Mercy (80 page)

“But, being home alone with her all day, well, I had the opportunity to spy on her in a way that I couldn’t do on Saturdays or after school. It was on the third day that I actually watched her use the dildo for the first time. She had a ritual with it that was…theatrical.” Margaret felt Mary’s thighs widen from his sides in an unconscious imitation of what she was seeing in her mind. “In front of the mirror.”

“On the fourth day, I devised another part of my retaliation. She decided to go shopping and left me at home alone. When I was sure she was gone, I went into her bedroom. Her dresser was covered with perfume bottles, every kind imaginable, lined up like votive fragrances. I had brought a little plastic pitcher with me from the kitchen. I put it in the middle of her bathroom floor, lowered my panties, squatted over it, and urinated until I was empty. Then I spent the next half hour opening every perfume bottle that I could get the top off without its being detected and pouring some of my urine into each bottle. Not enough that she could tell, but enough for me to know that every time she sprayed some of it on her she was spraying herself with my urine, too. On her face and neck, at her hairline, on her arms, behind her knees. She was soaked in my urine every day for months and months. She used a lot of I perfume. I was so despicable to her that she wouldn’t even look at me, refused to see what she had done. But I was with her anyway, intimately, every day. I was in her pores. She breathed me. I was all over her, in private places and in private ways. And the lies and regrets stacked up between us like a high, thick wall, solid and impenetrable.”

Margaret could feel Mary’s thighs trembling against his sides. Her voice had grown hoarse, as if she had screamed all of this from the bottom of her lungs, as if these words of malice had scoured the cords of her throat like a real and brutal acid. The construction of Margaret’s thoughts began to discompose, his ideas failing to comprise intelligible relationships. A fatal mistake. The fragments of Mary’s disintegrated personality tumbled out of his mind like tiny naked and crippled creatures, distorted and aborted little things that plummeted toward him out of a blood-black void, made for revenge, furious at him for their deformities, the stubs and clefts and malformed orifices of which they thrust at him in lewd predictions of the coming horror of his own last moments.

“It was humiliating, you know, not having your mother love you.” Mary turned her head and looked out to the large, hollow night. “I thought there was a reason, that there was something wrong with me that made me unlovable. That was what I honestly believed. Years passed before it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t my fault. Even when I started hating her for withholding her affection—I was so messed up—I thought, Well, it’s my fault, but still, unreasonably (I thought) I wanted her to love me in spite of myself, because I was a child. I gave myself some benefit of the doubt, you see; I knew that I couldn’t be expected to think and act like an adult, yet at the same time, I held myself to adult responsibilities. But I wanted desperately to be a child, to be carefree, as other children seemed to be. And I wanted her to tell me it was all right to be that way, that I shouldn’t worry myself about anything at all, that I should just go out and play. But she never did that. She never told me I didn’t have to worry.”

Mary fell silent, her face still turned toward the tall windows, toward the phosphorescing city in the humid belly of the night. Unaware of what she was doing, she had dropped her hands to Margaret’s stomach and was twining her fingers in the kinky hair that grew there. In rigid stupefaction, Margaret fixed his unblinking eyes on Mary’s profile as if he believed, against all reason, that salvation lay in absolute immobility.

“At the same time…I felt protective of her,” Mary continued, turning back to Margaret. “I felt responsible. That’s why I went along with his whining demands from the beginning. I couldn’t forget the itinerant life we’d led in those shabby rooming houses all across Dixie, those long, hot nights when I listened to her cry herself to sleep and nursed my own fears as best I could by comforting a doll with a porcelain face. So I let him have what he wanted, and we didn’t have to go back to that kind of life again. And she knew.”

Mary paused, and her two manicured fists began kneading Margaret’s stomach, kneading and twisting, then pinching, pulling at it fiercely until Margaret’s eyes burned with tears that ran black with mascara.

Margaret was catatonic. Unable either to blink or swallow, saliva suddenly and inexplicably sprang into the pockets of his jaws in such astonishing volume that his gaping, painted lips instantly overflowed with limpid, viscous ropes of it that draped his powdered neck and festooned the blond tresses of his wig. But he was oblivious of this glandular effusion. He saw and knew only Mary, and her ineffable and lethal beauty.

“She abandoned me,” Mary said hoarsely, spreading her fingers out over his stomach. She emitted a quick, muffled gasp. “Even in the womb, she abandoned me.”

She bent forward and began stroking Margaret’s wig, a gesture so unexpected and tender that it momentarily broke through the numbing paralysis of his hysteria. But he was mute. She lowered her head. He was dumbfounded. He felt the weight of her breasts upon his hips. It was ending. Her mouth began to suck at his sternum. He had wanted to understand the essence of Mary Lowe. He had longed for it, had fervently wished to know it. She began to gnaw at him, to bite him, her teeth gashing fiery gobs of him. Margaret arched his neck and made a sound in his throat through the well of saliva; he rolled his eyes in bewildered horror at such an indescribable sensation as Mary worked her way down his stomach.

62

E
veryone agreed that the search warrant should be obtained with the knowledge of as few people as possible. Palma called Birley and asked if he wanted to go along to back up her and Grant, an acknowledgment that Birley had an investment in the case and a gesture of a partner’s respect. Art Cushing and Richard Boucher were already there, since they had picked up the stakeout from Maples and Lee at the end of their shift. Leeland, who had had the patience not to chafe at being deskbound during the investigation, asked at the last minute if he could go along with Birley, a request that was readily granted.

It took them nearly an hour to get organized. While they waited for Birley to drive in from his home in Meyerland, Palma had to go through an ordeal to find the proper judge to sign the warrant. She finally located him at Brennan’s Restaurant, where he had taken his wife for a birthday dinner. Palma and the judge retreated from the dining room to a wrought-iron table outside in a secluded corner of the walled courtyard, where the humidity and heat worked its will on the judge’s shiny forehead and starched white shirt. Palma brought him up to date on the investigation and he, being a careful and politically astute man, had asked a number of questions after making it clear he did not want to be humored with glib responses.

Eventually he consented to sign the warrant, using the side of Palma’s purse to write on.

Followed by Birley and Leeland in a second car, Palma and Grant once more drove west through the tall pines of Memorial Park, the car’s headlights flitting through wispy streaks of night humidity which hung in the air like ribbons of smoke. It had been almost forty-eight hours since she had picked him up at the airport and taken him this route to see the hotel where Sandra Moser had been found, the condominium where Dorothy Samenov had died, and the large red bedroom in Hunters Creek where Bernadine Mello had had her last affair. But Palma’s preoccupation with the case had been so intense it had warped her sense of time, and Grant might have been there a week, or even a month.

They had not spoken since they left the police station, and just as they were passing the drive to the Houston Arboretum and approaching the West Loop Expressway, Grant shifted in his seat.

“How do you feel about it?” he asked.

“What part of it?”

“Confronting Broussard, now that we know a little more about him.”

“I’m thinking that if we don’t find anything in his place that nails him, it’s going to scare the hell out of me.”

Grant didn’t respond and it was a moment before Palma asked, “I didn’t say the right thing?”

“You said exactly the right thing. That’s what it does, scares the hell out of you.”

“When you don’t catch them?”

“That’s right. In the dozen or so years I’ve been doing this, there’s been a fair number of cases we’ve never cleared. In the beginning I consulted on a few that were never resolved, which bothered me, nagged at me, but the first time I was in charge of a case that wasn’t cleared it nearly drove me crazy. Damn thing plagued me. Couldn’t stop thinking about it. Dreamed about it. Daydreamed about it. It turned me inside out. It was the first real job-related stress that came between me I and Marne. That was our first taste of it.”

Grant looked out the window to the darkness, and then back at the headlights through the windshield.

“That first one almost changed the rest of my life, and then somehow I learned to cope with it. Me and Marne.”

Grant stopped talking until they had passed under the West Loop and got onto the tighter, narrower Woodway with the dense woods coming close up to the street.

“And then there was a second one,” he said. “And eventually others. Now there’s a collection of them.” He tapped his head. “They’re lodged in there like tumors turned silent and benign. You know they’re there, but you try not to think about them. If you think about them, draw psychic attention to them, they might come to life again…start killing again.”

“Are you trying to prepare me for something?” Palma asked. She was leaning toward the windshield, trying to find her turnoff.

“I’ve just been thinking about all those uncleared cases you mentioned earlier today,” Grant said, without answering her question. “Four, five thousand a year. Some are cleared eventually, but most aren’t. It adds up to numbers you don’t like to think about.”

“Here we are,” Palma said, and turned right onto a heavily wooded street where the houses were set far back into the dense pine and undergrowth. The only visible signs of habitation were the openings of narrow asphalt drives disappearing into thick vegetation. Occasionally a drive would be bordered with low curb lights casting eerie green splashes as they reflected off the low shrubbery, and occasionally a pale candescent glow would illuminate the magnetic card box of a security gate.

Palma slowed, and turned left into a corridor of thick pines and sapling oaks. She cut to her parking lights and immediately turned right into the drive that led to Broussard’s office. Her parking lights picked up Cushing’s car sitting in the darkness, and in her rearview mirror she caught the twin beads of Birley’s car right behind her.

They stopped perpendicular to Cushing, who had pointed his car toward the front of Broussard’s house so he and Boucher could watch the rest of the drive and the exit gate without having to crane their necks. Palma turned off the ignition, and she and Grant got out of the car. In the still, muggy darkness she could hear the muffled snapping of car door latches as Cushing and Boucher in front of her and Birley and Leeland behind her got out of their cars, and then a quartet of single snaps as the same doors were pushed closed to the first latch. Footsteps crunched over the gravel drive until everyone was standing at the front fender of Palma’s car.

“Nothing shakin’ in there, far as we can tell.” Typically Cushing was the first to speak, but he kept his voice low and soft. They were standing in a loose circle around her, close enough for her to smell Cushing’s cologne. “Place had been totally dark until about an hour ago when Rich noticed a dim light come on in the upstairs window.”

He turned and they all looked through the trees, where a faint glow identified the upper-floor window. “We took a little walk through the woods to get the layout of the place. Circle drive in the front comes out here,” he nodded to the entrance they had just come through, “and a wall goes out from either side of the house with a gate on this near side so you can get to the back. We looked through there, big lawn sloping down to the bayou. Big terrace thing on the back.”

“What about the light upstairs?” Palma asked. “It looks like it’s in a corner room.”

“Yeah,” Cushing nodded. “Top floor, left corner. Matter of fact, it looks like the room runs along the whole far end of. the house ‘cause we could see light along there. Looked like the windows were open; they’re the tall kind, big ones.”

“What’s below the windows?”

“Uh, I think, a hedge close to the house, about fifty or sixty feet of yard, and then the woods, all sloping down to the bayou.” Cushing looked around. “Hey, what is this, a raid? I thought you was just giving the guy a warrant.”

“We don’t expect him to answer the door,” Palma said. She was hoping no one would actually come right out and ask her if she planned to try very hard to get Broussard’s attention. “Cush, why don’t you stay with the cars in case there’s an effort to avoid us through the drive here?” The possibility of a car chase would appeal to Cushing and would keep him away from seeing anything she might decide to do that wasn’t strictly by the book. “Don, could you and Rich get outside the windows at the far end of the house? If they’re open, there could be an effort through there.” She didn’t know Boucher that well and didn’t want to trust him with a crucial exit site by himself or, like Gushing, with the opportunity to see her do something outside regs. “John, can you take the terrace? There are probably French doors back there, maybe a lot of them, something to allow a view to the lawn and bayou. If Broussard’s in the dark, he could see you coming up on the terrace.” Suddenly she realized she didn’t have to tell him that, but he nodded anyway. She was doing what she was supposed to do.

“Grant and I will go in the front,” she concluded. “If there’s no answer, we’ll go ahead and enter and try to get back to the terrace doors and get you inside as soon as we can,” she said to Birley. “Everybody keep your handsets on.” She looked at Leeland and Birley. “We’ll wait here until you let us know you’re in place.”