Mercy

by David L Lindsey

  This of course had been corroborated by countless interviews with her friends, women she had worked with in her charity activities, women who had been in her exercise classes, in the parents’ organization at her children’s school. Everyone had the same assessment, with one caveat. No one was really close to her, no one really knew her “that” well. She was a good, responsible mother and wife, fulfilled all her social duties, but had no “best” friend.

  “Have you ever heard of a woman named Dorothy Samenov?”

  Moser shook his head, wiping his eyes again.

  “How about Vickie Kittrie?”

  “No.”

  “Was there anything else, however small, you might have come across in her things? Addresses jotted down somewhere that you didn’t recognize, telephone numbers that weren’t familiar?”

  “We’ve already done this,” he reminded her.

  “I know, but sometimes things come to you.”

  Palma studied him while he looked at his coffee cup. He looked gaunt. Was he still holding something back? How labyrinthine was this thing? He took a drink of coffee.

  “Going through her things,” he said, shaking his head again. “I did that when my father died. I went through his things because my mother couldn’t do it. It was rough. But this…At first I just couldn’t do it. If you hadn’t said it was important I still probably wouldn’t have gone through her stuff. The box, I didn’t find the box until the last. Actually it was an accident. She’d hidden it at the back of her closet, inside an air-conditioning duct. She hadn’t put the vent grill back right.”

  Thinking back, he said, “But then, once I’d found that I couldn’t stop. I went through everything again and again. I didn’t know what the hell I was looking for, but I was obsessed with finding something else. I even went over the seams of her dresses thinking she might have hidden things in there. I went through every page of her books looking for notes, messages. I took the caps off her cosmetics, her perfume bottles, her eyebrow pencil, nothing was too insignificant. I even…I even took apart all the tampons I could find. I thought, you know, that she would have thought I would never look in a place like that. And I was terrified the whole time that I would find something. It was like getting it into my head that someone had let loose a poisonous snake in the house. I was afraid to look for it, and afraid not to.”

  The waitress dutifully made her rounds, poured fresh coffee for them, and Moser added cream and sugar again, thinking of something else the whole time. Palma didn’t know what to ask him next. They had been over everything already, and she had even gone back to see him on a couple of fishing expeditions, but the case had been at a dead end right from the beginning. If Moser was right—and telling the truth—the toys in his wife’s little black box hadn’t had anything to do with sadomasochism. She was just a little more sexually exuberant than he had thought.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment and then Moser said, “It was crazy, but I did it. I don’t know if it made me feel better or worse. You know, something like this, it…it’s completely disorienting. At first you’re so stunned by the death, and then that it’s murder—not a car wreck, an aneurism, or cancer—but murder, then you learn that it’s this kind of thing. You lose your wife, the one you had, and then you lose the one you thought you had. You end up with a head full of doubts, not even able to hang on to the memories because you’re not sure they were valid. What about all those things you said and did together over the years? Which parts of your life with her were truthful, which were the lies?” He stopped, resorted to his coffee again, taking a disinterested sip to wet his throat, which had been tightening. “I’m not dealing with this very well at all. I know that.”

  “No one deals with this very well,” Palma said. “Not at first, anyway.”

  “I’m talking about the whole thing.” The cook started up with Joe Cocker again, and Moser listened for a moment. “I only returned to work yesterday. I had to take some time off, and they were good about it. And then when I returned everyone bent over backward. But I knew everyone was wondering about it: What the hell was she doing in a hotel? All of them sorry for me, sorry that it had happened, but: What the hell was she doing in a hotel? And Sandra’s mother. The woman’s dying inside. We don’t even talk about it. I can’t; she can’t. We talk about everything in the world; we talk too much, but not about Sandra. Not about the goddamn hotel.”

  He stopped suddenly as if he’d caught himself getting out of line. He looked disgusted with himself, turned away from her and then looked back. “You said something about another woman.”

  Palma nodded. “That’s right. Another victim, there are some similarities of circumstance.”

  “She was in a hotel room?”

  “No, not that, but other things.”

  “What things?”

  “I can’t really get into that with you,” she said, starting the routine, but then something stopped her. She wondered if she weren’t being too cautious. They needed a break, and if she confided in Moser even a little it might scratch the surface of something. “I’ll give you some of it, but you’ve got to keep it to yourself.”

  Moser nodded curtly and frowned at her, impatient for her to get on with it.

  “She was four years older than Sandra, a divorcee. She was found at her home, on a bed like Sandra, same marks on her wrists and ankles, same battering, all of that, except this was more severe. She lived alone, worked for a computer firm, and…”

  “What firm?”

  “Computron.”

  “Jesus, I know people at Computron. A lot of people. We’re one of their largest software clients. What was her name?”

  “Dorothy Samenov. I asked you about her earlier.”

  Moser said the name to himself several times. “Christ! Sammy? She spells it Samme, it’s a nickname, but she pronounces it Sammy. Dorothy Samenov. Yeah, I do know her. She calls on our division at Sonametrics. I sign off on all our purchases from Computron for our division, and I’ve seen these yellow-flag notes: Thanks…Samme!’ Stuff like that. First time I saw it I didn’t know what, you know, it was: Samme, that didn’t make any sense to me. I asked about it and the woman who handles the account laughed and told me. And then I met her. That was maybe three years ago. I don’t see her much, but I know her. Goddamn.”

  “You see her?”

  “Not really, but I know who she is. I don’t deal directly with the sales people, but I see her at the parties. You know, company parties, Christmas, the annual picnic, holidays.”

  “Did Sandra know her?”

  “No…I mean, I can’t imagine she would. Although I guess she might have met her at one of the parties, a Christmas party one time, or one of the company picnics.”

  “You don’t know, though?”

  “I have no idea. But I guess she could’ve. That’s pretty strange, isn’t it?”

  Damn right, Palma thought. “I guess it’s not all that unusual,” she said. “What was she like?”

  “Very outgoing, almost aggressive in a way, but very friendly. You don’t really get to know anyone at those parties.”

  “Did she come alone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you remember if she associated with anyone in particular?”

  “No.”

  “I mentioned another woman, too, Vickie Kittrie. She works at Computron with Samenov.”

  “Something happened to her, too?”

  “No. She found Samenov; they were good friends.”

  Moser looked at her. “No, not at all. I don’t know that name.”

  “Were there any other circumstances where you and Sandra might have come into contact with Computron employees?”

  “No,” he answered without hesitating. “Just those times. That was it. Maybe two times a year.”

  Palma thought a moment. “Do you think they could have run into each other somewhere else?”

  “Where?” Moser’s face registered some kind of connection, as if he were reading som
e significance into this. Palma wondered whether to take it seriously. The significance he saw might exist only in his imagination, like seeing ghosts, or searching the hems of dresses for poisonous snakes. “What if they did?” he said suddenly.

  “I don’t know.” She really didn’t. But she knew in her own mind that she was going to assume that they had, and then she was going to try to prove it.

  “Look,” she said. “Work on this, give it some thought, but don’t talk to anyone about it, okay? It’s very important that you don’t tell anyone about any of this. If something else comes to you, be sure and give me a call.”

  “Sure,” he said, nodding. He was still thinking about his wife and Samenov. He was going to give it a lot of thought. “I’ll call you.”

  She picked up her purse and started to open it.

  “No, I’ll get it,” he said. “I’m going to sit here a little while.”

  “Thanks,” she said. It sounded inane. “If we come up with anything at all, I’ll get in touch with you.”

  Moser nodded, and Palma slid out of the booth. She walked away from him, leaving him pondering new possibilities, and went out the front door into the muggy midnight. As she walked to her car through the rippling shadows of the small parking lot she thought about Brian and the attorney with the long chestnut hair she had found him with. She remembered how it had been right after that, how it still was sometimes, wondering over and over about the details, how they had moved and touched, and if he had done the same things with that woman that he had done with her.

  SECOND DAY

  11

  Tuesday, May 30

  By six o’clock she was pulling up in the parking lot of Meaux’s Grille just off Bissonnet near Rice University. Open around the clock, Meaux’s always had a scattering of students and businessmen and was owned and run by a small, henna-haired French woman in her fifties named Lauré. Laura manned the cash register and looked after her clientele with hawk-eyed efficiency, while the kitchen was run by her husband, a Polish ex-merchant marine named Gustaw. On the morning shift they had two Guatemalan waitresses, sisters—one shy and one flirty—and a Chinese dishwasher and assistant cook called Ling. Gustaw and the Chinese (who, Lauré said, knew more dirty jokes than the whores of Marseilles) laughed and talked incessantly and turned out more good food in less time than any other two cooks in Houston. Inexplicably, they communicated only in Spanish so that the two Guatemalan girls, blushing or laughing lubriciously as suited their personalities, were the only ones who understood what was happening in the kitchen.

  Palma parked under the catalpa tree in the parking lot and bought a newspaper from one of the wire cages outside. She went in, took a booth by a window that looked out onto Bissonnet, and ordered breakfast from Alma, the shy sister. The place was still quiet, with only a coatless businessman on one of the stools at the counter. Palma turned first to the section of short articles covering the police news. After the initial mention of Samenov’s death on Tuesday morning, there had been nothing else about it, which was unusual. The press, like the police, tended to pay a little more attention when the victim’s address was in the high-dollar real estate. Mayhem in the middle class was cause for alarm, perhaps a sign that the felonious minorities and poor white trash were pushing their social disorder out of bounds. Still, it was good that no reporter had yet made the connection, but she couldn’t expect that kind of luck to last very long.

  When her food came, Palma folded the paper a quarter of its size and kept reading while she ate. By the time she finished, the traffic was beginning to pick up both in the diner and outside. Leaving a good tip for Alma, Palma paid Lauré at the cash register, and stepped outside in the cool morning. She loved this time of day. It was as cool as it was going to be until the same time the next day. At this time of morning it was possible to be optimistic.

  She was already sitting at her computer terminal when the seven o’clock shift began arriving. She had been up until two o’clock filling out what she could of the VICAP crime analysis report forms for both the Moser and Samenov cases and now was almost through with Samenov’s narrative summary. Although photographic services were true to their word and had two sets of Samenov’s crime scene photographs on her desk when she got there early that morning, the material Palma would be submitting to the FBI was less than ideal by its standards. She would not yet have a victimology or autopsy protocol for Samenov, nor would she have the crime lab’s results on the pubic hair, swabs, and smears. However, since she did have everything for Moser’s case, and since the police report would make it clear that the crime scene behavior was obviously similar to that in the case of Sandra Moser, she felt justified in requesting a “rough draft” profile in light of the fact that they might have a possible repeat killer with distinctive ritual behavior.

  Palma was beginning her third cup of coffee, her desk was covered with forms and photocopies and photographs and computer printouts of the crime report, and she was folding her leg up under her in her chair when she heard Cushing say, “You really think this’s going to get you anywhere?”

  He was standing in the doorway holding a black coffee mug he had ordered from Penthouse with a wraparound Asian nude painted on it in pink flesh tones and in such a posture that the mug’s handle became a partially penetrated phallus. She had seen the mug before, but only as a pornographic curiosity sitting on the filing cabinet in Cushing’s office. He had never actually used it for coffee until this morning. His silk shirt was a little blousy in the arms, and his full, pleated trousers a little narrow at the ankles. The thick scent of too much Aramis followed him into the room.

  “What do you think I think, Art?” Palma said, dropping her pencil and turning to him. “Why am I doing this?”

  “No, really, Carmen. I’ve seen some real screwups in those profiles. Missed ‘em by a mile. Not even close. They could get you thinking all wrong about how you should go after this guy. I wouldn’t put too much faith in them.”

  He casually set the coffee mug on the edge of her desk, pretending he had to tuck his shirttail in a little tighter.

  “They’ve messed you up before?” she asked, looking at Cushing, who was holding back a grin.

  “Not me personally, but I’ve known other guys, yeah.” He picked up the mug again and sucked loudly from it, his lips covering a strategically painted pink breast. “Selwin, ask Weedy Selwin. He’s had dealings with them before. One time they told him his guy ought to be a Swedish bachelor in his forties with a persecution complex and a hairlip, or something like that. Turned out to be a Mexican national who looked like Al Pacino and had four kids.”

  “Maybe I should tell Frisch you’ve decided we ought to just forget the FBI and get Weedy in on this?”

  Cushing shrugged. “Hey,” he said.

  “Right.” Palma nodded and looked at him. The technique was variously praised or maligned, depending upon a detective’s experience with it or depending on what he had heard. It wasn’t widely used because the kinds of cases in which it was employed were a relatively small percentage of all homicide cases investigated, and even the agent-analysts stressed that the method was never meant to be a substitute for good, solid investigative procedures. It should be used only as an additional tool to supplement everything else available to the investigator. However, the cases in which it was employed were by nature sensational so that the technique had gained a larger-than-life reputation that was easily disparaged by skeptics.

  Cushing sucked more coffee from his mug, this time playing with the sound a little bit. They looked at each other a moment and then Cushing, one hand in his pocket, turned unhurriedly and meandered out into the squad room. She watched him go and saw him join two other detectives who had been watching Cushing’s conversation with her through the window. All of them were laughing and Cushing was talking, gesturing with his coffee mug.

  Then Birley walked into the office.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said, pulling off his jacket and hanging it behind th
e door. “Long story…about a dog and a root canal and Sally and a Peeping Tom garbageman.” He flopped down in his chair, sighed enormously, and looked at a blue Tupperware bowl sitting on his desk that he had brought in with him. He looked at Palma and tapped the plastic. “Lasagna. Very good last night. Sally swears it’ll warm up just fine in the cafeteria’s microwave.” He pulled down the sides of his mouth and slowly shook his head. “It won’t.” He looked at Palma’s desk. “The FBI stuff?”

  She nodded. “I’m almost through with it. I’ve already called Garrett over at the FBI offices and told him I would drop the stuff by there later this morning.”

  “This’ll be fun,” Birley said. He smiled at her. “You want this guy’s ass, don’t you?”

  “I do,” she said. “I really do.”

  “You going to get carried away with it?”

  “I’m already carried away with it.”

  “Work out some little personal vendettas, maybe?”

  “I can’t think of a better way to do it.”

  Birley snorted and shook his head. “Hell, me either.”

  “I talked to Moser last night.”

  Birley held up his hand. “Wait. Let me get some coffee.” He grabbed his mug off his desk and lumbered out to the squad room, around the island of cubicles to the sink and coffeepot just outside Frisch’s office. Palma watched him wave at Frisch and a couple of secretaries in Frisch’s office, strike up a conversation with several detectives hanging around the coffeepot—he nudged Wyden (probably kidding him about his picture in the paper at a recent homicide scene), grabbed the spare tire at Marley’s waistline (probably kidding him about the obvious)—all the time talking, bullshitting, and whipping up his coffee concoction (he used everything).

  When he got back to the office he said, “Okay, let’s hear it,” as he came in the door.

  Palma told him.