Mercy

by David L Lindsey

  “But what about a guy with a night job?” Childs followed up. “Doesn’t have to be at work until eleven, twelve.”

  “And why on Thursday nights?” Grant anticipated.

  Childs looked at Grant and then shrugged.

  “That’s the way I was thinking, too,” Grant admitted. “But the whole scenario has to work, not just part of it. I couldn’t come up with a good reason why he would do it on that one specific night. That night is a bottleneck, we’re going to have to go through it, make it a logical part of whatever scenario we create. No way around it.”

  Grant stood up from the edge of the desk and crossed his arms, the crooked finger of one hand stroking his mustache.

  “Now it may turn out that you’ll be proved right on this because there’s something here we can’t foresee right now. But using what we do know, my scenario simply plays out better at this point. And there’s another element. Our experience tells us organized offenders often have good or above-average intelligence and prefer skilled employment. Disorganized offenders are of average or below-average intelligence and tend to have poor work histories. In general—with the exception of police work—” Grant grinned. “Night work is often the domain of the unskilled labor force. Therefore, if we accept the judgment that we’re dealing with an organized murderer, we’re going to have to provide him with a reason—other than employment—for being out of the house every Thursday night. Or, at least, on these Thursday nights.”

  Grant stopped and stared at the floor, thinking. “One other thing,” he said, looking up at them from under his eyebrows. “Look at the charts I’ve included with the report about the profile characteristics of the organized and disorganized murderers. Organized offenders are usually socially competent—Ted Bundys, smoothies, nonthreatening types. Remember, these victims—all upper-middle-class from the ‘social’ section of the city—all apparently agreed to meet this man. They feel comfortable with him.” His voice softened, imitating a reasonableness of attitude. “He’s their kind of people. Hell, they let him tie them up! This is not likely to have happened with a socially immature person who’d probably come across to these women like a misfit, someone who doesn’t travel in their circles.”

  Grant paused. “Our man is not going to be a loser, a member of the subculture. He’s going to be so ‘normal’ that I guarantee you you’ll never look at your next-door neighbor the same again.”

  “Sexually competent?” Joe Garro asked.

  “Right,” Grant snapped, pausing to turn to the desk, pick up his cup, and swallow a mouthful of coffee. “Sexual incompetence is most often associated with the kind of frustrations we see in spontaneous sexual homicide. A disorganized killer, a disorganized crime scene. But our man has taken control to the extreme. Everything about the crime scenes exhibits control. His motivations for the killings are most likely sexual, that’s true, but they’re deep-seated drives, not the sorts of things that can be satisfied by merely abducting a woman, killing her, and having sexual intercourse with her body. That’s a pretty primitive impulse. This man’s more complicated than that. What he does to her, he does before she’s dead. The sadism is important to him…he wants her to feel the pain, and he wants her to know that he knows she feels it and that it pleases him.”

  Nobody said anything for a moment, and Grant went for his coffee again. He was looking around, wanting more questions. Obviously he enjoyed explaining his reasoning, peeling back the layers of the subject he so far only had imagined, but whom he knew well enough to know how the layers were constructed.

  “Yeah, I’ve got a question.” It was Cushing. Palma had wondered how long he could hold out before trying his hand against Grant.

  “Under ‘Postoffense Behavior,’” he said, frowning at Grant’s report in his lap. You say that it’s likely that the murderer returned to some or all of these crime scenes and probably kept ‘souvenirs.’ I just don’t see this. I mean, the guy’s so careful, so methodical. It doesn’t seem logical to me that a guy who cleans up the crime scene the way this guy does would do something like that. You know, jeopardize his distance from the case. It’d be damn risky to come back to the scene, or to keep something in your possession associated with the victim.”

  Grant took another sip of coffee, not because he wanted it, Palma guessed, but because he wanted another few seconds to study Cushing, who had not disguised the challenging tone in his voice, nor the inflection that indicated he thought he had found a loophole in Grant’s analysis.

  But Grant knew how to handle him.

  “You’re right,” Grant said, putting down his coffee and walking over a few steps to address Cushing directly. “That’s a good point. The fact is, it isn’t logical behavior, which brings us to another important factor that I’ve also mentioned in the paper. But I want to emphasize it—in fact, I can’t emphasize it too much in this particular case. That is, the importance to the murderer of keeping alive the fantasy that gave birth to the crime in the first place. This behavior isn’t logical to you and me because we don’t think like this guy, but it’s logical to him because it serves a purpose.”

  Grant paused for emphasis, his eyes canvassing the room of detectives as he hunched his shoulders and punched the air with an index finger.

  “And that purpose is to sustain the excitement of the murder itself,” he said, emphasizing each word separately and distinctly. “This need to sustain the excitement is so strong that it overrides self-protective instincts. This fantasy is all-powerful. Returning to the scene, or keeping souvenirs that he can pull out and smell and fondle and taste, provides stimuli that enable him to relive the act, re-create the excitement of the event itself.”

  Grant turned and went back to Cushing, looking at him down the uneven bridge of his broken nose, his lips thinner under his mustache because he was tense, putting considerable energy into what he was saying.

  “I’ve seen these men return to the body sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours later to cut off the breasts and take them away. One guy came back to the body several weeks after the killing to engage the body in every form of necrophilia imaginable. Sometimes the desire to be once again physically involved with the body overrides any element of common sense. They’ll go back, sometimes simply to see the police discover the body. By doing this, they feel as if they’re still controlling the fantasy. It doesn’t stop for them. It’s the same reason they keep ‘souvenirs,’ panties, bras, jewelry, even pieces of the body—I’ve seen feet, breasts, intestines in cans, jars of blood. One man kept his victim’s feet in his freezer, in high-heeled shoes. In the case of our man, he’s probably kept their nipples. He takes them out of their box, or wherever he keeps them, and handles them, puts them to his tongue, something like that. They’re the catalysts that keep the fantasy alive, and the fantasy drives him and sustains him. The fantasy is all-powerful.”

  Grant ended by standing in front of Cushing again, his hands in his pockets, his thick shoulders slightly slumped. He gave the impression of being physically powerful, but unmindful of it, his intensity concentrated in the flesh around his eyes, which sat, warm and placid, in their sockets.

  Suddenly he turned and walked back to the desk where he had left his coffee and picked up the Styrofoam cup with his back to the detectives. He took a drink.

  “Let me clarify one point,” he said, turning around. “What we call the items these murderers keep is actually defined by what the items mean to the murderer. Most of the time it’s the disorganized murderer, the impulsive killer, who keeps ‘souvenirs.’ The organized killer tends to keep ‘trophies,’ some things that symbolize a successful accomplishment, proof of his skill. However, in this case, even though we have to consider our man an organized murderer, I think the fantasy is so overpowering that we have to consider his collected items as ‘souvenirs,’ something that helps him re-create the murders.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Richard Boucher had been motionless. He was the youngest detective in the room and had never investigated a
sexual homicide. Grant’s recitation was opening up a whole new world to him. It wasn’t a world for the queasy.

  The questions continued for another hour, most of the detectives taking notes, following up on earlier questions, asking for clarifications, elaborations, speculations. There was a break to allow everyone to go to the bathroom and get a fresh cup of coffee, and then they came back and went over the reconstructions of the killings in chronological order, Leeland providing graphic charts while Grant postulated the killer’s movements, pointed out how the severity and frequency of the crimes had accelerated and explained what that was likely to mean in terms of future expectations.

  At this point Birley asked his only question of the morning. Palma had noticed that he had taken few notes, but then she knew when Birley was concentrating he didn’t do anything but concentrate. Clearly, Grant fascinated him, and on several occasions she caught Birley nodding slightly to himself.

  “At the beginning you didn’t want to know anything about our suspects,” Birley said. His tie was loosened and the recent loss of sleep was showing on him by scoring the flesh around his eyes with deep, seemingly indelible lines, creases that aged him by years and functioned as symbols of the years deducted from his life because he had served long, cruel hours in the company of death. “At what point can we discuss them with you? It seems to me that we could benefit from a little feedback from you about these characters. How long you gonna want to keep your distance?”

  “A few more hours,” Grant said quickly. “I want to see the videotapes of the crime scenes first. That’ll give you more time to follow up on some more questions and maybe narrow down the suspect list even a little more. I think this whole thing is going to start moving faster now. There’s a certain amount of momentum building.” He looked at Frisch. “Is that all right with you? Let me look at the tapes first, and then I’ll be available to do whatever you want.”

  “Fine with me,” Frisch said. “Okay. Everybody check out through Leeland so we don’t pass up any interviews. I know some of these suspects have now overlapped into the purview of several different detectives, so you’re going to have to work it out among you as to who picks them up. When that’s decided nail it down with Leeland or Castle. And check with them about the tips. They’re coming in steadily now; they’ve got to be followed up.”

  39

  After the meeting broke up, Palma took her time getting her things together, but Grant was quickly engaged in conversation with Frisch and Captain McComb, who had also sat in on the meeting. She wasn’t going to be the last to leave the room, or even among the last, so she tossed her Styrofoam cup in the trash can beside the door on her way out and glanced back once through the plate-glass window as she went out into the squad room. Grant had his head tilted slightly, listening to McComb.

  “You off to Shore’s?” Birley asked from her blind side.

  “Claire,” she said, as they walked toward their office. “But could you help me with the other one?”

  “Check out his alibis?”

  “That’s right,” she said, stepping in front of him as she rounded the corner to the narrow aisle to their cubicle. “I don’t want her to know we’re checking up on him,” she said, walking through the door and tossing her notebook on her desk. “I called over to the medical school early this morning. She’s got a seminar lecture this morning.” She glanced at her watch. “She’s supposed to be in her office for about an hour or so after the seminar, so I’m going out there right now, catch her off balance.”

  “Do you want me to take him straight on? I don’t know that we really have time to play with it.”

  “That’s fine with me,” Palma said. “After I talk to her this morning it’s not going to matter anyway.”

  “But you don’t want me to blow her little secret, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Great,” Birley said.

  The Baylor College of Medicine was at the end of M.D. Anderson Boulevard, almost in the center of the vast Texas Medical Center. Its main building was shaped roughly like a Roman numeral III, with inner courtyards on either side of the central building. Palma parked in the lot across Moursund from the hospital and crossed in a light mist to the college’s south entrance. She located Dr. Shore’s name on the directory and proceeded through the long halls to the college’s departments of obstetrics and gynecology, where the hallways were busier and the air of youth and of academia mingled and humanized the scientific and minimalist feel of the shiny corridors of the hospital. According to the information Palma had received this morning, Dr. Shore should have been in her office nearly fifteen minutes. Palma made her way past the doorways with the right sequence of numbers, and entered a door in the middle of a corridor echoing with the voices of students and the occasional squeegeelike squeal of rubber-soled shoes.

  The secretary’s office was orderly but very much a place of business, a stack of three cardboard cartons just being delivered by a man with a two-wheeled dolly who had left them to one side of the secretary’s desk. She was on the telephone, a woman in her fifties with half-lensed tortoiseshell reading glasses on the bridge of her nose and a gold chain attached to either arm tangling on either side of her neck. She nodded and smiled at Palma as she talked, signing the invoice for the deliveryman while she assured the person on the telephone that the test scores would be posted outside the lecture hall by Wednesday noon. The deliveryman left and the secretary frowned at the boxes, looked again at Palma, rolled her eyes, and thanked the person for calling and ended her call.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, hanging up the telephone and making a note on a slip of paper. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, I need to see Dr. Shore, please. My name is Carmen Palma. I don’t have an appointment.”

  “Does she know what you need to see her about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. Just a moment.” She regarded the boxes again as she picked up the telephone, hit two numbers and looked at the invoice while she waited for an answer. “Dr. Shore, Carmen Palma is here to see you.” She hesitated, and looked up at Palma. “Yes. Carmen Palma,” she said more slowly, raising her eyebrows at Palma as if to confirm her name.

  Palma nodded.

  The secretary frowned and hung up the telephone. “I think she’ll be right out.”

  They both heard a door open down the hallway behind the secretary, and Palma saw Dr. Shore step out into the hallway and walk very deliberately, without hurrying, without seeming nervous, toward her. Just before she got to the secretary, she said, “Ms. Palma,” and motioned to her. She was out of the secretary’s field of vision. She waited for Palma to reach her and then turned and preceded Palma the few feet to her office. Inside she let Palma close the door behind them while she walked around and stood behind the desk, crossing her arms.

  “I suppose I should have known this would happen.” Her face was ashen. “Why didn’t you just call me? Why did you come here?” she asked sharply.

  Behind her the windows looking out over the buildings of the medical complex let in a muted, gray light. Dr. Shore was decidedly blond, and younger than Palma had guessed in the wet night when they first had talked. The dark wig, too, could have seemed to age her. She was an attractive woman. Palma would never have guessed her to have been old enough to have the kind of professional history that she had, or to be the mother of two teenage sons.

  “There’ve been more killings,” Palma said, watching her.

  Shore placed her hands on the back of the high-backed chair behind her desk. “I know it. I read the papers.”

  “Did you know Bernadine Mello?”

  Shore shook her head, her light hair pulled back in a chignon, a single gold bead in each ear providing just the right amount of accent to her emerald silk dress. She evoked a sense of cool intelligence and an unmistakable sexuality that must have assured a steady attendance at her lectures. She was also nervous and visibly furious.

  “What did you think when you read about Louise Ac
kley?”

  “What did I think? She seemed flabbergasted by the question, which she clearly considered absurd. She shook her head and looked away.

  “I found her myself,” Palma said. “I went to Mancera again, as you suggested. She sent me to Louise, but someone had gotten there ahead of me. She was still in bed. She’d been sitting up, and they blew her brains all over the wall.”

  Shore quickly looked back to Palma, her eyes wide, not from shock or surprise, but to keep back the tears, sustaining her anger.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were Dorothy Samenov’s physician, as well as Sandra Moser’s?” Palma asked.

  “You didn’t ask me,” she said.

  “You told me a lot of things I didn’t ask you,” Palma countered. “Remember, you’re the one who got in touch with me. But I’ve discovered you were very selective with your information. That makes me cautious.”

  “Of course I was selective,” Shore said. “Christ!” She struck the back of her chair with a fisted right hand. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing here?” It was too loud. She stopped herself, lowered her voice. “Goddammit. I could’ve met you somewhere.”

  Palma ignored her temper. Reaching inside her purse, she pulled out the photographs of Samenov with her masked partner, stepped to Shore’s desk and handed them to her. They were standing close to each other now, just the width of the desk between them. “Do you know the man?”

  Shore took them, and as soon as she saw what they were she swore under her breath. She quickly looked at each photograph, jerking each from the top of the stack and slapping it underneath, jerking another one off the top and slapping it underneath.