any doubt that we’ll eventually develop the physical evidence that we need. Unfortunately, it’s only been in the last eighteen hours that Broussard has come to our attention as a suspect, and it has only been within the last seven hours that we’ve come to focus on him as the suspect. There just hasn’t been enough time to develop very much of a case other than the circumstantial evidence we’ve just given you.”

“He’s with this Lowe woman right now,” McComb said to Loftus. “Been there all night last night, all day today. She’s got a husband and kids, but they haven’t reported her missing so we’re guessing they think she’s out of town, gone to Mama’s or something.”

“Damn,” Loftus said, “you’re sure he’s not chopping her up in there?”

“Hell, no, we’re not sure,” McComb said, showing a little heat. “That’s why we’ve got to come to some kind of decision here…how much we’re willing to risk legally and politically, and whatever the hell else, to get in there. Maybe we’ll barge in and bust up a cozy little weekend of adultery that they’d had to plan for a month to put together, and it’ll turn out Broussard’s just a horny psychiatrist whose business has got a lot of fringe benefits. Or we may find him cutting her up and putting her in the freezer, for Christ’s sake.”

“Actually,” Frisch said calmly, “Grant thinks he won’t kill her in his own home.” He looked at Grant for further explanation.

Grant was sitting on the edge of one of the desks, his arms folded. Palma thought he was beginning to look more than a little worn. They all were, some of them wearing out a little faster than the others. Frisch looked like he ought to be on sick leave. Palma herself could feel that the muscles in her shoulders were as tight as they were going to go.

“That’s my feeling,” Grant said. “But I’ve got a caveat. In any given case the suspect naturally will deviate from the behavioral models we’ve come to associate with these kinds of sexually motivated murderers. There’s no such thing as complete predictability, but there are variance tolerances. Broussard has stretched these tolerances to the limit. Insofar as we’ve been able to anticipate certain kinds of behavior, there’s some degree of predictability. Naturally, the better we know the suspect the better we can anticipate his actions.” He looked around the room at each of them. “We know practically nothing about Broussard. Additionally, so far his behavior has deviated from this behavior model more than any other suspect I’ve ever investigated.”

“What’s all that mean?” Loftus snapped. He wanted bottom-line deductions.

Grant looked at him evenly. He didn’t like being snapped at.

“It means that I don’t think Broussard will kill her in his home, but if it was up to me I wouldn’t bet the woman’s life on it. I’d get her out of there.”

“Fine,” Loftus said. He had one leg crossed over the other with an Astros baseball cap on his knee, and one hand dropped down picking at a tag of rubber coming off the sole of his aged Topsider. “I don’t know what your experience is with these society shrinks, Grant, but I suspect he could get bent out of shape real bad if you’re wrong about him. I don’t know. Hell, I know a preacher in Pasadena who for the last three years has been responsible for leading his congregation to provide more than half the full-time support for two orphanages here in the city. He also collects lesbian sex magazines. I don’t know what he does with them, but I’m sure he doesn’t use them to level up all his wobbly tables. I know an Exxon executive who personally collected over a million bucks in charity money last year and every four years supports a new indigent kid through four years of college. He also wears ladies’ panties instead of boxer shorts. What this means to his brain I do not know. But these guys’ strange quirks haven’t prevented either one of them from being useful citizens. Point is, weird don’t count for shit anymore. You can’t arrest people for being weird.”

Grant nodded. Palma knew he wasn’t going to get into that kind of an argument with a local commander. She also knew Loftus was intelligent enough not to beg the question or miss the point, both of which he seemed to be doing, so she could only believe that this was a serious case of jurisdictional jealousy. Loftus resented having a hotshot from Quantico coming down to Houston telling him how to run his investigations.

There was a moment’s pause before Frisch said, “I’m going to go with Palma. She’s been following this from the beginning, and I trust her judgment. They need physical evidence and, as far as I’m concerned, they’ve got probable cause. That’s our recommendation. That’s what we’re going to do unless some of you want to overrule us.”

Palma wanted to jump up and hug him. Frisch never failed to cut through the bullshit. He didn’t want to see a simple decision bog down in a committee decision process.

“Okay,” McKenna said abruptly. He knew exactly which course of action the administration would consider the most politically hazardous. “I’d rather run the risk of an invasion of privacy lawsuit from a pissed-off psychiatrist than be caught sitting on our asses while the guy kills another woman. Get a search warrant, probable cause being the accumulation of the circumstantial evidence against Broussard and the possible jeopardy to the woman, and go in.”

61

T
hrough the long, rising heat of the afternoon they had talked, about love and the lack of it, about revenge and the lack of it, about incest. And Mary had lied to him, and he had listened to her with as much interest in her lies as he had had in the slim threads of her truths, knowing that she no longer acknowledged the difference anyway and that it was all the same to her in the tangled skein of her mind. What he had suspected before had been confirmed to him today as he had listened to her talk from the window seat, that it probably had been years since she had had any concept at all of the meaning of truth. Long ago, years ago, she had abandoned reality for something less brutal, something more imaginative and compassionate. And until now, she had functioned reasonably well, playing the role of a person playing a role. The acting had been effortless because she had grown accustomed to being something other than herself. But in her unconscious, the lies had been unraveling silently until they had frayed beyond restraint, and the increasingly complex patterns of her imagination had overwhelmed her. Chaos had overcome design.

She had put on her panties and bra, but nothing else, and he had remained in his casual linens, his shirt unbuttoned so that his thick, hirsute chest was exposed to her, a display of bohemianism that he did not easily accommodate. They had gone down to Broussard’s kitchen, and from the richly eclectic stock of his pantry they had gotten several bottles of Valpolicella, breads and cheeses and pates and olives and fruits. They had taken it all upstairs to his bedroom, where they spread a linen cloth over the deep mahogany window seat that looked out the opened windows onto the wooded bayou below. They dined al fresco, leisurely, Broussard slicing the apples and pears into thin wedges with red and pale green borders, the aroma of the red wine wafting on the warm air, and, for Broussard, the exquisite sight of Mary’s long limbs, the rosy daubs of her nipples through the sheer cups of her overfilled bra, the tuck of her navel above the lace band of her panties, the red bite, like a vicious birthmark above her knee.

Behind them, on the other side of the city, the sun seared a trace of orange fire into the horizon where its impact spewed a radiant carnelian dust high into the sky, while in the east a mauve haze rose from behind the silhouette of the city’s skyline, and the heat of the afternoon settled into the darkening margins of the magnolias and the great, lowering oaks.

As the fight failed, Broussard listened to Mary’s lies with the taste of apples and wine on his tongue, and watched her as she began to blend into the waning evening like a ghost, her pale figure growing translucent as if she were an afterimage, visible only if he didn’t look directly at her. So, for him, her voice became Mary in the twilight, whereas her body had been Mary in the light, and her lies became the life-sustaining lies of her sex, tales of survival and cunning, the verbal archetypes of all her sex, the fables of all the modern Scheherazades.

Broussard waited until Mary in the twilight had finished another halting and painful recounting of her awakening sexual appetite as first experienced in intercourse with her father. Her voice had grown strained as she finished the story, and the two of them sat in silence.