Mercy

by David L Lindsey

  Cushing continually shifted in his chair, the snug crotch of his gigolo’s pants causing him discomfort. The police department’s chairs weren’t designed for being cool, and even though he professed disdain for Palma, he couldn’t bring himself to openly tug at his crotch for relief as he would have if only men had been present. Palma watched him squirm.

  “Temperature in the condo screwed up the time-of-death indicators,” he continued, his words coming out in a singsong fashion from a long sigh. “And because she was naked, she chilled down even quicker. Rutledge can only call it between three days and a week. But,” Cushing held up an open hand and looked at Frisch, “we should be able to narrow that down. She’d had a pepperoni and green olive pizza which had just about run its course in her stomach. Don says he remembers a pizza box in the kitchen trash. Maybe we can nail down when it was delivered, or when she picked it up.”

  Cushing flipped the pages of his notebook. “We got swabs and smears on the way to the lab as well as found hair and pubic combings. Rutledge found cotton fibers in her mouth, like from a bath towel, guessing maybe she’d been gagged. We’ll need to check these against the towels in her clothes hamper. Her vagina had been roughed up, bruised, but not torn. Rut-ledge says maybe a dildo. He also said that from the looks of the scar tissue in there she had a history of rough treatment. Same thing in her anus, and weak muscle tissue there, too. He says she’d have to have been into some pretty heavy stuff to get that kind of treatment.”

  “Aside from the recent damage, did he have any idea how old these scars were?” Palma asked. “Years?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Palma made a note, and Cushing watched her before he continued.

  “The wounds,” he paused for emphasis, “were antemortem. Nipples and eyelids had been removed with clean cuts, but the eyelid wounds were actually several smooth cuts instead of one single uninterrupted cut like it would have been if you held it up and ran a knife along it. He’s guessing scissors. Snip, snip, snip for each eyelid.” Cushing used the forefinger and thumb of his left hand to pretend he was grasping a nipple and stretching it up from a breast while the same fingers of his right hand became scissors. “Snip. Snip. Once for each nipple.

  “Bite marks. Sandra Moser had nine, six on the breasts, three just above her pubic hair. Samenov got sixteen, five around the breasts, couple around the navel, three on her right inner thigh, two on the left thigh, and the rest around the pubic area—a couple actually in the hair. These were pretty bad, with suck marks on them. Rutledge said they were also antemortem and were made slowly, not in the heat of struggle as if the teeth had been used as a subduing ‘tool.’”

  Cushing closed his notebook and sat back in his chair, trying to tug unobtrusively at his crawling pants legs.

  “Aren’t the bite marks excessive?” Palma asked, looking at Birley. “I mean, a lot of them?”

  “That’s a lot,” Birley acknowledged, swallowing the last wad of doughnut. “A few times I’ve seen a hell of a lot more, but not that often. Most of the time, it seems, you know, there’re less. I mean, sixteen. The guy was really going after it.”

  “What about the severity of them?” Frisch asked. He had been listening with unblinking concentration. “Did most of them penetrate the skin, or what?”

  “Yeah.” Cushing nodded quickly. “As a matter of fact, they did. About half of them went right through. Once, just inside the parameter of pubic hair at the top, he damn near took a mouthful out of her. Both upper and lower teeth penetrated, and embedded pubic hair into the wound.”

  Frisch grimaced.

  Leeland sipped his water, which was losing some of its fizz.

  “The bites around the navel,” Palma said. “Did Rutledge remark on those?”

  Cushing seemed to be a little irritated that Palma had picked up on that, but he went into it. If he was inclined to hold out on her, he couldn’t while Leeland was around. It was the work Cushing did alone that Palma worried about.

  “Uh, yeah, as a matter of fact he did,” Cushing said, wrinkling his eyebrows as if just remembering. “They were placed just right so that they made a complete circle around her navel. Looked like he did it on purpose. You know, put his teeth around it in a certain way. Also, it was the bite wound with the severest sucking evidence. He really went to work on her belly button, like he was trying to suck it out of there.”

  “Christ,” Birley said.

  Palma imagined that: the man, naked, bent over Samenov’s nude outstretched body, sucking on her navel. It must have felt like he was trying to empty her body through her stomach, suck her dry like a spider feeding on a live insect. It was an image she would not forget.

  “What about the condition of her face?” Birley asked.

  “Right.” Cushing nodded. “Yeah, she was in bad shape, jaw busted in two places, nose broken, a tooth chipped, a fractured cheekbone, a fractured eye socket.”

  “Which one?” Palma asked.

  “Uh,” Cushing referred to the report, “her right one.”

  “Could he tell what she’d been hit with? Fists?”

  “As a matter of fact, he didn’t think so. Maybe something rounded and covered with padding. He didn’t see any serious abrasions or evidence of a sharp edge. Something blunt and padded.”

  It was clear to all of them that the intensity of the killings, if they continued, was likely to follow an accelerating pattern. It was a grim prospect.

  “Samenov’s photographs will be ready in the morning?” Frisch asked.

  Birley nodded. “They’ll get them up here tonight, probably.”

  “Okay.” Frisch was thinking, looking at Birley. “Shit,” he said, turning his chair sideways to his desk and throwing a look out into the squad room. He thought about it, ignoring them in his silence, and then said, “Okay, I’m not going to expand this thing. I’m going to let the four of you go after it. Put all your other cases on the back burner and concentrate on getting a handle as soon as possible. I’ll go to the captain when we get through here and tell him what we’ve got and that I’m going to put the four of you on all the overtime you can handle. That’ll piss them off in the chief’s office, but if this thing gets away from us, gets out of control, the bad P.R. would be worse for the department than a drain on operating funds.”

  He looked at each of them. “First things first. How do you want to proceed?”

  After a brief discussion they agreed to have one of the evening-shift teams follow through with trying to locate Dennis Ackley.

  “If they find him,” Palma said, “I want them to call me. I don’t care what time it is. I’d like a little time with him before a lawyer gets in on it.”

  Frisch looked at her, and she could see him trying to assess her request. After a moment he nodded without saying anything. She raked her eyes across Cushing, who was trying to decide what she was up to and whether or not he should be there too.

  They decided Cushing and Leeland would follow up with Samenov’s associates at Computron, including Wayne Canfield, and try to find Gil Reynolds, Dirk somebody, and somebody Bristol, the bank vice president. Palma and Birley would make another call on Vickie Kittrie after she had calmed down and would talk again with Andrew Moser. They would also canvass the neighborhood and check into the question of the time of the pizza delivery, and make a more thorough check of the house.

  “One other thing,” Palma said. She was really stepping out in front on this one. Frisch looked at her again. “I want to get an FBI criminal personality profile on both of these. I’ve got everything I’ll need for Moser—our case report, the photographs, the autopsy protocol and lab reports—and by tomorrow morning I’ll have Samenov’s photographs. I can pull together a case report. And I’ll do the VICAP report for both of them too. If any cases ever justified it, these do.”

  Frisch raised his eyebrows in surprised approval. “Good,” he said. “This guy sure as hell qualifies for a psychological analysis. Fine, go ahead.” He looked around at each
of them. “I want you to pull out the stops on this one. I’m going to be glued to your supplements, and I want you to feed them to me often. No big lag times. After I brief the captain on this he’s going to be on my tail for updates, and I don’t want to be empty-handed. What comes down, goes down. So help me out.”

  8

  Bernadine Mello was forty-two. She was wealthy, living with her fourth husband (who was also wealthy, even before marrying Bernadine), and she was delicious to behold. When she had met with Dr. Broussard for her first interview five and a half years ago, her presenting problem had been “depression.” It still was.

  The chaise longue upon which Bernadine reposed was, professionally speaking, becoming passe. The trend among the more progressive psychoanalysts, especially those who concentrated on short-term therapies, was for the analyst and patient to sit in armchairs across from one another and to interact by means of the analyst confronting the patient face-to-face. It was a more egalitarian approach which Broussard disliked because he preferred the patriarchal advantage of the old Freudian style. And he still favored the chaise—for all their sophistication and addiction to things au courant, his clients were not aware of the academic subtleties that were making the chaise longue obsolete. For his style, for his approach, it was best. Men and women, he thought, had never been more clearly understood than by Sigmund Freud. His tools of psychoanalysis were symbols of their roles—the analyst upright, the woman recumbent—in this posture her mind was most easily penetrated.

  The geometric shape which Broussard most often thought of in regard to Bernadine was the oval. Her face was ovate, with pale gray eyes and a rounded chin that was the first thing to quiver and show emotion when she was troubled; her breasts, remarkably elastic for her age, were as round as the proverbial melons, and when she lay down they settled to large, wonderfully symmetrical knolls; her hips were beautiful ellipses which, when she turned her back to you and bent over with her legs together, did indeed suggest the perfect heart; her thighs emerged from her loins like the legs of a Modigliani woman, though, perhaps, not with as much length as one would have liked. If an artist were to sketch her naked, there would not be a straight line within the entire drawing. She was not a woman of angles, but of cambers.

  Of all the women with whom Dr. Broussard had consulted in the past fifteen years, Bernadine Mello had to be among the three most vulnerable. She had the sexual instincts of an Earth Mother, but she had no children. Her husbands all had been, and were, unfaithful to her, apparently with little regard to discretion. She was, in turn, unfaithful to them. But none of her trysts had ever led to a lasting relationship, and her husbands—all powerfully driven men who had found her insatiable sexuality an aphrodisiac until marital familiarity bred, rather than children, boredom—eventually left her. In fact, Dr. Broussard had been her longest-lasting relationship with a man, and occasionally she made offhandedly mocking remarks, which were actually in earnest, to the effect that he wouldn’t still be around either, if it weren’t for the monthly payments she made to him.

  She lay on the chaise now in low-cut pink panties and a thin Bali bra, two straight creases running across her stomach just above the navel. She was high-hipped. Her sandy reddish pubic hair darkened the crotch of her nylon panties, and the aureoles of her breasts were perfectly centered in each translucent cup of her bra. Her hands, small with tapering fingers and lacquered nails, were resting spread out on the flat of her stomach. Her kinky russet hair was pulled up from the nape of her neck and rested on the back of the chaise. They had worked up a considerable heat. Dr. Broussard was shirtless. He had pulled on his pants but they were unfastened, and he was bending over, tugging at his sock. His shirt was on a hanger on his closet’s opened door, his undershirt was folded neatly on the seat of a chair, his tie folded neatly on the undershirt. He had even put shoehorns in his shoes, which sat side by side underneath the chair that held his undershirt and tie. All of these articles were in the same places every time he had sexual intercourse with Bernadine Mello. Bernadine’s clothes, by comparison, were still in a crumpled heap in front of the large plate-glass window that overlooked the sun-dappled lawn that sloped through the trees to the bayou.

  “How many times does that make?” Bernadine was looking up at the trees outside, looking at the underside of the illuminated leaves.

  “What?” Broussard was straightening the toe seam on a nylon sock before pulling it on.

  “How many times does that make for us?” Her voice was a sultry contralto, which he very much enjoyed. She put her red thumbnails under the thin band of her panties and ran them back and forth, flattening out the lace.

  He was caught off guard by the question, and before he could respond, she went on.

  “Free-association time,” she said, looking at him, her head turned to the side on the chaise. “One time when I was a child I walked into my aunt and uncle’s bedroom in the middle of the afternoon. I was staying with them for the summer. They had two children, two daughters a couple of years younger than me, and sometimes I stayed with them for several weeks during the summers as a companion to the girls, to be an older sister. They liked me. On this afternoon they were taking naps. I was sewing little bonnets for them, little old-fashioned sunbonnets. I’d come across the patterns in a magazine. I’d broken a needle and went to Aunt Ceile’s room where I had last seen the sewing basket. I didn’t think anyone was in there. I walked in and he was bending over like you are now, exactly like you, no shirt, his pants undone all the way down so that his underwear showed, pulling on his socks. I was startled to see him like that and then I was dumbfounded when he turned his head toward me and it wasn’t my uncle. I don’t know who he was. Reflexively I looked over to the bed and Aunt Ceile was lying across it on her back, naked, her legs propped up and spread out facing him, and me. Her head was thrown back over the far side of the bed, her breasts pointing upward, and her hands grasping her inner thighs. She didn’t see me. The man stopped pulling on his socks, slowly raised one finger and placed it up to his lips, signaling me to be quiet. I backed out of the door and left. That was all there was to it.”

  Broussard didn’t say anything. He finished pulling on his socks and reached over and got his shoes. He took the shoehorns out of his shoes and put them on.

  “I never saw the man again,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I had the impression he was a stockbroker, like my uncle.”

  Broussard stood up and slipped on his undershirt, took his shirt off the door and put it on, buttoned it, fastened the cuff links, tucked in the tail, smoothing it over his boxer trunks in his pants, fastened his pants, fastened his belt.

  Bernadine watched him. “I’ve often thought about that man,” she said, raising her arms and pulling up the hair at the back of her neck, smoothing it. “I can still see his face perfectly. He smiled a little, almost sheepishly, but frankly. I was twelve.”

  Broussard went back to the armchair and sat down without putting on his tie. He didn’t believe her. That had never happened. Bernadine could be pitiful sometimes. She was wanting approval of another sort, something more than she was getting through her sexuality, so she was fabricating a story that she hoped he would find pregnant with symbolism. He had never heard this story before. She was so goddamn transparent. Bernadine was so hungry for approval that she would never achieve any significant degree of self-esteem. The only way she knew how to relate to people was by offering herself to be used, and every man she encountered accommodated her. She was beautiful; it was easy to do. Bernadine was going to be pitiful all her life.

  He looked at her clothes piled in front of the picture window where he had taken them off her, one piece at a time, and where he had had sex with her, pressing the front of her against the thick glass all the while imagining what it must have looked like from the other side, her heavy breasts, her stomach, her thighs, all the rounded portions of her becoming flat, except for the places where she didn’t touch. Woman in intaglio.

  “Sometime
s when we have sex I imagine myself being twelve,” she said. She cut her eyes at him. “Just twelve.”

  I don’t care, he thought, still looking at her clothes. They were silk, very expensive.

  She slid one of her feet up alongside the other leg, stopping with her knee in the air, her foot against the inner knee of the other on the leather chaise. With the index fingers of each hand she traced the two creases across her stomach.

  “Raymond,” she said, referring to her husband, “is seeing a woman who has practically no breasts at all.”

  Broussard frowned, and took his eyes off the pile of silk. He looked at her. She was already looking at him.

  “I hired an investigator,” she explained. “He’s taken pictures of them.” She looked at her own stomach. “The guy’s good. The detective, I mean.”

  “Why did you do that?” Broussard was still frowning at her.

  “I keep a file. Rather, my lawyer keeps a file. He arranged for the detective. It was his idea. It was okay with me, but it’s humiliating going to his office and looking at them.”

  “Raymond’s going to get the shaft?” Broussard stood and stepped over to a door in his bookcases and opened it. There was a liquor cabinet inside. He took ice from a freezer compartment, put a few cubes in a squatty glass, poured gin over the top of the ice, and came back to his chair and sat down, propping his legs up on a hassock in front of his chair. He didn’t bother offering anything to Bernadine, but he knew she was watching him and he knew she wanted him to offer her a drink too, to be nice, and he knew she would be hurt when he didn’t. He touched his tongue to the cold gin.